Selected Stories (57 page)

The next we heard of Lord Douglas he had got two years’ hard for embezzlement in connection with some canvassing he had taken up. Mrs Douglas fell ill—touch of brain-fever—and one of the labourers’ wives took care of the children while two others took turns in nursing. While she was recovering, Bob Brothers sent round the hat, and, after a conclave in the Union Office—as mysterious as any meeting ever called with the object of downing bloated Capitalism—it was discovered that one of the chaps—who didn’t wish his name to be mentioned—had borrowed just twenty-five pounds from Lord Douglas in the old days and now wished to return it to Mrs Douglas. So the thing was managed, and if she had any suspicions she kept them to herself. She started a little fancy goods shop and got along fairly comfortable.

Douglas, by the way, was, publicly, supposed, for her sake and because of the little girls, to be away in West Australia on the goldfields.

Time passes without much notice out back, and one hot day, when the sun hung behind the fierce sandstorms from the north-west as dully lurid as he ever showed in a London fog, Lord Douglas got out of the train that had just finished its five-hundred-miles’ run, and not seeing a new-chum porter, who started forward by force of habit to take his bag, he walked stiffly off the platform and down the main street towards his wife’s cottage.

He was very gaunt, and his eyes, to those who passed him closely, seemed to have a furtive, hunted expression. He had let his beard grow, and it had grown grey.

It was within a few days of Christmas—the same Christmas that we lost the pretty girl in the Salvation Army. As a rule the big shearing sheds within a fortnight of Bourke cut out in time for the shearers to reach the town and have their Christmas dinners and sprees—and for some of them to be locked up over Christmas Day—within sound of a church-going bell. Most of the chaps gathered in the Shearers’ Union Office on New Year’s Eve and discussed Douglas amongst other things.

“I vote we kick the cow out of the town!” snarled One-eyed Bogan, viciously.

“We can’t do that,” said Bob Brothers (the Giraffe), speaking more promptly than usual. “There’s his wife and youngsters to consider, yer know.”

“He something well deserted his wife,” snarled Bogan, “an’ now he comes crawlin’ back to her to keep him.”

“Well,” said Mitchell, mildly, “but we ain’t all got as much against him as you have, Bogan.”

“He made a crimson jail-bird of me!” snapped Bogan.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “that didn’t hurt you much, anyway; it rather improved your character if anything. Besides, he made a jail-bird of himself afterwards, so you ought to have a fellow-feeling—a feathered feeling, so to speak. Now you needn’t be offended, Bogan, we’re all jail-birds at heart, only we haven’t all got the pluck.”

“I’m in favour of blanky well tarrin’ an’ featherin’ him an’ kickin’ him out of the town!” shouted Bogan. “It would be a good turn to his wife, too; she’d be well rid of the——.”

“Perhaps she’s fond of him,” suggested Mitchell; “I’ve known such cases before. I saw them sitting together on the verandah last night when they thought no one was looking.”

“He deserted her,” said One-eyed Bogan, in a climbing-down tone, “and left her to starve.”

“Perhaps the police were to blame for that,” said Mitchell. “You know you deserted all your old mates once for three months, Bogan, and it wasn’t your fault——”

“He seems to be a crimson pet of yours, Jack Mitchell,” said Bogan, firing up.

“Ah, well, all I know,” said Mitchell, standing up and stretching himself wearily, “all I know is that he looked like a gentleman once, and treated us like a gentleman, and cheated us like a gentleman, and ran some of us in like a gentleman, and, as far as I can see, he’s served his time like a gentleman and come back to face us and live himself down like a man. I always had a sneaking regard for a gentleman.”

“Why, Mitchell, I’m beginning to think you are a gentleman yourself,” said Jake Boreham.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “I used to have a suspicion once that I had a drop of blue blood in me somewhere, and it worried me a lot; but I asked my old mother about it one day, and she scalded me—God bless her!—and father chased me with a stockwhip, so I gave up making inquiries.”

“You’ll join the bloomin’ Capitalists next,” sneered One-eyed Bogan.

“I wish I could, Bogan,” said Mitchell. “I’d take a trip to Paris and see for myself whether the Frenchwomen are as bad as they’re made out to be, or go to Japan. But what are we going to do about Douglas?”

“Kick the skunk out of town, or boycott him!” said one or two. “He ought to be tarred and feathered and hanged.”

“Couldn’t do worse than hang him,” commented Jake Boreham, cheerfully.

