Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

There is a yarn along the Darling about a cute Yankee who was invited up to Bourke to report on a proposed scheme for locking the river. He arrived towards the end of a long and severe drought, and was met at the railway station by a deputation of representative bushmen, who invited him, in the first place, to accompany them to the principal pub--which he did. He had been observed to study the scenery a good deal while coming up in the train, but kept his conclusions to himself. On the way to the pub he had a look at the town, and it was noticed that he tilted his hat forward very often, and scratched the back of his head a good deal, and pondered a lot; but he refrained from expressing an opinion--even when invited to do so. He guessed that his opinions wouldn't do much good, anyway, and he calculated that they would keep till he got back “over our way”--by which it was reckoned he meant the States.

When they asked him what he'd have, he said to Watty the publican:

“Wal, I reckon you can build me your national drink. I guess I'll try it.”

A long colonial was drawn for him, and he tried it. He seemed rather startled at first, then he looked curiously at the half-empty glass, set it down very softly on the bar, and leaned against the same and fell into a reverie; from which he roused himself after a while, with a sorrowful jerk of his head.

“Ah, well,” he said. “Show me this river of yourn.”

They led him to the Darling, and he had a look at it.

“Is this your river?” he asked.

“Yes,” they replied, apprehensively.

He tilted his hat forward till the brim nearly touched his nose, scratched the back of his long neck, shut one eye, and looked at the river with the other. Then, after spitting half a pint of tobacco juice into the stream, he turned sadly on his heel and led the way back to the pub. He invited the boys to “pisen themselves”; after they were served he ordered out the longest tumbler on the premises, poured a drop into it from nearly every bottle on the shelf, added a lump of ice, and drank slowly and steadily.

Then he took pity on the impatient and anxious population, opened his mouth, and spake.

“Look here, fellows,” he drawled, jerking his arm in the direction of the river, “I'll tell you what I'll dew. I'll bottle that damned river of yourn in twenty-four hours!”

Later on he mellowed a bit, under the influence of several drinks which were carefully and conscientiously “built” from plans and specifications supplied by himself, and then, among other things, he said:

“If that there river rises as high as you say it dew--and if this was the States--why, we'd have had the Great Eastern up here twenty years ago”----or words to that effect.

Then he added, reflectively:

“When I come over here I calculated that I was going to make things hum, but now I guess I'll have to change my prospectus. There's a lot of loose energy laying round over our way, but I guess that if I wanted to make things move in your country I'd have to bring over the entire American nation--also his wife and dawg. You've got the makings of a glorious nation over here, but you don't get up early enough!”

. . . . .

The only national work performed by the blacks is on the Darling. They threw a dam of rocks across the river--near Brewarrina, we think--to make a fish trap. It's there yet. But God only knows where they got the stones from, or how they carried them, for there isn't a pebble within forty miles.

A Case for the Oracle

The Oracle and I were camped together. The Oracle was a bricklayer by trade, and had two or three small contracts on hand. I was “doing a bit of house-painting”. There were a plasterer, a carpenter, and a plumber--we were all T'othersiders, and old mates, and we worked things together. It was in Westralia--the Land of T'othersiders--and, therefore, we were not surprised when Mitchell turned up early one morning, with his swag and an atmosphere of salt water about him.

He'd had a rough trip, he said, and would take a spell that day and take the lay of the land and have something cooked for us by the time we came home; and go to graft himself next morning. And next morning he went to work, “labouring” for the Oracle.

The Oracle and his mates, being small contractors and not pressed for time, had dispensed with the services of a labourer, and had done their own mixing and hod-carrying in turns. They didn't want a labourer now, but the Oracle was a vague fatalist, and Mitchell a decided one. So it passed.

The Oracle had a “Case” right under his nose--in his own employ, in fact; but was not aware of the fact until Mitchell drew his attention to it. The Case went by the name of Alfred O'Briar--which hinted a mixed parentage. He was a small, nervous working-man, of no particular colour, and no decided character, apparently. If he had a soul above bricks, he never betrayed it. He was not popular on the jobs. There was something sly about Alf, they said.

The Oracle had taken him on in the first place as a day-labourer, but afterwards shared the pay with him as with Mitchell. O'Briar shouted--judiciously, but on every possible occasion--for the Oracle; and, as he was an indifferent workman, the boys said he only did this so that the Oracle might keep him on. If O'Briar took things easy and did no more than the rest of us, at least one of us would be sure to get it into his head that he was loafing on us; and if he grafted harder than we did, we'd be sure to feel indignant about that too, and reckon that it was done out of nastiness or crawlsomeness, and feel a contempt for him accordingly. We found out accidentally that O'Briar was an excellent mimic and a bit of a ventriloquist, but he never entertained us with his peculiar gifts; and we set that down to churlishness.

O'Briar kept his own counsel, and his history, if he had one; and hid his hopes, joys, and sorrows, if he had any, behind a vacant grin, as Mitchell hid his behind a quizzical one. He never resented alleged satire--perhaps he couldn't see it--and therefore he got the name of being a cur. As a rule, he was careful with his money, and was called mean--not, however, by the Oracle, whose philosophy was simple, and whose sympathy could not realise a limit; nor yet by Mitchell. Mitchell waited.

