Selected Stories (26 page)

“Cheer up, old woman!” cried Tom, patting his mother on the back. “We’ll be happy yet. I’ve been wild and foolish, I know, and gave you some awful trouble, but that’s all done with. I mean to keep steady, and by-and-by we’ll go away to Sydney or Queensland. Give us a smile, mother.”

He got some “grubbing” to do, and for six months kept the family in provisions. Then a change came over him. He became moody and sullen—even brutal. He would sit for hours and grin to himself without any apparent cause; then he would stay away from home for days together.

“Tom’s going wrong again,” wailed Mrs Wylie. “He’ll get
into trouble again, I know he will. We are disgraced enough already, God knows.”

“You’ve done your best mother,” said Mary, “and can do no more. People will pity us; after all, the thing itself is not so bad as the everlasting dread of it. This will be a lesson for father—he wanted one—and maybe he’ll be a better man.” (She knew better than that.) “
You
did your best, mother.”

“Ah, Mary! you don’t know what I’ve gone through these thirty years in the bush with your father. I’ve had to go down on my knees and beg people not to prosecute him—and the same with your brother Tom; and this is the end of it.”

“Better to have let them go, mother; you should have left father when you found out what sort of a man he was; it would have been better for all.”

“It was my duty to stick by him, child; he was my husband. Your father was always a bad man, Mary—a bad man; I found it out too late. I could not tell you a quarter of what I have suffered with him…I was proud, Mary; I wanted my children to be better than others…It’s my fault; it’s a judgment…I wanted to make my children better than others…I was so proud, Mary.”

Mary had a sweetheart, a drover, who was supposed to be in Queensland. He had promised to marry her, and take her and her mother away when he returned; at least, she had promised to marry him on that condition. He had now been absent on his latest trip for nearly six months, and there was no news from him. She got a copy of a country paper to look for the “stock passings”; but a startling headline caught her eye:

IMPUDENT ATTEMPT AT ROBBERY UNDER ARM
S

A drover known to the police as Frederick Dunn, alia
s
Drew, was arrested last week at—
—

She read to the bitter end, and burned the paper. And the shadow of another trouble, darker and drearier than all the rest, was upon her.

So the little outcast family in Long Gully existed for several months, seeing no one save a sympathetic old splitter who would come and smoke his pipe by the fire of nights, and try to
convince the old woman that matters might have been worse, and that she wouldn’t worry so much if she knew the troubles of some of our biggest families, and that things would come out all right and the lesson would do Wylie good. Also, that Tom was a different boy altogether, and had more sense than to go wrong again. “It was nothing,” he said, “nothing; they didn’t know what trouble was.”

But one day, when Mary and her mother were alone, the troopers came again.

“Mrs Wylie, where’s your son Tom?” they asked.

She sat still. She didn’t even cry, “Oh, my God!”

“Don’t be frightened, Mrs Wylie,” said one of the troopers, gently. “It ain’t for much anyway, and maybe Tom’ll be able to clear himself.”

Mary sank on her knees by her mother’s side, crying “Speak to me mother. Oh, my God, she’s dying! Speak for my sake, mother. Don’t die, mother; it’s all a mistake. Don’t die and leave me here alone.”

But the poor old woman was dead.

Wylie came out towards the end of the year, and a few weeks later he brought home a—another woman.

Bob Bentley, general hawker, was camping under some rocks by the main road, near the foot of Long Gully. His mate was fast asleep under the tilted trap. Bob stood with his back to the fire, his pipe in his mouth, and his hands clasped behind him. The fire lit up the undersides of the branches above; a native bear sat in a fork blinking down at it, while the moon above him showed every hair on his ears. From among the trees came the pleasant jingle of hobble-chains, the slow tread of hoofs, and the “crunch, crunch” at the grass, as the horses moved about and grazed, now in moonlight, now in the soft shadows. “Old Thunder”, a big
black dog of no particular breed, gave a meaning look at his master, and started up the ridge, followed by several smaller dogs. Soon Bob heard from the hillside the “hy-yi-hi, whomp, whomp, whomp!” of old Thunder, and the yop-yop-yopping of the smaller fry—they had tree’d a ’possum. Bob threw himself on the grass, and pretended to be asleep. There was a sound as of a sizeable boulder rolling down the hill, and presently Thunder trotted round the fire to see if his master would come. Bob snored. The dog looked suspiciously at him, trotted round once or twice, and as a last resource gave him two great slobbery licks across the face. Bob got up with a good-natured oath.

