Selected Stories (29 page)

Next day there were sheets on my bed, and I felt pretty cocky until I remembered that I’d told her that I had no one to care for me; then I suspected pity again.

But next evening we remembered that both our fathers and mothers were dead, and discovered that we had no friends except Jack and old Black, and things went on very satisfactorily.

And next day there was a little table in my room with a crocheted cover and a looking-glass.

I noticed the other girls began to act mysterious and giggle when I was round, but Mary didn’t seem aware of it.

We got very chummy. Mary wasn’t comfortable at Haviland. Old Black was very fond of her and always took her part, but she wanted to be independent. She had a great idea of going to Sydney and getting into the hospital as a nurse. She had friends in Sydney, but she had no money. There was a little money coming to her when she was twenty-one—a few pounds—and she was going to try and get it before that time.

“Look here, Miss Brand,” I said, after we’d watched the moon rise. “I’ll lend you the money. I’ve got plenty—more than I know what to do with.”

But I saw I’d hurt her. She sat up very straight for a while, looking before her; then she said it was time to go in, and said: “Good-night, Mr Wilson.”

I reckoned I’d done it that time; but Mary told me afterwards that she was only hurt because it struck her that what she said about money might have been taken for a hint. She didn’t understand me yet, and I didn’t know human nature. I didn’t say anything to Jack—in fact, about this time I left off telling him about things. He didn’t seem hurt; he worked hard and seemed happy.

I really meant what I said to Mary about the money. It was pure good nature. I’d be a happier man now, I think, and richer man perhaps, if I’d never grown any more selfish than I was that night on the wood-heap with Mary. I felt a great sympathy for her—but I got to love her. I went through all the ups and downs of it. One day I was having tea in the kitchen, and Mary and another girl, named Sarah, reached me a clean plate at the same time: I took Sarah’s plate because she was first, and Mary seemed very nasty about it, and that gave me great hopes. But all next evening she played draughts with a drover that she’d chummed up with. I pretended to be interested in Sarah’s talk, but it didn’t seem to work.

Afew days later a Sydney jackeroo visited the station. He had a good pea-rifle, and one afternoon he started to teach Mary to shoot at a target. They seemed to get very chummy. I had a nice time for three or four days, I can tell you. I was worse than a
wall-eyed bullock with the pleuro. The other chaps had a shot out of the rifle. Mary called “Mr Wilson” to have a shot, and I made a worse fool of myself by sulking. If it hadn’t been a blooming jackeroo I wouldn’t have minded so much.

Next evening the jackeroo and one or two other chaps and the girls went out ’possum-shooting. Mary went. I could have gone, but I didn’t. I mooched round all the evening like an orphan bandicoot on a burnt ridge, and then I went up to the pub and filled myself with beer, and damned the world, and came home and went to bed. I think that evening was the only time I ever wrote poetry down on a piece of paper. I got so miserable that I enjoyed it.

I felt better next morning, and reckoned I was cured. I ran against Mary accidentally and had to say something.

“How did you enjoy yourself yesterday evening, Miss Brand?” I asked.

“Oh, very well, thank you, Mr Wilson,” she said. Then she asked, “How did you enjoy yourself, Mr Wilson?”

I puzzled over that afterwards, but couldn’t make anything out of it. Perhaps she only said it for the sake of saying something. But about this time my handkerchiefs and collars disappeared from the room and turned up washed and ironed and laid tidily on my table. I used to keep an eye out, but could never catch anybody near my room. I straightened up, and kept my room a bit tidy, and when my handkerchief got too dirty, and I was ashamed of letting it go to the wash, I’d slip down to the river after dark and wash it out, and dry it next day, and rub it up to look as if it hadn’t been washed, and leave it on my table. I felt so full of hope and joy that I worked twice as hard as Jack, till one morning he remarked casually:

“I see you’ve made a new mash, Joe. I saw the half-caste cook tidying up your room this morning and taking your collars and things to the wash-house.”

