. . . . .
The teacher taught that school for three years thereafter, without a hitch. But he went no more on Universal Brotherhood lines. And, for years after he had gone, his name was spoken of with great respect by the Maoris.
It was dark enough for anything in Dead Man's Gap—a round, warm, close darkness, in which retreating sounds seemed to be cut off suddenly at a distance of a hundred yards or so, instead of growing faint and fainter, and dying away, to strike the ear once or twice again—and after minutes, it might seem—with startling distinctness, before being finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights. So with the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through the “saddle”, the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel down the hidden “siding”, and the low sound of men's voices, blurred and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed, awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an empty saddle on its back—a lady's or “side-saddle”, if one could have distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely as though a great sound-proof door had swung to behind them.
It was dark enough on the glaringest of days down in the lonely hollow or “pocket”, between two spurs, at the head of a blind gully behind Mount Buckaroo, where there was a more or less dusty patch, barely defined even in broad daylight by a spidery dog-legged fence on three sides, and a thin “two-rail” (dignified with the adjective “split-rail”—though rails and posts were mostly of saplings split in halves) running along the frontage. In about the middle of it a little slab hut, overshadowed by a big stringy-bark shed, was pointed out as Johnny Mears's Farm.
“Black as—as charcoal,” said Johnny Mears. He had never seen coal, and was a cautious man, whose ideas came slowly. He stooped, close by the fence, with his hands on his knees, to “sky” the loom of his big shed and so get his bearings. He had been to have a look at the penned calves, and see that all slip-rails were up and pegged, for the words of John Mears junior, especially when delivered rapidly and shrilly and in injured tones, were not to be relied upon in these matters.
“It's hot enough to melt the belly out of my fiddle,” said Johnny Mears to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the little whitewashed “end-room”, putting a patch of patches over the seat of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. He lit his pipe, moved a stool to the side of the great empty fireplace, where it looked cooler—might have been cooler on account of a possible draught suggested by the presence of the chimney, and where, therefore, he felt a breath cooler. He took his fiddle from a convenient shelf, tuned it slowly and carefully, holding his pipe (in his mouth) well up and to one side, as if the fiddle were an inquisitive and restless baby. He played “Little Drops o' Brandy” three times, right through, without variations, blinking solemnly the while; then he put the violin carefully back in its box, and started to cut up another pipeful.
“You should have gone, Johnny,” said the haggard little woman.
“Rackin' the horse out a night like this,” retorted Johnny, “and startin' ploughin' to-morrow. It ain't worth while. Let them come for me if they want me. Dance on a night like this! Why! they'll dance in——”
“But you promised. It won't do you no good, Johnny.”
“It won't do me no harm.”
The little woman went on stitching.
“It's smotherin' hot,” said Johnny, with an impatient oath. “I don't know whether I'll turn in, or turn out, under the shed to-night. It's too d——d hot to roost indoors.”
She bent her head lower over the patch. One smoked and the other stitched in silence for twenty minutes or so, during which time Johnny might be supposed to have been deliberating listlessly as to whether he'd camp out on account of the heat, or turn in. But he broke the silence with a clout at a mosquito on the nape of his neck, and a bad word.
“I wish you wouldn't swear so much, Johnny,” she said wearily—“at least not to-night.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Why—why to-night? What's the matter with you to-night, Mary? What's to-night more than any other night to you? I see no harm—can't a man swear when a mosquito sticks him?”
“I—I was only thinking of the boys, Johnny.”
“The boys! Why, they're both on the hay in the shed.” He stared at her again, shifted uneasily, crossed the other leg tightly, frowned, blinked, and reached for the matches. “You look a bit off-colour, Mary. It's the heat that makes us all a bit ratty at times. Better put that by and have a swill o' oatmeal and water, and turn in.”
“It's too hot to go to bed. I couldn't sleep. I'm all right. I'll—I'll just finish this. Just reach me a drink from the water-bag—the pannikin's on the hob there, by your boot.”
He scratched his head helplessly, and reached for the drink. When he sat down again, he felt strangely restless. “Like a hen that didn't know where to lay,” he put it. He couldn't settle down or keep still, and didn't seem to enjoy his pipe somehow. He rubbed his head again.
