an ebook published by Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: The Miserable Clerk
Author: Steele Rudd
eBook No.: 2400251h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: September 2024
Most recent update: September 2024
This eBook was produced by: Walter Moore
The whole of the contents contained in the twenty chapters of “The Miserable Clerk” were first published in the Brisbane Courier, and to the proprietors of that journal I am indebted for permission to re-publish in book form.
—S.R.
Brisbane, May 1925.
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
There were curiosities in the Sheriff’s Office; and some of the sheriffs themselves were not the most disinteresting. We enjoyed a lot of sheriffs way back when “the world was wide,” but not all at the same time… Like the line of English Kings—and most of them came from England, when they didn’t come from Ireland, or some other place—they succeeded one another and ascended the bench and sat on the left-hand side of the judges upon days and dates duly recorded at different periods of official and picturesque history—and went to all this inconvenience for eight hundred pounds per annum, with a running fire of half-crowns and guineas thrown in as perks for “taking” affidavits, not for making or breaking them—also small presents in the shape of a uniform to wear in court and help swell the legal atmosphere with judicial terror and awe; and another, a shade or two more costly, to accompany their honours in, when in all the glamour and glow of scarlet robes and iron-grey antiquated wigs, they proceeded in solemn procession to aid and abet in the opening of Parliament. And, in addition to the uniform, sheriffs were presented with a big sword, which had a persistent and knavish habit of getting between their silk-stockinged legs when they walked beside the judges and caused them to stumble and lose step and dignity—and when I mention that some of the sheriffs were more than three score and ten years my readers will not be found wanting in sympathy. If we do not die, or get killed, or hanged, or turn into grasshoppers, we will all live to be that age some day, please God. But a uniform of black cloth, with a lace bib in front and a huge black rosette between the shoulders, made spectacular and imposing officials of those old sheriffs. ’Tis wonderful what clothes will do for a man… Be he ever so youthful, or even so aged or infirm, they work the same wonders on him. Nature—or whatever it was, accident, evolution, a monkey, or a protoplasm, that brought him into being—could never do anything like it for him. Left to Nature, or any of those things, man is hideous. When he has nothing to stand up in he’s bereft of dignity, beauty, confidence, deportment— everything. But in the hands of a tailor—any old sort of tailor—who will hide his defects—and all of him has to be hidden to hide them—man is a beautiful animal, a handsome creation, deserving of all the vainglorious pride he takes in himself.
But the long succession of sheriffs was not composed of men that resembled each other. They all differed in appearance, habits, manner, and temperament. Some were tall, some short, some were “courteous gentlemen”—some more of him would bite your head off. One was a pattern to be avoided in dignity, another a ventriloquist who took all the fun he could out of the accomplishment, while another, the greatest of them all, wore a large, aggressive wart on his nose, and when on circuit with a judge, at a guinea a day, had an undemocratic habit of placing his foot on his travelling-bag and hailing the nearest platform policeman to hurry along and knock the dust off the boot. Platform police were not very fond of that old sheriff, but never showed it in their countenances—police are very discreet in their countenances.
Writer didn’t know a great deal about the sheriff with a big wart on his nose, but of the tall, stately, dignified one he knew quite a lot. He spoke with a “cultured accent” that never came much into favour with us Australians—especially those whom he used to converse with. He was a dear old antiquarian, though, with a 14th century shave, and used to go to sleep every after-lunch when he wasn’t on the bench, and he used to go to sleep when he was on the bench, and irritated the judge, confounded the Bar, and amused every one else.
When he would sleep in his office the staff, which consisted mostly of the miserable clerk, liked him all the better for it. He was a much better “head” when he was asleep—a much better head than many make to-day when they are awake! The work of the office went on more amicably, and more expeditiously, and the Public Service Act and the Amended Public Service Act said that was how it ought to go on.
Lying back in his leather lined chair, with his venerable old head hanging over the edge (I’d like to quote some poetry from Scott or Burns here, but I don’t know any), his noisy slumbers often lowered his dignity, and imperilled his life at the hands of released prisoners, who used to poke their nose in the wrong door, looking for the man in charge of their “gratuity.”
