Selected Stories (43 page)

“But they called in a man who had some influence with the Flour, and between them—and with the assistance of the prettiest nurse on the premises—they persuaded him to wait. Dinny wasn’t ready yet; there were papers to sign; it wouldn’t be decent to the dead; he had to be prayed over; he had to be washed and shaved, and fixed up decent and comfortable. Anyway, they’d have him ready in an hour, or take the consequences.

“The Flour objected on the ground that all this could be done equally as well and better by the boys at Th’ Canary. ‘However,’ he said, ‘I’ll be round in an hour, and if you haven’t got me
lovely mate ready—look out!’ Then he shook his fist sternly at them once more and said:

“ ‘I know yer dirty tricks and dodges, and if there’s e’er a pin-scratch on me mate’s body—look out! If there’s a parin’ of Dinny’s toe-nail missin—look out!’

“Then he went out—taking the coffin with him.

“And when the police came to his lodgings to arrest him, they found the coffin on the floor by the side of the bed, and the Flour lying in it on his back, with his arms folded peacefully on his bosom. He was as dead drunk as any man could get to be and still be alive. They knocked air-holes, in the coffin-lid, screwed it on, and carried the coffin, the Flour, and all to the local lock-up. They laid their burden down on the bare, cold floor of the prison-cell, and then went out, locked the door, and departed several ways to put the ‘boys’ up to it. And about midnight the ‘boys’ gathered round with a supply of liquor, and waited, and somewhere along in the small hours there was a howl, as of a strong Irishman in Purgatory, and presently the voice of the Flour was heard to plead in changed and awful tones:

“ ‘Pray for me soul, boys—pray for me soul! Let bygones be bygones between us, boys, and pray for me lovely soul! The lovely Flour’s in Purgatory!’

“Then silence for a while; and then, a sound like a dray-wheel passing over a packing-case…That was the only time on record that the Flour was heard to swear. And he swore then.

They didn’t pray for him—they gave him a month. And, when he came out, he went half-way across the road to meet the doctor, and he—to his credit, perhaps—came the other half. They had a drink together, and the Flour presented the doctor with a fine specimen of coarse gold for a pin.

“ ‘It was the will o’ God, after all, doctor,’ said the Flour. ‘It was the will o’ God. Let bygones be bygones between us; gimme your hand, doctor…Goodbye.’

“Then he left for Th’ Canary.”

Oh, tell her a tale of the fairies bright—That only the Bushmen know—Who guide the feet of the lost aright, Or carry them up through the starry night, Where the Bush-lost babies go.

HE was one of those men who seldom smile. There are many in the Australian Bush, where drift wrecks and failures of all stations and professions (and of none) and from all the world. Or, if they do smile, the smile is either mechanical or bitter as a rule—cynical. They seldom talk. The sort of men who, as bosses, are set down by the majority—and without reason or evidence—as being proud, hard, and selfish—“too mean to live, and too big for their boots”.

But when the Boss did smile his, expression was very, very gentle, and very sad. I have seen him smile down on a little child who persisted in sitting on his knee and prattling to him, in spite of his silence and gloom. He was tall and gaunt, with haggard grey eyes—haunted grey eyes sometimes—and hair and beard thick and strong, but grey. He was not above forty-five. He was of the type of men who die in harness, with their hair thick and strong, but grey or white when it should be brown. The opposite type, I fancy, would be the soft, dark-haired, blue-eyed men who grow bald sooner than they grow grey, and fat and contented, and die respectably in their beds.

His name was Head—Walter Head. He was a boss drover on the overland routes. I engaged with him at a place north of the Queensland border to travel down to Bathurst, on the Great Western Line in New South Wales, with something over a thousand head of store bullocks for the Sydney market. I am an Australian Bushman (with city experience)—a rover, of course, and a ne’er-do-well, I suppose. I was born with brains and a thin skin—worse luck! It was in the days before I was married, and I
went by the name of “Jack Ellis” this trip,—not because the police were after me, but because I used to tell yarns about a man named Jack Ellis—and so the chaps nicknamed me.

The Boss spoke little to the men: he’d sit at tucker or with his pipe by the camp-fire nearly as silently as he rode his night-watch round the big, restless, weird-looking mob of bullocks camped on the dusky starlit plain. I believe that from the first he spoke oftener and more confidentially to me than to any other of the droving party. There was a something of sympathy between us—I can’t explain what it was. It seemed as though it were an understood thing between us that we understood each other. He sometimes said things to me which would have needed a deal of explanation—so I thought—had he said them to any other of the party. He’d often, after brooding a long while, start a sentence, and break off with “You know, Jack.” And somehow I understood, without being able to explain why. We had never met before I engaged with him for this trip. His men respected him, but he was not a popular boss: he was too gloomy, and never drank a glass nor “shouted” on the trip: he was reckoned a “mean boss”, and rather a nigger-driver.