. . . . .

O'Briar occupied a small tent by himself, and lived privately of evenings. When we began to hear two men talking at night in his tent, we were rather surprised, and wondered in a vague kind of way how any of the chaps could take sufficient interest in Alf to go in and yarn with him. In the days when he was supposed to be sociable, we had voted him a bore; even the Oracle was moved to admit that he was “a bit slow”.

But late one night we distinctly heard a woman's voice in O'Briar's tent. The Oracle suddenly became hard of hearing, and, though we heard the voice on several occasions, he remained exasperatingly deaf, yet aggressively unconscious of the fact. “I have got enough to do puzzling over me own whys and wherefores,” he said. Mitchell began to take some interest in O'Briar, and treated him with greater respect. But our camp had the name of being the best-constructed, the cleanest, and the most respectable in the vicinity. The health officer and constable in charge had complimented us on the fact, and we were proud of it. And there were three young married couples in camp, also a Darby and Joan; therefore, when the voice of a woman began to be heard frequently and at disreputable hours of the night in O'Briar's tent, we got uneasy about it. And when the constable who was on night duty gave us a friendly hint, Mitchell and I agreed that something must be done.

“Av coorse, men will be men,” said the constable, as he turned his horse's head, “but I thought I'd mention it. O'Briar is a dacent man, and he's one of yer mates. Av coorse. There's a bad lot in that camp in the scrub over yander, and--av coorse. Good-day to ye, byes.”

. . . . .

Next night we heard the voice in O'Briar's tent again, and decided to speak to Alf in a friendly way about it in the morning. We listened outside in the dark, but could not distinguish the words, though I thought I recognised the voice.

“It's the hussy from the camp over there; she's got holt of that fool, and she'll clean him out before she's done,” I said. “We're Alf's mates, any way it goes, and we ought to put a stop to it.”

“What hussy?” asked Mitchell; “there's three or four there.”

“The one with her hair all over her head,” I answered.

“Where else should it be?” asked Mitchell. “But I'll just have a peep and see who it is. There's no harm in that.”

He crept up to the tent and cautiously moved the flap. Alf's candle was alight; he lay on his back in his bunk with his arms under his head, calmly smoking. We withdrew.

“They must have heard us,” said Mitchell; “and she's slipped out under the tent at the back, and through the fence into the scrub.”

Mitchell's respect for Alf increased visibly.

But we began to hear ominous whispers from the young married couples, and next Saturday night, which was pay-night, we decided to see it through. We did not care to speak to Alf until we were sure. He stayed in camp, as he often did, on Saturday evening, while the others went up town. Mitchell and I returned earlier than usual, and leaned on the fence at the back of Alf's tent.

We were scarcely there when we were startled by a “rat-tat-tat” as of someone knocking at a door. Then an old woman's voice INSIDE the tent asked: “Who's there?”

“It's me,” said Alf's voice from the front, “Mr. O'Briar from Perth.”

“Mary, go and open the door!” said the old woman. (Mitchell nudged me to keep quiet.)

“Come in, Mr. O'Breer,” said the old woman. “Come in. How do you do? When did you get back?”

“Only last night,” said Alf.

“Look at that now! Bless us all! And how did you like the country at all?”

“I didn't care much for it,” said Alf. We lost the thread of it until the old woman spoke again.

“Have you had your tea, Mr. O'Breer?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.”

“Are you quite sure, man?”

“Quite sure, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.” (Mitchell trod on my foot.)

“Will you have a drop of whisky or a glass of beer, Mr. O'Breer?”

“I'll take a glass of beer, thank you, Mrs. O'Connor.”

There seemed to be a long pause. Then the old woman said, “Ah, well, I must get my work done, and Mary will stop here and keep you company, Mr. O'Breer.” The arrangement seemed satisfactory to all parties, for there was nothing more said for a while. (Mitchell nudged me again, with emphasis, and I kicked his shin.)

Presently Alf said: “Mary!” And a girl's voice said, “Yes, Alf.”

“You remember the night I went away, Mary?”

“Yes, Alf, I do.”

“I have travelled long ways since then, Mary; I worked hard and lived close. I didn't make my fortune, but I managed to rub a note or two together. It was a hard time and a lonesome time for me, Mary. The summer's awful over there, and livin's bad and dear. You couldn't have any idea of it, Mary.”

“No, Alf.”

“I didn't come back so well off as I expected.”

“But that doesn't matter, Alf.”

“I got heart-sick and tired of it, and couldn't stand it any longer, Mary.”

“But that's all over now, Alf; you mustn't think of it.”

“Your mother wrote to me.”

“I know she did”--(very low and gently).

“And do you know what she put in it, Mary?”

“Yes, Alf.”

“And did you ask her to put it in?”

“Don't ask me, Alf.”

“And it's all true, Mary?”