“There's a thunderstorm comin',” he said. “That's what it is; and the sooner it comes the better.”
He went to the back door, and stared at the blackness to the east, and, sure enough, lightning was blinking there.
“It's coming, sure enough; just hang out and keep cool for another hour, and you'll feel the difference.”
He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene—Margate in England—on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could “hit the time nigh enough by it,” after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial for a full minute by its own hand, decided “that it must be getting on toward nine o'clock.”
It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair, turned to the door and back again, and then, after an impatient gesture, took up his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder. Then the queer thing happened. He said afterwards, under conditions favourable to such sentimental confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take hold of the bow, through his, and—anyway, before he knew what he was about he had played the first bars of “When First I Met Sweet Peggy”, a tune he had played often, twenty years before, in his courting days, and had never happened to play since. He sawed it right through (the cold hand left after the first bar or two) standing up; then still stood with fiddle and bow trembling in his hands, with the queer feeling still on him, and a rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the fiddle away hastily, damning the bridge of it at the same time in loud but hurried tones, with the idea of covering any eccentricity which the wife might have noticed in his actions. “Must 'a' got a touch o' sun,” he muttered to himself. He sat down, fumbled with knife, pipe, and tobacco, and presently stole a furtive glance over his shoulder at his wife.
The washed-out little woman was still sewing, but stitching blindly, for great tears were rolling down her worn cheeks.
Johnny, white-faced on account of the heat, stood close behind her, one hand on her shoulder and the other clenched on the table; but the clenched hand shook as badly as the loose one.
“Good God! What is the matter, Mary? You're sick!” (They had had little or no experience of illness.) “Tell me, Mary—come now! Has the boys been up to anything?”
“No, Johnny; it's not that.”
“What is it then? You're taken sick! What have you been doing with yourself? It might be fever. Hold up a minute. You wait here quiet while I roost out the boys and send 'em for the doctor and someone——”
“No! no! I'm not sick, John. It's only a turn. I'll be all right in a minute.”
He shifted his hand to her head, which she dropped suddenly, with a life-weary sigh, against his side.
“Now then!” cried Johnny, wildly, “don't you faint or go into disterricks, Mary! It'll upset the boys; think of the boys! It's only the heat—you're only takin' queer.”
“It's not that; you ought to know me better than that. It was—I—Johnny, I was only thinking—we've been married twenty years to-night—an'—it's New Year's Night!”
“And I've never thought of it!” said Johnny (in the afterwards). “Shows what a God-forgotten selection will make of a man. She'd thought of it all the time, and was waiting for it to strike me. Why! I'd agreed to go and play at a darnce at Old Pipeclay School-house all night—that very night—and leave her at home because she hadn't asked to come; and it never struck me to ask her—at home by herself in that hole—for twenty-five bob. And I only stopped at home because I'd got the hump, and knew they'd want me bad at the school.”
They sat close together on the long stool by the table, shy and awkward at first; and she clung to him at opening of thunder, and they started apart guiltily when the first great drops sounded like footsteps on the gravel outside, just as they'd done one night-time before—twenty years before.
If it was dark before, it was black now. The edge of the awful storm-cloud rushed up and under the original darkness like the best “drop” black-brushed over the cheap “lamp” variety, turning it grey by contrast. The deluge lasted only a quarter of an hour; but it cleared the night, and did its work. There was hail before it, too—big as emu eggs, the boys said—that lay feet deep in the old diggers' holes on Pipeclay for days afterwards—weeks some said.
The two sweethearts of twenty years ago and to-night watched the retreat of the storm, and, seeing Mount Buckaroo standing clear, they went to the back door, which opened opposite the end of the shed, and saw to the east a glorious arch of steel-blue, starry sky, with the distant peaks showing clear and blue away back under the far-away stars in the depth of it.
They lingered awhile—arms round each other's waists—before she called the boys, just as they had done this time of night twenty years ago, after the boys' grandmother had called her.
“Awlright, mother!” bawled back the boys, with unfilial independence of Australian youth. “We're awlright! We'll be in directly! Wasn't it a pelterer, mother?”