He was full of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the English-Australian poet who shot himself, and so was I. I lost an old copy of Gordon’s poems on the route, and the Boss overheard me inquiring about it; later on he asked me if I liked Gordon. We got to it rather sheepishly at first, but by-and-by we’d quote Gordon freely in turn when we were alone in camp. “Those are grand lines about Burke and Wills, the explorers, aren’t they, Jack?” he’d say, after chewing his cud, or rather the stem of his briar, for a long while without a word. (He had his pipe in his mouth as often as any of us, but somehow I fancied he didn’t enjoy it: an empty pipe or a stick would have suited him just as well, it seemed to me.) “Those are great lines,” he’d say:

‘In Collins Street standeth a statue tall—A statue tall on a pillar of stone—Telling its story to great and small Of the dust reclaimed from the sand-waste lone.
‘Weary and wasted, worn and wan, Feeble and faint, and languid and low, He lay on the desert a dying man, Who has gone, my friends, where we all must go.
’

“That’s a grand thing, Jack. How does it go?—

‘With a pistol clenched in his failing hand, And the film of death o’er his fading eyes, He saw the sun go down on the sand,’—”

The Boss would straighten up with a sigh that might have been half a yawn—

“‘And he slept and never saw it rise,’”

—speaking with a sort of quiet force all the time. Then maybe he’d stand with his back to the fire roasting his dusty leggings, with his hands behind his back and looking out over the dusky plain.

“‘What mattered the sand or the whit’ning chalk, The blighted herbage or blackened log, The crooked beak of the eagle-hawk, Or the hot red tongue of the native dog?
’

“They don’t matter much, do they, Jack?” “Damned if I think they do, Boss!” I’d say.

“‘The couch was rugged, those sextons rude, But, in spite of a leaden shroud, we know, That the bravest and fairest are earth-worms’ food When once they have gone where we all must go.’
”

Once he repeated the poem containing the lines:

“‘Love, when we wandered here together, Hand in hand through the sparkling weather—God surely loved us a little then
.

“Beautiful lines those, Jack.

‘Then skies were fairer and shores were firmer, And the blue sea over the white sand rolled—Babble and prattle, and prattle and murmur’—

“How does it go, Jack?” He stood up and turned his face to the light, but not before I had a glimpse of it. I think that the saddest eyes on earth are mostly women’s eyes, but I’ve seen few so sad as the Boss’s were just then.

It seemed strange that he, a Bushman, preferred Gordon’s sea poems to his horsey and bushy rhymes; but so he did. I fancy his favourite poem was that one of Gordon’s with the lines:

I would that with sleepy soft embraces The sea would fold me, would find me rest In the luminous depths of its secret places, Where the wealth of God’s marvels is manifest!

He usually spoke quietly, in a tone as though death were in camp; but after we’d been on Gordon’s poetry for a while he’d end it abruptly with, “Well, it’s time to turn in,” or, “It’s time to turn out,” or he’d give me an order in connection with the cattle. He had been a well-to-do squatter on the Lachlan river-side, in New South Wales, and had been ruined by the drought, they said. One night in camp, and after smoking in silence for nearly an hour, he asked:

“Do you know Fisher, Jack—the man that owns these bullocks?”

“I’ve heard of him,” I said. Fisher was a big squatter, with stations both in New South Wales and in Queensland.

“Well, he came to my station on the Lachlan years ago without a penny in his pocket, or decent rag to his back, or a crust in his tucker-bag, and I gave him a job. He’s my boss now. Ah, well! it’s the way of Australia, you know, Jack.”

The Boss had one man who went on every droving trip with him; he was “bred” on the Boss’s station, they said, and had been with him practically all his life. His name was “Andy”. I forget his other name, if he really had one. Andy had charge of the “droving-plant” (a tilted two-horse waggonette, in which we carried the rations and horse-feed), and he did the cooking and kept accounts. The Boss had no head for figures. Andy might have been twenty-five or thirty-five, or anything in between. His hair stuck up like a well-made brush all round, and his big grey
eyes also had an inquiring expression. His weakness was girls, or he theirs, I don’t know which (half-castes not barred). He was, I think, the most innocent, good-natured, and open-hearted scamp I ever met. Towards the middle of the trip Andy spoke to me one night alone in camp about the Boss.

“The Boss seems to have taken to you, Jack, all right.”

“Think so?” I said. I thought I smelt jealousy and detected a sneer.

“I’m sure of it. It’s very seldom
he
takes to anyone.”

I said nothing.

Then after a while Andy said suddenly:

“Look here, Jack, I’m glad of it. I’d like to see him make a chum of someone, if only for one trip. And don’t you make any mistake about the Boss. He’s a white man. There’s precious few that know him—precious few now; but I do, and it’ll do him a lot of good to have someone to yarn with.” And Andy said no more on the subject for that trip.

The long, hot, dusty miles dragged by across the blazing plains—big clearings rather—and through the sweltering hot scrubs, and we reached Bathurst at last; and then the hot dusty days and weeks and months that we’d left behind us to the Great North-West seemed as nothing—as I suppose life will seem when we come to the end of it.