There was no answer, but the silence seemed satisfactory.

“And be sure you have yourself down here on Sunday, Alf, me son.” (“There's the old woman come back!” said Mitchell.)

“An' since the girl's willin' to have ye, and the ould woman's willin'--there's me hand on it, Alf, me boy. An' God bless ye both.” (“The old man's come now,” said Mitchell.)

. . . . .

“Come along,” said Mitchell, leading the way to the front of the tent.

“But I wouldn't like to intrude on them. It's hardly right, Mitchell, is it?”

“That's all right,” said Mitchell. He tapped the tent pole.

“Come in,” said Alf. Alf was lying on his bunk as before, with his arms under his head. His face wore a cheerful, not to say happy, expression. There was no one else in the tent. I was never more surprised in my life.

“Have you got the paper, Alf?” said Mitchell.

“Yes. You'll find it there at the foot of the bunk. There it is. Won't you sit down, Mitchell?”

“Not to-night,” said Mitchell. “We brought you a bottle of ale. We're just going to turn in.”

And we said “good-night”. “Well,” I said to Mitchell when we got inside, “what do you think of it?”

“I don't think of it at all,” said Mitchell. “Do you mean to say you can't see it now?”

“No, I'm dashed if I can,” I said. “Some of us must be drunk, I think, or getting rats. It's not to be wondered at, and the sooner we get out of this country the better.”

“Well, you must be a fool, Joe,” said Mitchell. “Can't you see? ALF THINKS ALOUD.”

“WHAT?”

“Talks to himself. He was thinking about going back to his sweetheart. Don't you know he's a bit of a ventriloquist?”

Mitchell lay awake a long time, in the position that Alf usually lay in, and thought. Perhaps he thought on the same lines as Alf did that night. But Mitchell did his thinking in silence.

We thought it best to tell the Oracle quietly. He was deeply interested, but not surprised. “I've heerd of such cases before,” he said. But the Oracle was a gentleman. “There's things that a man wants to keep to himself that ain't his business,” he said. And we understood this remark to be intended for our benefit, and to indicate a course of action upon which the Oracle had decided, with respect to this case, and which we, in his opinion, should do well to follow.

Alf got away a week or so later, and we all took a holiday and went down to Fremantle to see him off. Perhaps he wondered why Mitchell gripped his hand so hard and wished him luck so earnestly, and was surprised when he gave him three cheers.

“Ah, well!” remarked Mitchell, as we turned up the wharf.

“I've heerd of such cases before,” said the Oracle, meditatively. “They ain't common, but I've hear'd of such cases before.”

A Daughter of Maoriland

A sketch of poor-class Maoris

The new native-school teacher, who was “green”, “soft”, and poetical, and had a literary ambition, called her “August”, and fondly hoped to build a romance on her character. She was down in the school registers as Sarah Moses, Maori, 16 years and three months. She looked twenty; but this was nothing, insomuch as the mother of the youngest child in the school--a dear little half-caste lady of two or three summers--had not herself the vaguest idea of the child's age, nor anybody else's, nor of ages in the abstract. The church register was lost some six years before, when “Granny”, who was a hundred, if a day, was supposed to be about twenty-five. The teacher had to guess the ages of all the new pupils.

August was apparently the oldest in the school--a big, ungainly, awkward girl, with a heavy negro type of Maori countenance, and about as much animation, mentally or physically, as a cow. She was given to brooding; in fact, she brooded all the time. She brooded all day over her school work, but did it fairly well. How the previous teachers had taught her all she knew was a mystery to the new one. There had been a tragedy in August's family when she was a child, and the affair seemed to have cast a gloom over the lives of the entire family, for the lowering brooding cloud was on all their faces. August would take to the bush when things went wrong at home, and climb a tree and brood till she was found and coaxed home. Things, according to pa gossip, had gone wrong with her from the date of the tragedy, when she, a bright little girl, was taken--a homeless orphan--to live with a sister, and, afterwards, with an aunt-by-marriage. They treated her, 'twas said, with a brutality which must have been greatly exaggerated by pa-gossip, seeing that unkindness of this description is, according to all the best authorities, altogether foreign to Maori nature.

Pa-gossip--which is less reliable than the ordinary washerwoman kind, because of a deeper and more vicious ignorance--had it that one time when August was punished by a teacher (or beaten by her sister or aunt-by-marriage) she “took to the bush” for three days, at the expiration of which time she was found on the ground in an exhausted condition. She was evidently a true Maori or savage, and this was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition took an interest in her. She had a print of a portrait of a man in soldier's uniform, taken from a copy of the 'Illustrated London News', pasted over the fireplace in the whare where she lived, and neatly bordered by vandyked strips of silvered tea-paper. She had pasted it in the place of honour, or as near as she could get to it. The place of honour was sacred to framed representations of the Nativity and Catholic subjects, half-modelled, half-pictured. The print was a portrait of the last Czar of Russia, of all the men in the world; and August was reported to have said that she loved that man. His father had been murdered, so had her mother. This was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition thought he could get a romance out of her.

