“There I am as I was,” I said; “how do you like me?”
“Not a little bit, Griff,” he replied in the terse speech of his fortuitously native land. “I guess if you were to come like that among the friends you have now you’d look mighty like a dirty deuce in a new deck of cards.”
The next morning I went over to Williamstown to have a look at the scene of my old escapade, the only one, by the way, which ever brought me into unpleasant relations with the police, for in those days breaking your indentures was a matter of imprisonment. Happily they did not catch me. I found the old Railway Hotel, known, aforetime to officers and apprentices as the Hen and Chickens, since it was kept by a dear old Scotchwoman assisted by four charming daughters with one or all of whom every apprentice in port was supposed to be in love. It was through the kindly offices of one of them that I had saved my kit and dodged the police.
I sat in the little parlour on the same sofa I had sat on that memorable night; opposite was the same old piano on which one or other of our charmers used to accompany our shouting sea-songs, and there beside it was the little cupboard in the wall in which my superfluous wardrobe had been stowed away. Not a thing was altered, I believe the very table-cloth was the same, and the patch of vacant ground opposite, across which I had bolted at the penultimate moment to catch the last train to Melbourne, was still unbuilt on; and there was I, still a wanderer, though of a different sort, wanting only the old faces and the old voices to be able to persuade myself that the twenty changing years had begun with the last night’s dream and ended with the morning’s awaking.
II
DEMOS AND DEAR MONEY
No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second. Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes and the gradual fading of the “golden dreams of trustful twenty,”—or eighteen, to be more exact.
In those days I was, almost of necessity, a practical democrat living in a democracy which neither had the time nor the inclination to bother about politics; but now many experiences in many lands had taught me that democracy of the political sort is more pleasant to read about than to rub shoulders with!
America has an aristocracy of blood, brains, and money which looks with open contempt upon politics, and has no more connection with politicians than is involved in the payment of bribes by its agents. Australia has no such aristocracy, and everybody apparently goes into politics. In America democracy is a political fiction, and the person whom political advocates and managers call the working man is kept in his place by methods more or less moral but still effective. The real rulers of the United States believe, with Bismarck, that popular government of a country resembles control of a household by the nursery.