Two Christmas Days.
It was Christmas Day at New Rush—the Christmas of ’73. No merry peals rang out to celebrate the occasion—there were no bells. The streets were not decorated with festoons or bunting—there were no streets to decorate. The usual lot of church-goers: men in broadcloth, women in gay colours, children neat and spotless, Prayer-book in hand—these were not the features of the day. There was no broadcloth, there were no women, there was no church—only long straggling rows of white tents, only a lot of holes of various depths and a lot of heaps of débris, only a lot of men in flannel shirts and moleskins, broad-brimmed hats and thick boots, the bronzed, bearded, hardy pioneers of the Diamond Fields. They had no church, but they could celebrate Christmas as well as those who had. There was a function which appealed to their feelings as Britishers—a popular, time-honoured function, whose necessary auxiliaries were at hand. They could not go to church, but they could get drunk; and they did.
All through the day the songs and cries and curses of the celebrants bore ample testimony to their devotion. The canvas canteens were crowded, and the bare spaces around them were strewn with empty bottles and victims of injudicious zeal. Within and without the one never-ending topic was diamonds; diggers backed their finds for weight or colour, shape, or number. Fortunes were held in clumsy, grog-shaken hands, and shown round as “last week’s finds;” all was clamour, festivity, and drink.
And this was Christmas Day! And the same sun that blazed down so fiercely on the drinking, and scorched the unconscious upturned faces of the drunk, shone softly on the dark hedges and snow-clad meadows of old England. It saw the fighting and drinking of a turbulent New World and the peace and quietness of a respectable Old one. It saw the adventurers seeking fortune and the homes for which they worked. And across six thousand miles of land and ocean it looked down alike on the men who waste or struggle and the women who wait and pray.
In a fly-tent, away from the noisy portion of the camp, sat John Hardy—sober. Out of sorts, out of heart, and dead out of luck, he had neither the means nor the inclination to get drunk. Ten months on the fields had about done for him. Other men came with nothing; they had made fortunes and left. He came with a few hundreds, the proceeds of the sale of his farm and stock. He had sacrificed everything to come to this El Dorado—and now! Now the farm was gone and the money too. Bit by bit it had slipped away. The last thing to go was the cart and mule; he had managed to keep those till yesterday, but the grub score had to be met—one must live, you know—and the old mule and cart went the way of the rest. Last night he had changed his last fiver and paid his boys. Now all he had in the world was a bit of ground (thirty by thirty), a few old picks and shovels, two blankets, and a revolver.
All through the day he had heard the noise of shouting and singing, but it awoke no responsive chord. Every burst of merriment jarred on him. The first man he had met had smilingly wished him a merry Christmas. Great Heaven! was the man a fool, or was it a devil jeering at him? Merry! Ay, with black ruin on him, his hopes blasted and his chances gone. And this was Christmas, when human beings were gasping and blistering between the parched plain and the blue sky, where a fierce relentless sun blazed down upon them. Everything mocked him. Truly, when a man is down, trample on him! When it comes to this, that his own feelings are a hell to him, the more material things matter little. There is a limit to mental as well as physical pain; the mind becomes numb and the feelings spent. But Hardy had not yet come to this, and he felt acutely the sarcasm on his own fête that this Christmas Day presented.
At sunset he went out to take a last look at the hole that had swallowed up his all. Indeed, it was a poor exchange for the grand old farm and the cattle and sheep and horses, and, above all, the home that his dead wife had made a heaven of for the five years of their married life. For himself he cared little, but his little girl—her child!—whom he had left behind with friends! In his mad speculation he had robbed her—his darling, the one loving memento of his dead wife! Well, to-morrow at sunrise he would take the 15 pounds for the claim, and hire himself out as a miner to the new owner.
The setting sun glinted over the workings and shed its golden light on the mine, ribbed out by roads and divisions, all in little squares like the specimen-cases in museums. There were hundreds of those squares, and his was one, and a worthless one at that. Yes, he would take the 15 pounds, and lucky to get it, for every man in camp knew he had not found a stone worth mentioning.
For over two hours he sat in the little low tent; a dusty lantern dangled from the ridge-pole and shed its weak, uncertain light around. His supper he had forgotten, and he sat at the rough packing-case table, his forehead resting on his arms, inwardly and silently cursing his luck and himself and the place with the bitterest curses his mind could frame. A revolver lay on the table before him—a grim sort of companion for a ruined man.
Presently a step came along the path—the step of one walking cautiously to avoid the scores of tent-lines and pegs that were stretched and stuck in every direction. As the step came closer Hardy looked up, and a head was thrust through the flap of the tent.