“Well, old party,” he said to Thunder, “you’re a thundering old nuisance; but I s’pose you won’t be satisfied till I come.” He got a gun from the waggonette, loaded it, and started up the ridge; old Thunder rushing to and fro to show the way—as if the row the other dogs were making wasn’t enough to guide his master.

When Bob returned with the ’possums he was startled to see a woman in the camp. She was sitting on a log by the fire, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.

“Why—what the dev—who are you?”

The girl raised a white desperate face to him. It was Mary Wylie.

“My father and—and the woman—they’re drinking—they turned me out! They turned me out!”

“Did they now? I’m sorry for that. What can I do for you?…She’s mad sure enough,” he thought to himself; “I thought it was a ghost.”

“I don’t know,” she wailed, “I don’t know. You’re a man, and I’m a helpless girl. They turned me out! My mother’s dead, and my brother’s gone away. Look! Look here!” pointing to a bruise on her forehead. “The woman did that. My own father stood by and saw it done—said it served me right! Oh, my God!”

“What woman? Tell me all about it.”

“The woman father brought home!…I want to go away from the bush!…Oh! for God’s sake take me away from the bush!…Anything! anything!—you know!—only take me away from the bush!”

Bob and his mate—who had been roused—did their best to soothe her; but suddenly, without a moment’s warning, she sprang to her feet and scrambled to the top of the rock overhanging the camp. She stood for a moment in the bright moonlight, gazing intently down the vacant road.

“Here they come!” she cried, pointing down the road. “Here they come—the troopers! I can see their cap-peaks glistening in the moonlight!…I’m going away! Mother’s gone. I’m going now!—Good-bye!—Good-bye! I’m going away from the bush!”

Then she ran through the trees towards the foot of Long Gully. Bob and his mate followed; but, being unacquainted with the locality, they lost her.

She ran to the edge of a granite cliff on the higher side of the deepest of the rocky waterholes. There was a heavy splash, and three startled kangaroos, who had been drinking, leapt back and sped away, like three grey ghosts, up the ridge towards the moonlit peak.

“WE young fellows,” said “Sympathy Joe” to Mitchell, after tea, in their first camp west the river—“and you and I
are
young fellows, comparatively—think we know the world. There are plenty of young chaps knocking round in this country who reckon they’ve been through it all before they’re thirty. I’ve met cynics and men-o’-the-world, aged twenty-one or thereabouts, who’ve never been further than a trip to Sydney. They talk about ‘this world’ as if they’d knocked round in half-a-dozen other worlds before they came across here—and they are just as off-hand about it as older Australians are when they talk about this colony as compared with the others. They say: ‘My oath—same here.’ ‘I’ve been there.’ ‘My oath!—you’re right.’ ‘Take it from me!’ and all that sort of thing. They understand women, and have a contempt for ’em; and chaps that don’t talk as they talk, or do as they do, or see as they see, are either soft or ratty. Agood many reckon that ‘life ain’t blanky well worth livin’;’ sometimes they feel so blanky somehow that they wouldn’t give a blank whether they chucked it or not; but that sort never chuck it. It’s mostly the quiet men that do that, and if they’ve got any complaints to make against the world, they make ’em at the head station. Why, I’ve known healthy, single, young fellows under twenty-five who drank to drown their troubles—some because they reckoned the world didn’t understand nor appreciate ’em—as if it
could
!”

“If the world don’t understand or appreciate you,” said Mitchell solemnly, as he reached for a burning stick to light his pipe
—
“
make
it!”

