Selected Stories (14 page)

“Sellin’ papers. I’m always tryin’ to get a start in somethin’ else, but I ain’t got no luck. I always come back to sellin’ papers.”

Then, after a thought, he added reflectively: “Blast papers!”

His present ambition was to drive a cart.

“I drove a cart twice, and once I rode a butcher’s horse. A bloke worked me out of one billet, and I worked myself out of the other. I didn’t know when I was well off. Then the banks went bust, and my last boss went insolvent, and one of his partners went into Darlinghurst for suicide, and the other went into Gladesville for being mad; and one day the bailiff seized the cart and horse with me in it and a load of timber. So I went home and helped mother and the kids to live on one meal a day for six months, and keep the bum-bailiff out. Another cove had my news-stand.”

Then, after a thought:

“Blast reconstriction!”

“But you surely can’t make a living selling newspapers?”

“No, there’s nothin’ in it. There’s too many at it. The blessed women spoil it. There’s one got a good stand down in George Street, and she’s got a dozen kids sellin’—they can’t be all hers—and then she’s got the hide to come up to my stand and sell in front of me…What are you thinkin’ about doin’, Mrs Aspinall?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I really don’t know what to do.”

And there still being some distance to go, she plunged into her tale of misery once more, not forgetting the length of time she had dealt with her creditors.

Bill pushed his hat forward and walked along on the edge of the kerb.

“Can’t you shift? Ain’t you got no people or friends that you can go to for a while?”

“Oh, yes; there’s my sister-in-law; she’s asked me times without number to come and stay with her till things got better, and she’s got a hard enough struggle herself, Lord knows. She asked me again only yesterday.”

“Well, that ain’t too bad,” reflected Bill. “Why don’t you go?”

“Well, you see, if I did they wouldn’t let me take my furniture, and she’s got next to none.”

“Won’t the landlord let you take your furniture?”

“No, not him! He’s one of the hardest landlords in Sydney—the worst I ever had.”

“That’s red-hot!…I’d take it in spite of him. He can’t do nothing.”

“But I daren’t; and even if I did I haven’t got a penny to pay for a van.”

They neared the alley. Bill counted the flagstones, stepping from one to another over the joints: “Eighteen—nineteen—twenty—twenty-one!” he counted mentally, and came to the corner kerbing. Then he turned suddenly and faced her.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” he said decidedly. “Can you get your things ready by to-night? I know a cove that’s got a cart.”

“But I daren’t. I’m afraid of the landlord.”

“The more fool you,” said Bill. “Well, I’m not afraid of him. He can’t do nothin’. I’m not afraid of a landlady, and that’s worse. I know the law. He can’t do nothin’. You just do as I tell you.”

“I’d want to think over it first, and see my sister-in-law.”

“Where does your sister-’n-law live?”

“Not far.”

“Well, see her, and think over it—you’ve got plenty of time to do it in—and get your things ready by dark. Don’t be frightened. I’ve shifted mother and an aunt and two married sisters out of worse fixes than yours. I’ll be round after dark, and bring a push to lend a hand. They’re decent coves.”

“But I can’t expect your friend to shift me for nothing. I told you I haven’t got a——”

“Mrs Aspinall, I ain’t that sort of a bloke, neither is my chum, and neither is the other fellows—’relse they wouldn’t be friends of mine. Will you promise, Mrs Aspinall?”

“I’m afraid—I—I’d like to keep my few things now. I’ve kept them so long. It’s hard to lose my few bits of things—I wouldn’t care so much if I could keep the ironin’ table.”

“So you could, by law—it’s necessary to your living, but it would cost more’n the table. Now, don’t be soft, Mrs Aspinall. You’ll have the bailiff in any day, and be turned out in the end without a rag. The law knows no ‘necessary’. You want your furniture more’n the landlord does. He can’t do nothin’. You can trust it all to me…I know’d Arvie…Will you do it?”

“Yes, I will.”

At about eight o’clock that evening there came a mysterious knock at Mrs Aspinall’s door. She opened, and there stood Bill. His attitude was businesslike, and his manner very impressive. Three other boys stood along by the window, with their backs to the wall, deeply interested in the emptying of burnt cigarette ends into a piece of newspaper laid in the crown of one of their hats, and a fourth stood a little way along the kerb casually rolling a cigarette, and keeping a quiet eye out for suspicious appearances. They were of different makes and sizes, but there seemed an undefined similarity between them.

“This is my push, Mrs Aspinall,” said Bill; “at least,” he added apologetically, “it’s part of ’em. Here, you chaps, this is Mrs Aspinall, what I told you about.”