After the first week she hung round the new schoolmistress, dog-like--with “dog-like affection”, thought the teacher. She came down often during the holidays, and hung about the verandah and back door for an hour or so; then, by-and-bye, she'd be gone. Her brooding seemed less aggressive on such occasions. The teacher reckoned that she had something on her mind, and wanted to open her heart to “the wife”, but was too ignorant or too shy, poor girl; and he reckoned, from his theory of Maori character, that it might take her weeks, or months, to come to the point. One day, after a great deal of encouragement, she explained that she felt “so awfully lonely, Mrs. Lorrens.” All the other girls were away, and she wished it was school-time.

She was happy and cheerful again, in her brooding way, in the playground. There was something sadly ludicrous about her great, ungainly figure slopping round above the children at play. The schoolmistress took her into the parlour, gave her tea and cake, and was kind to her; and she took it all with broody cheerfulness.

One Sunday morning she came down to the cottage and sat on the edge of the verandah, looking as wretchedly miserable as a girl could. She was in rags--at least, she had a rag of a dress on--and was barefooted and bareheaded. She said that her aunt had turned her out, and she was going to walk down the coast to Whale Bay to her grandmother--a long day's ride. The teacher was troubled, because he was undecided what to do. He had to be careful to avoid any unpleasantness arising out of Maori cliquism. As the teacher he couldn't let her go in the state she was in; from the depths of his greenness he trusted her, from the depths of his softness he pitied her; his poetic nature was fiercely indignant on account of the poor girl's wrongs, and the wife spoke for her. Then he thought of his unwritten romance, and regarded August in the light of copy, and that settled it. While he talked the matter over with his wife, August “hid in the dark of her hair,” awaiting her doom. The teacher put his hat on, walked up to the pa, and saw her aunt. She denied that she had turned August out, but the teacher believed the girl. He explained his position, in words simplified for Maori comprehension, and the aunt and relations said they understood, and that he was “perfectly right, Mr. Lorrens.” They were very respectful. The teacher said that if August would not return home, he was willing to let her stay at the cottage until such time as her uncle, who was absent, returned, and he (the teacher) could talk the matter over with him. The relations thought that that was the very best thing that could be done, and thanked him. The aunt, two sisters, and as many of the others, including the children, as were within sight or hail at the time--most of them could not by any possible means have had the slightest connection with the business in hand--accompanied the teacher to the cottage. August took to the flax directly she caught sight of her relations, and was with difficulty induced to return. There was a lot of talk in Maori, during which the girl and her aunt shuffled and swung round at the back of each other, and each talked over her shoulder, and laughed foolishly and awkwardly once or twice; but in the end the girl was sullenly determined not to return home, so it was decided that she should stay. The schoolmistress made tea.

August brightened from the first day. She was a different girl altogether. “I never saw such a change in a girl,” said the young schoolmistress, and one or two others. “I always thought she was a good girl if taken the right way; all she wanted was a change and kind treatment.” But the stolid old Maori chairman of the school committee only shrugged his shoulders and said (when the schoolmistress, woman-like, pressed him for an opinion to agree with her own), “You can look at it two ways, Mrs. Lorrens.” Which, by the way, was about the only expression of opinion that the teacher was ever able to get out of him on any subject.

August worked and behaved well. She was wonderfully quick in picking up English ways and housework. True, she was awkward and not over cleanly in some things, but her mistress had patience with her. Who wouldn't have? She “couldn't do enough” for her benefactress; she hung on her words and sat at her footstool of evenings in a way that gladdened the teacher's sentimental nature; she couldn't bear to see him help his wife with a hat-pin or button--August must do it. She insisted on doing her mistress' hair every night. In short, she tried in every way to show her gratitude. The teacher and his wife smiled brightly at each other behind her back, and thought how cheerful the house was since she came, and wondered what they'd do without her. It was a settled thing that they should take her back to the city with them, and have a faithful and grateful retainer all their lives and a sort of Aunt Chloe for their children, when they had any. The teacher got yards of copy out of her for his “Maori Sketches and Characters”, worked joyously at his romance, and felt great already, and was happy. She had a bed made up temporarily (until the teacher could get a spring mattress for her from town) on the floor in the dining-room, and when she'd made her bed she'd squat on it in front of the fire and sing Maori songs in a soft voice. She'd sing the teacher and his wife, in the next room, to sleep. Then she'd get up and have a feed, but they never heard her.

Her manners at the table (for she was treated “like one of themselves” in the broadest sense of the term) were surprisingly good, considering that the adults of her people were decidedly cow-like in white society, and scoffed sea-eggs, shell-fish, and mutton-birds at home with a gallop which was not edifying. Her appetite, it was true, was painful at times to the poetic side of the teacher's nature; but he supposed that she'd been half-starved at home, poor girl, and would get over it. Anyway, the copy he'd get out of her would repay him for this and other expenses a hundredfold. Moreover, begging and borrowing had ceased with her advent, and the teacher set this down to her influence.

