by Henry Lawson
Somehow the lurid sympathy of the men irritated me worse than the boss-over-the-board had done. It must have been on account of the heat, as Mitchell says. I was sick of the shed and the life. It was within a couple of days of cut-out, so I told Mitchell—who was shearing—that I’d camp up the billabong and wait for him; got my cheque, rolled up my swag, got three days’ tucker from the cook, said so-long to him, and tramped while the men were in the shed.
I camped at the head of the billabong where the track branched, one branch running to Bourke, up the river, and the other out towards the Paroo—and hell.
About ten o’clock the third morning Mitchell came along with his cheque and his swag, and a new sheep-pup, and his quiet grin; and I wasn’t too pleased to see that he had a shearer called “the Lachlan” with him.
The Lachlan wasn’t popular at the shed. He was a brooding, unsociable sort of man, and it didn’t make any difference to the chaps whether he had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed—there were three or four chaps from the district he was reared in—that he’d done five years’ hard for burglary. What surprised me was that Jack Mitchell seemed thick with him; often, when the Lachlan was sitting brooding and smoking by himself outside the hut after sunset, Mitchell would perch on his heels alongside him and yarn. But no one else took notice of anything Mitchell did out of the common.
“Better camp with us till the cool of the evening,” said Mitchell to the Lachlan, as they slipped their swags. “Plenty time for you to start after sundown, if you’re going to travel to-night.”
So the Lachlan was going to travel all night and on a different track. I felt more comfortable, and put the billy on. I did not care so much what he’d been or had done, but I was green and soft yet, and his presence embarrassed me.
They talked shearing, sheds, tracks, and a little unionism—the Lachlan speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound common sense, it seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty, or even well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set, and had something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw in the eyes of union leaders and secretaries—the straight men of the strikes of ’90 and ’91. I fancied once or twice I saw in his eyes the sudden furtive look of the “bad egg” when a mounted trooper is spotted near the shed; but perhaps this was prejudice. And with it all there was about the Lachlan something of the man who has lost all he had and the chances of all he was ever likely to have, and is past feeling or caring or flaring up—past getting mad about anything—something, all the same, that warned men not to make free with him.
He and Mitchell fished along the billabong all the afternoon; I fished a little, and lay about the camp and read. I had an instinct that the Lachlan saw I didn’t cotton on to his camping with us, though he wasn’t the sort of man to show what he saw or felt. After tea, and a smoke at sunset, he shouldered his swag, nodded to me as if I was an accidental but respectful stranger at a funeral that belonged to him, and took the outside track. Mitchell walked along the track with him for a mile or so, while I poked round and got some boughs down for a bed, and fed and studied the collie pup that Jack had bought from the shearers’ cook.
I saw them stop and shake hands out on the dusty clearing, and they seemed to take a long time about it; then Mitchell started back, and the other began to dwindle down to a black peg and then to a dot on the sandy plain, that had just a hint of dusk and dreamy far-away gloaming on it between the change from glaring day to hard, bare, broad moonlight.
I thought Mitchell was sulky, or had got the blues, when he came back; he lay on his elbow smoking, with his face turned from the camp towards the plain. After a bit I got wild—if Mitchell was going to go on like that he might as well have taken his swag and gone with the Lachlan. I don’t know exactly what was the matter with me that day, but at last I made up my mind to bring the thing to a head.
“You seem mighty thick with the Lachlan,” I said.
“Well, what’s the matter with that?” asked Mitchell. “It ain’t the first felon I’ve been on speaking terms with. I borrowed half-a-caser off a murderer once, when I was in a hole and had no one else to go to; and the murderer hadn’t served his time, neither. I’ve got nothing against the Lachlan, except that he’s a white man and bears a faint family resemblance to a certain branch of my tribe.”
I rolled out my swag on the boughs, got my pipe, tobacco, and matches handy in the crown of a spare hat, and lay down.
Mitchell got up, relit his pipe at the fire, and mooned round for a while, with his hands behind him, kicking sticks out of the road, looking out over the plain, down along the billabong, and up through the mulga branches at the stars; then he comforted the pup a bit, shoved the fire together with his toe, stood the tea-billy on the coals, and came and squatted on the sand by my head.