“Oh, yes, we could,” said Mitchell, sitting down, resting his elbows on his knees, and marking his points with one forefinger on the other. “For instance, we might boil him slow in tar. We might skin him alive. We might put him in a cage and poke him with sticks, with his wife and children in another cage to look on and enjoy the fun.”

The chaps, who had been sitting quietly listening to Mitchell, and grinning, suddenly became serious and shifted their positions uneasily.

“But I can tell you what would hurt his feelings more than anything else we could do,” said Mitchell.

“Well, what is it, Jack?” said Tom Hall, rather impatiently.

“Send round the hat and take up a collection for him,” said Mitchell, “enough to let him get away with his wife and children and start life again in some less respectable town than Bourke. You needn’t grin, I’m serious about it.”

There was a thoughtful pause, and one or two scratched their heads.

“His wife seems pretty sick,” Mitchell went on in a reflective tone. “I passed the place this morning and saw him scrubbing out
the floor. He’s been doing a bit of house-painting for old Heegard to-day. I suppose he learnt it in jail. I saw him at work and touched my hat to him.”

“What!” cried Tom Hall, affecting to shrink from Mitchell in horror.

“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’m not sure that I didn’t take my hat off. Now I know it’s not Bush religion for a man to touch his hat, except to a funeral, or a strange roof or woman sometimes; but when I meet a braver man than myself I salute him. I’ve only met two in my life.”

“And who were they, Jack?” asked Jake Boreham.

“One,” said Mitchell—“one is Douglas, and the other—well, the other was the man I used to be. But that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“But perhaps Douglas thought you were crowing over him when you took off your hat to him—sneerin’ at him, like, Mitchell,” reflected Jake Boreham.

“No, Jake,” said Mitchell, growing serious suddenly. “There are ways of doing things that another man understands.”

They all thought for a while.

“Well,” said Tom Hall, “supposing we do take up a collection for him, he’d be too damned proud to take it.”

“But that’s where we’ve got the pull on him,” said Mitchell, brightening up. “I heard Dr Morgan say that Mrs Douglas wouldn’t live if she wasn’t sent away to a cooler place, and Douglas knows it; and, besides, one of the little girls is sick. We’ve got him in a corner and he’ll have to take the stuff. Besides, two years in jail takes a lot of the pride out of a man.”

“Well, I’m damned if I’ll give a sprat to help the man who tried his best to crush the Unions!” said One-eyed Bogan.

“Damned if I will either!” said Barcoo-Rot.

“Now, look here, One-eyed Bogan,” said Mitchell, “I don’t like to harp on old things, for I know they bore you, but when you returned to public life that time no one talked of kicking you out of the town. In fact, I heard that the chaps put a few pounds together to help you get away for a while till you got over your modesty.”

No one spoke.

“I passed Douglas’s place on my way here from my camp tonight,” Mitchell went on musingly, “and I saw him walking up and down in the yard with his sick child in his arms. You remember that little girl, Bogan? I saw her run and pick up your hat and give it to you one day when you were trying to put it on with your feet. You remember, Bogan? The shock nearly sobered you.”

There was a very awkward pause. The position had become too psychological altogether and had to be ended somehow. The awkward silence had to be broken, and Bogan broke it. He turned up Bob Brothers’s hat, which was, lying on the table, and “chucked in” a “quid”, qualifying the hat and the quid, and disguising his feelings with the national oath of the land.

“We’ve had enough of this gory, maudlin, sentimental tommy-rot,” he said. “Here, Barcoo, stump up or I’ll belt it out of your hide! I’ll—I’ll take yer to pieces!”

But Douglas didn’t leave the town. He sent his wife and children to Sydney until the heat wave was past, built a new room on to the cottage, and started a book and newspaper shop, and a poultry farm in the back paddock, and flourished.

They called him Mr Douglas for a while, then Douglas, then Percy Douglas, and now he is well-known as Old Daddy Douglas, and the Sydney
Worker, Truth
, and
Bulletin
and other democratic rags are on sale at his shop. He is big with schemes for locking the Darling River, and he gets his drink at O’Donohoo’s. He is scarcely yet regarded as a straight-out democrat. He was a gentleman once, Mitchell said, and the old blood was not to be trusted. But, last elections, Douglas worked quietly for Unionism, and gave the leaders certain hints, and put them up to various electioneering dodges which enabled them to return, in the face of Monopoly, a Labour member who, is as likely to go straight as long as any other Labour member.

