by Henry Lawson
Steelman turned off into a lane, cut across the paddocks to the road again, and waited for Smith. He hadn’t long to wait.
Smith went on towards the public-house, rehearsing his part as he walked—repeating his “lines” to himself, so as to be sure of remembering all that Steelman had told him to say to the landlord, and adding, with what he considered appropriate gestures, some fancy touches of his own, which he determined to throw in in spite of Steelman’s advice and warning. “I’ll tell him (this)—I’ll tell him (that). Well, look here, boss, I’ll say, you’re pretty right and I quite agree with you as far as that’s concerned, but,” etc. And so, murmuring and mumbling to himself, Smith reached the hotel. The day was late, and the bar was small, and low, and dark. Smith walked in with all the assurance he could muster, eased down his swag in a corner in what he no doubt considered the true professional style, and, swinging round to the bar, said in a loud voice which he intended to be cheerful, independent, and hearty:
“Good day, boss.”
But it wasn’t a “boss”. It was about the hardest-faced old woman that Smith had ever seen. The pub had changed hands.
“I—I beg your pardon, missus,” stammered poor Smith.
It was a knock-down blow for Smith. He couldn’t come to time. He and Steelman had had a landlord in their minds all the time, and laid their plans accordingly; the possibility of having a she—and one like this—to deal with never entered into their calculations. Smith had no time to reorganise, even if he had had the brains to do so, without the assistance of his mate’s knowledge of human nature.
“I—I beg your pardon, missus,” he stammered.
Painful pause. She sized him up.
“Well, what do you want?”
“Well, missus—I—the fact is—will you give me a bottle of beer for fourpence?”
“Wha—what?”
“I mean—The fact is, we’ve only got fourpence left, and—I’ve got a mate outside, and you might let us have a quart or so, in a bottle, for that. I mean—anyway, you might let us have a pint. I’m very sorry to bother you, missus.”
But she couldn’t do it. No. Certainly not. Decidedly not. All her drinks were sixpence. She had her licence to pay, and the rent, and a family to keep. It wouldn’t pay out there—it wasn’t worth her while. It wouldn’t pay the cost of carting the liquor out, etc.
“Well, missus,” poor Smith blurted out at last, in sheer desperation, “give me what you can in a bottle for this. I’ve—I’ve got a mate outside.” And he put the four coppers on the bar.
“Have you got a bottle?”
“No—but——”
“If I give you one, will you bring it back? You can’t expect me to give you a bottle as well as a drink.”
“Yes, mum; I’ll bring it back directly.”
She reached out a bottle from under the bar, and very deliberately measured out a little over a pint and poured it into the bottle, which she handed to Smith without a cork.
Smith went his way without rejoicing. It struck him forcibly that he should have saved the money until they reached Petone, or the city, where Steelman would be sure to get a decent drink. But how was he to know? He had chanced it, and lost; Steelman might have done the same. What troubled Smith most was the thought of what Steelman would say; he already heard him, in imagination, saying: “You’re a mug, Smith—Smith, you are a mug.”
But Steelman didn’t say much. He was prepared for the worst by seeing Smith come along so soon. He listened to his story with an air of gentle sadness, even as a stern father might listen to the voluntary confession of a wayward child; then he held the bottle up to the fading light of departing day, looked through it (the bottle), and said:
“Well—it ain’t worth while dividing it.”
Smith’s heart shot right down through a hole in the sole of his left boot into the hard road.
“Here, Smith,” said Steelman, handing him the bottle, “drink it, old man; you want it. It wasn’t altogether your fault; it was an oversight of mine. I didn’t bargain for a woman of that kind, and, of course, you couldn’t be expected to think of it. Drink it! Drink it down, Smith. I’ll manage to work the oracle before this night is out.”
Smith was forced to believe his ears, and, recovering from his surprise, drank.
“I promised to take back the bottle,” he said, with the ghost of a smile.
Steelman took the bottle by the neck and broke it on the fence.
“Come on, Smith; I’ll carry the swag for a while.”
And they tramped on in the gathering starlight.
How Steelman Told His Story
IT was Steelman’s humour, in some of his moods, to take Smith into his confidence, as some old bushmen do their dogs.
“You’re nearly as good as an intelligent sheep-dog to talk to, Smith—when a man gets tired of thinking to himself and wants a relief. You’re a bit of a mug and a good deal of an idiot, and the chances are that you don’t know what I’m driving at half the time—that’s the main reason why I don’t mind talking to you. You ought to consider yourself honoured; it ain’t every man I take into my confidence, even that far.”
Smith rubbed his head.
“I’d sooner talk to you—or a stump—any day than to one of those silent, suspicious, self-contained, worldly-wise chaps that listen to everything you say—sense and rubbish alike—as if you were trying to get them to take shares in a mine. I drop the man who listens to me all the time and doesn’t seem to get bored. He isn’t safe. He isn’t to be trusted. He mostly wants to grind his axe against yours, and there’s too little profit for me where there are two axes to grind, and no stone—though I’d manage it once, anyhow.”
“How’d you do it?” asked Smith.