They went in and sat down again. The embarrassment began to wear off.
“We'll get out of this, Mary,” said Johnny. “I'll take Mason's offer for the cattle and things, and take that job of Dawson's, boss or no boss”—(Johnny's bad luck was due to his inability in the past to “get on” with any boss for any reasonable length of time)—“I can get the boys on, too. They're doing no good here, and growing up. It ain't doing justice to them; and, what's more, this life is killin' you, Mary. That settles it! I was blind. Let the jumpt-up selection go! It's making a wall-eyed bullock of me, Mary—a dry-rotted rag of a wall-eyed bullock like Jimmy Nowlett's old Strawberry. And you'll live in town like a lady.”
“Somebody coming!” yelled the boys.
There was a clatter of sliprails hurriedly thrown down, and clipped by horses' hoofs.
“Insoide there! Is that you, Johnny?”
“Yes!” (“I knew they'd come for you,” said Mrs. Mears to Johnny.)
“You'll have to come, Johnny. There's no get out of it. Here's Jim Mason with me, and we've got orders to stun you and pack you if you show fight. The blessed fiddler from Mudgee didn't turn up. Dave Regan burst his concertina, and they're in a fix.”
“But I can't leave the missus.”
“That's all right. We've got the school missus's mare and side-saddle. She says you ought to be jolly well ashamed of yourself, Johnny Mears, for not bringing your wife on New Year's Night. And so you ought!”
Johnny did not look shame-faced, for reasons unknown to them.
“The boys couldn't find the horses,” put in Mrs. Mears. “Johnny was just going down the gully again.”
He gave her a grateful look, and felt a strange, new thrill of admiration for his wife.
“And—there's a bottle of the best put by for you, Johnny,” added Pat McDurmer, mistaking Johnny's silence; “and we'll call it thirty bob!” (Johnny's ideas were coming slowly again, after the recent rush.) “Or—two quid!—there you are!”
“I don't want two quid, nor one either, for taking my wife to a dance on New Year's Night!” said Johnny Mears. “Run and put on your best bib and tucker, Mary.”
And she hurried to dress as eager and excited, and smiling to herself as girlishly as she had done on such occasions on evenings before the bright New Year's Night twenty years ago.—For a related story, see “A Bush Dance”, in “Joe Wilson and His Mates”.—A. L., 1998.—
They called him Black Joe, and me White Joe, by way of distinction and for the convenience of his boss (my uncle), and my aunt, and mother; so, when we heard the cry of “Bla-a-ack Joe!” (the adjective drawn out until it became a screech, after several repetitions, and the “Joe” short and sharp) coming across the flat in a woman's voice, Joe knew that the missus wanted him at the house, to get wood or water, or mind the baby, and he kept carefully out of sight; he went at once when uncle called. And when we heard the cry of “Wh-i-i-te Joe!” which we did with difficulty and after several tries—though Black Joe's ears were of the keenest—we knew that I was overdue at home, or absent without leave, and was probably in for a warming, as the old folk called it. On some occasions I postponed the warming as long as my stomach held out, which was a good while in five-corner, native-cherry, or yam season—but the warming was none the cooler for being postponed.
Sometimes Joe heard the wrong adjective, or led me to believe he did—and left me for a whole afternoon under the impression that the race of Ham was in demand at the homestead, when I myself was wanted there, and maternal wrath was increasing every moment of my absence.
But Joe knew that my conscience was not so elastic as his, and—well, you must expect little things like this in all friendships.
Black Joe was somewhere between nine and twelve when I first met him, on a visit to my uncle's station; I was somewhere in those years too. He was very black, the darker for being engaged in the interesting but uncertain occupation of “burning off” in his spare time—which wasn't particularly limited. He combined shepherding, 'possum and kangaroo hunting, crawfishing, sleeping, and various other occupations and engagements with that of burning off. I was very white, being a sickly town boy; but, as I took great interest in burning off, and was not particularly fond of cold water—it was in winter time—the difference in our complexions was not so marked at times.