The first jar came when she was sent on horseback to the town for groceries, and didn't get back till late the next day. She explained that some of her relations got hold of her and made her stay, and wanted her to go into public-houses with them, but she wouldn't. She said that SHE wanted to come home. But why didn't she? The teacher let it pass, and hoped she'd gain strength of character by-and-bye. He had waited up late the night before with her supper on the hob; and he and his wife had been anxious for fear something had happened to the poor girl who was under their care. He had walked to the treacherous river-ford several times during the evening, and waited there for her. So perhaps he was tired, and that was why he didn't write next night.

The sugar-bag, the onion-basket, the potato-bag and the tea-chest began to “go down” alarmingly, and an occasional pound of candles, a pigeon, a mutton-bird (plucked and ready for Sunday's cooking), and other little trifles went, also. August couldn't understand it, and the teacher believed her, for falsehood and deceit are foreign to the simple natures of the modern Maoris. There were no cats; but no score of ordinary cats could have given colour to the cat theory, had it been raised in this case. The breath of August advertised onions more than once, but no human stomach could have accounted for the quantity. She surely could not have eaten the other things raw--and she had no opportunities for private cooking, as far as the teacher and his wife could see. The other Maoris were out of the question; they were all strictly honest.

Thefts and annoyances of the above description were credited to the “swaggies” who infested the roads, and had a very bad name down that way; so the teacher loaded his gun, and told August to rouse him at once, if she heard a sound in the night. She said she would; but a heavy-weight “swaggie” could have come in and sat on her and had a smoke without waking her.

She couldn't be trusted to go a message. She'd take from three to six hours, and come back with an excuse that sounded genuine from its very simplicity. Another sister of hers lay ill in an isolated hut, alone and uncared for, except by the teacher's wife, and occasionally by a poor pa outcast who had negro blood in her veins, and a love for a white loafer. God help her! All of which sounds strange, considering that Maoris are very kind to each other. The schoolmistress sent August one night to stay with the sick Maori woman and help her as she could, and gave her strict instructions to come to the cottage first thing in the morning, and tell her how the sick woman was. August turned up at lunch-time next day. The teacher gave her her first lecture, and said plainly that he wasn't to be taken for a fool; then he stepped aside to get cool, and, when he returned, the girl was sobbing as if her heart would break, and the wife comforting her. She had been up all night, poor girl, and was thoroughly worn out. Somehow the teacher didn't feel uncomfortable about it. He went down to the whare. August had not touched a dishcloth or broom. She had slept, as she always did, like a pig, all night, while her sister lay and tossed in agony; in the morning she ate everything there was to eat in the house (which, it seemed, was the Maori way of showing sympathy in sickness and trouble), after which she brooded by the fire till the children, running out of school, announced the teacher's lunch hour.

August braced up again for a little while. The master thought of the trouble they had with Ayacanora in “Westward Ho”, and was comforted, and tackled his romance again. Then the schoolmistress fell sick and things went wrong. The groceries went down faster than ever, and the house got very dirty, and began to have a native smell about it. August grew fat, and lazy, and dirty, and less reliable on washing-days, or when there was anything special to do in the house. “The savage blood is strong,” thought the teacher, “and she is beginning to long for her own people and free unconventional life.” One morning--on a washing-day, too, as it happened--she called out, before the teacher and his wife were up, that the Maoris who supplied them with milk were away, and she had promised to go up and milk the cow and bring the milk down. The teacher gave her permission. One of the scholars usually brought the milk early. Lunch time came and no August, no milk--strangest of all, only half the school children. The teacher put on his hat, and went up to the pa once more. He found August squatted in the midst of a circle of relations. She was entertaining them with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the teacher's domestic life, in which she showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards, and her character sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations--for she spared nobody--would have earned a white woman a long and well-merited term of imprisonment for criminal libel. She had cunningly, by straightforward and unscrupulous lying, prejudiced the principal mother and boss woman of the pa against the teacher and his wife; as a natural result of which the old lady, who, like the rest, was very ignorant and ungrateful, “turned nasty” and kept the children from school. The teacher lost his temper, so the children were rounded up and hurried down to school immediately; with them came August and her aunt, with alleged explanations and excuses, and a shell-fish. The aunt and sisters said they'd have nothing to do with August. They didn't want her and wouldn't have her. The teacher said that, under those circumstances, she'd better go and drown herself; so she went home with them.

The whole business had been a plot by her nearest relations. They got rid of the trouble and expense of keeping her, and the bother of borrowing in person, whenever in need of trifles in the grocery line. Borrowing recommenced with her dismissal; but the teacher put a full stop to it, as far as he was concerned. Then August, egged on by her aunt, sent a blackguardly letter to the teacher's wife; the sick sister, by the way, who had been nursed and supplied with food by her all along, was in it, and said she was glad August sent the letter, and it served the schoolmistress right. The teacher went up to the pa once more; an hour later, August in person, accompanied, as usual, by a relation or two, delivered at the cottage an abject apology in writing, the composition of which would have discouraged the most enthusiastic advocate of higher education for the lower classes.

