IV.—THE FIRE AT ROSS’S FARM
Ross’s farm was in a corner between the ridges and the creek. The fire had come down from the creek, but the siding on that side was fairly clear, and they had stopped the fire there. It went behind the ridge and ran up and over. The ridge was covered thickly with scrub and dead grass; the wheat-field went well up the siding, and along the top was a bush face with only a narrow bridle-track between it and the long dead grass. Everything depended on the wind. Mary saw Ross and Mrs Ross and the daughter Jenny, well up the siding above the fence, working desperately, running to and fro, and beating out the fire with green boughs. Mary left her horse, ran into the hut, and looked hurriedly round for something to wear in place of her riding-skirt. She only saw a couple of light print dresses. She stepped into a skillion room, which happened to be Bob’s room, and there caught sight of a pair of trousers and a coat hanging on the wall.
Bob Ross, beating desperately along a line of fire that curved down-hill to his right, and half-choked and blinded with the smoke, almost stumbled against a figure which was too tall to be his father.
“Why! who’s that?” he gasped.
“It’s only me, Bob,” said Mary, and she lifted her bough again.
Bob stared. He was so astonished that he almost forgot the fire and the wheat. Bob was not thin—but—
“Don’t look at me, Bob!” said Mary, hurriedly. “We’re going to be married, so it doesn’t matter. Let us save the wheat.”
There was no time to waste; there was a breeze now from over the ridges, light, but enough to bear the fire down on them. Once, when they had breathing space, Mary ran to the creek for a billy of water. They beat out the fire all along the siding to where a rib of granite came down over the ridge to the fence, and then they thought the wheat was safe. They came together here, and Ross had time to look and see who the strange man was; then he stared at Mary from under his black, bushy eyebrows. Mary, choking and getting her breath after her exertions, suddenly became aware, said “Oh!” and fled round the track beyond the point of granite. She felt a gust of wind and looked up the ridge. The bush fence ended here in a corner, where it was met by a new wire fence running up from the creek. It was a blind gully full of tall dead grass, and, glancing up, Mary saw the flames coming down fast. She ran back.
“Come on!” she cried, “come on! The fire’s the other side of the rocks!”
Back at the station, Wall walked up and down till he cooled. He went inside and sat down, but it was no use. He lifted his head and saw his dead wife’s portrait on the wall. Perhaps his whole life ran before him in detail—but this is not a psychological study.
There were only two tracks open to him now: either to give in, or go on as he was going—to shut himself out from human nature and become known as “Mean Wall,” “Hungry Wall,” or “Mad Wall, the Squatter.” He was a tall, dark man of strong imagination and more than ordinary intelligence. And it was the great crisis of his ruined life. He walked to the top of a knoll near the homestead and saw the fire on the ridges above Ross’s farm. As he turned back he saw a horseman ride up and dismount by the yard.
“Is that you, Peter?”
“Yes, boss. The fences is all right.”
“Been near Ross’s?”
“No. He’s burnt out by this time.”
Wall walked to and fro for a few minutes longer. Then he suddenly stopped and called, “Peter!”
“Ay, ay!” from the direction of the huts.
“Turn out the men!” and Wall went into a shed and came out with his saddle on his arm.
The fire rushed down the blind gully. Showers of sparks fell on the bush fence, it caught twice, and they put it out, but the third time it blazed and roared and a fire-engine could not have stopped it.
“The wheat must go,” said Ross. “We’ve done our best,” and he threw down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his eyes with a grimy hand.
The wheat was patchy in that corner—there were many old stumps of trees, and there were bare strips where the plough had gone on each side of them. Mary saw a chance, and climbed the fence.
“Come on, Bob,” she cried, “we might save it yet. Mr Ross, pull out the fence along there,” and she indicated a point beyond the fire. They tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps—the fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses’ hoofs on the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen men behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the middle of the wheat, towards the hut.
Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from the saplings, and, after twenty minutes’ hard fighting, the crop was saved—save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook. Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.
“Shake hands, Ross,” he said.
And it was Christmas Day.
But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. “You were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren’t you, Mary?” “Bob’s best Sunday-go-meetin’s, too, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Rather tight fit, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Couldn’t get ’em on now, could you, Mary?”
“But,” reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, “it ain’t every young chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her—is it? An’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”
And old Peter was set down as being an innercent sort of ole cove.
THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT
There had been heavy rain and landslips all along the branch railway which left the Great Western Line from Sydney just beyond the Blue Mountains, and ran through thick bush and scrubby ridgy country and along great alluvial sidings—were the hills on the opposite side of the wide valleys (misty in depths) faded from deep blue into the pale azure of the sky—and over the ends of western spurs to the little farming, mining and pastoral town of Solong, situated in a circle of blue hills on the banks of the willow-fringed Cudgegong River.
The line was hopelessly blocked, and some publicans at Solong had put on the old coach-road a couple of buggies, a wagonette, and an old mail coach—relic of the days of Cobb & Co., which had been resurrected from some backyard and tinkered up—to bring the train passengers on from the first break in the line over the remaining distance of forty miles or so. Capertee Station (old time, “Capertee Camp”—a teamster’s camp) was the last station before the first washout, and there the railway line and the old road parted company for the last time before reaching Solong—the one to run round by the ends of the western spurs that spread fanlike, and the other to go through and over, the rough country.