Black Joe's father, old Black Jimmie, lived in a gunyah on the rise at the back of the sheepyards, and shepherded for my uncle. He was a gentle, good-humoured, easy-going old fellow with a pleasant smile; which description applies, I think, to most old blackfellows in civilisation. I was very partial to the old man, and chummy with him, and used to slip away from the homestead whenever I could, and squat by the campfire along with the other piccaninnies, and think, and yarn socially with Black Jimmie by the hour. I would give something to remember those conversations now. Sometimes somebody would be sent to bring me home, when it got too late, and Black Jimmie would say:
“Piccaninnie alonga possum rug,” and there I'd be, sound asleep, with the other young Australians.
I liked Black Jimmie very much, and would willingly have adopted him as a father. I should have been quite content to spend my days in the scrub, enjoying life in dark and savage ways, and my nights “alonga possum rug”; but the family had other plans for my future.
It was a case of two blackfellows and one gin, when Black Jimmie went a-wooing—about twelve years before I made his acquaintance—and he fought for his bride in the black fashion. It was the last affair of that kind in the district. My uncle's brother professed to have been present at the fight, and gave me an alleged description of it. He said that they drew lots, and Black Jimmie put his hands on his knees and bent his head, and the other blackfellow hit him a whack on the skull with a nulla nulla. Then they had a nip of rum all round—Black Jimmie must have wanted it, for the nulla nulla was knotted, and heavy, and made in the most approved fashion. Then the other blackfellow bent his head, and Jimmie took the club and returned the whack with interest. Then the other fellow hit Jimmie a lick, and took a clout in return. Then they had another drink, and continued thus until Jimmie's rival lost all heart and interest in the business. But you couldn't take everything my uncle's brother said for granted.
Black Mary was a queen by right, and had the reputation of being the cleanest gin in the district; she was a great favourite with the squatters' wives round there. Perhaps she hoped to reclaim Jimmie—he was royal, too, but held easy views with regard to religion and the conventionalities of civilisation. Mary insisted on being married properly by a clergyman, made the old man build a decent hut, had all her children christened, and kept him and them clean and tidy up to the time of her death.
Poor Queen Mary was ambitious. She started to educate her children, and when they got beyond her—that is when they had learnt their letters—she was grateful for any assistance from the good-natured bush men and women of her acquaintance. She had decided to get her eldest boy into the mounted police, and had plans for the rest, and she worked hard for them, too. Jimmie offered no opposition, and gave her no assistance beyond the rations and money he earned shepherding—which was as much as could be expected of him.
He did as many husbands do “for the sake of peace and quietness”—he drifted along in the wake of his wife, and took things as easily as her schemes of reformation and education would allow him to.
Queen Mary died before her time, respected by all who knew or had heard of her. The nearest squatter's wife sent a pair of sheets for a shroud, with instructions to lay Mary out, and arranged (by bush telegraph) to drive over next morning with her sister-in-law and two other white women in the vicinity, to see Mary decently buried.
But the remnant of Jimmie's tribe were there beforehand. They tore the sheets in strips and tied Mary up in a bundle, with her chin to her knees—preparing her for burial in their own fashion—and mourned all night in whitewash and ashes. At least, the gins did. The white women saw that it was hopeless to attempt to untie any of the innumerable knots and double knots, even if it had been possible to lay Mary out afterwards; so they had to let her be buried as she was, with black and white obsequies. And we've got no interest in believing that she did not “jump up white woman” long ago.
My uncle and his brother took the two eldest boys. Black Jimmie shifted away from the hut at once with the rest of his family—for the “devil-devil” sat down there—and Mary's name was strictly “tabooed” in accordance with aboriginal etiquette.
Jimmie drifted back towards the graves of his fathers in company with a decreasing flock of sheep day by day (for the house of my uncle had fallen on times of drought and depression, and foot-rot and wool rings, and over-drafts and bank owners), and a few strips of bark, a dying fire, a black pipe, some greasy 'possum rugs and blankets, a litter of kangaroo tails, etc., four neglected piccaninnies, half a score of mangy mongrels, and, haply, a “lilly drap o' rum”, by night.
