One night the crisis arrived. I was suddenly awakened by a terrible crash at my front door, and the old “Barney Dear” was being sung with ferocious energy. I had overslept; he was outside terribly drunk, imploring to be let in. I was obdurate; and would not stir. At last his voice as he shouted, “Dear old Middy, let me in, I’ve got a roasted fowl here for you,” woke my curiosity, so anguish-stricken and appealing was his voice that I jumped up at once and looked out of the window. A large fire was blazing in my yard, and over it, spluttering and fizzling on an extemporised spit, was a fowl cooking! Unplucked, entrails and all, there it steamed, just as he had stolen it off the roost of my neighbour’s fowl-house, a hundred yards off.
As I opened the door I gazed sternly at him. He seemed surprised that I was not as pleased as he was with himself. I positively refused to eat of the fowl, and at this he got into a fearful rage, and kicked it as it hung on the spit. Well, I even forgave him for that night’s work. He’s dead now, and I always feel a bit sad when anyone sings, “Barney, take me Home again.” I remember years after, when in England, I sat by the fire telling my mother and sisters of old Naylor, and how relieved they seemed when I told them I had let the old man in, when he had sung, “Barney, take me Home again.”
It is strange how secretly in our hearts we have a world of sympathy for the villain, especially old ones, and had Naylor been a good pious old man he would have never been heard of.
A very strange thing happened some years after, when I was mate on a Clipper boat. A Welsh sailor by the name of Naylor, a member of my crew, showed a strong resemblance to the old Naylor of my Sydney experience, so much so that, one night while I was on the poop, I called him up and said, “Are you any relation to a Lloyd Naylor, an old man whom I had the pleasure of knowing in Australia?”
“That must have been my father,” he said, and he was delighted to know that I had known his father. I did not tell him of my experiences with his father, but said, “Naylor, your father was a fine man, a great friend of mine,” and sneaking the fellow into my cabin, I opened a bottle of whisky, poured him out a tumbler full to the brim, and by the way he smacked his lips I perceived that he was a real chip of the old block.
Native Pottery
XVIII
Back in Apia—Robert Louis Stevenson—Chief Mate Herberts lost Overboard—Savage Island—Thoughts of the Workman’s Train to London and back to the Suburbs