The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

by Henry Lawson

  ‘I did, I tell yer – the water won’t soak inter the ashes.’

  Geraniums were the only flowers I saw grow in the drought out there. I remembered this woman had a few dirty grey-green leaves behind some sticks against the bark wall near the door; and in spite of the sticks the fowls used to get in and scratch beds under the geraniums and scratch dust over them, and ashes were thrown there – with an idea of helping the flowers, I suppose; and greasy dish-water, when fresh water was scarce – till you might as well try to water a dish of fat.

  Then the woman’s voice again:

  ‘You, Tom-may!’ (Tommy.)

  Silence, save for an echo on the ridge.

  ‘Y-o-u T-o-m-may!’

  ‘Y-e-s!’ shrill shriek from across the creek.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to ride up to them new people and see if they want any meat or anythink?’ in one long screech.

  ‘Well – I karn’t find the horse.’

  ‘Well – find – it – first – think – in – the – morning – and – don’t – forgit – to – tell – Mrs – Wi’son – that – mother’ll – be – up – as – soon – as – she – can.’

  I didn’t feel like going to the woman’s house that night. I felt – and the thought came like a whipstroke on my heart – that this was what Mary would come to if I left her here.

  I turned and started to walk home, fast. I’d made up my mind. I’d take Mary straight back to Gulgong in the morning – I forgot about the load I had to take to the sheep station. I’d say, ‘Look here, Girlie’ (that’s what I used to call her), ‘we’ll leave this wretched life; we’ll leave the Bush for ever. We’ll go to Sydney, and I’ll be a man! and work my way up.’ And I’d sell wagon, horses, and all, and go.

  When I got to the hut it was lighted up. Mary had the only kerosene lamp, a slush-lamp, and two tallow candles going. She had got both rooms washed out – to James’s disgust, for he had to move the furniture and boxes about. She had a lot of things unpacked on the table; she had laid clean newspapers on the mantelshelf – a slab on two pegs over the fireplace – and put the little wooden clock in the centre and some of the ornaments on each side, and was tacking a strip of vandyked American oilcloth round the rough edge of the slab.

  ‘How does that look, Joe? We’ll soon get things shipshape.’

  I kissed her, but she had her mouth full of tacks. I went out in the kitchen, drank a pint of cold tea, and sat down.

  Somehow I didn’t feel satisfied with the way things had gone.

  II

  ‘PAST CARIN’’

  NEXT morning things looked a lot brighter. Things always look brighter in the morning – more so in the Australian Bush, I should think, than in most other places. It is when the sun goes down on the dark bed of the lonely Bush, and the sunset flashes like a sea of fire and then fades, and then glows out again, like a bank of coals, and then burns away to ashes – it is then that old things come home to one. And strange, new-old things too, that haunt and depress you terribly, and that you can’t understand. I often think how, at sunset, the past must come home to a new-chum black sheep, sent out to Australia and drifted into the Bush. I used to think that they couldn’t have much brains, or the loneliness would drive them mad.

  I’d decided to let James take the team for a trip or two. He could drive all right; he was a better business man, and no doubt would manage better than me – as long as the novelty lasted; and I’d stay at home for a week or so, till Mary got used to the place, or I could get a girl from somewhere to come and stay with her. The first weeks or few months of loneliness are the worst, as a rule, I believe, as they say the first weeks in jail are – I was never there. I know it’s so with tramping or hard graft: the first day or two are twice as hard as any of the rest. But, for my part, I could never get used to loneliness and dullness; the last days used to be the worst with me: then I’d have to make a move, or drink. When you’ve been too much and too long alone in a lonely place, you begin to do queer things, and think queer thoughts – provided you have any imagination at all. You’ll sometimes sit of an evening and watch the lonely track, by the hour, for a horseman or a cart or someone that’s never likely to come that way – someone, or a stranger, that you can’t and don’t really expect to see. I think that most men who have been alone in the Bush for any length of time – and married couples too – are more or less mad. With married couples it is generally the husband who is painfully shy and awkward when strangers come. The woman seems to stand the loneliness better, and can hold her own with strangers, as a rule. It’s only afterwards, and looking back, that you see how queer you got. Shepherds and boundary-riders, who are alone for months, must have their periodical spree, at the nearest shanty, else they’d go raving mad. Drink is the only break in the awful monotony, and the yearly or half-yearly spree is the only thing they’ve got to look forward to: it keeps their minds fixed on something definite ahead.

