Grif: A Story of Australian Life

by B. L. Farjeon

[CHAPTER XIII.]

OLD FLICK.

Old Flick's dwelling-place was in a narrow thoroughfare--so narrow, that Old Flick might have shaken hands with his neighbour on the opposite side of the way without moving from his own side of the pavement. Not that he ever tried the experiment; Old Flick was not given to the shaking of hands and was as secret and close as the grave. The thoroughfare was a misnomer; for if you walked about twenty yards beyond Old Flick's dwelling-place, you came, to your great discomfiture, plump upon the dead wall of a building which checked all further progress. Many deluded pedestrians, who had strolled into the place, curious to know whither it led, had been compelled to retire in dudgeon. A clever speculator had purchased the land round about Old Flick's dwelling, and had mapped it out and built upon it with so much ingenuity, that when he came to Old Flick's Thoroughfare, which was the last built upon, he, to his exceeding surprise, found himself blocked in; and rushing to his plans, discovered that he had given himself a few feet of land more upon paper than he actually possessed upon earth. But he derived consolation from the thought that he had accomplished his object, which was, to build as many tenements as he could crowd upon his freehold, and to allow as little walking and breathing space as possible to his tenantry. This result being successfully attained, he took a first-class passage home, and retired to Bermondsey, where he lives to the present day upon the results of his ingenuity, and talks continually, in grandiloquent strains, of his Estates in Victoria.

Old Flick's Thoroughfare, as it had grown to be called, boasted of about two feet of pavement and six feet of road, and contained sixteen tenements--eight on each side. In the owner's plan of the estate, which decorated the walls of his parlour in Bermondsey, it was represented as a magnificent street, lined on each side with handsome edifices, four storeys high, and crowded with carriages and pedestrians of the most fashionable character; whereas, in truth, the tenements were each composed of but one storey, and there was scarcely room in the road to wheel a barrow. Over the portico of Old Flick's dwelling was the inscription:--

OLD FLICK'S
ALL-SORTS STORE.
WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR EXPORTATION.

For be it here remarked, it is the fashion of all small traders in the colonies to sell everything down to oranges and gingerbread, "wholesale, retail, and for exportation." It is an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the class. In the windows of Old Flick's All-sorts Store was heaped the most worthless collection of worthless articles that could possibly be compressed within so small a space. Blunt saws, dirty pannikins, broken crockery, worn-out dog collars, two-bladed penknives, empty ink bottles, rust-eaten picks and shovels, a few torn books, the broken works of two or three clocks and watches, with a multitude of other utterly incongruous things, were tumbled indiscriminately upon each other. In one pane there was an advertisement to the effect that "Doctor Flick prescribed for and cured every disorder incidental to the human frame, at the lowest possible rates;" and in another pane appeared the announcement that Old Flick was a land and estate agent, and collected rents and debts, and acted as the confidential adviser of all persons in trouble and difficulty, and that secrecy and despatch might be relied upon. To show that he was ready for consultation or active business, Old Flick, with his palsied frame and blear eyes, might be seen, half the day, standing in ragged slippers, at his door, on the watch for customers. He might not inaptly have been likened to an ugly spider on the look-out for flies.

The origin of Old Flick was wrapped in mystery. Nothing further was known of him than that he had sprung up suddenly in Canvas Town, in the early days of the gold-diggings, and that, when that motley delectability was swept away, he had migrated to the blind alley to which he gave his name, and which had just then been formed by the operations of the Bermondsey speculator. Canvas Town, when Old Flick first made his appearance there, was indeed a delectable locality. Take a few acres of level ground, where in the winter people sank over their ankles in thick mud, and where in the summer they were blinded with the fine dust which an Australian hot wind drove mercilessly in their faces; divide the ground into the narrowest and most irregular of streets and lanes; erect (if it may be so called) upon it a few hundreds of canvas tents, of all sizes and shapes, which in a civilised city would not be thought fit for pigs or poultry; smoke-dry the entire space until the canvas of the tents becomes black and rotten, and hangs in shreds from weak battens and crazy poles; let the wretched habitations be tenanted by gaol-refuse, by unscrupulous traders, by dismayed and distressed immigrants who have journeyed over stormy seas in search of gold, by brute faces and kind faces, by flaunting women and ladies of tender rearing; let the spaces be choked up with packing-cases, and immigrants' trunks, and crying children, and perplexed wanderers from distant lands; above all, let no vice be hidden, let no shame be shame-faced: and a reasonably correct picture of Canvas Town, Melbourne, in the early days of the gold-diggings, will be portrayed. But even in Canvas Town, where probably was assembled the most incongruous mass of human beings ever congregated together; where thief and gentleman slept with but the division of a strip of calico between them, and where ladies cooked their family meals, and washed their family clothes, in the open thoroughfares--even there, Old Flick was a mystery. He was a tall, thin, stooping man, with an unwholesome-looking face, always stubbled and dirty. He was a dealer in everything, whether honestly come by or not, and professed himself a doctor; and as a proof of his skill he was in the habit of exhibiting a musty, yellow, old cash-book, in which were inscribed more than fifty testimonials from grateful patients who had been cured of lumbago, tooth-ache, and other plagues which human flesh is heir to. He was sixty years of age, or thereabouts, and he was so shaky that he could scarcely hold a glass to his lips without spilling half its contents. He said it was ague; others said it was rum. At the time of his introduction to the reader, he was standing at his door, as usual, in his ragged slippers, with his blear eyes looking frequently over his shoulder to the room at the back of his store. While thus engaged, he was accosted by Milly, whose manner and appearance betokened that she had been drinking.

"Hallo! Old Flick! Who is inside?"

"No one, Milly," he answered.

"What a liar you are, Flick!" said Milly. "Jim's inside, and you know it."