“Joe! I’ll tell you a yarn.”
“All right; fire away! Has it got anything to do with the Lachlan?”
“No. It’s got nothing to do with the Lachlan now; but it’s about a chap he knew. Don’t you ever breathe a word of this to the Lachlan or anyone, or he’ll get on to me.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“You know I’ve been a good many things in my time. I did a deal of house-painting at one time; I was a pretty smart brush hand, and made money at it. Well, I had a run of work at a place called Redclay, on the Lachlan side. You know the sort of town—two pubs, a general store, a post-office, a blacksmith’s shop, a police station, a branch bank, and a dozen private weatherboard boxes on piles, with galvanised-iron tops, besides the humpies. There was a paper there, too, called the Redclay Advertiser (with which was incorporated the Geebung Chronicle), and a Roman Catholic Church, a Church of England, and a Wesleyan chapel. Now, you see more of private life in the house-painting line than in any other—bar plumbing and gasfitting; but I’ll tell you about my house-painting experiences some other time.
“There was a young chap named Jack Drew editing the Advertiser then. He belonged to the district, but had been sent to Sydney to a grammar-school when he was a boy. He was between twenty-five and thirty; had knocked round a good deal, and gone the pace in Sydney. He got on as a boy reporter on one of the big dailies; he had brains, and could write rings round a good many, but he got in with a crowd that called themselves ‘Bohemians’, and the drink got a hold on him. The paper stuck to him as long as it could (for the sake of his brains), but they had to sack him at last.
“He went out back, as most of them do, to try and work out their salvation, and knocked round amongst the sheds. He ‘picked-up’ in one shed where I was shearing, and we carried swags together for a couple of months. Then he went back to the Lachlan side, and prospected amongst the old fields round there with his elder brother Tom, who was all there was left of his family. Tom, by the way, broke his heart digging Jack out of a cave in a drive they were working, and died a few minutes after the rescue. But that’s another yarn. * Jack Drew had a bad spree after that; then he went to Sydney again, got on his old paper, went to the dogs, and a Parliamentary push that owned some city fly-blisters and country papers sent him up to edit the Advertiser at two quid a week. He drank again, and no wonder—you don’t know what it is to run a Geebung Advocate or Mudgee Budgee Chronicle, and live there. He was about the same build as the Lachlan, but stouter, and had something the same kind of eyes; but he was ordinarily as careless and devil-may-care as the Lachlan is grumpy and quiet.
“There was a doctor there, called Dr Lebinski. They said he was a Polish exile. He was fifty or sixty, a tall man, with the set of an old soldier when he stood straight; but he mostly walked with his hands behind him, studying the ground. Jack Drew caught that trick off him towards the end. They were chums in a gloomy way, and kept to themselves—they were the only two men with brains in that town. They drank and fought the drink together. The Doctor was too gloomy and impatient over little things to be popular. Jack Drew talked too straight in the paper, and in spite of his propr
ietors, about pub spieling and such things—and was too sarcastic in his progress committee, town council, and toady reception reports. The Doctor had a hawk’s nose, pointed grizzled beard and moustache, and steely-grey eyes with a haunted look in them sometimes (especially when he glanced at you sideways), as if he loathed his fellow-men, and couldn’t always hide it; or as if you were the spirit of morphia or opium, or a dead girl he’d wronged in his youth—or whatever his devil was, beside drink. He was clever, and drink had brought him down to Redclay.
“The bank manager was a heavy snob named Browne. He complained of being a bit dull of hearing in one ear—after you’d yelled at him three or four times; sometimes I’ve thought he was as deaf as a book-keeper in both. He had a wife and youngsters, but they were away on a visit while I was working at Redclay. His niece—or, rather, his wife’s niece—a girl named Ruth Wilson, did the housekeeping. She was an orphan, adopted by her aunt, and was general slavey and scapegoat to the family—especially to the brats, as is often the case. She was rather pretty, and ladylike, and kept to herself. The women and girls called her Miss Wilson, and didn’t like her. Most of the single men—and some of the married ones, perhaps—were gone on her, but hadn’t the brains or the pluck to bear up and try their luck. I was gone worse than any, I think, but had too much experience or common sense. She was very good to me—used to hand me out cups of tea and plates of sandwiches, or bread and butter, or cake, mornings and afternoons the whole time I was painting the bank. The Doctor had known her people, and was very kind to her. She was about the only woman—for she was more woman than girl—that he’d brighten up and talk for. Neither he nor Jack Drew were particularly friendly with Browne or his push.
