Grif: A Story of Australian Life

by B. L. Farjeon

As a counteractive, Old Flick applied himself industriously to his rum-and-water, which he swallowed with a running accompaniment of oaths and curses. Now, as too much rum-and-water will make a man drunk, and as Old Flick had drunk a great deal too much rum-and-water, and still continued drinking it, he soon got very drunk indeed--so drunk, that he began to cry, and to beat his breast, and to tear his hair, and to shake so, that the table trembled when he leant upon it.

"To scorch one to a cinder," he mumbled, pursuing his previous remark. "Supposing it should come, and scorch me to a cinder!"

He held up his hands, as if to ward off a blow, and as he looked about him, his fevered fancy conjured a thousand crawling things upon the ceiling and the walls. With sight-terror fixed he gazed at them as they crept nearer and nearer to him. As fast as he brushed them away, they came again. In desperation he drank more rum, and strove to rid himself of the terrible fancies.

"Go away--go away," he cried, menacing them with impotent fingers; "I know what it is. I've been drinking too much. I must leave it off, or I shall have the deliriums." To strengthen his good resolution he applied himself again to the bottle. "I'm better now. What a cat that Milly is! Beast--beast--beast! Why don't she die? What good is she in the world? She wished to frighten me by asking me if I had ever tried to take poison. What did she mean by 'the devils in the glass?' Ugh! I can see them glaring at me!"--and Old Flick staggered to his feet in dire terror, and then dropped down in a drunken swoon.

It was late in the afternoon now, and people began to breathe more freely. A slight but refreshing breeze set in from the sea, and the cooler air, floating through the streets, brought a sweet relief to exhausted nature. To no person did the grateful change bring more satisfaction than to Grif, whose sufferings during the day had caused him to fret exceedingly. The whole of that day, as he stood blistering in the sun, he had been propounding questions to himself--questions to which he could find only one answer, dictated by hunger and misery. Why was he so unfortunate? All other boys were not so. He was trying hard to be good, and something would not let him. He felt that his requirements were modest, that he did not ask for too much. The constant pressure of misery had caused him to look about him and compare his condition with that of other boys. There were plenty of them walking the streets--well-fed, well-dressed boys; not sons of gentlemen, but working boys--boys occupying the social sphere to which he aspired. What had he done that his lot should not be as comfortable as theirs appeared to be? He was sure he was trying hard enough to deserve it. "I've been bad, I know," he reflected, "but I can't make out as it was all my fault. I couldn't help it. There's father, he was bad, and in course I was bad too; I didn't know nothin' else. Then Ally come, and she made me good--leastways, she tried to. But what's the good of bein' good? I usen't to be 'arf so hungry when I was bad!" This was the argument which clenched the matter. When he was bad, his stomach was better supplied, as a rule, than now that he was good.

Not only was Grif's mind argumentative, but his nature was sensitive. How this came about was strange, for his father's nature was brutal enough; he did not remember his mother, and had never given her a thought. His sensitiveness was a positive misfortune; it intensified his sufferings just now. What with the awful heat, which made his heart faint and sick, the hunger which gnawed at his vitals, and the sorrow he felt at being parted for ever from Little Peter, his condition was an utterly miserable one. He could not battle against such influences; they were too powerful for him. He felt an irresistible conviction that he should never see Little Peter again. "I wonder if he ever thinks of me?" Grif mused; and in his then despondent mood he groaned at the thought that all remembrance of him was wiped out of Little Peter's mind. "No matter, it was all for his good. He's a precious sight better off where he is, I'll be bound. I suppose he's got good clothes and good boots, and plenty of grub. That's jolly for him, poor Little Peter! If he was here to-day, it'd pretty well settle him, I think." There was some small consolation in this reflection, and Grif tried to make the most of it.

From this it will be perceived how unfortunate Grif had been in his new vocation. Honesty and morality had not taken to him kindly. As a moral shoeblack, his career had been the very reverse of prosperous, notwithstanding that he had striven to deserve better. He had attended some meetings of the Moral Bootblacking Boys' Reformatory, and had heard a great deal about morality; and, albeit he would have been considerably perplexed if he had been asked to define the meaning of the word, it could not but be presumed that he had been much edified by the moral essays and exhortations to which he had listened. And yet his mental condition, when he came away from those meetings, was one of perplexity. He could not see the connection between morality and a bellyful of food. "It's all very well," he would mutter, "for them coves who's got lots to eat and drink to talk about morality; but what good does it do me?" Exhortations, moral lessons, pious sermons, would often be given by well-meaning men at the meetings of the Moral Bootblacking Boys' Reformatory. At one of these meetings, the speaker had fixed Grif with his eye during the whole of his discourse, which occupied nearly an hour. The burden of his exhortation was an oppressive beseeching to Grif to "look up." By day and by night, awake or asleep, standing still or walking, always through his life, Grif was entreated to "look up." Never mind how persistent misfortune might be in persecuting him, never mind what calamities might overtake him, everything would come right if he would continue to "look up." "But how can I do that," Grif asked of himself, "when I'm forced to be always lookin' down?" whereby he meant, literally, looking down at the boots of the passers-by to see if they wanted polishing. Which coarse perversion of the pious speaker's exhortation was another proof of the baseness of Grif's nature.

