“So am I. I told the boss this morning this would be my last week; I’m off for Sydney. Windsor may be good enough for old men to die in, but for a young man who wants to live Sydney’s the place.”
“Then I’ll go with you, I’m blest if I don’t. I’ll tell the old man to-night. Young George is big enough now to do my work, and if the old man does not like it he can just do the other thing.”
So the bargain was concluded, and the two young men, each turned to discontent by a pretty face, decided to explore the unknown, and plunge in the maelstrom of Sydney life.
CHAPTER IX
HUEY AND ALEC
The two lads had been to Sydney before as holiday visitors, but to actually live there, to depend for their future on what the city might offer, was a new, and at first, delightful experience. Huey did not own to himself that he was following in Bertha’s footsteps. He satisfied his mind that he was only acting from the wise desire to better his prospects and enlarge his opportunities. As the time came that saw them at last alighting on Redfern platform, his ambition had soared into wild dreams of what the metropolis might hold out. Why should he not be sub-editor of one of the important dailies? Or editor, perhaps, of some minor paper? What the Professor had said about his capabilities was, no doubt, exaggerated; but he felt there was a substratum of truth. Once let him get his foot on the ladder, as high of course as possible to start with, and he felt all the power to climb to the top. Parliament and the Ministerial bench all shone before him in a dim vista of future greatness. He had perhaps too much common-sense to take those dreams quite seriously, yet there was pleasure in the nursing of them and Youth and Hope sat by to fool him.
Alec, in his own more stolid, matter-of-fact way, had his dreams too. A well-paid billet, with little to do but drive about in a buggy and have unlimited drinks at the wayside pubs, was nearly his ideal, if put in words. He was not brought to Sydney in a hope to renew the sight of Bertha; he did not know she had gone there; for Huey, with an instinctive jealousy, had not told him.
The sight of this girl had acted on him as a species of revelation that the good things of life were not confined to a timber-getter on Pitt Town Common. That in fact much that was desirable, this girl, for instance, was, for a firewood-getter, hopelessly cut off. So he had thrown down his tools, careless of his father’s displeasure, and taken the train with Huey.
To an arrival from the country George Street, Sydney, is an everlasting wonder and delight. The throng of passengers and vehicles all rushing along, the multitude of strange faces, and smartly dressed shop-windows, causes him to wander up and down, with mouth half open and staring eyes, devouring, as it were, the scene before him. Huey and Alec were not quite new chums to the city, and passed successfully the numerous door men on Brickfield Hill, who, perhaps attracted by their tanned faces, or the country clothes, or some other sign that their dog-like instinct finds in the Bushman, solicited their patronage on terms the most pressing.
It was only after their second day, when they had first made inquiries in the direction of their hopes, that those hopes became more shadowy and indistinct.
Huey found no possible opening for a sub-editor who was not qualified by previous experience in the same kind of work.