They elbowed the wall back, rubbed their heads with their hats, shuffled round, and seemed to take a vacant sort of interest in abstract objects, such as the pavement, the gas-lamp, and neighbouring doors and windows.

“Got the things ready?” asked Bill.

“Oh, yes.”

“Got ’em downstairs?”

“There’s no upstairs. The rooms above belong to the next house.”

“And a nice house it is,” said Bill, “for rooms to belong to. I wonder,” he reflected, cocking his eye at the windows above; “I wonder how the police manage to keep an eye on the next house without keepin’ an eye on yours—but they know.”

He turned towards the street end of the alley and gave a low whistle. Out under the lamp from behind the corner came a long, thin, shambling, hump-backed youth, with his hat down over his head like an extinguisher, dragging a small bony horse, which, in its turn, dragged a rickety cart of the tray variety, such as is used in the dead marine trade. Behind the cart was tied a mangy retriever. This affair was drawn up opposite the door.

“The cove with a cart” was introduced as “Chinny”. He had no chin whatever, not even a receding chin. It seemed as though his chin had been cut clean off horizontally. When he took off his hat he showed to the mild surprise of strangers a pair of shrewd grey eyes and a broad high forehead. Chinny was in the empty bottle line.

“Now, then, hold up that horse of yours for a minute, Chinny,” said Bill briskly, “’relse he’ll fall down and break the shaft again.” (It had already been broken in several places and spliced with strips of deal, clothes-line, and wire.) “Now, you chaps, fling yourselves about and get the furniture out.”

This was a great relief to the push. They ran against each other and the door post in their eagerness to be at work. The furniture—what Mrs A. called her “few bits of things”—was carried out with elaborate care. The ironing table was the main item. It was placed top down in the cart, and the rest of the things went between the legs without bulging sufficiently to cause, Chinny any anxiety.

Just then the picket gave a low, earnest whistle, and they were aware of a policeman standing statue-like under the lamp on the opposite corner, and apparently unaware of their existence. He was looking, sphinx-like, past them towards the city.

“It can’t be helped; we must put on front an’ go on with it now,” said Bill.

“He’s all right, I think;” said Chinny. “He knows me.”

“He can’t do nothin’,” said Bill; “don’t mind him, Mrs Aspinall. Now, then (to the push), tie up. Don’t be frightened of the dorg—what are you frightened of? Why! he’d only apologise if you trod on his tail.”

The dog went under the cart, and kept his tail carefully behind him.

The policeman—he was an elderly man—stood still, looking towards the city, and over it, perhaps, and over the sea, to long years agone in Ireland when he and the boys ducked bailiffs, and resisted evictions with “shticks”, and “riz” sometimes, and gathered together at the rising of the moon, and did many things contrary to the peace of Gracious Majesty, its laws and constitutions, crown and dignity; as a reward for which he had helped to preserve the said peace for the best years of his life, without promotion, for he had a great aversion to running in “the boys”—which included nearly all mankind—and preferred to keep, and was most successful in keeping, the peace with no other assistance than that of his own rich fatherly brogue.

Bill took charge of two of the children; Mrs Aspinall carried the youngest.

“Go ahead, Chinny,” said Bill.

Chinny shambled forward sideways, dragging the horse, with one long, bony, short-sleeved arm stretched out behind holding the rope reins; the horse stumbled out of the gutter, and the cart seemed to pause a moment, as if undecided whether to follow or not, and then, with many rickety complaints, moved slowly and painfully up on to the level out of the gutter. The dog rose like a long, weary, mangy sigh, but with a lazy sort of calculation, before his rope (which was short) grew taut—which was good judgment on his part, for his neck was sore; and his feet being tender, he felt his way carefully and painfully over the metal, as if he feared that at any step he might spring some treacherous, ’air-trigger trap-door which would drop and hang him.

“Nit, you chaps,” said Bill, “and wait for me.” The push rubbed its head with its hat, said “Good night, Mrs Ashpennel”, and was absent, spook-like.

When the funeral reached the street, the lonely “trap” was, somehow, two blocks away in the opposite direction, moving very slow, and very upright, and very straight, like an automaton.