  But Mary kept her head pretty well through the first months of loneliness. Weeks rather, I should say, for it wasn’t as bad as it might have been farther up-country: there was generally someone came of a Sunday afternoon – a spring-cart with a couple of women, or maybe a family – or a lanky shy bush native or two on lanky shy horses. On a quiet Sunday, after I’d brought Jim home, Mary would dress him and herself-just the same as if we were in town – and make me get up on one end and put on a collar and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek. She said she wanted to keep me civilised. She tried to make a gentleman of me for years, but gave it up gradually.

  Well. It was the first morning on the creek: I was greasing the wagon-wheels, and James out after the horse, and Mary hanging out clothes, in an old print dress and a big ugly white hood, when I heard her being hailed as ‘Hi, missus!’ from the front sliprails.

  It was a boy on horseback. He was a light-haired, very much freckled boy of fourteen or fifteen, with a small head, but with limbs, especially his bare sun-blotched shanks, that might have belonged to a grown man. He had a good face and frank grey eyes. An old, nearly black cabbage-tree hat rested on the butts of his ears, turning them out at right angles from his head, and rather dirty sprouts they were. He wore a dirty torn Crimean shirt; and a pair of men’s moleskin trousers rolled up above the knees, with a wide waistband gathered under a greenhide belt. I noticed, later on, that, even when he wore trousers short enough for him, he always rolled ’em up above the knees when on horseback, for some reason of his own: to suggest leggings, perhaps, for he had them rolled up in all weathers, and he wouldn’t have bothered to save them from the sweat of the horse, even if that horse ever sweated.

  He was seated astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole of a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern something after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy. His colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey; and, one time, when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought it was some old shepherd’s hut that I hadn’t noticed there before. When he cantered it was like the humpy starting off on its corner-posts.

  ‘Are you Mrs Wilson?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary.

  ‘Well, mother told me to ride acrost and see if you wanted anythink. We killed lars’ night, and I fetched a piece er cow.’

  ‘Piece of what?’ asked Mary.

  He grinned, and handed a sugar-bag across the rail with something heavy in the bottom of it, that nearly jerked Mary’s arm out when she took it. It was a piece of beef, that looked as if it had been cut off with a wood-axe, but it was fresh and clean.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ cried Mary. She was always impulsive, save to me sometimes. ‘I was just wondering where we were going to get any fresh meat. How kind of your mother! Tell her I’m very much obliged to her indeed.’ And she felt behind her for a poor little purse she had. ‘And now – how much did your mother say it would be?’

  The boy blinked at her, and scratched his head.

  ‘How much
will it be,’ he repeated, puzzled. ‘Oh – how much does it weigh I-s’pose-yer-mean. Well, it ain’t been weighed at all – we ain’t got no scales. A butcher does all that sort of thing. We just kills it, and cooks it, and eats it – and goes by guess. What won’t keep we salts down in the cask. I reckon it weighs about a ton by the weight of it if yer wanter know. Mother thought that if she sent any more it would go bad before you could scoff it. I can’t see –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mary, getting confused. ‘But what I want to know is, how do you manage when you sell it?’

  He glared at her, and scratched his head. ‘Sell it? Why, we only goes halves in a steer with someone, or sells steers to the butcher – or maybe some meat to a party of fencers or surveyors, or tank-sinkers, or them sorter people –”

  ‘Yes, yes; but what I want to know is, how much am I to send your mother for this?’

  ‘How much what?’

  ‘Money, of course, you stupid boy,’ said Mary. ‘You seem a very stupid boy.’

  Then he saw what she was driving at. He began to fling his heels convulsively against the sides of his horse, jerking his body backward and forward at the same time, as if to wind up and start some clock-work machinery inside the horse, that made it go, and seemed to need repairing or oiling.