The train reached Capertee about midnight in broad moonlight that was misty in the valleys and round the blue of Crown Ridge. I got a “box-seat” beside the driver on the old coach. It was a grand old road—one of the old main coach-roads of New South Wales—broad and white, metalled nearly all the way, and in nearly as good condition as on the day when the first passenger train ran into Solong and the last-used section of the old road was abandoned. It dated back to the bushranging days—right back to convict times: it ran through tall dark bush, up over gaps or “saddles” in high ridges, down across deep dark gullies, and here and there across grey, marshy, curlew-haunted flats. Cobb & Co’s coach-and-six, with “Royal Mail” gilded on the panels, had dashed over it in ten and twelve-mile stages in the old days, the three head-lamps flashing on the wild dark bush at night, and maybe twenty-four passengers on board. The biggest rushes to richest goldfields in the west had gone over this old road on coaches, on carts, on drays, on horse and bullock wagons, on horseback, and on foot; new chums from all the world and from all stations in life.
When many a step was on the mountains,
Marching west to the land of gold.
And a few came back rich—red, round-faced and jolly—on the box-seat of Cobb & Co’s, treating the driver and all hands, “going home” to sweethearts or families. (Home people will never feel the meaning of those two words, “going home,” as it is felt in a new land.) And many came back broken men, tramping in rags, and carrying their swags through the dusty heat of the drought in December or the bitter, pelting rain in the mountains in June. Some came back grey who went as boys; and there were many who never came back.
I remembered the old mile-trees, with a section of bark cut away and the distances cut in Roman letters in the hardened sap—the distance from Bowenfels, the railway terminus then. It was a ghostly old road, and if it wasn’t haunted it should have been. There was an old decaying and nearly deserted coaching town or two; there were abandoned farms and halfway inns, built of stone, with the roofs gone and nettles growing high between the walls; the remains of an orchard here and there—a few gnarled quince-trees—and the bush reclaiming its own again. It was a haunted ride for me, because I had last ridden over this old road long ago when I was young—going to see the city for the first time—and because I was now on my way to attend the funeral of one of my father’s blood from whom t had parted in anger.
We slowly climbed, and almost as slowly descended, the steep siding of a great hill called Aaron’s Pass, and about a mile beyond the foot of the hill I saw a spot I remembered passing on the last journey down, long ago. Rising back from the road, and walled by heavy bush, was a square clearing, and in the background I saw plainly, by the broad moonlight, the stone foundations for a large house; from the front an avenue of grown pines came down to the road.
“Why!” I exclaimed, turning to the driver, “was that house burnt down?”
“No,” he said slowly. “That house was never built.”
I stared at the place again and caught sight of a ghostly-looking light between the lines of the foundations, which I presently made out to be a light in a tent.
“There’s someone camping there,” I said.
“Yes,” said the driver, “some old swaggy or ‘hatter.’ I seen him comin’ down. I don’t know nothing about that there place.” (I hadn’t “shouted” for him yet.)
I thought and remembered. I remembered myself, as a boy, being sent a coach journey along this road to visit some relatives in Sydney. We passed this place, and the women in the coach began to talk of the fine house that was going to be built there. The ground was being levelled for the foundations, and young pines had been planted, with stakes round them to protect them from the cattle. I remembered being mightily interested in the place, for the women said that the house was to be a two-storied one. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to see a two-storied house there in the bush. The height of my ambition was to live in a house with stairs in it. The women said that this house was being built for young Brassington, the son of the biggest squatter then in the district, who was going to marry the daughter of the next biggest squatter. That was all I remember hearing the women say.
Three or four miles along the road was a public-house, with a post office, general store, and blacksmith shop attached, as is usual in such places—all that was left of the old pastoral and coaching town of Ilford. I “shouted” for the driver at the shanty, but got nothing further out of him concerning the fate of the house that was never built. I wanted that house for a story.
However, while yarning with some old residents at Solong, I mentioned the Brassingtons, and picked up a few first links in the story. The young couple were married and went to Sydney for their honeymoon. The story went that they intended to take a trip to the old country and Paris, to be away a twelve-month, and the house was to be finished and ready for them on their return. Young Brassington himself had a big sheep-run round there. The railway wasn’t thought of in those days, or if it was, no Brassington could have dreamed that the line could have been brought to Solong in any other direction than through the property of the “Big Brassingtons,” as they were called. Well, the young couple went to Sydney, but whether they went farther the old residents did not know. All they knew was that within a few weeks, and before the stone foundations for the brick walls of the house were completed, the building contract was cancelled, the workmen were dismissed, and the place was left as I last saw it; only the ornamental pines had now grown to trees. The Brassingtons and the bride’s people were English families and reserved. They kept the story, if there was a story, to themselves. The girl’s people left the district and squatted on new stations up-country. The Big Brassingtons came down in the world and drifted to the city, as many smaller people do, more and more every year. Neither young Brassington nor his wife was ever again seen or heard of in the district.
I attended my relative’s funeral, and next day started back for Sydney.
Just as we reached Ilford, as it happened, the pin of the fore under-carriage of the coach broke, and it took the blacksmith several hours to set it right. The place was dull, the publican was not communicative—or else he harped on the old local grievance of the railway not having come that way—so about half an hour before I thought the coach would be ready, I walked on along the road to stretch by legs. I walked on and on until I came, almost unaware, to the site of the house that was never built. The tent was still there, in fact, it was a permanent camp, and I was rather surprised to see the man working with a trowel on a corner of the unfinished foundations of the house. At first I thought he was going to build a stone hut in the corner, but when I got close to him I saw that he was working carefully on the original plan of the building: he was building the unfinished parts of the foundation walls up to the required height. He had bricklayer’s tools, a bag of lime, and a heap of sand, and had worked up a considerable quantity of mortar. It was a rubble foundation: he was knocking off the thin end of a piece of stone to make it fit, and the clanging of the trowel prevented his hearing my footsteps.
