‘“Give me a loaf,” says I, “and we’ll cry quits.” A bushman never disputes his grog score. If he’s been a fool, he’s willing to uphold it. So off I went and walked straight along the road, and slept under a tree that night. Next day I was better; and the third day I got a billet, and was as well as ever I was in my life. I had one or two sprees after that, but never such an out-and-out desperate one again.’
Ernest Neuchamp looked at the clear eyes and healthy bronzed skin of the man as he spoke, noble in all the marvellous grace and strength of godlike youth, and thought how deep the pity that such a spirit, such a frame, should sink into the drunkard’s nerveless, hopeless, shapeless life in death.
He rode onward more than a mile in silence and deep thought, then he spoke—
‘I cannot say with truth, Jack, that I feel inclined to abuse and condemn wholesale everybody and everything connected with intemperance, casual or habitual. I see in it a habit—say a vice—to which the most energetic, intelligent, and industrious of our race have been prone since the dawn of history. Where circumstance is invariable there must be an underlying law. I forget, you don’t understand this sort of talk. But, you will admit that it’s a bad thing—a thing that grows upon a man till it eats out his will, like a grub in the root of a plant, and then, man or plant withers and dies. Now you’re a practical man of wide experience, you know that I mean what I say chiefly, and I want to see my way to do good in this matter. What’s the likeliest cure, in your opinion?’
‘As to that, sir,’ said Mr. Windsor, settling himself so suspiciously in the saddle that Ben Bolt arched his back and made ready for hostile action, ‘I should be cock-sure that having an empty cobbra, as the blacks say, was on the main track that led to the grog-camp, only that the best eddicated chaps are the worst lushingtons when they give way at all. Perhaps they remember old times too well, if they’ve come down in the world. But I’ve noticed that a working man as likes reading, and is always looking out for a new book, or thinks he knows something as will alter the pull of money over labour—he’s a very unlikely card to drink much. If he gets a paper with a long letter in it, or a working man’s yarn in a book, he goes home as happy as a king, and reads away to his wife, or sits up half the night spelling it out. He don’t drink. Even if he spouts a bit at the public, he talks a deal more than he swipes.’
‘I am quite of your opinion, Jack; the more a man knows, the more he wants to know. Then he must read; if he reads steadily all his spare time, he finds his drinking companions low and dull, and thinks it a great waste of time to be shouting out foolish songs or idle talk for four or five hours that would put him half way through a new book. Besides, he has become good company for himself, which your drinking man is not.’
‘That’s the best reason of all, sir,’ heartily assented his follower. ‘It is hard lines on those chaps that can only talk about horses or cattle, or crops, or bullock driving. When they’re by themselves they can only sulk. It’s natural that they should want other men to talk to, and then it’s hard work to make any fun without the grog.’
‘And there’s another very powerful beverage,’ continued Ernest, ‘that has been known to preserve men from the snare of strong drink, when nothing else would.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘The influence of a good woman, John. The hope to win her some day by prudence and self-denial; the endeavour to be worthy of her; or the determination to give the best part of one’s life to the comfort and happiness of her and her children, after she is a wife.’