The bullocks were going by rail from Bathurst to Sydney. We were all one long afternoon getting them into the trucks, and when we’d finished the Boss said to me:

“Look here, Jack, you’re going on to Sydney, aren’t you?”

“Yes; I’m going down to have a fly round.”

“Well, why not wait and go down with Andy in the morning? He’s going down in charge of the cattle. The cattle-train starts about daylight. It won’t be so comfortable as the passenger; but you’ll save your fare, and you can give Andy a hand with the cattle. You’ve only got to have a look at ’em every other station, and poke up any that fall down in the trucks. You and Andy are mates, aren’t you?”

I said it would just suit me. Somehow I fancied that the Boss seemed anxious to have my company for one more evening, and,
to tell the truth, I felt really sorry to part with him. I’d had to work as hard as any of the other chaps; but I liked him, and I believed he liked me. He’d struck me as a man who’d been quietened down by some heavy trouble, and I felt sorry for him without knowing what the trouble was.

“Come and have a drink, Boss,” I said. The agent had paid us off during the day.

He turned into a hotel with me.

“I don’t drink, Jack,” he said; “but I’ll take a glass with you.”

“I didn’t know you were a teetotaller, Boss,” I said. I had not been surprised at his keeping so strictly from the drink on the trip; but now that it was over it was a different thing.

“I’m not a teetotaller, Jack,” he said. “I can take a glass or leave it.” And he called for a long beer, and we drank “Here’s luck!” to each other.

“Well,” I said, “I wish I could take a glass or leave it.” And I meant it.

Then, the Boss spoke as I’d never heard him speak before. I thought for the moment that the one drink had affected him; but I understood before the night was over. He laid his hand on my shoulder with a grip like a man who has suddenly made up his mind to lend you five pounds. “Jack!” he said, “there’s worse things than drinking, and there’s worse things than heavy smoking. When a man who smokes gets such a load of trouble on him that he can find no comfort in his pipe, then it’s a heavy load. And when a man who drinks gets so deep into trouble that he can find no comfort in liquor, then it’s deep trouble. Take my tip for it, Jack.”

He broke off, and half turned away with a jerk of his head, as if impatient with himself; then presently he spoke in his usual quiet tone:

“But you’re only a boy yet, Jack. Never mind me. I won’t ask you to take the second drink. You don’t want it; and, besides, I know the signs.”

He paused, leaning with both hands on the edge of the counter, and looking down between his arms at the floor. He stood that way thinking for a while; then he suddenly
straightened up, like a man who’d made up his mind to do something.

“I want you to come along home with me, Jack,” he said; “we’ll fix you a shake-down.”

I forgot to tell you that he was married and lived in Bathurst.

“But won’t it put Mrs Head about?”

“Not at all. She’s expecting you. Come along; there’s nothing to see in Bathurst, and you’ll have plenty of knocking round in Sydney. Come on; we’ll just be in time for tea.”

He lived in a brick cottage on the outskirts of the town—an old-fashioned cottage, with ivy and climbing roses, like you see in some of those old settled districts. There was, I remember, the stump of a tree in front, covered with ivy till it looked like a giant’s club with the thick end up.

When we got to the house the Boss paused a minute with his hand on the gate. He’d been home a couple of days, having ridden in ahead of the bullocks.

“Jack,” he said, “I must tell you that Mrs Head had a great trouble at one time. We—we lost our two children. It does her good to talk to a stranger now and again—she’s always better afterwards; but there’s very few I care to bring. You—you needn’t notice anything strange. And agree with her, Jack. You know, Jack.”

“That’s all right, Boss,” I said. I’d knocked about the Bush too long, and run against too many strange characters and things, to be surprised at anything much.

The door opened, and he took a little woman in his arms. I saw by the light of a lamp in the room behind that the woman’s hair was grey, and I reckoned that he had his mother living with him. And—we do have odd thoughts at odd times in a flash—and I wondered how Mrs Head and her mother-in-law got on together. But the next minute I was in the room, and introduced to “My wife, Mrs Head”, and staring at her with both eyes.

It was his wife. I don’t think I can describe her. For the first minute or two, coming in out of the dark and before my eyes got used to the lamp-light, I had an impression as of a little old woman—one of those fresh-faced, well-preserved, little old
ladies—who dressed young, wore false teeth, and aped the giddy girl. But this was because of Mrs Head’s impulsive welcome of me, and her grey hair. The hair was not so grey as I thought at first, seeing it with the lamp-light behind it: it was like dull-brown hair lightly dusted with flour. She wore it short, and it became her that way. There was something aristocratic about her face—her nose and chin—I fancied, and something that you couldn’t describe. She had big dark eyes—dark-brown, I thought, though they might have been hazel: they were a bit too big and bright for me, and now and again, when she got excited, the white showed all round the pupils—just a little, but a little was enough.