The four little Australians grew dirtier and more shy and savage, and ate underdone kangaroo and 'possum and native bear, with an occasional treat of oak grubs and goanna by preference—and died out, one by one, as blacks do when brought within the ever widening circle of civilisation. Jimmie moved promptly after each death, and left the evil one in possession, and built another mia-mia—each one being less pretentious than the last. Finally he was left, the last of his tribe, to mourn his lot in solitude.
But the devil-devil came and sat down by King Jimmie's side one night, so he, too, moved out across the Old Man border, and the mia-mia rotted into the ground and the grass grew there.
. . . . .
I admired Joe; I thought him wiser and cleverer than any white boy in the world. He could smell out 'possums unerringly, and I firmly believed he could see yards through the muddiest of dam water; for once, when I dropped my boat in, and was not sure of the spot, he fished it out first try. With cotton reels and bits of stick and bark he would make the model of a station homestead, slaughter-yards, sheep-yards, and all complete, working in ideas and improvements of his own which might have been put into practice with advantage. He was a most original and interesting liar upon all subjects upon which he was ignorant and which came up incidentally. He gave me a very interesting account of an interview between his father and Queen Victoria, and mentioned casually that his father had walked across the Thames without getting wet.
He also told me how he, Joe, had tied a mounted trooper to a verandah post and thrashed him with pine saplings until the timber gave out and he was tired. I questioned Jimmie, but the incidents seemed to have escaped the old king's memory.
Joe could build bigger woodheaps with less wood than any black or white tramp or loafer round there. He was a born architect. He took a world of pains with his wood-heaps—he built them hollow, in the shape of a break-wind, with the convex side towards the house for the benefit of his employers. Joe was easy-going; he had inherited a love of peace and quietness from his father. Uncle generally came home after dark, and Joe would have little fires lit at safe distances all round the house, in order to convey an impression that the burning off was proceeding satisfactorily.
When the warm weather came, Joe and I got into trouble with an old hag for bathing in a waterhole in the creek in front of her shanty, and she impounded portions of our wardrobe. We shouldn't have lost much if she had taken it all; but our sense of injury was deep, especially as she used very bad grammar towards us.
Joe addressed her from the safe side of the water. He said, “Look here! Old leather-face, sugar-eye, plar-bag marmy, I call it you.”
“Plar-bag marmy” meant “Mother Flour-bag”, and ration sugar was decidedly muddy in appearance.
She came round the waterhole with a clothes prop, and made good time, too; but we got across and away with our clothes.
That little incident might have changed the whole course of my existence. Plar-bag Marmy made a formal complaint to uncle, who happened to pass there on horseback about an hour later; and the same evening Joe's latest and most carefully planned wood heap collapsed while aunt was pulling a stick out of it in the dark, and it gave her a bad scare, the results of which might have been serious.
So uncle gave us a thrashing, without the slightest regard for racial distinctions, and sent us to bed without our suppers.
We sought Jimmie's camp, but Joe got neither sympathy nor damper from his father, and I was sent home with a fatherly lecture “for going alonga that fella,” meaning Joe.
Joe and I discussed existence at a waterhole down the creek next afternoon, over a billy of crawfish which we had boiled and a piece of gritty damper, and decided to retire beyond the settled districts—some five hundred miles or so—to a place that Joe said he knew of, where there were lagoons and billabongs ten miles wide, alive with ducks and fish, and black cockatoos and kangaroos and wombats, that only waited to be knocked over with a stick.
I thought I might as well start and be a blackfellow at once, so we got a rusty pan without a handle, and cooked about a pint of fat yellow oak-grubs; and I was about to fall to when we were discovered, and the full weight of combined family influence was brought to bear on the situation. We had broken a new pair of shears digging out those grubs from under the bark of the she-oaks, and had each taken a blade as his own especial property, which we thought was the best thing to do under the circumstances. Uncle wanted those shears badly, so he received us with the buggy whip—and he didn't draw the colour line either. All that night and next day I wished he had. I was sent home, and Joe went droving with uncle soon after that, else I might have lived a life of freedom and content and died out peacefully with the last of my adopted tribe.
Joe died of consumption on the track. When he was dying uncle asked: “Is there anything you would like?”
