Selected Stories (6 page)

IN ONE of these years a paragraph appeared in a daily paper to the effect that a constable had discovered a little boy asleep on the steps of Grinder Bros.’ factory at four o’clock one rainy morning. He awakened him, and demanded an explanation.

The little fellow explained that he worked there, and was frightened of being late; he started work at six, and was apparently greatly astonished to hear that it was only four. The constable examined a small parcel which the frightened child had in his hand. It contained a clean apron and three slices of bread and treacle.

The child further explained that he woke up and thought it was late, and didn’t like to wake mother and ask her the time “because she’d been washin’”. He didn’t look at the clock, because they “didn’t have one”. He volunteered no explanation as to how he expected mother to know the time, but, perhaps, like many other mites of his kind, he had unbounded faith in the infinitude of a mother’s wisdom. His name was Arvie Aspinall, please, sir, and he lived in Jones’s Alley. Father was dead.

Afew days later the same paper took great pleasure in stating, in reference to that “Touching Incident” noticed in a recent issue, that a benevolent society lady had started a subscription among her friends with the object of purchasing an alarm clock for the little boy found asleep at Grinder Bros.’ workshop door.

Later on, it was mentioned, in connection with the touching incident, that the alarm clock had been bought and delivered to the boy’s mother, who appeared to be quite overcome with gratitude. It was learned, also, from another source, that the last assertion was greatly exaggerated.

The touching incident was worn out in another paragraph, which left no doubt that the benevolent society lady was none other than a charming and accomplished daughter of the House of Grinder.

It was late in the last day of the Easter holidays, during which Arvie Aspinall had lain in bed with a bad cold. He was still what he called “croopy”. It was about nine o’clock, and the business of Jones’s Alley was in full swing.

“That’s better, mother, I’m far better,” said Arvie, “the sugar and vinegar cuts the phlegm, and the both’rin’ cough gits out.” It got out to such an extent for the next few minutes that he could not speak. When he recovered his breath, he said:

“Better or worse, I’ll have ter go to work to-morrow. Gimme the clock, mother.”

“I tell you you shall not go! It will be your death.”

“It’s no use talking, mother; we can’t starve—and—sposin’ somebody got my place! Gimme the clock, mother.”

“I’ll send one of the children round to say you’re ill. They’ll surely let you off for a day or two.”

“ ‘Taint no use; they won’t wait; I know them—what does Grinder Bros. care if I’m ill? Never mind, mother, I’ll rise above ’em all yet.
Give me the clock
, mother.”

She gave him the clock, and he proceeded to wind it up and set the alarm.

“There’s somethin’ wrong with the gong,” he muttered, “it’s gone wrong two nights now, but I’ll chance it. I’ll set the alarm at five, that’ll give me time to dress and git there early. I wish I hadn’t to walk so far.”

He paused to read some words engraved round the dial:

Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.

He had read the verse often before, and was much taken with the swing and rhyme of it. He had repeated it to himself, over and over again, without reference to the sense or philosophy of it. He had never dreamed of doubting anything in print, and this was engraved. But now a new light seemed to dawn upon him. He studied the sentence awhile, and then read it aloud for the second time. He turned it over in his mind again in silence.

“Mother!” he said suddenly, “I think it lies.” She placed the clock on the shelf, tucked him into his little bed on the sofa, and blew out the light.

Arvie seemed to sleep, but she lay awake thinking of her troubles. Of her husband carried home dead from his work one morning; of her eldest son who only came to loaf on her when he was out of gaol; of the second son, who had feathered his nest in another city, and had no use for her any longer; of the next—poor delicate little Arvie—struggling manfully to help, and wearing his young life out at Grinder Bros. when he should be at school; of the five helpless younger children asleep in the next room: of her hard life—scrubbing floors from half-past five till eight, and then starting her day’s work-washing!—of having to rear her children in the atmosphere of brothels, because she could not afford to move and pay a higher rent; and of the rent.

Arvie commenced to mutter in his sleep.

“Can’t you get to sleep, Arvie?” she asked. “Is your throat sore? Can I get anything for you?”

“I’d like to sleep,” he muttered, dreamily, “but it won’t seem more’n a moment before—before——”

“Before what, Arvie?” she asked, quickly, fearing that he was becoming delirious.

“Before the alarm goes off!”

He was talking in his sleep.

She rose gently and put the alarm on two hours. “He can rest now,” she whispered to herself.

Presently Arvie sat bolt upright, and said quickly, “Mother! I thought the alarm went off!” Then, without waiting for an answer, he lay down as suddenly and slept.

