Selected Stories (53 page)

That was the burden of his song all through, between his groans.

There were a good few chaps sitting quietly about the bar and verandah when the doctor arrived. The Giraffe was sitting at the end of the counter, on which he had laid his hat while he wiped his face, neck and forehead with a big speckled “sweat-rag”. It was a very hot day.

The doctor, a good-hearted young Australian, was heard saying something. Then German Charlie, in a voice that rung with pain:

“Make that leg right, doctor—quick! Dis is der tird pluddy year—and I must go home!”

The doctor asked him if he was in great pain.

“Neffer mind der pluddy bain, doctor! Neffer mind der pluddy bain! Dot vas nossing. Make dat leg well quick, doctor. Dis vas der last gontract, and I vas going home dis year.” Then the words jerked out of him by physical agony: “Der girl vas vaiting dree year, und—by Got! I must go home.”

The publican—Watty Braithwaite, known as “Watty Broadweight”, or, more familiarly, “Watty Bothways”—turned over the Giraffe’s hat in a tired, bored sort of way, dropped a quid into it, and nodded resignedly at the Giraffe.

The Giraffe caught up the hint and the hat with alacrity. The hat went all round town, so to speak; and, as soon as his leg was firm enough not to come loose on the road, German Charlie went home.

It was well known that I contributed to the Sydney
Bulletin
and several other papers. The Giraffe’s bump of reverence was very large, and swelled especially for sick men and poets. He treated me with much more respect than is due from a Bushman to a man, and with an odd sort of extra gentleness, I sometimes fancied. But one day he rather surprised me.

“I’m sorry to trouble yer,” he said in a shamefaced way. “I don’t know as you go in for sportin’, but One-eyed Bogan an’ Barcoo-Rot is goin’ to have a bit of a scrap down by the billybong this evenin’, an’—”

“A bit of a what?” I asked.

“A bit of fight to a finish,” he said apologetically. “An’ the chaps is tryin’ to fix up a fiver to put some life into the thing. There’s bad blood between One-eyed Bogan and Barcoo-Rot, an’ it won’t do them any harm to have it out.”

It was a great fight, I remember. There must have been a couple of score blood-soaked handkerchiefs (or “sweat-rags”) buried in a hole on the field of battle, and the Giraffe was busy the rest of the evening helping to patch up the principals. Later on he took up a small collection for the loser, who happened to be Barcoo-Rot in spite of the advantage of an eye.

The Salvation Army lassie, who went round with the
War Cry
, nearly always sold the Giraffe three copies.

Anew-chum parson, who wanted a subscription to build or enlarge a chapel, or something, sought the assistance of the Giraffe’s influence with his mates.

“Well,” said the Giraffe, “I ain’t a churchgoer meself. I ain’t what you might call a religious cove, but I’ll be glad to do what I can to help yer. I don’t suppose I can do much. I ain’t been to church since I was a kiddy.”

The parson was shocked, but later on he learned to appreciate the Giraffe and his mates, and to love Australia for the Bushman’s sake, and it was he who told me the above anecdote.

The Giraffe helped fix some stalls for a Catholic church bazaar, and some of the chaps chaffed him about it in the union office.

“You’ll be taking up a collection for a joss-house down in the Chinamen’s camp next,” said Tom Hall in conclusion.

“Well, I ain’t got nothin’ agen the Roming Carflics,” said the Giraffe. “An’ Father O’Donovan’s a very decent sort of cove. He stuck up for the unions all right in the strike anyway.” (“He wouldn’t be Irish if he wasn’t,” someone commented.) “I carried swags once for six months with a feller that was a Carflic, an’ he was a very straight feller. And a girl I knowed turned Carflic to marry a chap that had got her into trouble, an’ she was always jes’ the same to me after as she was before. Besides, I like to help everything that’s goin’ on.”

Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink. But we all loved the Giraffe.

He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be most serious and philosophical.

