“Who’s going to stoush us?” Orton asked fiercely.
This turned the talk again to larger issues and possibilities—delivered on both sides straight from the shoulder without malice or heat, between bursts of song from round the piano at the far end. Bevin and I sat out, watching.
“Well, I don’t understand these matters,” said Bevin at last. “But I’d hate to have one of your crowd have it in for me for anything.”
“Would you? Why?” Orton pierced him with his pale, artificial eye.
“Well, you’re a trifle—what’s the word?—vindictive?—spiteful? At least, that’s what I’ve found. I expect it comes from drinking stewed tea with your meat four times a day,” said Bevin. “No! I’d hate to have an Australian after me for anything in particular.”
Out of this came his tale—somewhat in this shape:
It opened with an Australian of the name of Hickmot or Hickmer—Bevin called him both—who, finding his battalion completely expended at Gallipoli, had joined up with what stood of Bevin’s battalion, and had there remained, unrebuked and unnoticed. The point that Bevin laboured was that his man had never seen a table-cloth, a china plate, or a dozen white people together till, in his thirtieth year, he had walked for two months to Brisbane to join up. Pole found this hard to believe.
“But it’s true,” Bevin insisted. “This chap was born an’ bred among the black fellers, as they call ’em, two hundred miles from the nearest town, four hundred miles from a railway, an’ ten thousand from the grace o’ God—out in Queensland near some desert.”
“Why, of course. We come out of everywhere,” said Orton. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Yes—but——Look here! From the time that this man Hickmot was twelve years old he’d ridden, driven—what’s the word?—conducted sheep for his father for thousands of miles on end, an’ months at a time, alone with these black fellers that you daren’t show the back of your neck to—else they knock your head in. That was all that he’d ever done till he joined up. He—he—didn’t belong to anything in the world, you understand. And he didn’t strike other men as being a—a human being.”