But the miserable clerk rarely ever disturbed his chief until 4 o’clock; then he’d go in softly with a fistful of papers and warrants and things that required the sheriff’s signature. If the “head” wouldn’t come out of his sleep and rise to the occasion when spoken quietly to, or the papers rattled at him, the miserable clerk would touch him on the shoulder. The touch was always magnetic. The sheriff would start like an escaped prisoner surprised in bed by the law—and gasp, “What? Who?” and for a moment or two would glare through space as though he felt there was a burglar in the office. Discovering the miserable clerk grinning over him, he’d sigh, “Ah-h, ’tis you, Rudd.” Then, seeing the bundle of papers for signature: “Oh, dear! More work, more work!” And, reaching slowly for a pen, he’d start to sign the documents… When he’d put the final touches to James (“James” wasn’t his Christian name, but it will do as well as any other name— several quite decent fellows have been christened James) he would put the pen down with a trembling hand, and, smiling up at the clerk, would ask: “Did you remembah old Judge Blake?” The miserable clerk didn’t remember old Judge Blake, or any other old judge, and didn’t want to remember him, either! All he wanted was those documents signed, and to get out and away home as quick as possible! The sheriff took out a dainty little handkerchief with lace on it, that his young wife had made for him for his 78th birthday, shook it for a while to air it, then blew his nose noisily in it—then sneezed in it, and said: “When I was Clerk of Petty Sessions at Romah, Judge Blake came up there-ah on a circ’it.” Here he reached forward, fumbled the pen till he got a good grip of it, then took it up again, looked down along the handle like a fellow squinting through the barrel of a gun—and completed his signature, leaving a spasmodic flourish and a black-bubble blot beneath it. “And in a case of horse stealing,” he went on, “he was finding some difficulty in reading the depositions that were put in as evidence. ‘Pardon me, your Honah,’ I said, ‘I wrote the depositions; may I decipher them for your Honah?’ ‘Oh, dear, no, Mr. Clerk,’ he said, ‘they are written in a beautiful hand, a lovely fist, but most illegible!’ ”
And the old sheriff himself laughed most enjoyably—laughed until in his feeble paroxysms of mirth he hit his knee on the edge of the cedar table, then he shut up like an alarm clock, and nursed the wounded cap with wrinkled brows.
Coming lower down in the scale, a quaint curiosity always lurked in the miserable clerk’s desk. It was a cat-o’-nine-tails, one that had seen yeoman service, and was justly pensioned. The strands of it had mellowed and shrunk and softened with age; the knobs adorning them were all intact and difficult to undo—paying a great tribute to the memory and skill of the genius who invented the concern—but the binding that had strengthened the handle and softened it to the grip of the horny-handed flagellator had mostly worn away. The clerk was excessively proud of that cat-o’-nine-tails. It became endeared to him. He looked upon it as his own. It was the only thing he really could call his own after the first of every month. He used with pride bring it from its lurking-place to dilate on its virtues as a societarian heirloom, as an instrument of great reform—a baptising, colonising, civilising medium—a medium in whose every strand were far more thrills than in any of Conan Doyle’s spooks—to visitors with gentle dispositions and tender susceptibilities and weak hearts just to watch them shudder and shrink from it. And if they didn’t shudder to his satisfaction he would strike the attitude of a golfer (flagellators should make supreme golfers) and slash the under-sheriff’s empty chair with it, then curricomb the strands with his fingers, explaining the while that that was what the public flagellator did, to cleanse them after every bonser stroke he delivered on a chap’s naked back. There was a lot of legal humour in the miserable clerk when he was in the right mood.
Once, when the hangman himself, who was also the flagellator, was reposing in the office, waiting for something to turn up and grumbling about the bad times and the slump in business, the miserable clerk brought out his cat-o’-nine-tails, and, shaking out the strands, waved it proudly, and asked if he thought it a good specimen.
“Too light, far too light! And too limp!” he sneered. “Why, you couldn’t knock a fly off a man’s back with a thing like that!”
The miserable clerk’s pride of property was offended. “By cripes,” he answered, fondling his possession proudly, “pull off your shirt and lean across that table, and there won’t be many flies on your back when I’m done with y’, though there might be swarms of them after y’ to-morrow.”
The miserable clerk had been clerking for a couple of years in the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t the best or the brightest office in the service for a clerk to clerk in, if he wanted to rise without taking to the gallows, or to make a fortune. Yet it had its attractions. Few things there are that haven’t attractions of some kind; and the sheriff’s office had some that were all its own. There were features about it that no other office possessed, or cared to possess; and there was quite a variety of them. There were the hangman’s features, for instance—they were copyrighted by the office, were its very own, and no other office had anything to compare with them. For that reason our staff was proud of the hangman. He did us great honour, and was our novelty, our rara avis. We skited about him.
* * *
Though the sheriff’s office was not a hive of business, and didn’t contribute enormously to the Treasury, still a lot of people passed in and out of it. They didn’t pass in and out every day; and they didn’t pass in and out as they might pass in and out of an arcade, for instance. They were mostly passed in on summonses, but went out on their own. And they mostly went out sad-looking, and disconsolate, and some of them were often downright discourteous.