Then various petty annoyances were tried. The teacher is firmly convinced that certain animal-like sounds round the house at night were due to August's trying to find out whether his wife was as likely to be haunted as the Maoris were. He didn't dream of such a thing at the time, for he did not believe that one of them had the pluck to venture out after dark. But savage superstition must give way to savage hate. The girl's last “try-on” was to come down to the school fence, and ostentatiously sharpen a table-knife on the wires, while she scowled murderously in the direction of the schoolmistress, who was hanging out her washing. August looked, in her dark, bushy, Maori hair, a thoroughly wild savage. Her father had murdered her mother under particularly brutal circumstances, and the daughter took after her father.

The teacher called her and said: “Now, look here, my lady, the best thing you can do is to drop that nonsense at once” (she had dropped the knife in the ferns behind her), “for we're the wrong sort of people to try it on with. Now you get out of this and tell your aunt--she's sneaking there in the flax--what I tell you, and that she'd better clear out of this quick, or I'll have a policeman out and take the whole gang into town in an hour. Now be off, and shut that gate behind you, carefully, and fasten it.” She did, and went.

The worst of it was that the August romance copy was useless. Her lies were even less reliable and picturesque than the common Jones Alley hag lie. Then the teacher thought of the soft fool he'd been, and that made him wild. He looked like a fool, and was one to a great extent, but it wasn't good policy to take him for one.

Strange to say, he and others had reason to believe that August respected him, and liked him rather than otherwise; but she hated his wife, who had been kind to her, as only a savage can hate. The younger pupils told the teacher, cheerfully and confidently, that August said she'd cut Mrs. Lorrens' throat the first chance she got. Next week the aunt sent down to ask if the teacher could sell her a bar of soap, and sent the same old shilling; he was tired of seeing it stuck out in front of him, so he took it, put it in his pocket, and sent the soap. This must have discouraged them, for the borrowing industry petered out. He saw the aunt later on, and she told him, cheerfully, that August was going to live with a half-caste in a certain house in town.

Poor August! For she was only a tool after all. Her “romance” was briefly as follows:--She went, per off-hand Maori arrangement, as 'housekeeper' in the hut of a labourer at a neighbouring saw-mill. She stayed three months, for a wonder; at the expiration of which time she put on her hat and explained that she was tired of stopping there, and was going home. He said, 'All right, Sarah, wait a while and I'll take you home.' At the door of her aunt's house he said, 'Well, good-bye, Sarah,' and she said, in her brooding way, 'Good-bye, Jim.' And that was all.

As the last apparent result of August's mischief-making, her brother or someone one evening rode up to the cottage, drunk and inclined to bluster. He was accompanied by a friend, also drunk, who came to see the fun, and was ready to use his influence on the winning side. The teacher went inside, brought out his gun, and slipped two cartridges in. “I've had enough of this,” he said. “Now then, be off, you insolent blackguards, or I'll shoot you like rabbits. Go!” and he snapped his jaw and the breech of his gun together. As they rode off, the old local hawk happened to soar close over a dead lamb in the fern at the corner of the garden, and the teacher, who had been “laying” for him a long time, let fly both barrels at him, without thinking. When he turned, there was only a cloud of dust down the track.

. . . . .

The teacher taught that school for three years thereafter, without a hitch. But he went no more on Universal Brotherhood lines. And, for years after he had gone, his name was spoken of with great respect by the Maoris.

New Year's Night

It was dark enough for anything in Dead Man's Gap--a round, warm, close darkness, in which retreating sounds seemed to be cut off suddenly at a distance of a hundred yards or so, instead of growing faint and fainter, and dying away, to strike the ear once or twice again--and after minutes, it might seem--with startling distinctness, before being finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights. So with the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through the “saddle”, the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel down the hidden “siding”, and the low sound of men's voices, blurred and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed, awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an empty saddle on its back--a lady's or “side-saddle”, if one could have distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely as though a great sound-proof door had swung to behind them.

It was dark enough on the glaringest of days down in the lonely hollow or “pocket”, between two spurs, at the head of a blind gully behind Mount Buckaroo, where there was a more or less dusty patch, barely defined even in broad daylight by a spidery dog-legged fence on three sides, and a thin “two-rail” (dignified with the adjective “split-rail”--though rails and posts were mostly of saplings split in halves) running along the frontage. In about the middle of it a little slab hut, overshadowed by a big stringy-bark shed, was pointed out as Johnny Mears's Farm.

“Black as--as charcoal,” said Johnny Mears. He had never seen coal, and was a cautious man, whose ideas came slowly. He stooped, close by the fence, with his hands on his knees, to “sky” the loom of his big shed and so get his bearings. He had been to have a look at the penned calves, and see that all slip-rails were up and pegged, for the words of John Mears junior, especially when delivered rapidly and shrilly and in injured tones, were not to be relied upon in these matters.