“There are several ways. Either you join forces, for instance, and find a grindstone—or make one of the other man’s axe. But the last way is too slow, and, as I said, takes too much brain-work—besides, it doesn’t pay. It might satisfy your vanity or pride, but I’ve got none. I had once, when I was younger, but it—well, it nearly killed me, so I dropped it.
“You can mostly trust the man who wants to talk more than you do; he’ll make a safe mate—or a good grindstone.”
Smith scratched the nape of his neck and sat blinking at the fire, with the puzzled expression of a woman pondering over a life-question or the trimming of a hat. Steelman took his chin in his hand and watched Smith thoughtfully.
“I—I say, Steely,” exclaimed Smith, suddenly, sitting up and scratching his head and blinking harder than ever; “wha—what am I?”
“How do you mean?”
“Am I the axe or the grindstone?”
“Oh! your brain seems in extra good working order to-night, Smith. Well, you turn the grindstone and I grind.” Smith settled. “If you could grind better than I, I’d turn the stone and let you grind—I’d never go against the interests of the firm—that’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
“Ye-es,” admitted Smith; “I suppose so.”
“So do I. Now, Smith, we’ve got along all right together for years, off and on, but you never know what might happen. I might stop breathing, for instance—and so might you.”
Smith began to look alarmed.
“Poetical justice might overtake one or both, of us—such things have happened before, though not often. Or, say, misfortune or death might mistake us for honest, hard-working mugs with big families to keep, and cut us off in the bloom of all our wisdom. You might get into trouble, and, in that case, I’d be bound to leave you there, on principle; or I might get into trouble, and you wouldn’t have the brains to get me out—though I know you’d be mug enough to try. I might make a rise and cut you, or you might be misled into showing some spirit, and clear out after I’d stoushed you for it. You might get tired of me calling you a mug, and bossing you and making a tool or convenience of you, you know. You might go in for honest graft (you were always a bit weak-minded) and then I’d have to wash my hands of you (unless you
agreed to keep me) for an irreclaimable mug. Or it might suit me to become a respected and worthy fellow-townsman, and then, if you came within ten miles of me, or hinted that you ever knew me, I’d have you up for vagrancy, or soliciting alms, or attempting to levy blackmail. I’d have to fix you—so I give you fair warning. Or we might get into some desperate fix (and it needn’t be very desperate, either) when I’d be obliged to sacrifice you for my own personal safety, comfort, and convenience. Hundreds of things might happen.
“Well, as I said, we’ve been at large together for some years, and I’ve found you sober, trustworthy and honest; so, in case we do part—as we will sooner or later—and you survive, I’ll give you some advice from my own experience.
“In the first place: if you ever happen to get born again—and it wouldn’t do you much harm—get born with the strength of a bullock and the hide of one as well, and a swelled head, and no brains—at least no more brains than you’ve got now. I was born with a skin like tissue-paper, and brains; also a heart.
“Get born without relatives, if you can; if you can’t help it, clear out on your own just as soon after you’re born as you possibly can. I hung on.
“If you have relations, and feel inclined to help them any time when you’re flush (and there’s no telling what a weak-minded man like you might take it into his head to do)—don’t do it. They’ll get a down on you if you do. It only causes family troubles and bitterness. There’s no dislike like that of a dependant. You’ll get neither gratitude nor civility in the end, and be lucky if you escape with a character. (You’ve got no character, Smith; I’m only just supposing you have.) If you help relations, more than once they’ll begin to regard it as a right; and when you’re forced to leave off helping them, they’ll hate you worse than they’d hate a stranger. No one likes to be deprived of his rights—especially by a relation. There’s no hatred too bitter for, and nothing too bad to be said of, the mug who turns. The worst yarns about a man are generally started by his own tribe, and the world believes them at once on that very account. Well, the first thing to do in life is to escape from your friends.
“If you ever go to work—and miracles have happened before—no matter what your wages are, or how you are treated, you can take it for granted that you’re sweated; act on that to the best of your ability, or you’ll never rise in the world. If you go to see a show on the nod you’ll be found a comfortable seat in a good place; but if you pay, the chances are the ticket clerk will tell you a lie, and you’ll have to hustle for standing room. The man that doesn’t ante gets the best of this world; anything he’ll stand is good enough for the man that pays. If you try to be too sharp you’ll get into gaol sooner or later; if you try to be too honest the chances are that the bailiff will get into your house—if you have one—and make a holy show of you before the neighbours. The honest softy is more often mistaken for a swindler, and accused of being one, than the out-and-out scamp; and the man that tells the truth too much is set down as an irreclaimable liar. But most of the time crow low and roost high, for it’s a funny world, and you never know what might happen.
“And if you get married (and there’s no accounting for a woman’s taste) be as bad as you like, and then moderately good, and your wife will love you. If you’re bad all the time she can’t stand it for ever, and if you’re good all the time she’ll naturally treat you with contempt. Never explain what you’re going to do, and don’t explain afterwards, if you can help it. If you find yourself between two stools, strike hard for your own self, Smith—strike hard, and you’ll be respected more than if you fought for all the world. Generosity isn’t understood nowadays, and what the people don’t understand is either ‘mad’ or ‘cronk’. Failure has no case, and you can’t build one for it…I started out in life very young—and very soft.”