“Good day, mate,” I said, close beside him.
I half expected he’d start when I spoke, but he didn’t: he looked round slowly, but with a haunted look in his eyes as if I might have been one of his ghosts. He was a tall man, gaunt and haggard-eyed, as many men are in the bush; he may have been but little past middle age, and grey before his time.
“Good day,” he said, and he set the stone in its place, carefully flush with the outer edge of the wall, before he spoke again. Then he looked at the sun, which was low, laid down his trowel, and asked me to come to the tent-fire. “It’s turning chilly,” he said. It was a model camp, everything clean and neat both inside the tent and out; he had made a stone fireplace with a bark shelter over it, and a table and bench under another little shed, with shelves for his tin cups and plates and cooking utensils. He put a box in front of the fire and folded a flour-bag on top of it for a seat for me, and hung the billy over the fire. He sat on his heels and poked the burning sticks, abstractedly I thought, or to keep his hands and thoughts steady.
“I see you’re doing a bit of building,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes on the fire; “I’m getting on with it slowly.”
I don’t suppose he looked at me half a dozen times the whole while I was in his camp. When he spoke he talked just as if he were sitting yarning in a row of half a dozen of us. Presently he said suddenly, and giving the fire a vicious dig with his poker:
“That house must be finished by Christmas.”
“Why?” I asked, taken by surprise. “What’s the hurry?”
“Because,” he said, “I’m going to be married in the New Year—to the best and dearest girl in the bush.”
There was an awkward pause on my part, but presently I pulled myself together.
“You’ll never finish it by yourself,” I said. “Why don’t you put on some men?”
“Because,” he said, “I can’t trust them. Besides, how am I to get bricklayers and carpenters in a place like this?”
I noticed all through that his madness or the past in his mind was mixed up with the real and the present.
“Couldn’t you postpone the marriage?” I asked.
“No!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet. “No!” and he looked round wildly on the darkening bush. There was madness in his tone that time, the last “No!” sounding as if from a man who was begging for his life.
“Couldn’t you run up a shanty then, to live in until the house is ready?” I suggested, to soothe him.
He gave his arm an impatient swing. “Do you think I’d ask that girl to live in a hut?” he said. “She ought to live in a palace!”
There seemed no way out of it, so I said nothing: he turned his back and stood looking away over the dark, low-lying sweep of bush towards sunset. He folded his arms tight, and seemed to me to be holding himself. After a while he let fall his arms and turned and blinked at me and the fire like a man just woke from a doze or rousing himself out of a deep reverie.
“Oh, I almost forgot the billy!” he said. “I’ll make some tea—you must be hungry.”
He made the tea and fried a couple of slices of ham; he laid the biggest slice on a thick slice of white baker’s bread on a tin plate, and put it and a pint-pot full of tea on a box by my side. “Have it here, by the fire,” he said; “it’s warmer and more comfortable.”
I took the plate on my knee, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed that meal. The bracing mountain air and the walk had made me hungry. The hatter had his meal standing up, cutting his ham on a slice of bread with a clasp-knife. It was bush fashion, and set me thinking of some old times. He ate very little, and, as far as I saw, he didn’t smoke. Non-smokers are very scarce in the bush.
I saw by the way his tent was pitched and his camp arranged generally, and by the way he managed the cooking, that he must have knocked about the bush for some years.
He put the plates and things away and came and sat down on the other empty gin-case by my side, and fell to poking the fire again. He never showed the least curiosity as to who I was, or where I came from, or what I was doing on this deserted track: he seemed to take me as a matter of course—but all this was in keeping with bush life in general.
Presently he got up and stood looking upwards over the place where the house should have been.
“I think now,” he said slowly, “I made a mistake in not having the verandas carried all round the house.”
“I—I beg pardon!”
“I should have had the balcony all round instead of on two sides only, as the man who made the plan suggested; it would have looked better and made the house cooler in summer.”
I thought as I listened, and presently I saw that it was a case of madness within madness, so to speak: he was mad on the idea that he could build the house himself, and then he had moods when he imagined that the house had been built and he had been married and had reared a family.
“You could easily get the balcony carried round,” I said; “it wouldn’t cost much—you can get good carpenters at Solong.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll have it done after Christmas.” Then he turned from the house and blinked down at me. “I am sorry,” he said, “that there’s no one at home. I sent the wife and family to Sydney for a change. I’ve got the two boys at the Sydney Grammar School. I think I’ll send the eldest to King’s School at Parramatta. The girls will have to get along with a governess at home and learn to help their mother—”
And so he went on talking away just as a man who has made money in the bush, and is married and settled down, might yarn to an old bachelor bush mate.
“I suppose I’ll have to get a good piano,” he went on. “The girls must have some amusement: there’ll be no end of balls and parties. I suppose the boys will soon be talking of getting ‘fivers’ and ‘tenners’ out of the ‘guvner’ or ‘old man.’ It’s the way of the world. And they’ll marry and leave us. It’s the way of the world—”
It was awful to hear him go on like this, the more so because he never smiled—just talked on as if he had said the same thing over and over again. Presently he stopped, and his eyes and hands began to wander: he sat down on his heel to the fire again and started poking it. I began to feel uneasy; I didn’t know what other sides there might be to his madness, and wished the coach would come along.
“You’ve knocked about the bush a good deal?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I thought he might break loose if I let him brood too long.
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
“Been in Queensland and the Gulf country, I suppose?”
“I have.”