“Some of them Bush girls is regular tomboys,” he said to me solemnly one day. “Some of them is too cheeky altogether. I remember once I was stoppin’ at a place—they was sort of relations o’ mine—an’ they put me to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass door an’ no blinds. An’ the first mornin’ the girls—they was sort o’ cousins o’ mine—they come gigglin’ and foolin’ round outside the door on the verander, an’ kep’ me in bed till nearly ten o’clock. I had to put me trowsis on under the bedclothes in the end. But I got back on ’em the next night,” he reflected.

“How did you do that, Bob?” I asked.

“Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!”

One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great Western Hotel. I was anxious to get the job finished. The work had been kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me, and drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the paint wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards when:

“I’m very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin’ yer; but there’s that there woman and them girls—”

I looked down—about the first time I had looked down on him—and there was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns in it.

“Oh, that’s all right, Bob,” I said, and I dropped in half-a-crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word, who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing season, and had taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town. There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and turned out by their landlord.

“This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe,” said one of the shearers. “Them——s has made enough out of us coves. They’ve got plenty of stuff, don’t you fret. Let ’em go to——! I’m blanked if I give a sprat.”

“They ain’t got their fares to Sydney,” said the Giraffe. “An’ what’s more, the little ’un is sick, an’ two of them has kids in Sydney.”

“How the——do you know?”

“Why, one of ’em come to me an’ told me all about it.”

There was an involuntary guffaw.

“Look here, Bob,” said Billy Woods, the Rouseabouts’ Secretary, kindly. “Don’t you make a fool of yourself. You’ll have all the chaps laughing at you. Those girls are only working you for all you’re worth. I suppose one of ’em came crying and whining to you. Don’t you bother about them.
You
don’t know them; they can pump water at a moment’s notice. You haven’t had any experience with women yet, Bob.”

“She didn’t come whinin’ and cryin’ to me,” said the Giraffe, dropping his twanging drawl a little. “She looked me straight in the face an’ told me all about it.”

“I say, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks, “what have you been doin’? You’ve bin down there on the nod. I’m surprised at yer, Giraffe.”

“An’ he pretends to be so gory soft an’ innocent too,” growled the Bogan. “We know all about you, Giraffe.”

“Look here, Giraffe,” said Mitchell the shearer. “I’d never have thought it of you. We all thought you were the only virgin youth west the river; I always thought you were a moral young man. You mustn’t think that because your conscience is pricking you everyone else’s is.”

“I ain’t had anythin’ to do with them,” said the Giraffe, drawling again. “I ain’t a cove that goes in for that sort of thing. But other chaps has, and I think they might as well help ’em out of their fix.”

“They’re a rotten crowd,” said Billy Woods. “You don’t know them, Bob. Don’t bother about them—they’re not worth it. Put your money in your pocket. You’ll find a better use for it before next shearing.”

“Better shout, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks.

Now in spite of the Giraffe’s softness he was the hardest man in Bourke to move when he’d decided on what he thought was “the fair thing to do”. Another peculiarity of his was that on occasion, such for instance as “sayin’ a few words” at a strike meeting, he would straighten himself, drop the twang, and rope in his drawl, so to speak.

“Well, look here, you chaps,” he said now. “I don’t know anything about them women. I s’pose they’re bad, but I don’t suppose they’re worse than men has made them. All I know is that there’s four women turned out, without any stuff, and every woman in Bourke, an’ the police, an’ the law agen ’em. An’ the fact that they is women is agenst ’em most of all. You don’t expect ’em to hump their swags to Sydney! Why, only I ain’t got the stuff I wouldn’t trouble yer. I’d pay their fares meself. Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “there they are now, an’ one of the girls is cryin’. Don’t let ’em see yer lookin’.”

I dropped softly from the plank and peeped out with the rest.

They stood by the fence on the opposite side of the street, a bit up towards the railway station, with their portmanteaux and bundles at their feet. One girl leant with her arms on the fence rail and her face buried in them; another was trying to comfort her. The third girl and the woman stood facing our way. The woman was good-looking; she had a hard face, but it might have been made hard. The third girl seemed half defiant, half inclined to cry. Presently she went to the other side of the girl who was crying on the fence and put her arm round her shoulder. The woman suddenly turned her back on us and stood looking away over the paddocks.