“To drown
their
troubles!” continued Joe, in a tone of impatient contempt. “The Oracle must be well on towards the sixties; he can take his glass with any man, but you never saw him drunk.”

“What’s the Oracle to do with it?”

“Did you ever hear his history?”

“No. Do you know it?”

“Yes, though I don’t think he has any idea that I do. Now, we were talking about the Oracle a little while ago. We know he’s an old ass; a good many outsiders consider that he’s a bit soft or ratty, and, as we’re likely to be mates together for some time on that fencing contract, if we get it, you might as well know what sort of a man he is and was, so’s you won’t get uneasy about him if he gets deaf for a while when you’re talking, or does funny things with his pipe or pint-pot, or walks up and down by himself for an hour or so after tea, or sits on a log with his head in his hands, or leans on the fence in the gloaming and keeps looking in a blank sort of way, straight ahead, across the clearing. For he’s gazing at something a thousand miles across country, south-east, and about twenty years back into the past, and no doubt he sees himself (as a young man), and a Gippsland girl, spooning under the stars along between the hop-gardens and the Mitchell River. And, if you get holt of a fiddle or a concertina, don’t rasp or swank too much on old tunes, when he’s round, for the Oracle can’t stand it. Play something lively. He’ll be down there at that surveyor’s camp yarning till all hours, so we’ll have plenty of time for the story—but don’t you ever give him a hint that you know.

“My people knew him well; I got most of the story from them—mostly from Uncle Bob, who knew him better than any. The rest leaked out through the women—you know how things leak out amongst women?”

Mitchell dropped his head and scratched the back of it.
He
knew.

“It was on the Cudgegong River. My Uncle Bob was mates with him on one of those ‘rushes’ along there—the ‘Pipeclay’, I think it was, or the ‘Log Paddock’. The Oracle was a young man then, of course, and so was Uncle Bob (he was a match for most men). You see the Oracle now, and you can imagine what he was when he was a young man. Over six feet, and as straight as a sapling, Uncle Bob said, clean-limbed, and as fresh as they made men in those days; carried his hands behind him, as he does now, when he hasn’t got the swag—but his shoulders were back in those days. Of course he wasn’t the Oracle then; he was young Tom Marshall—but that doesn’t matter. Everybody liked him—especially
women and children. He was a bit happy-go-lucky and careless, but he didn’t know anything about ‘this world’, and didn’t bother about it; he hadn’t ‘been there’. ‘And his heart was as good as gold,’ my aunt used to say. He didn’t understand women as we young fellows do nowadays, and therefore he hadn’t any contempt for ’em. Perhaps he understood, and understands them better than any of us, without knowing it. Anyway, you know, he’s always gentle and kind where a woman or child is concerned, and doesn’t like to hear us talk about women as we do sometimes.

“There was a girl on the goldfields—a fine lump of a blonde, and pretty gay. She came from Sydney, I think, with her people, who kept shanties on the fields. She had a splendid voice, and used to sing ‘Madeline’. There might have been one or two bad women before that, in the Oracle’s world, but no cold-blooded, designing ones. He calls the bad ones ‘unfortunate’.

“Perhaps it was Tom’s looks, or his freshness, or his innocence, or softness—or all together—that attracted her. Anyway, he got mixed up with her before the goldfield petered out.

“No doubt it took a long while for the facts to work into Tom’s head that a girl might sing like she did and yet be thoroughly unprincipled. The Oracle was always slow at coming to a decision, but when he does it’s generally the right one. Anyway, you can take that for granted, for you won’t move him.

“I don’t know whether he found out that she wasn’t all that she pretended to be to him, or whether they quarrelled, or whether she chucked him over for a lucky digger. Tom never had any luck on the goldfields. Anyway, he left and went over to the Victorian side, where his people were, and went up Gippsland way. It was there for the first time in his life that he got what you would call ‘properly gone on a girl’; he got hard hit—he met his fate.