His tone and manner seemed a bit more natural. He had knocked about pretty well all over Australia, and had been in many places where I had been. I had got him on the right track, and after a bit he started telling bush yarns and experiences, some of them awful, some of them very funny, and all of them short and good; and now and then, looking at the side of his face, which was all he turned to me, I thought I detected the ghost of a smile.
One thing I noticed about him; when he spoke as a madman, he talked like a man who had been fairly well educated (or sometimes, I fancied, like a young fellow who was studying to be a school-teacher); his speech was deliberate and his grammar painfully correct—far more so than I have made it; but when he spoke as an old bushman, he dropped his g’s and often turned his grammar back to front. But that reminds me that I have met English college men who did the same thing after being a few years in the bush; either they dropped their particular way of speaking because it was mimicked, because they were laughed and chaffed out of it, or they fell gradually into the habit of talking as rough bushmen do (they learnt Australian), as clean-mouthed men fall, in spite of themselves, into the habit of swearing in the heat and hurry and rough life of a shearing-shed. And, coming back into civilized life, these men, who had been well brought up, drop into their old manner and style of speaking as readily as the foulest-mouthed man in a shed or camp—who, amongst his fellows, cannot say three words without an oath—can, when he finds himself in a decent home in the woman-and-girl world, yarn by the hour without letting slip a solitary little damn.
The hatter warmed up the tea-billy again, got out some currant buns, which he had baked himself in the camp-oven, and we were yarning comfortably like two old bushmen, and I had almost forgotten that he was “ratty,” when we heard the coach coming. I jumped up to hurry down to the road. This seemed to shake him up. He gripped my hand hard and glanced round in his frightened, haunted way. I never saw the eyes of a man look so hopeless and helpless as his did just then.
“I’m sorry you’re going,” he said, in a hurried way. “I’m sorry you’re going. But—but they all go. Come again, come again—we’ll all be glad to see you.”
I had to hurry off and leave him. “We all,” I suppose, meant himself and his ghosts.
I ran down between the two rows of pines and reached the road just as the coach came up. I found the publican from Ilford aboard—he was taking a trip to Sydney. As the coach went on I looked up the clearing and saw the hatter standing straight behind the fire, with his arms folded and his face turned in our direction. He looked ghastly in the firelight, and at that distance his face seemed to have an expression of listening blindness. I looked round on the dark bush, with, away to the left, the last glow of sunset fading from the bed of it, like a bed of reddening coals, and I looked up at the black loom of Aaron’s Pass, and thought that never a man, sane or mad, was left in such a depth of gloomy loneliness.
“I see you’ve been yarning with him yonder,” said the publican, who seemed to have relaxed wonderfully.
“Yes.”
“You know these parts, don’t you?”
“Yes. I was about here as a boy.”
He asked me what my name might be. I told him it was Smith. He blinked a while.
“I never heard of anyone by the name of Smith in the district,” he said.
Neither had I. I told him that we lived at Solong, and didn’t stay long. It saved time.
“Ever heard of the Big Brassingtons?”
“Yes.”
“Ever heard the yarn of the house that wasn’t built?”
I told him how much I had heard of it.
“And that’s about all any on ’em knows. Have you any idea who that man back yonder is?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well, who do you think it is?”
“He is, or rather he was, young Brassington.”
“You’ve hit it!” said the publican. “I know—and a few others.”
“And do you know what became of his wife?” I asked.
“I do,” said the shanty-keeper, who had a generous supply of whisky with him, and seemed to have begun to fill himself up for the trip.
He said no more for a while, and when I had remained silent long enough, he went on, very deliberately and impressively:
“One yarn is that the girl wasn’t any good; that when she was married to Brassington, and as soon as they got to Sydney, she met a chap she’d been carrying on with before she married Brassington (or that she’d been married to in secret), an’ she cleared off with him, leaving her fortnight-old husband. That was one yarn.”
“Was it?” I said.
“Yes,” said the publican. “That yarn was a lie.” He opened a flask of whisky and passed it round.
“There was madness in the family,” he said, after a nip.
“Whose?” I asked. “Brassington’s?”
“No,” said the publican, in a tone that implied contempt at my ignorance, in spite of its innocence, “the girl’s. Her mother had been in a ’sylum, and so had her grandmother. It was—it was heridited. Some madnesses is heridited, an’ some comes through worry and hard graft (that’s mine), an’ some comes through drink, and some through worse, and, but as far as I’ve heard, all madnesses is pretty much the same. My old man was a warder in a ’sylum. They have their madnesses a bit different, the same as boozers has their d.t.’s different; but, takin’ it by the lump, it’s pretty much all the same. The difference is accordin’ to their natures when they’re sane. All men are—”
“But about young Mrs Brassington,” I interrupted.
“Young Mrs Brassington? Rosy Webb she was, daughter of Webb the squatter. Rosy was the brightest, best, good-heartedest, an’ most ladylike little girl in the district, an’ the heriditry business come on her in Sydney, about a week after she was married to young Brassington. She was only twenty. Here—” He passed the flask round.
“And what happened?” I asked.
“What happened?” he repeated. Then he pulled himself together, as if conscious that he had shown signs of whisky. “Everything was done, but it was no use. She died in a year in a ’sylum.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do I know that?” he repeated in a tone of contempt. “How do I know that? Well, I’ll tell you how. My old wife was in service at Brassington’s station at the time—the oldest servant—an’ young Brassington wired to her from Sydney to come and help him in his trouble. Old Mrs Brassington was bedridden, an’ they kep’ it from her.”
“And about young Brassington?”
