Jinny the Carrier

by Israel Zangwill

“Tony Flippance.

“P.S.—I am so sorry but I find I can’t find (excuse my Irish) any way of sending the half-crown by post, so I am compelled to send you an IOU, but if you send it to Polly (Duke’s Marionettes, England, is sure to find her some day) I have no doubt she will honour it on my behalf. Safest address for me by the way is Poste Restante, Boulogne, as Madame F. likes trying different hotels.

“P.P.S.—There is a game here called ‘Little Horses.’ Most fascinating.”

Many and mixed were Jinny’s feelings as she ploughed through this bulky document, swollen by the opulent handwriting. Having no notion about investments, she vaguely imagined that Spanish robbers had impounded Cleopatra’s money, and it added to her sense of the unsettled state of the Continent. As for the IOU, she was angrily amused to think that he had already paid her the half-crown on the very morning of the bacon and mushrooms so fondly recalled, and that she had bought him his wedding present—a Bible—with it. To pay little debts twice over while defrauding the big creditors (and she had reason to think Miss Gentry as well as the Purleys had been left unpaid) seemed to her only an aggravation of fecklessness. But perhaps the Flippances had not meant to be dishonest: it was those Spanish freebooters that were to blame, who had captured the gold destined for Little Bradmarsh. The humiliation of his reference to Blanche was hard to bear—it made her want to dismiss Will altogether—but oddly enough a still keener emotion was kindled by Mr. Flippance’s obsession with Australia. Yes, Australia was in the air, it was a net into which everybody was being swept. Will was going from her—and to a place bristling with blacks and snakes and convicts and desperado diggers. Never had she received so perturbing a letter.

VII

In the menacing silence of Will, she began to study this interloping and kidnapping Australia. For it was not only his silence that menaced: through the hundred threads of her carrying career—antennæ always groping for news of him—she learned that his resolve was fixed. Indeed, Frog Farm was almost the only place on her rounds where his departure was not talked of. At the fountain head she could collect no information, for Martha was the only person she now saw there and the old lady seemed anxious, after receiving her parcels, to rush back to the clearing up of the colossal mess of the receded flood: a work in which the scrupulously invisible Will was understood to be lending a hand almost as vigorous as his father’s, albeit a single hand. But if the other was still in its sling, it was getting dangerously better, she gathered from Bundock’s father.

That he would go without another word to her was highly probable. Was there not in Finchingfield a hot-tempered farmer who had kept silence for seven years after his wife’s death? Miss Gentry, who in her Colchester days used to make his wife’s gowns—the lady riding in behind him to be measured—said it was from remorse because he had once used an improper expression to her. And this same Essex obstinacy was liable to manifest itself in less noble forms, as her grandfather’s feuds had proved abundantly. Will would shake off the soil of old England as surlily as he had shaken it off in his boyhood. As he had run away from his parents, so he would now run away from her, though far more unreasonably. But this time she would at least know where he was going, and her tortured soul reached out hungrily to picture his new world. The Spelling-Book was absolutely blank about Australia—how empty and worthless loomed that storehouse of information, with this gigantic lacuna!—but from a bound magazine volume of Miss Gentry’s, borrowed for the first time, she drew confirmation of her worst fears. It was a place that needed many more stations and out-stations of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and there were mosquitoes that could only be kept off by lighted torches, and biting spiders as big as your palm; after frying at 105 in the shade, you might shiver the next moment in the icy blast of the “Southern Buster.” And there were dust-winds to boot. If you went to the cemetery of Port Phillip, you would see that the majority of deaths were between the ages of thirty and forty. This premature mortality was due to the excessive drinking of cold water natural in so droughty a country. What a blessing that Will was not, like Mr. Skindle, a member of the Temperance Friendly Society! Nor was the labour market, congested as it was with ticket-of-leave men and bounty-emigrants from England, really superior to that of the old country, while house-rents were twice as high. As for the interior, another number of the magazine contained a story in which “an ill-favoured man with his arm in a sling” was pursued by a bull amid mimosa swamps in a setting of blacks with tomahawks and whites with pistols. “The Bull and the Bush,” she murmured whimsically to herself, but at heart she was cold with apprehension.

Then by a strange coincidence she found reassurance. Calling on Mrs. Bidlake in her confinement, she found the mother well and the new child vigorous. But it was not from their condition merely that emanated the novel atmosphere of happiness that radiated over the household: perhaps, indeed, the well-being was only a consequence of the happiness. For the Bidlakes, too, were off to Australia, though not to the goldfields. The cloud over the family had lifted at last. Not that Hezekiah had been proved innocent, but that he was become opulent. Released on ticket-of-leave, the sturdy ploughman had got a position with a cottage and garden in that “splendid suny clim” as he now called it, and then, just as he was about to send for Sophy and Sally, he had won six hundred and forty acres on the outskirts of Port Phillip in a lottery run by the Bank of Australasia! If he could borrow the capital from the bank, as was not improbable, he would be able to cut up his prize into ten-acre allotments and build houses on it—by that you simply doubled or trebled your outlay in a few years. His sister should have a house anyhow, and in the meantime her husband could help him manage or farm the vast estate. As for the “dere gels” there would be no need for them to work now, though if they wanted pocket-money they would be snapped up for service, and get as much as sixteen pounds a year each. He had already sent fifty pounds towards the passage-money, and would raise more when he knew if they would all come out, and moreover he understood that there was a Family Colonization Society in London to which Ephraim might apply for an advance. What a change, this going out of theirs, from that dreadful departure in the prison coach for the hulks and Botany Bay! Jinny, sharing their tears of joy, was vastly relieved on her own account at the paradise the grotesquely spelt letter conjured up, and she rejoiced to reflect that all that ancient barbarous harshness of magistrates and judges had led under Providence to the enrichment of Britain’s new soil with the sweat of her skilled agriculturists, and was even opening up new horizons for their innocent relatives. For assuredly this was a paradise on earth, if Hezekiah’s letter was not a shameless lure for his brother-in-law.

Think of tea at eighteenpence a pound—even a shilling if bought by the chest!—think of sugar at twopence-halfpenny, and neck of mutton at a penny a pound, nay, a whole sheep for five shillings. Think of pork at twopence and the best cows’ butter at sixpence; and after one has been reduced to turnips and dry bread, think of a land where ox-tails can be had for the skinning and sheeps’ heads and plucks by the barrow for the fetching away. A land where, as he wound up rapturously, any man who worked could have his bellyful, and where everything was plentiful except women, so that his girls would be able to pick and choose among the “gumsuckers” and have “cornstalks” for husbands. They shouldn’t marry among the “prisoners,” please God, for he didn’t reckon himself in that set, having done nothing to be ashamed of, though he did see now that threshing-machines were necessary when you had a lot of land.

“If they want women so badly, I might do worse than go myself,” said Jinny laughingly.