“Her name was Bertha Bredt, I remember. Aunt Bob saw her afterwards. Aunt Bob used to say that she was ‘a girl as God made her’—a good, true, womanly girl—one of the sort of girls that only love once. Tom got on with her father, who was packing horses through the ranges to the new goldfields—it was rough country, and there were no roads; they had to pack everything
there in those days, and there was money in it. The girl’s father took to Tom—as almost everybody else did—and, as far as the girl was concerned, I think it was a case of love at first sight. They only knew each other for about six months and were only ‘courting’ (as they called it then) for three or four months altogether; but she was that sort of girl that can love a man for six weeks and lose him for ever, and yet go on loving him to the end of her life—and die with his name on her lips.

“Well, things were brightening up every way for Tom, and he and his sweetheart were beginning to talk about their own little home in future, when there came a letter from the ‘Madeline’ girl in New South Wales.

“She was in terrible trouble. Her baby was to be born in a month. Her people had kicked her out, and she was in danger of starving. She begged and prayed of him to come back and marry her, if only for his child’s sake. He could go then, and be free; she would never trouble him any more—only come and marry her for the child’s sake.

“The Oracle doesn’t know where he lost that letter, but I do. It was burnt afterwards by a woman, who was more than a mother to him in his trouble—Aunt Bob. She thought he might carry it round with the rest of his papers, in his swag, for years, and come across it unexpectedly when he was camped by himself in the bush and feeling dull. It wouldn’t have done him any good then.

“He must have fought the hardest fight in his life when he got that letter. No doubt he walked to and fro, to and fro, all night, with his hands behind him, and his eyes on the ground, as he does now sometimes. Walking up and down helps you to fight a thing out.

“No doubt he thought of things pretty well as he thinks now: the poor girl’s shame on every tongue, and belled round the district by every hag in the township; and her looked upon by women as being as bad as any man who ever went to Bathurst in the old days, handcuffed between two troopers. There is sympathy, a pipe and tobacco, a cheering word, and maybe a whisky now and then, for the criminal on his journey; but there is no mercy, at least as far as women are concerned, for the poor
foolish girl, who has to sneak out the back way and round by back streets and lanes after dark, with a cloak on to hide her figure.

“Tom sent what money he thought he could spare, and next day he went to the girl he loved and who loved him, and told her the truth, and showed her the letter. She was only a girl—but the sort of girl you
could
go to in a crisis like that. He had made up his mind to do the right thing, and she loved him all the more for it. And so they parted.

“When Tom reached Pipeclay, the girl’s relations, that she was stopping with, had a parson readied up, and they were married the same day.”

“And what happened after that?” asked Mitchell.

“Nothing happened for three or four months; then the child was born. It wasn’t his!”

Mitchell stood up with an oath.

“The girl was thoroughly bad. She’d been carrying on with God knows how many men, both before and after she trapped Tom.”

“And what did he do then?”

“Well, you know how the Oracle argues over things, and I suppose he was as big an old fool then as he is now. He thinks that, as most men would deceive women if they could, when one man gets caught, he’s got no call to squeal about it; he’s bound, because of the sins of men in general against women, to make the best of it. What is one man’s wrong counted against the wrongs of hundreds of unfortunate girls?

“It’s an uncommon way of arguing—like most of the Oracle’s ideas—but it seems to look all right at first sight.

“Perhaps he thought she’d go straight; perhaps she convinced him that he was the cause of her first fall; anyway he stuck to her for more than a year, and intended to take her away from that place as soon as he’d scraped enough money together. It might have gone on up till now, if the father of the child—a big black Irishman named Redmond—hadn’t come sneaking back at the end of a year. He—well, he came hanging round Mrs Marshall while Tom was away at work—and she encouraged him. And Tom was forced to see it.