“About young Brassington? He took a swag an’ wandered through the bush. We’ve had him at our place several times all these years, but he always wandered off again. My old woman tried everything with him, but it was all no use. Years ago she used to get him to talk of things as they was, in hopes of bringin’ his mind back, but he was always worse after. She does all she can for him even now, but he’s mighty independent. The last five or six years he’s been taken with the idea of buildin’ that cursed house. He’ll stay there till he gets short of money, an’ then he’ll go out back, shearin’, stock-ridin’, drovin’, cookin’, fencin’—anything till he gets a few pounds. Then he’ll settle down and build away at that bloody house. He’s knocked about so much that he’s a regular old bushman. While he’s an old bushman he’s all right an’ amusin’ an’ good company;—but when he’s Brassington he’s mad—Don’t you ever let on to my old woman that I told you. I allers let my tongue run a bit when I get out of that hole we’re living in. We’ve kept the secret all these years, but what does it matter now?—I ask you.”
“It doesn’t matter much,” I said.
“Nothing matters much, it seems to me, nothing matters a damn. The Big Brassingtons come down years ago; the old people’s gone, and the young scattered God knows where or how. The Webbs (the girl’s people) are away up in new country, an’ the girls (they was mostly all girls) are married an’ settled down by this time. We kept the secret, an’ the Webbs kept the secret—even when the dirty yarns was goin’ round—so’s not to spoil the chances of the other girls. What about the chances of their husbands? Some on ’em might be in the same hell as Brassington for all I know. The Brassingtons kept the secret because I suppose they reckoned it didn’t matter much. Nothing matters much in this world—”
But I was thinking of another young couple who had married long ago, whose married life was twenty long years of shameful quarrels, of useless brutal recrimination—not because either was bad, but because their natures were too much alike; of the house that was built, of the family that was reared, of the sons and daughters who “went wrong,” of the father and mother separated after twenty years, of the mother dead of a broken heart, of the father (in a lunatic asylum), whose mania was not to build houses, but to obtain and secrete matches for the purpose of burning houses down.
“BARNEY, TAKE ME HOME AGAIN”
This is a sketch of one of the many ways in which a young married woman, who is naturally thick-skinned and selfish—as most women are—and who thinks she loves her husband, can spoil his life because he happens to be good-natured, generous, sensitive, weak or soft, whichever you like to call it.
Johnson went out to Australia a good many years ago with his young wife and two children, as assisted emigrants. He should have left his wife and children with her mother, in a street off City Road, N., and gone out by himself and got settled down comfortably and strengthened in the glorious climate and democratic atmosphere of Australia, and in the knowledge that he could worry along a while without his wife, before sending for her. That bit of knowledge would have done her good also, and it would have been better for both of them. But no man knows the future, and few can prescribe for their own wives. If we saw our married lives as others see them, half of us would get divorced. But Johnson was sentimental, he could not bear to part from his wife for a little while. Moreover, man is instinctively against leaving his wife behind; it may be either a natural or a cowardly instinct-but we won’t argue that. I don’t believe that Johnson was a coward in that direction; I believe that he trusted his wife implicitly, or rather that he never dreamed of such a thing—as is the way with most married men. Sentiment is selfishness, perhaps, but we won’t argue that, such arguments come to nothing.
I heard from a fellow-passenger of Johnson’s that he had “a hell of a voyage” because of his young wife’s ignorant selfishness and his own sensitiveness; he bribed stewards for better food and accommodation for his wife and children, paid the stewardess to help with the children, got neither rest, nor peace, nor thanks for himself, and landed in Sydney a nervous wreck, with five pounds out of the ten he started with.
Johnson was a carpenter. He got work from a firm of contractors in Sydney, who, after giving him a fortnight’s trial, sent him up-country to work on the railway station buildings, at the little pastoral mining and farming town of Solong. The railway having come to Solong, things were busy in the building line, and Johnson settled there.
Johnson was thin when he came to Solong; he had landed a living skeleton, he said, but he filled out later on. The democratic atmosphere soothed his mind and he soon loved the place for its unconventional hospitality. He worked hard and seemed to have plenty of energy—he said he got it in Australia. He said that another year of the struggle in London would have driven him mad. He fished in the river on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and, perhaps for the first month or so, he thought that he had found peace. Johnson’s wife was a rather stout, unsympathetic-looking young woman, with the knit of obstinacy in her forehead; she had that stamp of “hardness” on her face which is the rule amongst English and the exception amongst Australian women. We of Solong thought her hard, selfish and narrow-minded, and paltry; later on we thought she was a “bit touched;” but local people often think that of strangers.
By her voice and her habit of whining she should have been a thin, sharp-faced, untidy, draggled-tailed woman in a back street in London, or a worn-out selector’s wife in the bush. She whined about the climate. “It will kill the children! It will kill the children! We’ll never rear them here!” She whined about the “wretched hole in the bush” that her husband had brought her to; and to the women whom she condescended to visit—because a woman must have a woman to talk to—she exaggerated the miseries of the voyage until the thing became a sing-song from repetition. Later on she settled down to endless accounts of her home in London, of her mother and sisters, of the way they lived. “And I’ll never see it any more. I’ll never see them any more.”
The Solong climate was reckoned the best in Australia; the “wretched hole” was a pretty little town on the banks of a clear, willow-bordered river, with vineyards on the slopes, and surrounded by a circle of blue hills and peaks. We knew nothing of London, so she had her own way there.
“She’ll feel a bit lonely at first, but she’ll soon get used to Australia,” said Johnson. He seemed to me to go out of his way to excuse his wife.