“The banker, the storekeeper, one of the publicans, the butcher (a popular man with his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his head, and nothing in it), the postmaster, and his toady, the lightning squirter, were the scrub-aristocracy. The rest were crawlers, mostly pub spielers and bush larrikins, and the women were hags and larrikinesses. The town lived on chequemen from the surrounding bush. It was a nice little place, taking it all round.
“I remember a ball at the local town hall, where the scrub-aristocrats took one end of the room to dance in, and the ordinary scum the other. It was a saving in music. Some day an Australian writer will come along who’ll remind the critics and readers of Dickens, Carlyle, and Thackeray mixed, and he’ll do justice to these little customs of ours in the little settled-district towns of Democratic Australia. This sort of thing came to a head one New Year’s Night at Redclay, when there was a ‘public’ ball and peace on earth and goodwill towards all men—mostly on account of a railway to Redclay being surveyed. We were all there. They’d got the Doc. out of his shell to act as M.C.
“One of the aristocrats was the daughter of the local storekeeper; she belonged to the lawn-tennis clique, and they were select. For some reason or other—because she looked upon Miss Wilson as a slavey, or on account of a fancied slight, or the heat working on ignorance, or on account of something that comes over girls and women that no son of sin can account for—this Miss Tea-’n’-sugar tossed her head and refused Miss Wilson’s hand in the first set, and so broke the ladies’ chain and the dance. Then there was a to-do. The Doctor held up his hand to stop the music, and said, very quietly, that he must call upon Miss So-and-so to apologise to Miss Wilson—or resign the chair. After a lot of fuss the girl did apologise in a snappy way that was another insult. Jack Drew gave Miss Wilson his arm and marched her off without a word—I saw she was almost crying. Someone said: ‘Oh, let’s go on with the dance’. The Doctor flashed round on them, but they were too paltry for him, so he turned on his heel and went out without a word. But I was beneath them again in social standing, so there was nothing to prevent me from making a few well-chosen remarks on things in general—which I did; and broke up that ball, and broke some heads afterwards, and got myself a good deal of hatred and respect, and two sweethearts; and lost all the jobs I was likely to get, except at the bank, the Doctor’s, and the Royal.
“One day it was raining—general rain for a week. Rain, rain, rain, over ridge and scrub and galvanised iron, and into the dismal creeks. I’d done all my inside work, except a bit under the Doctor’s verandah, where he’d been having some patching and altering done round the glass doors of his surgery, where he consulted his patients. I didn’t want to lose time. It was a Monday and no day for the Royal, and there was no dust, so it was a good day for varnishing. I took a pot and brush and went along to give the Doctor’s doors a coat of varnish. The Doctor and Drew were inside with a fire, drinking whisky and smoking, but I didn’t know that when I started work. The rain roared on the iron roof like the sea. All of a sudden it held up for a minute, and I heard their voices. The Doctor had been shouting on account of the rain, and forgot to lower his voice. ‘Look here, Jack Drew,’ he said, ‘there are only two things for you to do if you have any regard for that girl; one is to stop this’ (the liquor I suppose he meant) ‘and pull yourself together; and I don’t think you’ll do that—I know men. The other is to throw up the Advertiser—it’s doing you no good—and clear out.’ ‘I won’t do that,’ says Drew. ‘Then shoot yourself,’ said the Doctor. ‘(There’s another flask in the cupboard.) You know what this hole is like…She’s a good true girl—a girl as God made her. I knew her father and mother, and I tell you, Jack, I’d sooner see her dead than…’ The roof roared again. I felt a bit delicate about the business and didn’t like to disturb them, so I knocked off for the day.