They judge not and they are not judged—’tis their philosophy—

(There’s something wrong with every ship that sails upon the sea).

—The Ballad of the Rouseabout

“AND what became of One-eyed Bogan?” I asked Tom Hall when I met him and Jack Mitchell down in Sydney with their shearing cheques the Christmas before last.

“You’d better ask Mitchell, Harry,” said Tom. “He can tell you about Bogan better than I can. But first, what about the drink we’re going to have?”

We turned out of Pitt Street into Hunter Street, and across George Street, where a double line of fast electric tramway was running, into Margaret Street and had a drink at Pfahlert’s Hotel; where a counter lunch—as good as many dinners you get for a shilling-was included with a sixpenny drink. “Get a quiet corner,” said Mitchell, “I like to hear myself cackle.” So we took our beer out in the fernery and got a cool place at a little table in a quiet corner amongst the fern boxes.

“Well, One-eyed Bogan was a hard case, Mitchell,” I said. “Wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Mitchell, putting down his “long-beer” glass, “he was.”

“Rather a bad egg?”

“Yes, a regular bad egg,” said Mitchell, decidedly.

“I heard he got caught cheating at cards,” I said.

“Did you?” said Mitchell. “Well, I believe he did. Ah, well,” he added reflectively, after another long pull, “One-eyed Bogan won’t cheat at cards any more.”

“Why?” I said. “Is he dead then?”

“No,” said Mitchell, “he’s blind.”

“Good God!” I said, “how did that happen?”

“He lost the other eye,” said Mitchell, and he took another drink; “ah, well, he won’t cheat at cards any more—unless there’s cards invented for the blind.”

“How did it happen?” I asked.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “you see, Harry, it was this way. Bogan went pretty free in Bourke after the shearing before last, and in the end he got mixed up in a very ugly-looking business; he was accused of doing two new-chum jackeroos out of their stuff by some sort of confidence trick.”

“Confidence trick,” I said. “I’d never have thought that One-eyed Bogan had the brains to go in for that sort of thing.”

“Well, it seems he had, or else he used somebody else’s brains; there’s plenty of broken-down English gentlemen sharpers knocking about out back, you know, and Bogan might have been taking lessons from one. I don’t know the rights of the case: it was hushed up, as you’ll see presently; but anyway, the jackeroos swore that Bogan had done ’em out of ten quid. They were both Cockneys and I suppose they reckoned themselves smart, but Bushmen have more time to think. Besides, Bogan’s one eye was in his favour. You see, he always kept his one eye fixed strictly on whatever business he had in hand; if he’d had another eye to rove round and distract his attention and look at things on the outside, the chances are he would never have got into trouble.”

“Never mind that, Jack,” said Tom Hall. “Harry wants to hear the yarn.”

“Well, to make it short, one of the jackeroos went to the police and Bogan cleared out. His character was pretty bad just then, so there was a piece of blue paper cut for him. Bogan didn’t seem to think the thing was so serious as it was, for he only went a few miles down the river and camped with his horses on a sort of island inside an anabranch, till the thing should blow over or the new-chums leave Bourke.

“Bogan’s old enemy, Constable Campbell, got wind of Bogan’s camp, and started out after him. He rode round the outside track and came in onto the river just below where the anabranch joins it, at the lower end of the island and right
opposite Bogan’s camp. You know what those billabongs are: dry gullies till the river rises from the Queensland rains and backs them up till the water runs round into the river again and makes anabranches of ’em—places that you thought were hollows you’ll find above water, and you can row over places you thought were hills. There’s no water so treacherous and deceitful as you’ll find in some of those billabongs. Aman starts to ride across a place where he thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a deep channel—that wasn’t there before—with a steady undercurrent with the whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if he can’t swim and his horse isn’t used to it—or sometimes if he can swim—it’s a case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest on him, if they have time, before he’s buried deep in Darling River mud for ever. And somebody advertises in the missing column for Jack Somebody who was last heard of in Australia.”

“Never mind that, Mitchell, go on,” I said.

“Well, Campbell knew the river and saw that there was a stiff current there, so he hailed Bogan.

“ ‘Good day, Campbell,’ shouted Bogan.

“ ‘I want you, Bogan,’ said Campbell. ‘Come across and bring your horses.’

“ ‘I’m damned if I will,’ says Bogan. ‘I’m not going to catch me death o’ cold to save your skin. If you want me you’ll have to bloody well come and git me.’ Bogan was a good strong swimmer, and he had good horses, but he didn’t try to get away—I suppose he reckoned he’d have to face the music one time or another—and one time is as good as another out back.