I felt very much off colour all the rest of the day, and I had such a bad night of it that I made up my mind next morning to look the hopelessness square in the face and live the thing down.
It was the evening before Anniversary Day. Jack and I had put in a good day’s work to get the job finished, and Jack was having a smoke and a yarn with the chaps before he started home. We sat on an old log along by the fence at the back of the house. There was Jimmy Nowlett the bullock-driver, and long Dave Regan the drover, and big Jim Bullock the fencer, and one or two others. Mary and the station girls and one or two visitors were sitting under the old verandah. The jackeroo was there too, so I felt happy. It was the girls who used to bring the chaps hanging round. They were getting up a dance party for Anniversary night. Along in the evening another chap came riding up to the station: he was a big shearer, a dark, handsome fellow, who looked like a gipsy: it was reckoned that there was foreign blood in him. He went by the name of Romany. He was supposed to be shook after Mary too. He had the nastiest temper and the best violin in the district, and the chaps put up with him a lot because they wanted him to play at Bush dances. The moon had risen over Pine Ridge, but it was dusky where we were. We saw Romany loom up, riding in from the gate; he rode round the end of the coach-house and across towards where we were—I suppose he was going to tie up his horse at the fence; but about half-way across the grass he disappeared. It struck me that there was something peculiar about the way he got down, and I heard a sound like a horse stumbling.

“What the hell’s Romany trying to do?” said Jimmy Nowlett. “He couldn’t have fell off his horse—or else he’s drunk.”

Acouple of chaps got up and went to see. Then there was that waiting, mysterious silence that comes when something happens in the dark and nobody knows what it is. I went over, and the thing dawned on me. I’d stretched a wire clothesline across there during the day, and had forgotten all about it for the moment. Romany had no idea of the line, and, as he rode up, it caught him on a level with his elbows and scraped him off his horse. He was sitting on the grass, swearing in a surprised voice, and the horse looked surprised too. Romany wasn’t hurt, but the sudden shock had spoilt his temper. He wanted to know who’d put up that bloody line. He came over and sat on the log. The chaps smoked a while.

“What did you git down so sudden for, Romany?” asked Jim Bullock presently. “Did you hurt yerself on the pommel?”

“Why didn’t you ask the horse to go round?” asked Dave Regan.

“I’d like to know who put up that bleeding wire!” growled Romany.

“Well,” said Jimmy Nowlett, “if we’d put up a sign to beware of the line you couldn’t have seen it in the dark.”

“Unless it was a transparency with a candle behind it,” said Dave Regan. “But why didn’t you get down on one end, Romany, instead of all along? It wouldn’t have jolted yer so much.”

All this with the Bush drawl, and between the puffs of their pipes. But I didn’t take any interest in it. I was brooding over Mary and the jackeroo.

“I’ve heard of men getting down over their horse’s head,” said Dave presently, in a reflective sort of way; “in fact I’ve done it myself—but I never saw a man get off backwards over his horse’s rump.”

But they saw that Romany was getting nasty, and they wanted him to play the fiddle next night, so they dropped it.

Mary was singing an old song. I always thought she had a sweet voice, and I’d have enjoyed it if that damned jackeroo hadn’t been listening too. We listened in silence until she’d finished.

“That gal’s got a nice voice,” said Jimmy Nowlett.

“Nice voice!” snarled Romany, who’d been waiting for a chance to be nasty. “Why, I’ve heard a tom-cat sing better.”

I moved, and Jack—he was sitting next me—nudged me to keep quiet. The chaps didn’t like Romany’s talk about ’Possum at all. They were all fond of her: she wasn’t a pet or a tomboy, for she wasn’t built that way, but they were fond of her in such a way that they didn’t like to hear anything said about her. They said nothing for a while, but it meant a lot. Perhaps the single men didn’t care to speak for fear that it would be said that they were gone on Mary. But presently Jimmy Nowlett gave a big puff at his pipe and spoke:

“I suppose you got bit too in that quarter, Romany?”

“Oh, she tried it on, but it didn’t go,” said Romany. “I’ve met her sort before. She’s setting her cap at that jackeroo now. Some girls will run after anything with trousers on,” and he stood up.

Jack Barnes must have felt what was coming, for he grabbed my arm and whispered, “Sit still, Joe, damn you! He’s too good for you!” but I was on my feet and facing Romany as if a giant hand had reached down and wrenched me off the log and set me there.

“You’re a damned crawler, Romany!” I said.

Little Jimmy Nowlett was between us and the other fellows round us before a blow got home. “Hold on, you damned fools!” they said. “Keep quiet till we get away from the house!” There was a little clear flat down by the river and plenty of light there, so we decided to go down there and have it out.