The hat went round. Billy Woods was first, then Box-o’-Tricks, and then Mitchell.

Billy contributed with eloquent silence. “I was only jokin’, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks, dredging his pockets for a couple of shillings. It was some time after the shearing, and most of the chaps were hard up.

“Ah, well,” sighed Mitchell. “There’s no help for it. If the Giraffe would take up a collection to import some decent girls
to this God-forgotten hole there might be some sense in it…It’s bad enough for the Giraffe to undermine our religious prejudices, and tempt us to take a morbid interest in sick chows and Afghans, and blacklegs and widows; but when he starts mixing us up with strange women it’s time to buck.” And he prospected his pockets and contributed two shillings, some odd pennies, and a pinch of tobacco dust.

“I don’t mind helping the girls, but I’m damned if I’ll give a penny to help the old——,” said Tom Hall.

“Well, she was a girl once herself,” drawled the Giraffe.

The Giraffe went round to the other pubs and to the union offices, and when he returned he seemed satisfied with the plate, but troubled about something else.

“I don’t know what to do for them for to-night,” he said. “None of the pubs or boardin’-houses will hear of them, an’ there ain’t no empty houses, an’ the women is all agen’ ’em.”

“Not all,” said Alice, the big, handsome barmaid from Sydney. “Come here, Bob.” She gave the Giraffe half-a-sovereign and a look for which some of us would have paid him ten pounds—had we had the money, and had the look been transferable.

“Wait a minute, Bob,” she said, and she went in to speak to the landlord.

“There’s an empty bedroom at the end of the store in the yard,” she said when she came back. “They can camp there for to-night if they behave themselves. You’d better tell ’em, Bob.”

“Thank yer, Alice,” said the Giraffe.

Next day, after work, the Giraffe and I drifted together and down by the river in the cool of the evening, and sat on the edge of the steep, drought-parched bank.

“I heard you saw your lady friends off this morning, Bob,” I said, and was sorry I said it, even before he answered.

“Oh, they ain’t no friends of mine,” he said. “Only four poor devils of women. I thought they mightn’t like to stand waitin’ with the crowd on the platform, so I jest offered to get their tickets an’ told ’em to wait round at the back of the station till the bell rung…An’ what do yer think they did, Harry?” he went on, with an exasperatingly unintelligent grin. “Why, they wanted to kiss me.”

“Did they?”

“Yes. An’ they would have done it, too, if I hadn’t been so long…Why, I’m blessed if they didn’t kiss me hands.”

“You don’t say so.”

“God’s truth. Somehow I didn’t like to go on to the platform with them after that; besides they was cryin’, and I can’t stand women cryin’. But some of the chaps put them into an empty carriage.” He thought a moment. Then:

“There’s some terrible good-hearted fellers in the world,” he reflected.

I thought so too.

“Bob,” I said, “you’re a single man. Why don’t you get married and settle down?”

“Well,” he said, “I ain’t got no wife an’ kids, that’s a fact. But it ain’t my fault.”

He may have been right about the wife. But I thought of the look that Alice had given him, and—

“Girls seem to like me right enough,” he said, “but it don’t go no further than that. The trouble is that I’m so long, and I always seem to get shook after little girls. At least there was one little girl in Bendigo that I was properly gone on.”

“And wouldn’t she have you?”

“Well, it seems not.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Oh, yes, I asked her right enough.”

“Well, and what did she say?”

“She said it would be redicilus for her to be seen trottin’ alongside of a chimbly like me.”

“Perhaps she didn’t mean that. There are any amount of little women who like tall men.”

“I thought of that too—afterwards. P’r’aps she didn’t mean it that way. I s’pose the fact of the matter was that she didn’t cotton on to me, and wanted to let me down easy. She didn’t want to hurt me feelin’s, if yer understand—she was a very good-hearted little girl. There’s some terrible tall fellers where I come from, and I know two as married little girls.”

He seemed a hopeless case.

“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I wish that I wasn’t so blessed long.”

“There’s that there deaf jackeroo,” he reflected presently. “He’s something in the same fix about girls as I am. He’s too deaf and I’m too long.”