“It's hot enough to melt the belly out of my fiddle,” said Johnny Mears to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the little whitewashed “end-room”, putting a patch of patches over the seat of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. He lit his pipe, moved a stool to the side of the great empty fireplace, where it looked cooler--might have been cooler on account of a possible draught suggested by the presence of the chimney, and where, therefore, he felt a breath cooler. He took his fiddle from a convenient shelf, tuned it slowly and carefully, holding his pipe (in his mouth) well up and to one side, as if the fiddle were an inquisitive and restless baby. He played “Little Drops o' Brandy” three times, right through, without variations, blinking solemnly the while; then he put the violin carefully back in its box, and started to cut up another pipeful.

“You should have gone, Johnny,” said the haggard little woman.

“Rackin' the horse out a night like this,” retorted Johnny, “and startin' ploughin' to-morrow. It ain't worth while. Let them come for me if they want me. Dance on a night like this! Why! they'll dance in----”

“But you promised. It won't do you no good, Johnny.”

“It won't do me no harm.”

The little woman went on stitching.

“It's smotherin' hot,” said Johnny, with an impatient oath. “I don't know whether I'll turn in, or turn out, under the shed to-night. It's too d----d hot to roost indoors.”

She bent her head lower over the patch. One smoked and the other stitched in silence for twenty minutes or so, during which time Johnny might be supposed to have been deliberating listlessly as to whether he'd camp out on account of the heat, or turn in. But he broke the silence with a clout at a mosquito on the nape of his neck, and a bad word.

“I wish you wouldn't swear so much, Johnny,” she said wearily--“at least not to-night.”

He looked at her blankly.

“Why--why to-night? What's the matter with you to-night, Mary? What's to-night more than any other night to you? I see no harm--can't a man swear when a mosquito sticks him?”

“I--I was only thinking of the boys, Johnny.”

“The boys! Why, they're both on the hay in the shed.” He stared at her again, shifted uneasily, crossed the other leg tightly, frowned, blinked, and reached for the matches. “You look a bit off-colour, Mary. It's the heat that makes us all a bit ratty at times. Better put that by and have a swill o' oatmeal and water, and turn in.”

“It's too hot to go to bed. I couldn't sleep. I'm all right. I'll--I'll just finish this. Just reach me a drink from the water-bag--the pannikin's on the hob there, by your boot.”

He scratched his head helplessly, and reached for the drink. When he sat down again, he felt strangely restless. “Like a hen that didn't know where to lay,” he put it. He couldn't settle down or keep still, and didn't seem to enjoy his pipe somehow. He rubbed his head again.

“There's a thunderstorm comin',” he said. “That's what it is; and the sooner it comes the better.”

He went to the back door, and stared at the blackness to the east, and, sure enough, lightning was blinking there.

“It's coming, sure enough; just hang out and keep cool for another hour, and you'll feel the difference.”

He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene--Margate in England--on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could “hit the time nigh enough by it,” after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial for a full minute by its own hand, decided “that it must be getting on toward nine o'clock.”

It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair, turned to the door and back again, and then, after an impatient gesture, took up his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder. Then the queer thing happened. He said afterwards, under conditions favourable to such sentimental confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take hold of the bow, through his, and--anyway, before he knew what he was about he had played the first bars of “When First I Met Sweet Peggy”, a tune he had played often, twenty years before, in his courting days, and had never happened to play since. He sawed it right through (the cold hand left after the first bar or two) standing up; then still stood with fiddle and bow trembling in his hands, with the queer feeling still on him, and a rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the fiddle away hastily, damning the bridge of it at the same time in loud but hurried tones, with the idea of covering any eccentricity which the wife might have noticed in his actions. “Must 'a' got a touch o' sun,” he muttered to himself. He sat down, fumbled with knife, pipe, and tobacco, and presently stole a furtive glance over his shoulder at his wife.

The washed-out little woman was still sewing, but stitching blindly, for great tears were rolling down her worn cheeks.

Johnny, white-faced on account of the heat, stood close behind her, one hand on her shoulder and the other clenched on the table; but the clenched hand shook as badly as the loose one.

“Good God! What is the matter, Mary? You're sick!” (They had had little or no experience of illness.) “Tell me, Mary--come now! Has the boys been up to anything?”

“No, Johnny; it's not that.”

“What is it then? You're taken sick! What have you been doing with yourself? It might be fever. Hold up a minute. You wait here quiet while I roost out the boys and send 'em for the doctor and someone----”

“No! no! I'm not sick, John. It's only a turn. I'll be all right in a minute.”

He shifted his hand to her head, which she dropped suddenly, with a life-weary sigh, against his side.

“Now then!” cried Johnny, wildly, “don't you faint or go into disterricks, Mary! It'll upset the boys; think of the boys! It's only the heat--you're only takin' queer.”

“It's not that; you ought to know me better than that. It was--I--Johnny, I was only thinking--we've been married twenty years to-night--an'--it's New Year's Night!”