Now I never was a fighting man; I’d never learnt to use my hands. I scarcely knew how to put them up. Jack often wanted to teach me, but I wouldn’t bother about it. He’d say, “You’ll get into a fight some day, Joe, or out of one, and shame me;” but I hadn’t the patience to learn. He’d wanted me to take lessons at the station after work, but he used to get excited, and I didn’t want Mary to see him knocking me about. Before he was married Jack was always getting into fights—he generally tackled a better man and got a hiding; but he didn’t seem to care so long as he made a good show—though he used to explain the thing away from a scientific point of view for weeks after. To tell the truth, I had a horror of fighting; I had a horror of being marked about the face; I think I’d sooner stand off and fight a man with revolvers than fight him with fists; and then I think I would say, last thing, “Don’t shoot me in the face!” Then again I hated the idea of hitting a man. It seemed brutal to me. I was too sensitive and sentimental, and that was what the matter was. Jack seemed very serious on it as we walked down to the river, and he couldn’t help hanging out blue lights.

“Why didn’t you let me teach you to use your hands?” he said. “The only chance now is that Romany can’t fight after all. If you’d waited a minute I’d have been at him.” We
were a bit behind the rest, and Jack started giving me points about lefts and rights, and “half-arms”, and that sort of thing. “He’s left-handed, and that’s the worst of it,” said Jack. “You must only make as good a show as you can, and one of us will take him on afterwards.”

But I just heard him and that was all. It was to be my first fight since I was a boy, but, somehow, I felt cool about it—sort of dulled. If the chaps had known all they would have set me down as a cur. I thought of that, but it didn’t make any difference with me then; I knew it was a thing they couldn’t understand. I knew I was reckoned pretty soft. But I knew one thing that they didn’t know. I knew that it was going to be a fight to a finish, one way or the other. I had more brains and imagination than the rest put together, and I suppose that that was the real cause of most of my trouble. I kept saying to myself, “You’ll have to go through with it now, Joe old man! It’s the turning-point of your life.” If I won the fight, I’d set to work and win Mary; if I lost, I’d leave the district for ever. Aman thinks a lot in a flash sometimes; I used to get excited over little things, because of the very paltriness of them, but I was mostly cool in a crisis—Jack was the reverse. I looked ahead: I wouldn’t be able to marry a girl who could look back and remember when her husband was beaten by another man—no matter what sort of brute the other man was.

I never in my life felt so cool about a thing. Jack kept whispering instructions, and showing with his hands, up to the last moment, but it was all lost on me.

Looking back, I think there was a bit of romance about it: Mary singing under the vines to amuse a jackeroo dude, and a coward going down to the river in the moonlight to fight for her.

It was very quiet in the little moonlit flat by the river. We took off our coats and were ready. There was no swearing or barracking. It seemed an understood thing with the men that if I went out first round Jack would fight Romany; and if Jack knocked him out somebody else would fight Jack to square matters. Jim Bullock wouldn’t mind obliging for one; he was a mate of Jack’s, but he didn’t mind who he fought so long as it was for the sake of fair play—or “peace and quietness”, as he
said. Jim was very good-natured. He backed Romany, and of course Jack backed me.

As far as I could see, all Romany knew about fighting was to jerk one arm up in front of his face and duck his head by way of a feint, and then rush and lunge out. But he had the weight and strength and length of reach, and my first lesson was a very short one. I went down early in the round. But it did me good; the blow and the look I’d seen in Romany’s eyes knocked all the sentiment out of me. Jack said nothing—he seemed to regard it as a hopeless job from the first. Next round I tried to remember some things Jack had told me, and made a better show, but I went down in the end.

I felt Jack breathing quick and trembling as he lifted me up.

“How are you, Joe?” he whispered.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“It’s all right,” whispered Jack in a voice as if I was going to be hanged, but it would soon be all over. “He can’t use his hands much more than you can—take your time, Joe—try to remember something I told you, for God’s sake!”

When two men fight who don’t know how to use their hands, they stand a show of knocking each other about a lot. I got some awful thumps, but mostly on the body. Jimmy Nowlett began to get excited and jump round—he was an excitable little fellow.