I recall to mind how I once met a derelict old sundowner. I was quite a lad then, tramping alone across the Australian bush on the borders of Queensland. He hove into sight as a real godsend to me, and looked an awe-inspiring being. His ancient wardrobe, his enormous bushy grey beard, made him appear like a wonderful, emblematical ship’s figurehead from some wreck on the coast with all the crew lost; an apostolic figurehead, that had in some mysterious way become endowed with life and was curiously roaming inland. Approaching IT with considerable trepidation, I played a tender, conciliatory strain on my violin. Having the desired effect, we chummed together, and, notwithstanding his peculiarities, he became a boon and a blessing to me. His enormous grey beard, clotted with spittle and tobacco juice of other years, attracted all the irritating bush flies, and gyrating bunches of hungry, fierce mosquitoes. And as I kept to leeward of him, I travelled on quite untormented by the buzz of his mighty beard. Indeed I felt like some Pied Piper of Hamelin as I fiddled away by his side, happy as one could well be, all the flies dancing, like the singing spheres, to the leeward of that beard, as we tramped southward bound for Bummer’s Creek!
I recall that strange old sundowner because I cannot help feeling that his old beard, hoarding all the flies, bringing me intense relief beneath the scorching, tropical suns, resembled the vast cities of the world, which are like dirty, old, tangled, smelling beards that collect hungry, aspiring humanity, whilst the happy, musical vagabond, tramps along untormented by flies or men, out in the wide spaces of the world, breathing the transcendent beauty of God’s blue heaven. And now I could half imagine that that old man was like unto God Himself as he tramped across the spaces, his monstrous beard followed by the singing spheres—the fireflies by night—till, with his swag on his back, he disappears for ever from my sight, passing away into the silence of the ragged gum-trees on the sky-line.
So one may perceive that I have had more advantages than most men in this world where men stare fiercely, or kindly, at each other as they express their own opinions, and then depart!
Thus do I—by reviewing the shadowy pageantry of the sympathetic period of my career—apologise to myself for my book.
Gone the mediæval, heroic age of my existence, when chivalry’s wondrous light glistened in the deep eyes and on the tangled, kingly beards of strange, apostolic old men, and on the bronzed faces of hairy-chested sailormen. But the ineffable, eternal glory of romantic beauty still shines in the sad eyes of mysterious, homeless women and girls, men and yearning boys, who are, to me, the lost, wandering children of some far-off Israel of the great, glorious Bible of Youth—the shrivelled, fingered pages of the unforgotten light of other days—the light that warms the world.
A. S. M.
I cast my bread on the waters
In dreams of feverish haste,
But it came back after many days