“I suppose your old boozing mate’s wife was very happy when he reformed,” I said to Mitchell.
“Well, no,” said Mitchell, rubbing his head rather ruefully. “I suppose it was an exceptional case. But I knew her well, and the fact is that she got more discontented and thinner, and complained and nagged him worse than she’d ever done in his drinking days. And she’d never been afraid of him. Perhaps it was this way: She loved and married a careless, good-natured, drinking scamp, and when he reformed and became a careful, hard-working man, and an honest and respected fellow-townsman, she was disappointed in him. He wasn’t the man that won her heart when she was a girl. Or maybe he was only company for her when he was half drunk. Or maybe lots of things. Perhaps he’d killed the love in her before he reformed—and reformed too late. I wonder how a man feels when he finds out for the first time that his wife doesn’t love him any longer? But my old mate wasn’t the nature to find out that sort of thing. Ah, well! If a woman caused all our trouble, my God! women have suffered for it since—and they suffer like martyrs mostly and with the patience of working bullocks. Anyway it goes, if I’m the last man in the world, and the last woman is the worst, and there’s only room for one more in Heaven, I’ll step down at once and take my chances in Blazes.”
THE SEX PROBLEM AGAIN
It was Mitchell’s habit to take an evening off now and then from yarning or reflecting, and proceed, in a most methodical manner, to wash his spare shirts and patch his pants. I was in the habit of contributing to some Sydney papers, and every man is an editor at heart, so, at other times, Mitchell would take another evening off, and root out my swag, and go through my papers in the same methodical manner, and make alterations and additions without comment or reference to me; and sometimes he’d read a little thing of my own which didn’t meet his views, and accidentally drop it into the fire; and at other times he’d get hold of some rhyme or sketch that was troubling me, and wrap it up and give it to a passing mailman unbeknown to me. The unexpected appearance of such articles in the paper, as well as the effects of the involuntary collaboration in other pieces, gave me several big surprises.
It was in camp on a fencing contract west of Bourke. We had a book which we’d borrowed from a library at Bourke for a year or two—never mind the name of it—it was in ninety-one or ninety-two, and the sex problem was booming then. I had been surreptitiously tearing some carefully-written slips of manuscript—leaves taken from an old pocket-book—into small pieces; I dropped them, with apparent carelessness, into the fire and stood with my back to it.
“I’ll bet five pounds,” said Mitchell, suddenly, “that you’ve been trying your hand on a sex-problem story.”
I shifted uneasily and brought my hands from behind me into my pockets. “Well, to tell you the truth,” I admitted, “I have.”
“I thought so,” exclaimed Mitchell. “We’ll be put to the expense of sending you to Sydney for medical treatment yet. You’ve been having too easy times lately, plenty of hard graft and no anxiety about tucker or the future. What are the symptoms?”
“Well,” I said, taking a hand out to scratch the back of my head, “the plot looked all right—at first sight.”
“So there’s a plot, is there? Well, in the first place, a plot is a problem. Well, what’s the plot?... Come on, you needn’t be frightened to tell an old mate like me.”