And Joe said: “I'd like a lilly drap o' rum, boss.”
Which were his last words, for he drank the rum and died peacefully.
I was the first to hear the news at home, and, being still a youngster, I ran to the house, crying “Oh, mother! aunt's Joe is dead!”
There were visitors at our place at the time, and, as the eldest child of the maternal aunt in question had also been christened Joe—after a grandfather of our tribe (my tribe, not Black Joe's)—the news caused a sudden and unpleasant sensation. But cross-examination explained the mistake, and I retired to the rear of the pig-sty, as was my custom when things went wrong, with another cause for grief.
“Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulatethe heaviest swags of trouble in this world.”—Steelman.Told by Mitchell's Mate.
We were coming back from West Australia, steerage—Mitchell, the Oracle, and I. I had gone over saloon, with a few pounds in my pocket. Mitchell said this was a great mistake—I should have gone over steerage with nothing but the clothes I stood upright in, and come back saloon with a pile. He said it was a very common mistake that men made, but, as far as his experience went, there always seemed to be a deep-rooted popular prejudice in favour of going away from home with a few pounds in one's pocket and coming back stumped; at least amongst rovers and vagabonds like ourselves—it wasn't so generally popular or admired at home, or in the places we came back to, as it was in the places we went to. Anyway it went, there wasn't the slightest doubt that our nearest and dearest friends were, as a rule, in favour of our taking away as little as we could possibly manage with, and coming back with a pile, whether we came back saloon or not; and that ought to settle the matter as far as any chap that had the slightest consideration for his friends or family was concerned.
There was a good deal of misery, underneath, coming home in that steerage. One man had had his hand crushed and amputated out Coolgardie way, and the stump had mortified, and he was being sent to Melbourne by his mates. Some had lost their money, some a couple of years of their life, some their souls; but none seemed to have lost the heart to call up the quiet grin that southern rovers, vagabonds, travellers for “graft” or fortune, and professional wanderers wear in front of it all. Except one man—an elderly eastern digger—he had lost his wife in Sydney while he was away.
They sent him a wire to the Boulder Soak, or somewhere out back of White Feather, to say that his wife was seriously ill; but the wire went wrong, somehow, after the manner of telegrams not connected with mining, on the lines of “the Western”. They sent him a wire to say that his wife was dead, and that reached him all right—only a week late.
I can imagine it. He got the message at dinner-time, or when they came back to the camp. His mate wanted him to sit in the shade, or lie in the tent, while he got the billy boiled. “You must brace up and pull yourself together, Tom, for the sake of the youngsters.” And Tom for long intervals goes walking up and down, up and down, by the camp—under the brassy sky or the gloaming—under the brilliant star-clusters that hang over the desert plain, but never raising his eyes to them; kicking a tuft of grass or a hole in the sand now and then, and seeming to watch the progress of the track he is tramping out. The wife of twenty years was with him—though two thousand miles away—till that message came.
I can imagine Tome sitting with his mates round the billy, they talking in quiet, subdued tones about the track, the departure of coaches, trains and boats—arranging for Tom's journey East, and the working of the claim in his absence. Or Tom lying on his back in his bunk, with his hands under his head and his eyes fixed on the calico above—thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking, with a touch of his boyhood's faith perhaps; or wondering what he had done in his long, hard-working married life, that God should do this thing to him now, of all times.
“You'd best take what money we have in the camp, Tom; you'll want it all ag'in' the time you get back from Sydney, and we can fix it up arterwards.... There's a couple o' clean shirts o' mine—you'd best take 'em—you'll want 'em on the voyage.... You might as well take them there new pants o' mine, they'll only dry-rot out here—and the coat, too, if you like—it's too small for me, anyway. You won't have any time in Perth, and you'll want some decent togs to land with in Sydney.”
. . . . .
“I wouldn't 'a' cared so much if I'd 'a' seen the last of her,” he said, in a quiet, patient voice, to us one night by the rail. “I would 'a' liked to have seen the last of her.”
“Have you been long in the West?”
“Over two years. I made up to take a run across last Christmas, and have a look at 'em. But I couldn't very well get away when 'exemption-time' came. I didn't like to leave the claim.”
