"I was tellin' you about my old woman.—Look! There's a joey runnin' there along the track."
Jack looked, and saw a funny little animal half leaping, half running along.
"We call them baby 'roos, joeys, you understand, and they make the cutest little pets you ever did imagine."
They were still in sandy country, on a good road not far from the river, and Jack saw the little chap jump to cover. The tall gum trees with their brownish pale smooth stems and loose strips of bark stood tall and straight and still, scattered like a thin forest that spread unending, rising from a low, heath-like undergrowth. It seemed open, and yet weird, enclosing you in its vast emptiness. This bush, that he had heard so much of! The sun had climbed out of the mist, and was becoming gold and powerful in a limpid sky. The leaves of the gum trees hung like heavy narrow blades, inert and colourless, in a weight of silence. Save when they came to a more open place, and a flock of green parrots flew shrieking, "Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight!" At least that was what the driver said they cried.—The lower air was still somewhat chilly from the mist. A number of black-and-white handsome birds, that they call magpies, flew alongside in the bush, keeping pace for a time with the buggy. And once a wallaby ran alongside for a while on the path, a bigger 'roo than the joey, and very funny, leaping persistently alongside with his little hands dangling.
It was a new country after all. It was different. A small exultance grew inside the youth. After all, he had got away, into a country that men had not yet clutched into their grip. Where you could do as you liked, without being stifled by people. He still had a secret intention of doing as he liked, though what it was he would do when he could do as he liked, he did not know. Nothing very definite. And yet something stirred in his bowels as he saw the endless bush, and the noisy green parrots and the queer, tame kangaroos: and no man.
"It's dingy country down here," the coachman was saying. "Not good for much. No good for nothing except cemetery, though Mr. George says he believes in it. And there's nothing you can do with it, seeing as how many gents what come in the first place has gone away for ever, lock stock and barrel, leaving nothing but their 'claims' on the land itself, so nobody else can touch it." Here he shook the reins on the horses' backs. "But I hopes you settles, and makes good, and marries and has children, like me and my old woman, sir. She've put five daughters into the total, born in a shack, though their mother was born in Pontesbeach Hall——"
But Jack's mind drifted away from the driver. He was in that third state, not uncommon to youth, which seems to intervene between reality and dream. The bush, the coach, the wallabies, the coachdriver were not very real to him. Neither was his own self and his own past very real to him. There seemed to him to be another mute core to himself. Apart from the known Jack Grant, and apart from the world as he had known it. Even apart from this Australia which was so unknown to him.
As a matter of fact, he had not yet come-to in Australia. He had not yet extricated himself from England and the ship. Half of himself was left behind, and the other half was gone ahead. So there he sat, mute and stupid.
He only knew he wanted something, and he resented something. He resented having been so much found fault with. They had hated him because he preferred to make friends among "good-for-nothings." But as he saw it, "good-for-nothings" were the only ones that had any daring. Not altogether tamed. He loathed the thought of harness. He hated tameness, hated it, hated it. The thought of it made his innocent face take on a really devilish look. And because of his hatred of harness, he hated answering the questions that people put to him. Neither did he ask many, for his own part. But now one popped out.
"There are policemen here, are there?"