“Tom wanted to fight out his own battle without interference, but the chaps wouldn’t let him—they reckoned that he’d stand very little show against Redmond, who was a very rough customer and a fighting man. My Uncle Bob, who was there still, fixed it up this way: the Oracle was to fight Redmond, and if the Oracle got licked Uncle Bob was to take Redmond on. If Redmond whipped Uncle Bob, that was to settle it; but if Uncle Bob thrashed Redmond, then he was also to fight Redmond’s mate, another big rough Paddy, named Duigan. Then the affair would be finished—no matter which way the last bout went. You see, Uncle Bob was reckoned more of a match for Redmond than the Oracle was, so the thing looked fair enough—at first sight.

“Redmond had his mate, Duigan, and one or two others of the rough gang that used to terrorise the fields round there in the roaring days of Gulgong. The Oracle had Uncle Bob, of course, and long Dave Regan, the drover—a good-hearted, sawny kind of chap that’d break the devil’s own buck-jumper, or smash him, or get smashed himself—and little Jimmy Nowlett, the bullocky, and one or two of the old, better-class diggers that were left on the field.

“There’s a clear space among the saplings in Specimen Gully, where they used to pitch circuses; and there, in the cool of a summer evening, the two men stood face to face. Redmond was a rough, roaring, foul-mouthed man; he stripped to his shirt, and roared like a bull, and swore, and sneered, and wanted to take the whole of Tom’s crowd while he was at it, and make one clean job of ’em. Couldn’t waste time fighting them all one after the other, because he wanted to get away to the new rush at Cattle Creek next day. The fool had been drinking shanty-whisky.

“Tom stood up in his clean, white moles and white flannel shirt—one of that sort with no sleeves, that give the arms play. He had a sort of set expression, and a look in his eyes that Uncle Bob—nor none of them—had ever seen there before. ‘Give us plenty of——room!’ roared Redmond; ‘one of us is going to hell, now! This is going to be a fight to a——finish, and a——short one!’ And it was!” Joe paused.

“Go on,” said Mitchell—“go on.”

Joe drew a long breath.

“The Oracle never got a mark! He was top-dog right from the start. Perhaps it was his strength that Redmond had underrated, or his want of science that puzzled him, or the awful silence of the man that frightened him (it made even Uncle Bob uneasy). Or perhaps it was Providence (it was a glorious chance for Providence), but, anyway, as I say, the Oracle never got a mark, except on his knuckles. After a few rounds Redmond funked and wanted to give in, but the chaps wouldn’t let him—not even his own mates—except Duigan. They made him take it as long as he could stand on his feet. He even shammed to be knocked out, and roared out something about having broken his——ankle—but it was no use. And the Oracle! The chaps that knew him thought that he’d refuse to fight, and never hit a man that had given in. But he did. He just stood there with that quiet look in his eyes and waited, and, when he did hit, there wasn’t any necessity for Redmond to
pretend
to be knocked down. You’ll see a glint of that old light in the Oracle’s eyes even now, once in a while; and when you do it’s a sign that someone is going too far, and had better pull up, for it’s a red light on the line, old as he is.

“Now, Jimmy Nowlett was a nuggety little fellow, hard as cast iron, good hearted, but very excitable; and when the bashed Redmond was being carted off (poor Uncle Bob was always pretty high-strung, and was sitting on a log sobbing like a great child from the reaction), Duigan made some sneering remark that only Jimmy Nowlett caught, and in an instant he was up and at Duigan.

“Perhaps Duigan was demoralised by his mate’s defeat, or by the suddenness of the attack; but, at all events, he got a hiding, too. Uncle Bob used to say that it was the funniest thing he ever saw in his life. Jimmy kept yelling: ‘Let me get at him! By the Lord, let me get at him!’And nobody was attempting to stop him, he
was
getting at him all the time—and properly, too; and, when he’d knocked Duigan down, he’d dance round him and call on him to get up; and every time he jumped or bounced, he’d squeak like an india-rubber ball, Uncle Bob said, and he would nearly burst his boiler trying to lug the big man on to his feet so’s he could knock him down again. It took two of Jimmy’s mates all
their time to lam him down into a comparatively reasonable state of mind after the fight was over.