I left home and drifted to Sydney, and “back into the Great North-West where all the rovers go,” and knocked about the country for six or seven years before I met Peter M’Laughlan again. I was young yet, but felt old at times, and there were times, in the hot, rough, greasy shearing-shed on blazing days, or in the bare “men’s hut” by the flicker of the stinking slush-lamp at night, or the wretched wayside shanty with its drink-madness and blasphemy, or tramping along the dusty, endless track—there were times when I wished I could fall back with all the experience I’d got, and sit once more in the little slab-and-bark “chapel” on Ross’s Creek and hear Peter M’Laughlan and the poor, struggling selectors sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and then go out and start life afresh.
My old school chum and bush mate, Jack Barnes, had married pretty little Clara Southwick, who used to play the portable harmonium in chapel. I nearly broke my heart when they were married, but then I was a young fool. Clara was a year or so older than I, and I could never get away from a boyish feeling of reverence for her, as if she were something above and out of my world. And so, while I was worshipping her in chapel once a month, and at picnics and parties in between, and always at a distance, Jack used to ride up to Southwick’s place on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and on other days, and hang his horse up outside, or turn it in the paddock, and argue with old Southwick, and agree with the old woman, and court Clara on the sly. And he got her.
It was at their wedding that I first got the worse for drink.
Jack was a blue-eyed, curly black-haired, careless, popular young scamp; as good-hearted as he was careless. He could ride like a circus monkey, do all kinds of bush work, add two columns of figures at once, and write like copper-plate.
Jack was given to drinking, gambling and roving. He steadied up when he got married and started on a small selection of his own; but within the year Clara was living in a back skillion of her father’s house and Jack was up-country shearing. He was “ringer” of the shed at Piora Station one season and made a decent cheque; and within a fortnight after the shed “cut out” he turned up at home in a very bad state from drink and with about thirty shillings in his pockets. He had fallen from his horse in the creek near Southwick’s, and altogether he was a nice sort of young husband to go home to poor, heart-broken Clara.
I remember that time well. She stopped me one day as I was riding past to ask me if I’d seen Jack, and I got off my horse. Her chin and mouth began to twitch and tremble and I saw her eyes filling with tears. She laid her hand on my arm and asked me to promise not to drink with Jack if I met him, but to try and persuade him to come home. And—well, have you, as a man, ever, with the one woman that you can’t have, and no matter at what time or place, felt a sudden mad longing to take her in your arms and kiss her—and damn the world? I got on my horse again. She must have thought me an ignorant brute, but I felt safer there. And when I thought how I had nearly made a fool of myself, and been a cowardly brute, and a rotten mate to my mate, I rode ten miles to find Jack and get him home.
He straightened up again after a bit and went out and got another shed, and they say that Peter M’Laughlan got hold of him there. I don’t know what Peter did to him then—Jack never spoke of it, even to me, his old mate; but, anyway, at the end of the shearing season Jack’s cheque came home to Clara in a registered envelope, addressed in Peter’s hand-writing, and about a week later Jack turned up a changed man.
He got work as a temporary clerk in the branch government land office at Solong, a pretty little farming town in a circle of blue hills on the banks of a clear, willow-fringed river, where there were rich, black-soil, river-flat farms, and vineyards on the red soil slopes, and blue peaks in the distance. It was a great contrast to Ross’s Creek. Jack paid a deposit on an allotment of land, a bit out of town, on the river bank, and built a little weather-board box of a cottage in spare times, and planted roses and grape-vines to hide its ugliness by and by. It wasn’t much of a place, but Clara was mighty proud of it because it was “our house.” They were very happy, and she was beginning to feel sure of Jack. She seemed to believe that the miserable old time was all past and gone.
When the work at the land’s office gave out, Jack did all sorts of jobs about town, and at last, one shearing season, when there was a heavy clip of wool, and shearers were getting L1 a hundred, he decided to go out back. I know that Clara was against it, but he argued that it was the only chance for him, and she persuaded herself that she could trust him. I was knocking about Solong at the time, and Jack and I decided to go out together and share his packhorse between us. He wrote to Beenaway Shed, about three hundred: miles north-west in the Great Scrubs, and got pens for both of us.
It was a fine fresh morning when we started; it was in a good season and the country looked grand. When I rode up to Jack’s place I saw his horse and packhorse tied up outside the gate. He had wanted me to come up the evening before and have tea with them and camp at his place for the night. “Come up! man alive!” he said. “We’ll make you a shake-down!” But I wouldn’t; I said I had to meet a chap. Jack wouldn’t have understood. I had been up before, but when I saw him and Clara so happy and comfortable, and thought of the past and my secret, and thought of myself, a useless, purposeless, restless, homeless sort of fellow, hanging out at a boarding-house, it nearly broke me up, and I had to have a drink or two afterwards. I often wonder if Clara guessed and understood. You never know how much a woman knows; but—ah, well!