  ‘We ain’t that sorter people, missus,’ he said. ‘We don’t sell meat to new people that come to settle here.’ Then, jerking his thumb contemptuously towards the ridges, ‘Go over ter Wall’s if yer wanter buy meat; they sell meat ter strangers.’ (Wall was the big squatter over the ridges.)

  ‘Oh!’ said Mary, ‘I’m so sorry. Thank your mother for me. She is kind.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nothink. She said to tell yer she’ll be up as soon as she can. She’d have come up yisterday evening – she thought yer’d feel lonely comin’ new to a place like this – but she couldn’t git up.’

  The machinery inside the old horse showed signs of starting. You almost heard the wooden joints creak as he lurched forward, like an old propped-up humpy when the rotting props give way; but at the sound of Mary’s voice he settled back on his foundations again. It must have been a very poor selection that couldn’t afford a better spare horse than that.

  ‘Reach me that lump er wood, will yer, missus?’ said the boy, and he pointed to one of my ‘spreads’ (for the team-chains) that lay inside the fence. ‘I’ll fling it back again over the fence when I git this ole cow started.’

  ‘But wait a minute – I’ve forgotten your mother’s name,’ said Mary.

  He grabbed at his thatch impatiently. ‘Me mother – oh! – the old woman’s name’s Mrs Spicer. (Git up, karn’t yer!)’ He twisted himself round, and brought the stretcher down on one of the horse’s ‘points’ (and he had many) with a crack that must have jarred his wrist.

  ‘Do you go to school?’ asked Mary. There was a three-days-a-week school over the ridges at Wall’s station.

  ‘No!’ he jerked out, keeping his legs going. ‘Me – why I’m going on fur fifteen. The last teacher at Wall’s finished me. I’m going to Queensland next month drovin’.’ (Queensland border was over three hundred miles away.)

  ‘Finished you? How?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Me edgercation, of course! How do yer expect me to start this horse when yer keep talkin’?’

  He split the ‘spread’ over the horse’s point, threw the pieces over the fence, and was off, his elbows and legs flinging wildly, and the old sawstool lumbering along the road like an old working bullock trying a canter. That horse wasn’t a trotter.

  And next month he did start for Queensland. He was a younger son and a surplus boy on a wretched, poverty-stricken selection; and as there was ‘northin’ doin’’ in the district, his father (in a burst of fatherly kindness, I suppose) made him a present of the old horse and a new pair of blucher boots, and I gave him an old saddle and a coat, and he started for the Never-Never country.

  And I’ll bet he got there. But I’m doubtful if the old horse did.

  Mary gave the boy five shillings, and I don’t think he had anything more except a clean shirt and an extra pair of white cotton socks.

  ‘Spicer’s farm’ was a big bark humpy on a patchy clearing in the native apple-tree scrub. The clearing was fenced in by a light ‘doglegged’ fence (a fence of sapling poles resting on forks and X-shaped uprights), and the dusty ground round the house was almost entirely covered with cattle-dung. There was no attempt at cultivation when I came to live on the creek; but there were old furrow-marks amongst the stumps of another shapeless patch in the scrub near the hut. There was a wretched sapling cow-yard and calf-pen, and a cow-bail with one sheet of bark over it for shelter. There was no dairy to be seen, and I suppose the milk was set in one of the two skillion rooms, or lean-to’s behind the hut – the other was ‘the boys’ bedroom’. The Spicers kept a few cows and steers, and had thirty or forty sheep. Mrs Spicer used to drive down the creek once a week, in her rickety old spring-cart, to Cobborah, with butter and eggs. The hut was nearly as bare inside as it was out – just a frame of ‘round-timber’ (sapling poles) covered with bark. The furniture was permanent (unless you rooted it up), like in our kitchen: a rough slab table on stakes driven into the ground, and seats made the same way. Mary told me afterwards that the beds in the bag-and-bark partitioned-off room (‘mother’s bedroom’) were simply poles laid side by side on cross-pieces supported by stakes driven into the ground, with straw mattresses and some worn-out bed-clothes. Mrs Spicer had an old patchwork quilt, in rags, and the remains of a white one, and Mary said it was pitiful to see how these things would be spread over the beds – to hide them as much as possible – when she went down there. A packing-case, with something like an old print skirt draped round it, and a cracked looking-glass (without a frame) on top, was the dressing-table. There were a couple of gin-cases for a wardrobe. The boys’ beds were three-bushel bags stretched between poles fastened to uprights. The floor was the original surface, tramped hard, worn uneven with much sweeping, and with puddles in rainy weather where the roof leaked. Mrs Spicer used to stand old tins, dishes, and buckets under as many of the leaks as she could. The saucepans, kettles and boilers were old kerosene-tins and billies. They used kerosene-tins, too, cut longways in halves, for setting the milk in. The plates and cups were of tin; there were two or three cups without saucers, and a crockery plate or two – also two mugs, cracked, and without handles, one with ‘For a Good Boy’ and the other with ‘For a Good Girl’ on it; but all these were kept on the mantelshelf for ornament and for company. They were the only ornaments in the house, save a little wooden clock that hadn’t gone for years. Mrs Spicer had a superstition that she had ‘some things packed away from the children’.