Many such sermons did Grif hear; they sounded well, all of them. But they shrank into very nothingness when he applied them to his own case. To him they were nothing; they did him no good. Grif wanted practical arguments. Theory was valueless to him. As for good advice he had enough of that, goodness knows. He received it by the bushel; it was literally heaped upon him. But he did not get an ounce of meat out of it for all its virtue. He was an especial object of attention to Mr. Zachariah Blemish. That great man and princely merchant had at various times condescended to be gracious to Grif by word of mouth. Mr. Blemish would inquire of Grif how he was getting along, and Grif did not have courage to answer that he was getting along badly, or rather that he was not getting along at all. It would have sounded like an impeachment of the conduct of the great man in providing him with the implements of his occupation. "That is right--that is right," Mr. Blemish would remark. "You are moral, are you not?" "Very moral, Sir," Grif would answer, humbly. "Very good; mind you keep moral," Mr. Blemish would exhort. And Grif invariably ducked his head and promised that he would keep very moral. But when the great merchant was gone, Grif would shrug his shoulders, and ponder and puzzle over the good advice given him without arriving at any satisfactory conclusion.

Occasionally he visited Alice, and argued matters with her. Alice truly was his good angel. Many and many a time had they two sat together, he listening to her gentle voice, she striving to impress upon him truths which would have seemed to him the bitterest of lies if he had judged them by the light of his hard experience. But Grif did not interpret her words by that light. If he did not understand, he believed; his nature did not rebel against her sweet words and gentle voice as it did against the sermons preached at the Moral Reformatory. What Alice said to him was good, was true, and he was satisfied. It was happiness to hear her, to sit near her, to look up into her face now and then: it was more than happiness, it was heaven. With such an influence upon him, Grif could not be otherwise than good. She kept him from crime. Bad promptings had no chance with him when he thought of her. Ill as she could afford it, poor girl, she fed him often, although every day her means grew less and less, and although Hunger, with its white eyes and despairing face, crept nearer and nearer at every turn of the hour-glass. All she could do was to wait for it, and shudder at its near approach. The first few weeks after her husband left her, she had heard regularly from him, and had received long letters filled with love, and tenderness, and hope. And she would read them again and again, and cry for joy over them, and press them to her lips, to her heart, and place them under her pillow at night. Many a happy dream did they bring her, and she would rise in the morning with a light heart, hopeful and smiling. But lately his letters had become shorter and shorter, and the intervals between them longer. And now three weeks had passed, and she had received no letter. Three or four times every day she went to the post-office, until her face became so familiar to the clerk that, directly he saw it looking almost beseechingly through the little window, he would shake his head without waiting for her to speak. How hurriedly she would throw on her bonnet and shawl, and hasten to the little window, and how sadly and slowly she would walk back to her poor lodgings, heartsore and disappointed! That little window! It might have been likened unto heaven's gate, or the gate of despair. Sometimes, when she reached it, panting, she lingered before she asked, as if fearful to have her hope destroyed. That would be mostly when there were no other applicants; but when there was a crowd round it, drawn thither by the arrival of an important mail, she would take her stand among them, and burn with impatience until her turn came. Then she would think it cruel that others had letters and she had none. Many of them had three, four, a dozen, and she not one! The pleased expressions upon the faces of women who opened their letters and read as they walked, made her feel as she ought not to have felt; and to drive away envious thoughts she would lower her veil, and soon could see nothing through her blinding tears. The last letter she had received from Richard was written in a very despondent mood, and that made her more anxious to hear from him. There are some men who cannot fight with the world--who cannot battle with misfortune. The first blow floors them, and they lie helpless, and make no effort to rise. There are others who, at every knock-down blow, jump up again, hurt but not killed, and who, to speak metaphorically, square up at misfortune with courage and vigour. Richard Handfield was one of the former, and because he did not find a rich patch of gold at the bottom of the first hole he sank, he whimpered at Fate, and did not care to try again. All that Alice could glean from his last letter was, that misfortune pursued him and mocked at his efforts. That was the way he expressed it; he chose to believe that the world had a special spite against him, and that he, of all the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who are fighting life's battles, was singled out for the victim. The fault, which was in himself, he laid upon fate; he was partial to the common platitude, "fate was against him." He was naturally indolent, and if he had known how to work he would scarcely have cared to do so. There are thousands of men of this type in the world.

Alice often fed Grif. But Grif was shrewd enough to perceive that Alice was daily more unable to spare him the food she pressed upon and forced him to eat. One evening, when he was in the midst of eating a thick slice of bread and butter which Alice had given him, he stopped suddenly, and, looking at her, was overcome with remorse at the thought that he was eating her meal. He could not eat any more; he placed the bread upon the table, and said, with his eyes filled with tears, that he was satisfied. From that day, he never tasted food in her room. Often when he was hungry, often, when he had stood about all the day patiently, without earning sixpence, he refrained from going to her, and crept, supperless, to sleep. At other times he waited until he knew Alice had finished her poor meal, and then, in answer to her inquiry as to whether he had had his tea, would say that he had had a jolly good tuck-out, and would make his mouth water by particularising what he had eaten.