“Campbell was no swimmer; he had no temptation to risk his life—you see it wasn’t as in war with a lot of comrades watching ready to advertise a man as a coward for staying alive—so he argued with Bogan and tried to get him to listen to reason, and swore at him. ‘I’ll make it damned hot, for you, Bogan,’ he said, ‘if I have to come over for you.’

“ ‘Two can play at that game,’ says Bogan.

“ ‘Look here, Bogan,’ said Campbell, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you give me your word that you’ll come up to the police-station
to-morrow I’ll go back and say nothing about it. You can say you didn’t know a warrant was out after you. It will be all the better for you in the end. Better give me your word, man.’

“Perhaps Campbell knew Bogan better than any of us.

“ ‘Now then, Bogan,’ he said, ‘don’t be a fool. Give your word like a sensible man, and I’ll go back. I’ll give you five minutes to make up your mind.’And he took out his watch.

“But Bogan was nasty and wouldn’t give his word, so there was nothing for it but for Campbell to make a try for him.

“Campbell had plenty of pluck, or obstinacy, which amounts to the same thing. He put his carbine and revolver under a log, out of the rain that was coming on, saw to his handcuffs, and then spurred his horse into the water. Bogan lit his pipe with a stick from his camp fire—so Campbell said afterwards—and sat down on his heels and puffed away, and waited for him.

“Just as Campbell’s horse floundered into the current Bogan shouted to go back, but Campbell thought it was a threat and kept on. But Bogan had caught sight of a log coming down the stream, end on, with a sharp, splintered end, and before Campbell knew where he was, the sharp end of the log caught the horse in the flank. The horse started to plunge and struggle sideways, with all his legs, and Campbell got free of him as quick as he could. Now, you know, in some of those Darling River reaches the current will seem to run steadily for a while, and then come with a rush. (I was caught in one of those rushes once, when I was in swimming, and would have been drowned if I hadn’t been born to be hanged.) Well, a rush came along just as Campbell got free from his horse, and he went down stream one side of a snag and his horse the other. Campbell’s pretty stout, you know, and his uniform was tight, and it handicapped him.

“Just as he was being washed past the lower end of the snag he caught hold of a branch that stuck out of the water and held on. He swung round and saw Bogan running down to the point opposite him. Now, you know there was always a lot of low cunning about Bogan, and I suppose he reckoned that if he pulled Campbell out he’d stand a good show of getting clear of his
trouble; anyway, if he didn’t save Campbell it might be said that he killed him—besides, Bogan was a good swimmer, so there wasn’t any heroism about it anyhow. Campbell was only a few feet from the bank, but Bogan started to strip—to make the job look as big as possible, I suppose. He shouted to Campbell to say he was coming, and to hold on. Campbell said afterwards that Bogan seemed an hour undressing. The weight of the current was forcing down the bough that Campbell was hanging on to, and suddenly, he said, he felt a great feeling of helplessness take him by the shoulders. He yelled to Bogan and let go.

“Now, it happened that Jake Boreham and I were passing away the time between shearings, and we were having a sort of fishing and shooting loaf down the river in a boat arrangement that Jake had made out of boards and tarred canvas. We called her the
Jolly Coffin.
We were just poking up the bank in the slack water, a few hundred yards below the billabong, when Jake said, ‘Why, there’s a horse or something in the river;’ then he shouted, ‘No, by God it’s a man,’ and we poked the
Coffin
out into the stream for all she was worth. ‘Looks like two men fighting in the water,’ Jake shouts presently. ‘Hurry up, or they’ll drown each other.’

“We hailed ’em, and Bogan shouted for help. He was treading water and holding Campbell up in front of him now in real professional style. As soon as he heard us he threw up his arms and splashed a bit—I reckoned he was trying to put as much style as he could into that rescue. But I caught a crab, and, before we could get to them, they were washed past into the top of a tree that stood well below flood-mark. I pulled the boat’s head round and let her stern down between the branches. Bogan had one arm over a limb and was holding Campbell with the other, and trying to lift him higher out of the water. I noticed Bogan’s face was bleeding—there was a dead limb stuck in the tree with nasty sharp points on it, and I reckoned he’d run his face against one of them. Campbell was gasping like a codfish out of water, and he was the whitest man I ever saw (except one, and
he’d
been drowned for a week). Campbell had the sense to keep still. We asked Bogan if he could hold on, and he said he could, but he
couldn’t hold Campbell any longer. So Jake took the oars and I leaned over the stern and caught hold of Campbell, and Jake ran the boat into the bank, and we got him ashore; then we went back for Bogan and landed him.