AT the local police court, where the subject of this sketch turned up periodically amongst the drunks, he had “James” prefixed to his name for the sake of convenience and as a matter of form previous to his being fined forty shillings (which he never paid) and sentenced to “a month hard” (which he contrived to make as soft as possible). The local larrikins, called him “Grog”, a very appropriate name, all things considered; but to the
Geebung Times
he was known until the day of his death as “a well-known character named Bogg”. The antipathy of the local paper might have been accounted for by the fact that Bogg strayed into the office one day in a muddled condition during the absence of the staff at lunch and corrected a revise proof of the next week’s leader, placing bracketed “query” and “see proof” marks opposite the editor’s most flowery periods and quotations, and leaving on the margin some general advice to the printers to “space better”, &c. He also corrected a Latin quotation or two, and added a few ideas of his own in good French.

But no one, with the exception of the editor of the
Times
, ever dreamed that there was anything out of the common in the shaggy, unkempt head upon which poor Bogg used to “do his little time”, until a young English doctor came to practise at Geebung. One night the doctor and the manager of the local bank and one or two others wandered into the bar of the Diggers’ Arms, where Bogg sat in a dark corner mumbling to himself as usual and spilling half his beer on the table and floor. Presently some drunken utterances reached the doctor’s ear, and he turned round in a surprised manner and looked at Bogg. The drunkard continued to mutter for some time, and then broke out into something like the fag-end of a song. The doctor walked over to the table at which Bogg was sitting, and, seating himself on the far corner, regarded the drunkard attentively for some minutes; but the latter’s voice ceased, his head fell slowly on his folded arms, and all became silent except the drip, drip of the
overturned beer falling from the table to the form and from the form to the floor.

The doctor rose and walked back to his friends with a graver face. “You seem interested in Bogg,” said the bank manager.

“Yes,” said the doctor.

“What was he mumbling about?”

“Oh, that was a passage from Homer.”

“What?”

The doctor repeated his answer.

“Then do you mean to say he understands Greek?”

“Yes,” said the doctor sadly, “he is, or must have been, a classical scholar.”

The manager took time to digest this, and then asked:

“What was the song?”

“Oh, that was an old song we used to sing at the Dublin University,” said the doctor.

During his sober days Bogg used to fossick about among the old waste heaps, or split palings in the bush, and by these means he managed to keep out of debt. Strange to say, in spite of his drunken habits, his credit was as good as that of any man in the town. He was very unsociable, seldom speaking, whether drunk or sober; but a weary, hard-up sundowner was always pretty certain to get a meal and a shake-down at Bogg’s lonely hut among the waste heaps. It happened one dark night that a little “push” of local larrikins, having nothing better to amuse them, wended their way through the old mullock heaps in the direction of the lonely little hut, with the object of playing off an elaborately planned ghost joke on Bogg. Previously to commencing operations, the leader of the jokers put his eye to a crack in the bark to reconnoitre. He didn’t see much, but what he did see seemed to interest him, for he kept his eye there till his companions grew impatient. Bogg sat in front of his rough little table with his elbows on the same, and his hands supporting his forehead. Before him on the table lay a few articles such as lady
novelists and poets use in their work, and such as bitter cynics often wear secretly next their bitter and cynical hearts.

There was the usual faded letter, a portrait of a girl, something that looked like a pressed flower and, of course, a lock of hair. Presently Bogg folded his arms over these things, and his face sank lower and lower, till nothing was visible to the unsuspected watcher except the drunkard’s rough, shaggy hair; rougher and wilder looking in the uncertain light of the slush lamp.

The larrikin turned away and beckoned his comrades to follow him.

“Wot is it?” asked one, when they had gone some distance.

The leader said, “We’re a-goin’ ter let ’im alone;
that’s
wot it is.”

There was some demur over this, and an explanation was demanded; but the boss bully unbuttoned his coat, and spit on his hands, and said:

“We’re a-goin’ ter let Bogg alone; that’s wot it is.”

So they went away and let Bogg alone that night.

Afew days later the following paragraph appeared in the
Geebung Times
:—“Awell-known character named Bogg was found drowned in the river on Sunday last, his hat and coat being found on the bank. At a late hour on Saturday night a member of our staff saw a man walking slowly along the river bank, but it was too dark to identify the person.”

We suppose it was Bogg whom the
Times
reported, but of course we cannot be sure. The chances are that it was Bogg. It was pretty evident that he had committed suicide, and, being a “well-known character”, no doubt he had reasons for his rash act. Perhaps he was walking by himself in the dark along the river bank, and thinking of those reasons when the
Times
man saw him. Strange to say, the world knows least about the lives and sorrows of “well-known characters” of this kind, no matter what their names might be, and—well, there is no reason why we should bore a reader, or waste any more space over a well-known character named Bogg.