  The pictures were cut from old copies of the Illustrated Sydney News and pasted on to the bark. I remember this, because I remembered, long ago, the Spencers, who were our neighbours when I was a boy, had the walls of their bedroom covered with illustrations of the American Civil War, cut from illustrated London papers, and I used to ‘sneak’ into ‘mother’s bedroom’ with Fred Spencer whenever we got a chance, and gloat over the prints. I gave him the blade of a pocket-knife once, for taking me in there.

  I saw very little of Spicer. He was a big, dark, dark-haired and whiskered man. I had an idea that he wasn’t a selector at all, only a ‘dummy’ for the squatter of the Cobborah run. You see, selectors were allowed to take up land on runs, or pastoral leases. The squatters kept them off as much as possible, by all manner of dodges and paltry persecution. The squatter would get as much freehold as he could afford, ‘select’ as much land as the law allowed one man to take up, and then employ dummies (dummy selectors) to take up bits of land that he fancied about his run, and hold them for him.

  Spicer seemed gloomy and unsociable. He was seldom at home. He was generally supposed to be away shearin’, or fencin’, or workin’ on somebody’s station. It turned out that the last six months he was away it was on the evidence of a cask of beef and a hide
with the brand cut out, found in his camp on a fencing contract up-country, and which he and his mates couldn’t account for satisfactorily, while the squatter could. Then the family lived mostly on bread and honey, or bread and treacle, or bread and dripping, and tea. Every ounce of butter and every egg was needed for the market, to keep them in flour, tea, and sugar. Mary found that out, but couldn’t help them much – except by ‘stuffing’ the children with bread and meat or bread and jam whenever they came to our place – for Mrs Spicer was proud with the pride that lies down in the end and turns its face to the wall and dies.

  Once, when Mary asked Annie, the eldest girl at home, if she was hungry, she denied it – but she looked it. A ragged mite she had with her explained things. The little fellow said:

  ‘Mother told Annie not to say we was hungry if yer asked; but if yer give us anythink to eat, we was to take it an’ say thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ’a’ told yer a lie; but I thought Jimmy would split on me, Mrs Wilson,’ said Annie. ‘Thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.’

  She was not a big woman. She was gaunt and flat-chested, and her face was ‘burnt to a brick’, as they say out there. She had brown eyes, nearly red, and a little wild-looking at times, and a sharp face – ground sharp by hardship – the cheeks drawn in. She had an expression like – well, like a woman who had been very curious and suspicious at one time, and wanted to know everybody’s business and hear everything, and had lost all her curiosity, without losing the expression or the quick suspicious movements of the head. I don’t suppose you understand. I can’t explain it any other way. She was not more than forty.

  I remember the first morning I saw her. I was going up the creek to look at the selection for the first time, and called at the hut to see if she had a bit of fresh mutton, as I had none and was sick of ‘corned beef’.

  ‘Yes – of – course,’ she said, in a sharp nasty tone, as if to say, ‘Is there anything more you want while the shop’s open?’ I’d met just the same sort of woman years before while I was carrying swag between the shearing-sheds in the awful scrubs out west of the Darling River, so I didn’t turn on my heels and walk away. I waited for her to speak again.