“Do any good over there?”
“Well, things brightened up a bit the last month or two. I had a hard pull at first; landed without a penny, and had to send back every shilling I could rake up to get things straightened up a bit at home. Then the eldest boy fell ill, and then the baby. I'd reckoned on bringing 'em over to Perth or Coolgardie when the cool weather came, and having them somewheres near me, where I could go and have a look at 'em now and then, and look after them.”
“Going back to the West again?”
“Oh, yes. I must go for the sake of the youngsters. But I don't seem to have much heart in it.” He smoked awhile. “Over twenty years we struggled along together—the missus and me—and it seems hard that I couldn't see the last of her. It's rough on a man.”
“The world is damned rough on a man sometimes,” said Mitchell, “most especially when he least deserves it.”
The digger crossed his arms on the rail like an old “cocky” at the fence in the cool of the evening, yarning with an old crony.
“Mor'n twenty years she stuck to me and struggled along by my side. She never give in. I'll swear she was on her feet till the last, with her sleeves tucked up—bustlin' round.... And just when things was brightening and I saw a chance of giving her a bit of a rest and comfort for the end of her life.... I thought of it all only t'other week when things was clearing up ahead; and the last 'order' I sent over I set to work and wrote her a long letter, putting all the good news and encouragement I could think of into it. I thought how that letter would brighten up things at home, and how she'd read it round. I thought of lots of things that a man never gets time to think of while his nose is kept to the grindstone. And she was dead and in her grave, and I never knowed it.”
Mitchell dug his elbow into my ribs and made signs for the matches to light his pipe.
“An' yer never knowed,” reflected the Oracle.
“But I always had an idea when there was trouble at home,” the digger went on presently, in his quiet, patient tone. “I always knowed; I always had a kind of feeling that way—I felt it—no matter how far I was away. When the youngsters was sick I knowed it, and I expected the letter that come. About a fortnight ago I had a feeling that way when the wife was ill. The very stars out there on the desert by the Boulder Soak seemed to say: 'There's trouble at home. Go home. There's trouble at home.' But I never dreamed what that trouble was. One night I did make up my mind to start in the morning, but when the morning came I hadn't an excuse, and was ashamed to tell my mates the truth. They might have thought I was going ratty, like a good many go out there.” Then he broke off with a sort of laugh, as if it just struck him that we might think he was a bit off his head, or that his talk was getting uncomfortable for us. “Curious, ain't it?” he said.
“Reminds me of a case I knowed,——” commenced the Oracle, after a pause.
I could have pitched him overboard; but that was a mistake. He and the old digger sat on the for'ard hatch half the night yarning, mostly about queer starts, and rum go's, and curious cases the Oracle had knowed, and I think the Oracle did him a lot of good somehow, for he seemed more cheerful in the morning.
We were overcrowded in the steerage, but Mitchell managed to give up his berth to the old digger without letting him know it. Most of the chaps seemed anxious to make a place at the first table and pass the first helpings of the dishes to the “old cove that had lost his missus.”
They all seemed to forget him as we entered the Heads; they had their own troubles to attend to. They were in the shadow of the shame of coming back hard up, and the grins began to grow faint and sickly. But I didn't forget him. I wish sometimes that I didn't take so much notice of things.
