“Yes, they’re Kaffirs,” he admitted, without any enthusiasm. “And a low set of animals they are, too.”
“They don’t look exactly lovely,” Norah said. “Only you see, it’s so queer to me to be in a country where there are coloured people everywhere. I can’t help feeling excited.”
“And it’s within my memory,” said the doctor, “that an Australian boy came to my school—and we English boys were all quite indignant because he could speak our language, and because he wasn’t black! We had a kind of idea that every one in Australia was black!”
“But how queer!” said Norah, laughing.
“That’s what we said when we discovered that he was white. But you have seen your aborigines, haven’t you, Miss Norah?”
“Oh, I’ve seen them, of course!” Norah answered, “some of them, that is. There are not so very many left now, you know, especially in Victoria; they are dying out fast, and the remaining ones are principally kept in their special settlements. And I never remember enough of them to make it seem that they were really the people of the country.”
“Poor wretches!” said the doctor. “It makes one feel a bit sorry for them.”
“It wouldn’t if you knew them,” Jim put in. “They’re a most unpleasant crowd—the lowest, I believe, in the scale of civilisation. Useless, shifty, lazy, thieving—you can’t trust many of them. They will steal, and they won’t work.”
“But I’ve heard you speak of one that you employ,” said the doctor.
“Oh, Billy! But I always tell Dad that Billy is the only decent black fellow left. And he, like the curate’s egg, is only good in patches. He’s very fond of us, and rather afraid of us, and so he works well—on a horse. But if you take him off a horse he’s a most hopeless person. Now those fellows”—Jim indicated the gang of chattering Kaffirs—“may not be perfection, but at least they can be made to work.”