“And I've never thought of it!” said Johnny (in the afterwards). “Shows what a God-forgotten selection will make of a man. She'd thought of it all the time, and was waiting for it to strike me. Why! I'd agreed to go and play at a darnce at Old Pipeclay School-house all night--that very night--and leave her at home because she hadn't asked to come; and it never struck me to ask her--at home by herself in that hole--for twenty-five bob. And I only stopped at home because I'd got the hump, and knew they'd want me bad at the school.”

They sat close together on the long stool by the table, shy and awkward at first; and she clung to him at opening of thunder, and they started apart guiltily when the first great drops sounded like footsteps on the gravel outside, just as they'd done one night-time before--twenty years before.

If it was dark before, it was black now. The edge of the awful storm-cloud rushed up and under the original darkness like the best “drop” black-brushed over the cheap “lamp” variety, turning it grey by contrast. The deluge lasted only a quarter of an hour; but it cleared the night, and did its work. There was hail before it, too--big as emu eggs, the boys said--that lay feet deep in the old diggers' holes on Pipeclay for days afterwards--weeks some said.

The two sweethearts of twenty years ago and to-night watched the retreat of the storm, and, seeing Mount Buckaroo standing clear, they went to the back door, which opened opposite the end of the shed, and saw to the east a glorious arch of steel-blue, starry sky, with the distant peaks showing clear and blue away back under the far-away stars in the depth of it.

They lingered awhile--arms round each other's waists--before she called the boys, just as they had done this time of night twenty years ago, after the boys' grandmother had called her.

“Awlright, mother!” bawled back the boys, with unfilial independence of Australian youth. “We're awlright! We'll be in directly! Wasn't it a pelterer, mother?”

They went in and sat down again. The embarrassment began to wear off.

“We'll get out of this, Mary,” said Johnny. “I'll take Mason's offer for the cattle and things, and take that job of Dawson's, boss or no boss”--(Johnny's bad luck was due to his inability in the past to “get on” with any boss for any reasonable length of time)--“I can get the boys on, too. They're doing no good here, and growing up. It ain't doing justice to them; and, what's more, this life is killin' you, Mary. That settles it! I was blind. Let the jumpt-up selection go! It's making a wall-eyed bullock of me, Mary--a dry-rotted rag of a wall-eyed bullock like Jimmy Nowlett's old Strawberry. And you'll live in town like a lady.”

“Somebody coming!” yelled the boys.

There was a clatter of sliprails hurriedly thrown down, and clipped by horses' hoofs.

“Insoide there! Is that you, Johnny?”

“Yes!” (“I knew they'd come for you,” said Mrs. Mears to Johnny.)

“You'll have to come, Johnny. There's no get out of it. Here's Jim Mason with me, and we've got orders to stun you and pack you if you show fight. The blessed fiddler from Mudgee didn't turn up. Dave Regan burst his concertina, and they're in a fix.”

“But I can't leave the missus.”

“That's all right. We've got the school missus's mare and side-saddle. She says you ought to be jolly well ashamed of yourself, Johnny Mears, for not bringing your wife on New Year's Night. And so you ought!”

Johnny did not look shame-faced, for reasons unknown to them.

“The boys couldn't find the horses,” put in Mrs. Mears. “Johnny was just going down the gully again.”

He gave her a grateful look, and felt a strange, new thrill of admiration for his wife.

“And--there's a bottle of the best put by for you, Johnny,” added Pat McDurmer, mistaking Johnny's silence; “and we'll call it thirty bob!” (Johnny's ideas were coming slowly again, after the recent rush.) “Or--two quid!--there you are!”

“I don't want two quid, nor one either, for taking my wife to a dance on New Year's Night!” said Johnny Mears. “Run and put on your best bib and tucker, Mary.”

And she hurried to dress as eager and excited, and smiling to herself as girlishly as she had done on such occasions on evenings before the bright New Year's Night twenty years ago.--For a related story, see “A Bush Dance”, in “Joe Wilson and His Mates”.--A. L., 1998.--

Black Joe

They called him Black Joe, and me White Joe, by way of distinction and for the convenience of his boss (my uncle), and my aunt, and mother; so, when we heard the cry of “Bla-a-ack Joe!” (the adjective drawn out until it became a screech, after several repetitions, and the “Joe” short and sharp) coming across the flat in a woman's voice, Joe knew that the missus wanted him at the house, to get wood or water, or mind the baby, and he kept carefully out of sight; he went at once when uncle called. And when we heard the cry of “Wh-i-i-te Joe!” which we did with difficulty and after several tries--though Black Joe's ears were of the keenest--we knew that I was overdue at home, or absent without leave, and was probably in for a warming, as the old folk called it. On some occasions I postponed the warming as long as my stomach held out, which was a good while in five-corner, native-cherry, or yam season--but the warming was none the cooler for being postponed.

Sometimes Joe heard the wrong adjective, or led me to believe he did--and left me for a whole afternoon under the impression that the race of Ham was in demand at the homestead, when I myself was wanted there, and maternal wrath was increasing every moment of my absence.

But Joe knew that my conscience was not so elastic as his, and--well, you must expect little things like this in all friendships.