“About a week before that I was down in the bed of the Redclay Creek fishing for ‘tailers’. I’d been getting on all right with the housemaid at the Royal—she used to have plates of pudding and hot pie for me on the big gridiron arrangement over the kitchen range; and after the third tuck-out I thought it was good enough to do a bit of a bear-up in that direction. She mentioned one day, yarning, that she liked a stroll by the creek sometimes in the cool of the evening. I thought she’d be off that day, so I said I’d go for a fish after I’d knocked off. I thought I might get a bite. Anyway, I didn’t catch Lizzie—tell you about that some other time.
“It was Sunday. I’d been fishing for Lizzie about an hour, when I saw a skirt on the bank out of the tail of my eye—and thought I’d got a bite, sure. But I was had. It was Miss Wilson, strolling along the bank in the sunset, all by her pretty self. She was a slight girl, not very tall, with reddish frizzled hair, grey eyes, and small, pretty features. She spoke as if she had more brains than the average, and had been better educated. Jack Drew was the only young man in Redclay she could talk to, or who could talk to a girl like her; and that was the whole trouble in a nutshell. The newspaper office was next to the bank, and I’d seen her hand cups of tea and cocoa over the fence to his office window more than once, and sometimes they yarned for a while.
“She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Mitchell.’
“I said, ‘Good morning, Miss.’
“There’s some girls I can’t talk to like I’d talk to other girls. She asked me if I’d caught any fish, and I said, ‘No, Miss.’ She asked me if it wasn’t me down there fishing with Mr Drew the other evening, and I said, ‘Yes—it was me.’ Then presently she asked me straight if he was fishing down the creek that afternoon. I guessed they’d been down fishing for each other before. I said, ‘No, I thought he was out of town.’ I knew he was pretty bad at the Royal. I asked her if she’d like to have a try with my line, but she said No, thanks, she must be going; and she went off up the creek. I reckoned Jack Drew had got a bite and landed her. I felt a bit sorry for her, too.
“The next Saturday evening after the rainy Monday at the Doctor’s, I went down to fish for tailers—and Lizzie. I went down under the banks to where there was a big she-oak stump half in the water, going quietly, with an idea of not frightening the fish. I was just unwinding the line from my rod when I noticed the end of another rod sticking out from the other side of the stump; and while I watched it
was dropped into the water. Then I heard a murmur, and craned my neck round the back of the stump to see who it was. I saw the back view of Jack Drew and Miss Wilson; he had his arm round her waist, and her head was on his shoulder. She said, ‘I will trust you, Jack—I know you’ll give up the drink for my sake. And I’ll help you, and we’ll be so happy!’ or words in that direction. Athunderstorm was coming on. The sky had darkened up with a great blue-black storm-cloud rushing over, and they hadn’t noticed it. I didn’t mind, and the fish bit best in a storm. But just as she said ‘happy’ came a blinding flash and a crash that shook the ridges, and the first drops came peltering down. They jumped up and climbed the bank, while I perched on the she-oak roots over the water to be out of sight as they passed. Half-way to the town I saw them standing in the shelter of an old stone chimney that stood alone. He had his overcoat round her and was sheltering her from the wind…
“Smoke-oh, Joe. The tea’s stewing.”
Mitchell got up, stretched himself, and brought the billy and pint-pots to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon had closed in. Acouple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand in the moonlight, and an idea struck him. He got a big old felt hat he had, lifted his pup, nose to tail, fitted it in the hat, shook it down, holding the hat by the brim, and stood the hat near the head of his doss, out of the moonlight. “He might get moonstruck,” said Mitchell, “and I don’t want that pup to be a genius.” The pup seemed perfectly satisfied with this new arrangement.
“Have a smoke,” said Mitchell. “You see,” he added, with a sly grin, “I’ve got to make up the yarn as I go along, and it’s hard work. It seems to begin to remind me of yarns your grandmother or aunt tells of things that happened when she was a girl—but those yarns are true. You won’t have to listen long now; I’m well on into the second volume.