Johnson had had a few contracts in England at one time; they had been in “better circumstances”—that was the time she looked back to in England; the last two years of bitter, black struggle at “home” seemed a blank in her mind—but that’s how women jump over facts when they have a selfish fad.
Johnson rented a cottage and garden on the bank of the sunny river. He said he took the place because there was ivy growing on the cottage, and it might cheer his wife; but he had lost sight of the fact that, while he had been born in an English village, his wife had been born and bred in London, and had probably never noticed ivy. She said it was worse than living in a slum.
Johnson was clever at his trade, and at many other things, but his wife didn’t seem aware of it. He was well liked, he grew to be popular, but she didn’t seem proud of the fact; she never seemed interested in him or his prospects. She only wanted him to take her home again. We mustn’t forget that while he had a rush of work to occupy his mind she had not.
But Johnson grew stouter and prospered in spite of his wife—for a year or so. New schools were being built in the district and the town was practically re-built. Johnson took contracts for brickwork, plumbing and house-painting, as well as carpentering, and had at one time as many as ten men in his employ. He was making money.
I was working at my trade then, house-painting, and worked for Johnson. I lodged at his cottage for a while, but soon got tired of hearing about London, and Mrs Johnson’s mother and sisters, and the house they lived in, and the street it was in, and the parks where they used to take their babies, and the shopping on Saturday afternoon. That woman was terrible. She was at Johnson all the time about taking her home. “We’ll surely be able to go home this year, Will.” “You promised to take me home by the end of the year.” “Mother says in her last letter, that Jack says there’s more building going on about London than ever.” “You’ll do just as well in London as you’ll do here.” “What chance have the children got in a hole like this?” And the rest of it—every night. When he took a new contract, it would be, “What did you want to take that new contract for, Will, when we’re going home? You know you promised me you wouldn’t take any more contracts.” First he’d try to cheer her, then he’d argue; but she’d only sit with the knit in her forehead deep, looking as obstinate as a mule. Then she’d sit down to a little harmonium he’d bought her and play and sing “Barney, take me Home again,” and “The Old Folks at Home,” and “Swannie Ribber,” till I felt like hanging myself—and I wasn’t an exile. Sometimes Johnson would flare up and there’d be a row and he’d go to the pub. Gentle persuasion, argument, or swearing, it was all the same with her.
Bosses and men were different towards each other in Solong to what they are in London; besides, when I wasn’t Johnson’s sub-contractor I was his foreman—so we often had a few drinks together; and one night over a beer (and after a breeze at home, I think) he said to me:
“I can’t make it out, Harry; there was nothing but struggle and worry and misery for us in England, and London was smothering me, my chest was bad and the wife was always in ill-health; but I suppose I’ll have to take her home in the end or else she’ll go melancholy mad!” And he drew a breath that was more like a gasp than a sigh.
“Why not send her home for a trip, or a year or so, boss?” I asked. “As likely as not she’ll be just as eager to get back; and that will be the end of it.”
“I couldn’t do that, Harry,” said Johnson. “I couldn’t stay here and work alone. It would be like beginning life again; I’ve started twice and couldn’t start the third time. You’ll understand when you’re married, Harry.”
Well, in the end, she wore Johnson out—or wore into him rather. He drank more, and once or twice I saw him drinking alone. Sometimes he’d “round on us” at work for nothing at all, and at other times he’d take no interest in the jobs—he’d let the work go on anyhow. Some thought that Johnson was getting too big for his boots, that’s how men are misjudged. He grew moody and melancholy and thin again. Johnson was homesick himself. No doubt it was the misery of his domestic life in Australia that made him so.
Towards the end of the third or fourth year Johnson threw up a couple of contracts he had on hand, sacrificed a piece of land which he had bought and on which he had built a cottage in the short time he had been in Solong, and, one lovely day in June, when the skies were their fairest, the hills their bluest, the river its widest and clearest, and the grass was waving waist high after rain—one blue and green and golden day the Johnsons left Solong, with the trunks they had brought out with them, for Sydney, en route for smoky London.
Mrs Johnson was a woman transformed—she was happy and looked it. The last few weeks she had seemed in every way the opposite of the woman we had known: cheerful, kind to neighbours in sickness and trouble, even generous; she made many small presents in the way of mantelshelf ornaments, pictures, and house-linen. But then it was Johnson who had to pay for that in the end.
He looked worn and worried at the railway station—more like himself as he was when he first came to Solong—and as the train moved off I thought he looked—well, frightened.
That must have been nearly twenty years ago.
London last winter. It was one of those days when London’s lurid sun shows up for a little while like a smoky danger signal. The snow had melted from the house-tops and the streets were as London streets are after the first fall of snow of the season. But I could stand the flat no longer, I had to go out and walk. I was sun-sick—I was heart-sick for the sun, for the sunny South—for grassy plains, blue mountains, sweeps of mountain bush and sunny ocean beaches. I walked hard; I walked till I was mud-splashed to the shoulders; I walked through the squalid, maddening sameness of miles of dingy, grimy-walled blocks and rows of four-storied houses till I felt smothered—jailed, hopelessly. “Best get home and in, and draw the blinds on it,” I said, “or my brain will turn.”
I was about to ask a policeman where I was when I saw, by the name on a corner of the buildings, that I was in City Road, North. All the willow-fringed rivers and the sunny hills of Solong flashed before me at the sight of the name of that street. I had not been able to recall the name of the street off City Road in which the Johnsons lived, though I had heard it often enough in the old days from the tongue of Mrs Johnson.
