“Gentleman Once,” said Peter, “he came from the old country with a good education and no character. He disgraced himself and family once too often and came, or was sent, out to Australia to reform. It’s a great mistake. If a man is too far gone, or hasn’t the strength to live the past down and reform at home, he won’t do it in a new country, unless a combination of circumstances compels him to it. A man rises by chance; just as often he falls by chance. Some men fall into the habit of keeping steady and stick to it, for the novelty of it, until they are on their feet and in their sane minds and can look at the past, present and future sensibly. I knew one case—But that’s got nothing to do with the story.
“Gentleman Once came out on the remittance system. That system is fatal in nine cases out of ten. The remittance system is an insult to any manhood that may be left in the black sheep, and an insult to the land he is sent to. The cursed quarterly allowance is a stone round his neck which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he’s drunk and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne’er-do-well lands in Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because he has to. But when he lands on the remittance system he drinks, first to drown homesickness. He decides that he’ll wait till he gets his next quarter’s allowance and then look round. He persuades himself that it’s no use trying to do anything: that, in fact, he can’t do anything until he gets his money. When he gets it he drifts into one ‘last’ night with chums he has picked up in second and third-rate hotels. He drinks from pure selfishness. No matter what precautions his friends at home take, he finds means of getting credit or drawing on his allowance before it is due—until he is two or three quarters behind. He drinks because he feels happy and jolly and clever and good-natured and brave and honest while he is drinking. Later on he drinks because he feels the reverse of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and repentance. He doesn’t know that a healthy-minded man doesn’t waste time in repenting. He doesn’t know how easy it is to reform, and is too weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can’t be mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength of his next quarter’s allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two behind, and sometimes gets into trouble connected with borrowed money. He drifts to the bush and drinks, to drown the past only. The past grows blacker and blacker until it is a hell without repentance; and often the black sheep gets to that state when a man dreads his sober hours. And the end? Well, you see old Danny there, and you saw old Awful Example back at Thomas’s shanty—he’s worse than Danny, if anything. Sometimes the end comes sooner. I saw a young new-land-new-leaf man dying in a cheap lodging-house in Sydney. He was a schoolmate of mine, by the way. For six weeks he lay on his back and suffered as I never saw a man suffer in this world; and I’ve seen some bad cases. They had to chloroform him every time they wanted to move him. He had affected to be hard and cynical, and I must say that he played it out to the end. It was a strong character, a strong mind sodden and diseased with drink. He never spoke of home and his people except when he was delirious. He never spoke, even to me, of his mental agony. That was English home training. You young Australians wouldn’t understand it; most bushmen are poets and emotional.
“My old schoolmate was shifted to the Sydney Hospital at last, and consented to the amputation of one leg. But it was too late. He was gone from the hips down. Drink—third-rate hotel and bush shanty drink—and low debauchery.”
Jack Barnes drew up his leg and rubbed it surreptitiously. He had “pins and needles.” Mitchell noticed and turned a chuckle into a grunt.
“Gentleman Once was a remittance man,” continued Peter. “But before he got very far he met an Australian girl in a boarding-house. Her mother was the landlady. They were bush people who had drifted to the city. The girl was pretty, intelligent and impulsive. She pitied him and nursed him. He wasn’t known as Gentleman Once then, he hadn’t got far enough to merit the nickname.”
Peter paused. Presently he jerked his head, as if he felt a spasm of pain, and leaned forward to get a stick from the fire to light his pipe.
“Now, there’s the girl who marries a man to reform him, and when she has reformed him never lets him hear the last of it. Sometimes, as a woman, she drives him back again. But this was not one of that sort of girls. I once held a theory that sometimes a girl who has married a man and reformed him misses in the reformed man the something which attracted her in the careless scamp, the something which made her love him—and so she ceases to love him, and their married life is a far more miserable one than it would have been had he continued drinking. I hold no theory of that kind now. Such theories ruin many married lives.”
Peter jerked his head again as if impatient with a thought, and reached for a fire-stick.
“But that’s got nothing to do with the story. When Gentleman Once reformed his natural selfishness came back. He saw that he had made a mistake. It’s a terrible thing for a young man, a few months, perhaps a few weeks after his marriage, to ask himself the question, ‘Have I made a mistake?’ But Gentleman Once wasn’t to be pitied. He discovered that he had married beneath him in intellect and education. Home training again. He couldn’t have discovered that he had married beneath him as far as birth was concerned, for his wife’s father had been a younger son of an older and greater family than his own—But Gentleman Once wouldn’t have been cad enough to bother about birth. I’ll do him that much justice. He discovered, or thought he did, that he and his wife could never have one thought in common; that she couldn’t possibly understand him. I’ll tell you later on whether he was mistaken or not. He was gloomy most times, and she was a bright, sociable, busy little body. When she tried to draw him out of himself he grew irritable. Besides, having found that they couldn’t have a thought in common he ceased to bother to talk to her. There are many men who don’t bother talking to their wives; they don’t think their wives feel it—because the wives cease to complain after a while; they grow tired of trying to make the man realize how they suffer. Gentleman Once tried his best—according to his lights—and weakness. Then he went in for self-pity and all the problems. He liked to brood, and his poor little wife’s energy and cheerfulness were wearying to him. He wanted to be left alone. They were both high-spirited, in different ways; she was highly strung and so was he—because of his past life mostly. They quarrelled badly sometimes. Then he drank again and she stuck to him. Perhaps the only time he seemed cheerful and affectionate was when he had a few drinks in him. It was a miserable existence—a furnished room in a cheap lodging-house, and the use of the kitchen.
“He drank alone.