The rain had cleared away, and a bright, starry dome was over sea and city; over slum and villa alike; but little of it could be seen from the hovel in Jones’s Alley, save a glimpse of the Southern Cross and a few stars round it. It was what ladies call a “lovely night”, as seen from the house of Grinder—“Grinderville”—with its moonlit terraces and garden sloping gently to the water, and its windows lit up for an Easter ball, and its reception rooms thronged by its own exclusive set, and one of its charming
and accomplished daughters melting a select party to tears by her pathetic recitation about a little crossing sweeper.

There was something wrong with the alarm clock, or else Mrs Aspinall had made a mistake, for the gong sounded startlingly in the dead of night. She woke with a painful start, and lay still, expecting to hear Arvie get up; but he made no sign. She turned a white, frightened face towards the sofa where he lay—the light from the alley’s solitary lamp on the pavement above shone down through the window, and she saw that he had not moved.

Why didn’t the clock wake him? He was such a light sleeper! “Arvie!” she called; no answer. “Arvie!” she called again, with a strange ring of remonstrance mingling with the terror in her voice. Arvie never answered.

“Oh! my God!” she moaned.

She rose and stood by the sofa. Arvie lay on his back with his arms folded—a favourite sleeping position of his; but his eyes were wide open and staring upwards as though they would stare through ceiling and roof to the place where God ought to be.

He was dead.

“My God! My God!” she cried.

WHILE out boating one Sunday afternoon on a billabong across the river, we saw a young man on horseback driving some horses along the bank. He said it was a fine day, and asked if the water was deep there. The joker of our party said it was deep enough to drown him, and he laughed and rode farther up. We didn’t take much notice of him.

Next day a funeral gathered at a corner pub and asked each other in to have a drink while waiting for the hearse. They passed away some of the time dancing jigs to a piano in the bar parlour. They passed away the rest of the time skylarking and fighting.

The defunct was a young union labourer, about twenty-five, who had been drowned the previous day while trying to swim some horses across a billabong of the Darling.

He was almost a stranger in town, and the fact of his having been a union man accounted for the funeral. The police found some union papers in his swag, and called at the General Labourers’ Union Office for information about him. That’s how we knew. The secretary had very little information to give. The departed was a “Roman”, and the majority of the town were otherwise—but unionism is stronger than creed. Drink, however, is stronger than unionism; and, when the hearse presently arrived, more than two-thirds of the funeral were unable to follow. They were too drunk.

The procession numbered fifteen, fourteen souls following the broken shell of a soul. Perhaps not one of the fourteen possessed a soul any more than the corpse did—but that doesn’t matter.

Four or five of the funeral, who were boarders at the pub, borrowed a trap which the landlord used to carry passengers to and from the railway station. They were strangers to us who were on foot, and we to them. We were all strangers to the corpse.

Ahorseman, who looked like a drover just returned from a big trip, dropped into our dusty wake and followed us a few
hundred yards, dragging his packhorse behind him, but a friend made wild and demonstrative signals from a hotel verandah—hooking at the air in front with his right hand and jobbing his left thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the bar—so the drover hauled off and didn’t catch up to us any more. He was a stranger to the entire show.

We walked in twos. There were three twos. It was very hot and dusty; the heat rushed in fierce dazzling rays across every iron roof and light-coloured wall that was turned to the sun. One or two pubs closed respectfully until we got past. They closed their bar doors and the patrons went in and out through some side or back entrance for a few minutes. Bushmen seldom grumble at an inconvenience of this sort, when it is caused by a funeral. They have too much respect for the dead.

On the way to the cemetery we passed three shearers sitting on the shady side of a fence. One was drunk—very drunk. The other two covered their right ears with their hats, out of respect for the departed—whoever he might have been—and one of them kicked the drunk and muttered something to him.

He straightened himself up, stared, and reached helplessly for his hat, which he shoved half off and then on again. Then he made a great effort to pull himself together—and succeeded. He stood up, braced his back against the fence, knocked off his hat, and remorsefully placed his foot on it—to keep it off his head till the funeral passed.

A tall, sentimental drover, who walked by my side, cynically quoted Byronic verses suitable to the occasion—to death—and asked with pathetic humour whether we thought the dead man’s ticket would be recognised “over yonder”. It was a G.L.U. ticket, and the general opinion was that it would be recognised.

Presently my friend said:

“You remember when we were in the boat yesterday, we saw a man driving some horses along the bank?”

“Yes.”

He nodded at the hearse and said:

“Well, that’s him.”

I thought awhile.