“I thought you were going to tell me your story, Steely,” remarked Smith.
Steelman smiled sadly.
FROM OVER THE SLIPRAILS
The Shanty-keeper’s Wife
THERE were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker—and one or two professional spielers, perhaps. We were tired and stiff and nearly frozen—too cold to talk and too irritable to risk the inevitable argument which an interchange of ideas would have led up to. We had been looking forward for hours, it seemed, to the pub where we were to change horses. For the last hour or two all that our united efforts had been able to get out of the driver was a grunt to the effect that it was “ ‘bout a couple o’ miles”. Then he said, or grunted, “ ‘Tain’t fur now,” a couple of times, and refused to commit himself any further; he seemed grumpy about having committed himself so far.
He was one of those men who take everything in dead earnest; who regard any expression of ideas outside their own sphere of life as trivial, or, indeed, if addressed directly to them, as offensive; who, in fact, are darkly suspicious of anything in the shape of a joke or laugh on the part of an outsider in their own particular dust-hole. He seemed to be always thinking, and thinking a lot; when his hands were not both engaged, he would tilt his hat forward and scratch the base of his skull with his little finger, and let his jaw hang. But his intellectual powers were mostly concentrated on a doubtful swingle-tree, a misfitting collar, or that there bay or piebald (on the off or near side) with the sore shoulder.
Casual letters or papers, to be delivered on the road, were matters which troubled him vaguely, but constantly—like the abstract ideas of his passengers.
The joker of our party was a humorist of the dry order, and had been slyly taking rises out of the driver for the last two or three stages. But the driver only brooded. He wasn’t the one to tell you straight if you offended him, or if he fancied you offended him, and thus gain your respect, or prevent a misunderstanding which would result in life-long enmity. He might meet you in after years when you had forgotten all about your trespass—if indeed you had ever been conscious of it—and “stoush” you unexpectedly on the ear.
Also you might regard him as your friend, on occasion, and yet he would stand by and hear a perfect stranger tell you the most outrageous lies, to your hurt, and know that the stranger was telling lies, and never put you up to it. It would never enter his head to do so. It wouldn’t be any affair of his—only an abstract question.
It grew darker and colder. The rain came as if the frozen south were spitting at our face and neck and hands, and our feet grew as big as camels’, and went dead, and we might as well have stamped the footboards with wooden legs for all the feeling we got into our own. But they were more comfortable that way, for the toes didn’t curl up and pain so much, nor did our corns stick out so hard against the leather, and shoot.
We looked out eagerly for some clearing, or fence, or light—some sign of the shanty where we were to change horses—but there was nothing save blackness all round. The long, straight, cleared road was no longer relieved by the ghostly patch of light, far ahead, where the bordering tree-walls came together in perspective and framed the ether. We were down in the bed of the bush.
We pictured a haven of rest with a suspended lamp burning in the frosty air outside and a big log fire in a cosy parlour off the bar, and a long table set for supper. But this is a land of contradictions; wayside shanties turn up unexpectedly, and in the most unreasonable places, and are, as likely as not, prepared for a banquet when you are not hungry and can’t wait, and as cold and dark as a bushman’s grave when you are and can.
Suddenly the driver said: “We’re there now.” He said this as if he had driven us to the scaffold to be hanged, and was fiercely glad that he’d got us there safely at last. We looked but saw nothing; then a light appeared ahead and seemed to come towards us; and presently we saw that it was a lantern held up by a man in a slouch hat, with a dark bushy beard, and a three-bushel bag around his shoulders. He held up his other hand, and said something to the dri
ver in a tone that might have been used by the leader of a search party who had just found the body. The driver stopped and then went on slowly.
“What’s up?” we asked. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said the driver.
“The publican’s wife is sick,” somebody said, “and he wants us to come quietly.”
The usual little slab and bark shanty was suggested in the gloom, with a big bark stable looming in the background. We climbed down like so many cripples. As soon as we began to feel our legs and be sure we had the right ones and the proper allowance of feet, we helped, as quietly as possible, to take the horses out and round to the stable.
“Is she very bad?” we asked the publican, showing as much concern as we could.
“Yes,” he said, in a subdued voice of a rough man who had spent several anxious, sleepless nights by the sick-bed of a dear one. “But, God willing, I think we’ll pull her through.”
Thus encouraged we said, sympathetically: “We’re very sorry to trouble you, but I suppose we could manage to get a drink and a bit to eat?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s nothing to eat in the house, and I’ve only got rum and milk. You can have that if you like.”
One of the pilgrims broke out here.
“Well, of all the pubs,” he began, “that I’ve ever——”
“Hush-sh-sh!” said the publican.
The Pilgrim scowled and retired to the rear. You can’t express your feelings freely when there’s a woman dying close handy.
“Well, who says rum and milk?” asked the joker in a low voice.
“Wait here,” said the publican, and disappeared into the little front passage.
Presently a light showed through a window, with a scratched and fly-bitten B and Aon two panes, and a mutilated R on the third, which was broken. Adoor opened, and we sneaked into the bar. It was like having drinks after hours where the police are strict and independent.