I felt it would be a relief to see anyone who had been in Australia. “Now,” I thought, “if I walk along City Road and see the name of that street I’ll remember it”—and I did. It was a blind street, like the long, narrow yard of a jail, walled by dark houses, all alike. The next door but one to that at which I knocked to inquire was where the Johnsons lived; they lived in a four-storied house, or rather a narrow section of a four-storied terrace. I found later on that they paid the land-lord, or nearly paid him, by letting lodgings. They lived in one room with the use of the parlour and the kitchen when the lodgers weren’t using them, and the son shared a room with a lodger. The back windows looked out on the dead wall of a poorhouse of some kind, the front on rows of similar windows opposite—rows of the same sort of windows that run for miles and miles in London. In one a man sat smoking in his shirtsleeves, from another a slavey leaned out watching a fourwheeler that had stopped next door, in a third a woman sat sewing, and in a fourth a woman was ironing, with a glimpse of a bedstead behind her. And all outside was gloom and soot and slush.
I would never have recognized the Johnsons. I have visited them several times since and their faces are familiar to me now, but I don’t know whether any traces of the old likenesses worked up in my memory. I found Johnson an old man—old and grey before his time. He had a grizzly stubble round his chin and cheeks towards the end of the week, because he could only afford a shave on Saturday afternoon. He was working at some branch of his trade “in the shop” I understood, but he said he felt the work come heavier on him every winter. “I’ve felt very poorly this last winter or two,” he said, “very poorly indeed.” He was very sad and gentle.
Mrs Johnson was old and thin-looking, but seemed cheerful and energetic. Some chest trouble kept her within doors most of the winter.
“I don’t mind so long as I can manage,” she said, “but Johnson gets so depressed.”
They seemed very kind towards each other; they spoke little of Australia, and then only as an incident in their lives which was not of any importance—had long been past and done with. It was all “before we went to Australia” or “after we came back from Australia,” with Mrs Johnson.
The son, whom I remembered as a bright, robust little fellow, was now a tall, white-faced, clean-shaven young man, a clerk on thirty shillings a week. He wore, on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, a tall hat and a frock coat and overcoat made cheaply in the latest fashion, so he couldn’t afford to help the old folk much.
“David is very extravagant,” said the old man, gently. “He won’t wear anything when once the gloss is off it. But,” with a sad smile, “I get the left-off overcoats.”
He took me across to see his daughter. She had married a tradesman and they were having a hard struggle in three rooms in a workman’s dwelling. She was twenty-five, thin, yellow, and looking ten years older.
There were other children who had died. “I think we might have done better for the children in Australia,” said the old man to me, sadly, when we got outside, “but we did our best.”
We went into a hotel and had a drink. Johnson had treated last time—twenty years before. We call treating “shouting” in Australia. Presently Johnson let fall a word or two of Australian slang, and brightened up wonderfully; we got back out into Australia at once and stayed there an hour or so. Being an old man, Johnson’s memory for the long ago was better than mine, and I picked up links; and, in return, I told him what Solong was like now, and how some men he knew, who were going up, had gone down, and others, who were going to the dogs in his time, had gone up—and we philosophized. About one he’d say, “Ah, well! who’d have thought it! I never thought that boy would come to any good;” about another, “Ah, well! and he might have been an independent man.” How familiar that expression sounded!—I think it is used more often in Australia than in any other country: “He might have been an independent man.”
When I left Johnson I felt less lonely in London, and rather humbled in spirit. He seemed so resigned—I had never seen such gentle sadness in a man’s eyes, nor heard it in a man’s voice. I could get back to Australia somehow and start life again, but Johnson’s day had been dead for many years. “Besides, assisted emigration’s done away with now,” he said, with his sad, sad smile.
I saw the Johnsons again later on. “Things have been going very sadly with us, very sadly indeed,” said the old man, when we’d settled down. He had broken down at the beginning of the winter, he had dragged himself out of bed and to work and back again until he could do so no longer; he had been laid up most of the winter. Mrs Johnson had not been outside the door for months.
“It comes very hard on us,” she said, “and I’m so poorly, and David out of work, too. I wouldn’t mind if I could get about. But,” she went on in her energetic manner, “we’ve had the house full all the winter; we’ve had very good luck with the lodgers, all respectable people, and one of them answers the door and that keeps me away from the draught—so it might be worse, mightn’t it? But Johnson doesn’t seem to mend at all, and he gets so terribly depressed. But the warm weather coming on, etc.”
They and the Lord only knew how they managed to live, for they are honest people and the lodgers scarcely pay the rent of the house. There was only David between them and the poorhouse, as far as I could see.
Johnson came out with me a piece and we had a drink or two together—his was gin hot. He talked a good deal about Australia, but sadly and regretfully on this occasion.
“We could have done well in Australia,” he said, “very well indeed. I might have been independent and the children well started in life. But we did things for the best. Mrs Johnson didn’t like Australia, you know. It was a pity we didn’t stay there, a great pity. We would have done far better than in England. I’d go out again now if I had the money, but I’m getting too old.”
“Would Mrs Johnson go out?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. But I’m afraid she wouldn’t stand the voyage.... Things have been very sad with us ever since we came back to England, very sad indeed.” And after a while he suddenly caught his breath.
“It takes me that way sometimes,” he said. “I catch my breath just as if I was going to lose it.”
A DROVING YARN
Andy Maculloch had heard that old Bill Barker, the well-known overland drover, had died over on the Westralian side, and Dave Regan told a yarn about Bill.
“Bill Barker,” said Dave, talking round his pipe stem, “was the quintessence of a drover—”
“The whatter, Dave?” came the voice of Jim Bentley, in startled tones, from the gloom on the far end of the veranda.