There was no mistaking them—the little group that stood apart near the end of the wharf, dressed in cheap black. There was the eldest single sister—thin, pale, and haggard-looking—that had had all the hard worry in the family till her temper was spoilt, as you could see by the peevish, irritable lines in her face. She had to be the mother of them all now, and had never known, perhaps, what it was to be a girl or a sweetheart. She gave a hard, mechanical sort of smile when she saw her father, and then stood looking at the boat in a vacant, hopeless sort of way. There was the baby, that he saw now for the first time, crowing and jumping at the sight of the boat coming in; there was the eldest boy, looking awkward and out of place in his new slop-suit of black, shifting round uneasily, and looking anywhere but at his father. But the little girl was the worst, and a pretty little girl she was, too; she never took her streaming eyes off her father's face the whole time. You could see that her little heart was bursting, and with pity for him. They were too far apart to speak to each other as yet. The boat seemed a cruel long long time swinging alongside—I wished they'd hurry up. He'd brought his traps up early, and laid 'em on the deck under the rail; he stood very quiet with his hands behind him, looking at his children. He had a strong, square, workman's face, but I could see his chin and mouth quivering under the stubbly, iron-grey beard, and the lump working in his throat; and one strong hand gripped the other very tight behind, but his eyelids never quivered—only his eyes seemed to grow more and more sad and lonesome. These are the sort of long, cruel moments when a man sits or stands very tight and quiet and calm-looking, with his whole past life going whirling through his brain, year after year, and over and over again. Just as the digger seemed about to speak to them he met the brimming eyes of his little girl turned up to his face. He looked at her for a moment, and then turned suddenly and went below as if pretending to go down for his things. I noticed that Mitchell—who hadn't seemed to be noticing anything in particular—followed him down. When they came on deck again we were right alongside.
“'Ello, Nell!” said the digger to the eldest daughter.
“'Ello, father!” she said, with a sort of gasp, but trying to smile.
“'Ello, Jack, how are you getting on?”
“All right, father,” said the boy, brightening up, and seeming greatly relieved.
He looked down at the little girl with a smile that I can't describe, but didn't speak to her. She still stood with quivering chin and mouth and great brimming eyes upturned, full of such pity as I never saw before in a child-face—pity for him.
“You can get ashore now,” said Mitchell; “see, they've got the gangway out aft.”
Presently I saw Mitchell with the portmanteau in his hand, and the baby on his arm, steering them away to a quiet corner of the shed at the top of the wharf. The digger had the little girl in his arms, and both hers were round his neck, and her face hidden on his shoulder.
When Mitchell came back, he leant on the rail for a while by my side, as if it was a boundary fence out back, and there was no hurry to break up camp and make a start.
“What did you follow him below that time for, Mitchell?” I asked presently, for want of something better to say.
Mitchell looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
“I wanted to score a drink!” he said. “I thought he wanted one and wouldn't like to be a Jimmy Woodser.”
“When you're going away by boat,” said Mitchell, “you ought to say good-bye to the women at home, and to the chaps at the last pub. I hate waiting on the wharf or up on deck when the boat's behind time. There's no sense in it, and a lot of unnecessary misery. Your friends wait on the wharf and you are kept at the rail to the bitter end, just when they and you most want a spell. And why? Some of them hang out because they love you, and want to see the last of you; some because they don't like you to see them going away without seeing the last of you; and you hang out mostly because it would hurt 'em if you went below and didn't give them a chance of seeing the last of you all the time—and you curse the boat and wish to God it would start. And those who love you most—the women-folk of the family—and who are making all the fuss and breaking their hearts about having to see the last of you, and least want to do it—they hang out the longest, and are the most determined to see it. Where's the sense in it? What's the good of seeing the last of you? How do women manage to get consolation out of a thing like that?
“But women get consolation out of queer things sometimes,” he added reflectively, “and so do men.
“I remember when I was knocking about the coasts, an old aunt of mine always persisted in coming down to see the last of me, and bringing the whole family too—no matter if I was only going away for a month. I was her favourite. I always turned up again in a few months; but if I'd come back every next boat it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to her. She'd say that I mightn't come back some day, and then she'd never forgive herself nor the family for not seeing me off. I suppose she'll see the end of me yet if she lives long enough—and she's a wiry old lady of the old school. She was old-fashioned and dressed like a fright, they said at home. They hated being seen in public with her; to tell the truth, I felt a bit ashamed, too, at times. I wouldn't be, now. When I'd get her off on to the wharf I'd be overcome with my feelings, and have to retire to the privacy of the bar to hide my emotions till the boat was going. And she'd stand on the end of the pier and wave her handkerchief and mop her old eyes with it until she was removed by force.
“God bless her old heart! There wasn't so much affection wasted on me at home that I felt crowded by hers; and I never lost anything by her seeing the last of me.
“I do wish the Oracle would stop that confounded fiddle of his—it makes you think over damned old things.”