“We had some whisky and soon brought Campbell round; but Bogan was bleeding like a pig from a nasty cut over his good eye, so we bound wet handkerchiefs round his eyes and led him to a log and he sat down for a while, holding his hand to his eye and groaning. He kept saying, ‘I’m blind, mates, I’m blind! I’ve lost me other eye!’ but we didn’t dream it was so bad as that: we kept giving him whisky. We got some dry boughs and made a big fire. Then Bogan stood up and held his arms stiff down to his sides, opening and shutting his hands as if he was in great pain. And I’ve often thought since what a different man Bogan seemed without his clothes and with the broken bridge of his nose and his eyes covered by the handkerchiefs. He was clean shaven, and his mouth and chin are his best features, and he’s clean limbed and well hung. I often thought afterwards that there was something of a blind god about him as he stood there naked by the fire on the day he saved Campbell’s life—something that reminded me of a statue I saw once in the Art Gallery. (Pity the world isn’t blinder to a man’s worst points.)

“Presently Jake listened and said, ‘By God, that’s lucky!’ and we heard a steamer coming up river and presently we saw her coming round the point with a couple of wool-barges in tow. We got Bogan aboard and got some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital. The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never saw anything again—except ‘a sort of dull white blur’, as he called it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for the first time. Ah, well!

“Bogan’s old enemy, Barcoo-Rot, went to see him in the hospital, and Bogan said, ‘Well, Barcoo, I reckon we’ve had our last fight. I owe you a hiding, but I don’t see how I’m going to pay you.’ ‘Never mind that, Bogan, old man,’ says Barcoo. ‘I’ll take it from anyone yer likes to appoint, if that worries yer; and, look here, Bogan, if I can’t fight you I can fight for you—and
don’t you forget it!’ And Barcoo used to lead Bogan round about town in his spare time and tell him all that was going on; and I believe he always had an ear cocked in case someone said a word against Bogan—as if any of the chaps would say a word against a blind man.

“Bogan’s case was hushed up. The police told us to fix it up the best way we could. One of the jackeroos, who reckoned that Bogan had swindled him, was a gentleman, and he was the first to throw a quid in the Giraffe’s hat when it went round for Bogan, but the other jackeroo was a cur: he said he wanted the money that Bogan had robbed him of. There were were two witnesses, but we sent ’em away, and Tom Hall, there, scared the jackeroo. You know Tom was always the best hand we had at persuading witnesses in Union cases to go home to see their mothers.”

“How did you scare that jackeroo, Tom?” I asked.

“Tell you about it some other time,” said Tom.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “Bogan was always a good wool-sorter, so, next shearing, old Baldy Thompson—you know Baldy Thompson, Harry, of West-o’-Sunday Station—Baldy had a talk with some of the chaps, and took Bogan out in his buggy with him to West-o’-Sunday. Bogan would sit at the end of the rolling tables, in the shearing shed, with a boy to hand him the fleeces, and he’d feel a fleece and tell the boy what bin to throw it into; and by-and-by he began to learn to throw the fleeces into the bins himself. And sometimes Baldy would have a sheep brought to him and get him to feel the fleece and tell him the quality of it. And then again Baldy would talk, just loud enough for Bogan to overhear, and swear that he’d sooner have Bogan, blind as he was, than half-a-dozen scientific jackeroo experts with all their eyes about them.

“Of course Bogan wasn’t worth anything much to Baldy, but Baldy gave him two pounds a week out of his own pocket, and another quid that we made up between us; so he made enough to pull him through the rest of the year.

“It was curious to see how soon he learned to find his, way about the hut and manage his tea and tucker. It was a rough shed, but everybody was eager to steer Bogan about—and, in fact, two
of them had a fight about it one day. Baldy and all of us—and especially visitors when they came—were mighty interested in Bogan; and I reckon we were rather proud of having a blind wool-sorter. I reckon Bogan had thirty or forty pairs of eyes watching out for him in case he’d run against something or fall. It irritated him to be messed round too much—he said a baby would never learn to walk if it was held all the time. He reckoned he’d learn more in a year than a man who’d served a lifetime to blindness; but we didn’t let him wander much—for fear he’d fall into the big rocky water-hole there, by accident.