The Sorcerer's Stone

by Beatrice Grimshaw

There was a table at the far end of the room; on the table was a gramophone, muffled up in black and surrounded with white flowers from the bush.

All the miners were looking at the instrument, and listening to it as they slowly and seriously drank their whisky and their beer. And the gramophone was bellowing out the song that we had heard, not in the voice of a trained singer, such as one associates with mechanical records, but in the raucous, howling tones of a man who could sing very little and had handicapped that little ability by getting drunk before he began to sing.

It was a dead still night, here in the clearing on the river flat, with the trees shutting off every breath of wind all round us, and the Kilori, inky-black and quiet, running smooth as a canal behind the store. The lantern in the rafters did not waver, the white flowers thrown about the gramophone lay still as flowers about the body of some one dead. You could hear the men suck in their drinks and swallow, in the pauses of the song, and the grinding of the wornout needle sounded sharply.

Many of the men I knew, though some were strangers, and I was anxious to greet my mates—doubly so, after all the troubles that the Marquis and I had been through. So I stepped right in, walked up to Hubbard, who had shared a claim with me on the Yodda years before, and held out my hand, saying something in the way of a greeting.

It was received with an instantaneous and universal “Hist!” Hubbard himself said, “Wait—we must finish,” and pulled me down on the bench beside him. The Marquis, his innate courtesy rising above his natural impatience and weariness, also took a seat. The song went on to its dreary end.

Then the storekeeper, an elderly man with a wooden face, who looked as if he had seen so many surprising things that nothing on earth could by any possibility surprise him again, took the black cloth off the gramophone, removed the flowers and lifted the instrument to put it away on a shelf.

“Hold on!” said one of the miners, stretching out his glass of beer. “We’ll give the poor beggar a last drink.” He poured his beer into the gramophone, the others looking on quite seriously.

“Are you all mad?” I inquired. “And can’t you spare half a second to give a drink to men who haven’t had any for three weeks, when you’ve done feeding a gramophone?”

“Where have you been?” asked the storekeeper. I told him briefly.

We had no cause to complain after that; old Burchell, the storekeeper, Hubbard, and all the men I knew bestirred themselves to find us food, drink, tobacco, clothing, beds and to make us warmly welcome to the Kilori. Our adventures didn’t astonish any one very much; most of the men had had experiences quite as startling in their time. Yarns and reminiscences, mostly colored with gore, ran like a flood in the little slab-built bar of the storekeeper’s house, and I saw the Marquis’ eyes grow rounder and rounder as he listened.