“I didn’t take any particular notice of him,” I said. “He said something, didn’t he?”

“Yes; said it was a fine day. You’d have taken more notice if you’d known that he was doomed to die in the hour, and that those were the last words he would say to any man in this world.”

“To be sure,” said a full voice from the rear. “If ye’d known that, ye’d have prolonged the conversation.”

We plodded on across the railway line and along the hot, dusty road which ran to the cemetery, some of us talking about the accident, and lying about the narrow escapes we had had ourselves. Presently someone said:

“There’s the Devil.”

I looked up and saw a priest standing in the shade of the tree by the cemetery gate.

The hearse was drawn up and the tail-boards were opened. The funeral extinguished its right ear with its hat as four men lifted the coffin out and laid it over the grave. The priest—a pale, quiet young fellow—stood under the shade of a sapling which grew at the head of the grave. He took off his hat, dropped it carelessly on the ground, and proceeded to business. I noticed that one or two heathens winced slightly when the holy water was sprinkled on the coffin. The drops quickly evaporated, and the little round black spots they left were soon dusted over; but the spots showed, by contrast, the cheapness and shabbiness of the cloth with which the coffin was covered. It seemed black before; now it looked a dusky grey.

Just here man’s ignorance and vanity made a farce of the funeral. Abig, bull-necked publican, with heavy, blotchy features and a supremely ignorant expression, picked up the priest’s straw hat and held it about two inches over the head of his reverence during the whole of the service. The father, be it remembered, was standing in the shade. Afew shoved their hats on and off uneasily, struggling between their disgust for the living and their respect for the dead. The hat had a conical crown and a brim sloping down all round like a sunshade, and the publican held it with his great red claw spread over the crown. To do the priest
justice, perhaps he didn’t notice the incident. Astage priest or parson in the same position might have said: “Put the hat down, my friend; is not the memory of our departed brother worth more than my complexion?” Awattlebark layman might have expressed himself in stronger language, none the less to the point. But my priest seemed unconscious of what was going on. Besides, the publican was a great and important pillar of the Church. He couldn’t, as an ignorant and conceited ass, lose such a good opportunity of asserting his faithfulness and importance to his Church.

The grave looked very narrow under the coffin, and I drew a breath of relief when the box slid easily down. I saw a coffin get stuck once, at Rookwood, and it had to be yanked out with difficulty, and laid on the sods at the feet of the heart-broken relations, who howled dismally while the grave-diggers widened the hole. But they don’t cut contracts so fine in the West. Our grave-digger was not altogether bowelless, and, out of respect for that human quality described as “feelin’s”, he scraped up some light and dusty soil and threw it down to deaden the fall of the clay lumps on the coffin. He also tried to steer the first few shovelfuls gently down against the end of the grave with the back of the shovel turned outwards, but the hard, dry Darling River clods rebounded and knocked all the same. It didn’t matter much—nothing does. The fall of lumps of clay on a stranger’s coffin doesn’t sound any different from the fall of the same things on an ordinary wooden box—at least I didn’t notice anything awesome or unusual in the sound; but, perhaps, one of us—the most sensitive—might have been impressed by being reminded of a burial of long ago, when the thump of every sod jolted his heart.

I have left out the wattle—because it wasn’t there. I have also neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent—he was probably “Out Back”. For similar reasons I have omitted reference to the suspicious moisture in the eyes of a bearded bush ruffian named Bill. Bill failed to turn up; and the only moisture was that which was
induced by the heat. I have left out the “sad Australian sunset” because the sun was not going down at the time. The burial took place exactly at mid-day.

The dead bushman’s name was Jim, apparently; but they found no portraits, nor locks of hair, nor any love letters, nor anything of that kind in his swag—not even a reference to his mother; only some papers relating to union matters. Most of us didn’t know the name till we saw it on the coffin; we knew him as “that poor chap that got drowned yesterday”.

“So his name’s James Tyson,” said my drover acquaintance, looking at the plate.

“Why! Didn’t you know that before?” I asked.

“No; but I knew he was a union man.”

It turned out, afterwards, that J.T. wasn’t his real name—only “the name he went by”.

Anyhow he was buried by it, and most of the “Great Australian Dailies” have mentioned in their brevity columns that a young man named James John Tyson was drowned in a billabong of the Darling last Sunday.

We did hear, later on, what his real name was; but if we ever chance to read it in the “Missing Friends Column”, we shall not be able to give any information to heart-broken Mother or Sister or Wife, nor to anyone who could let him hear something to his advantage—for we have already forgotten the name.