“The quintessence,” said Dave, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “You shut up, Jim. As I said, Bill Barker was the quintessence of a drover. He’d been at the game ever since he was a nipper. He run away from home when he was fourteen and went up into Queensland. He’s been all over Queensland and New South Wales and most of South Australia, and a good deal of the Western, too: over the great stock routes from one end to the other, Lord knows how many times. No man could keep up with him riding out, and no one could bring a mob of cattle or a flock of sheep through like him. He knew every trick of the game; if there was grass to be had Bill’d get it, no matter whose run it was on. One of his games in a dry season was to let his mob get boxed with the station stock on a run where there was grass, and before Bill’s men and the station-hands could cut ’em out, the travelling stock would have a good bellyful to carry them on the track. Billy was the daddy of the drovers. Some said that he could ride in his sleep, and that he had one old horse that could jog along in his sleep too, and that—travelling out from home to take charge of a mob of bullocks or a flock of sheep—Bill and his horse would often wake up at daylight and blink round to see where they were and how far they’d got. Then Bill would make a fire and boil his quart-pot, and roast a bit of mutton, while his horse had a mouthful of grass and a spell.
“You remember Bill, Andy? Big dark man, and a joker of the loud sort. Never slept with a blanket over him—always folded under him on the sand or grass. Seldom wore a coat on the route—though he always carried one with him, in case he came across a bush ball or a funeral. Moleskins, flannel waistcoat, cabbage-tree hat and ’lastic-side boots. When it was roasting hot on the plains and the men swore at the heat, Jim would yell, ‘Call this hot? Why, you blanks, I’m freezin’! Where’s me overcoat?’ When it was raining and hailing and freezing on Bell’s Line in the Blue Mountains in winter, and someone shivered and asked, ‘Is it cold enough for yer now, Bill?’ ‘Cold!’ Bill would bellow, ‘I’m sweatin’!’
“I remember it well. I was little more than a youngster then—Bill Barker came past our place with about a thousand fat sheep for the Homebush sale-yards at Sydney, and he gave me a job to help him down with them on Bell’s Line over the mountains, and mighty proud I was to go with him, I can tell you. One night we camped on the Cudgegong River. The country was dry and pretty close cropped and we’d been “sweating” the paddocks all along there for our horses. You see, where there weren’t sliprails handy we’d just take the tomahawk and nick the top of a straight-grained fence-post, just above the mortise, knock out the wood there, lift the top rail out and down, and jump the horses in over the lower one—it was all two-rail fences around there with sheep wires under the lower rail. And about daylight we’d have the horses out, lift back the rail, and fit in the chock that we’d knocked out. Simple as striking matches, wasn’t it?
“Well, the horses were getting a good bellyful in the police horse paddock at night, and Bill took the first watch with the sheep. It was very cold and frosty on the flat and he thought the sheep might make back for the ridges, it’s always warmer up in the ridges in winter out of the frost. Bill roused me out about midnight. ‘There’s the sheep,’ he says, pointing to a white blur. ‘They’ve settled down. I think they’ll be quiet till daylight. Don’t go round them; there’s no occasion to go near ’em. You can stop by the fire and keep an eye on ’em.’
“The night seemed very long. I watched and smoked and toasted my shins, and warmed the billy now and then, and thought up pretty much the same sort of old things that fellers on night watch think over all over the world. Bill lay on his blanket, with his back to the fire and his arm under his head—freezing on one side and roasting on the other. He never moved. I itched once or twice to turn him over and bake the front of him—I reckoned he was about done behind.
“At last daylight showed. I took the billy and started down to the river to get some water to make coffee; but half-way down, near the sheep camp, I stopped and stared, I was never so surprised in my life. The white blur of sheep had developed into a couple of acres of long dead silver grass!
“I woke Bill, and he swore as I never heard a man swear before—nor since. He swore at the sheep, and the grass, and at me; but it would have wasted time, and besides I was too sleepy and tired to fight. But we found those sheep scattered over a scrubby ridge about seven miles back, so they must have slipped away back of the grass and started early in Bill’s watch, and Bill must have watched that blessed grass for the first half of the night and then set me to watch it. He couldn’t get away from that.
“I wondered what the chaps would say if it got round that Bill Barker, the boss overland drover, had lost a thousand sheep in clear country with fences all round; and I suppose he thought that way too, for he kept me with him right down to Homebush, and when he paid me off he threw in an extra quid, and he said:
“‘Now, listen here, Dave! If I ever hear a word from anyone about watching that gory grass, I’ll find you, Dave, and murder you, if you’re in wide Australia. I’ll screw your neck, so look out.’
“But he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”
There was silence for some time after Dave had finished. The chaps made no comment on the yarn, either one way or the other, but sat smoking thoughtfully, and in a vague atmosphere as of sadness—as if they’d just heard of their mother’s death and had not been listening to an allegedly humorous yarn.
Then the voice of old Peter, the station-hand, was heard to growl from the darkness at the end of the hut, where he sat on a three-bushel bag on the ground with his back to the slabs.
“What’s old Peter growlin’ about?” someone asked.
“He wants to know where Dave got that word,” someone else replied.
“What word?”
“Quint-essents.”
There was a chuckle.
“He got it out back, Peter,” said Mitchell, the shearer. “He got it from a new chum.”
“How much did yer give for it, Dave?” growled Peter.
“Five shillings, Peter,” said Dave, round his pipe stem. “And stick of tobacco thrown in.”
Peter seemed satisfied, for he was heard no more that evening.