* * *
It was an isolated office, hidden away on the southern side of the Supreme Court buildings, and it looked out on the river—the broad Brisbane River now languishing monotonously in the throes of its centenary—and the clerk shared a room in it (the office, not the river) with the under sheriff— shared it with him when he wasn’t out having a drink, or over at the Boggo-road Gaol inspecting it, or “up in court,” sitting on the bench, half asleep, beside one of the judges, or beside the whole lot of them, if it happened to be a “Full Court day”— and Full Court days happened as often as the court calendar said they should happen.
* * *
A big lump of a man was the under-sheriff of those days, with a cropped beard and a chronic growl. He walked with an aristocratic bend, and talked to his staff in impolite mono-syllables, which he uttered with a huge pipe between his teeth. Those who had been closely associated with him for 40 years or so called him by his Christian name, “Henry.” The miserable clerk had only known him for two years or so, and called him “mister.” He addressed the clerk always by his surname. There was nothing social or affectionate in his nature so far as the miserable clerk was concerned.
* * *
Solicitors and their clerks frequently passed in and out the sheriff’s office; but they mostly passed themselves in on a writ of Fieri Facias, or a writ of Possessiononium, or a writ of Capias ad respondendum, or some other hifalutin’ document, which was usually accompanied by a lodgment fee of 2/6, or 5/6, or a guinea, or whatever was the charge according to regulations. And, when in charge of the office, mounted upon a high three-legged stool at a dull wooden desk, it was the clerk’s duty to receive these writs and fees, and on the strength of them to write out warrants on Fi. Fa. addressed to the bailiffs concerned, commanding them in the name of the King and the sheriff, and everybody concerned, to take and make of the goods, chattels, moneys, bank-notes, tenements, and hereditaments, and other property of Bill Smith or Jack Brown or Somebody, the sum of five hundred pounds (perhaps six hundred) together with interest thereon, at the moderate rate of 8 per cent, and solicitor’s costs amounting perhaps to a couple of hundred pounds, with also interest at the same low rate, besides poundage, officers’ fees, and all other incidental expenses, amounting in all to, perhaps, eight or nine hundred pounds; and whereof the bailiff was finally commanded to “hereof fail not.”
Or perhaps he would have a warrant on Ca. Re. to write out commanding the bailiff by virtue of it to take and seize the body of Bill Smith or Jack Brown, and hold it (no matter what kind of body it was) till that down-hearted and doomed gentleman satisfied him to the tune of some hundreds of pounds, and if he wouldn’t or couldn’t part up to lodge his body in the nearest gaol, whether a country gaol, or the Toowoomba Gaol, or Stewart’s Creek Gaol, or Boggo-road Gaol, or any other gaol—any of them would be quite good enough for him—who ever he might be. There were no society lines or discriminations where gaol accommodation was concerned. That was one of the beautiful democratic features of the sheriff’s office.
* * *
One fine morning while the Full Court was sitting in all its splendour, and gorgeousness, and whimsicalities, and the under-sheriff dozing on sentry at the rear of their Honours, a lawyer’s clerk, right out of wind, bounced in upon the miserable clerk with a writ of Fieri Facias and half-a-crown … and showing much nervousness, which was unusual for a lawyer’s clerk.
“Here you are”—he gasped—“we want the sheriff to have this executed at once”—and out of the door he dashed as if there was a dog after him.
Scenting something unusual, the clerk took up the writ, and scanned it curiously.
My stars! He nearly fell off the high stool… It was a writ against the under-sheriff, himself, and was for £21,000, exclusive of “solicitor’s charges, interest,” &c. It was the most interesting document he had ever handled. And “Henry,” as his friends addressed him, was never worth more than a few quid after the first of the month … Anyway, the miserable clerk had no choice other than to sit down and draw out a warrant against the under-sheriff himself, and have it ready for him to sign when he came out of court.
There were numerous warrants to prepare that morning, and when the lot were ready he placed them all on his table, carefully putting the one against the under-sheriff himself at the bottom of the file. Then, like a criminal, he waited for the court to rise, and for Henry to come along.
“Are all these to sign?” he grunted, sitting at his table, and eyeing the file of warrants. The miserable clerk said they were.
“Are they all right?” he grunted again, taking up a pen. The miserable clerk reckoned so.
“Because I can’t be in court, you know, and be in here looking after things, too.”
The clerk thought it wouldn’t make much difference, even it he could; but didn’t think it loud enough for him to hear.
* * *
Then he began slashing his signature across the warrants, his pen “swishing” like a scythe tearing into green wheat. The miserable clerk watched him out of the corner of his bush-trained eye, wondering what he would say when he struck the gold-mine at the bottom! But when he came to it he neither said anything nor saw anything. He signed the one for £21,000 against himself, as he signed all the others, without looking at it. Then off he went as hard as he could go for his lunch.
Next morning the chief bailiff, with a genial Irish smile on his face, presented the warrant to his superior officer, and demanded £21,000 from him, “together with interest, poundage,” &c.
The under-sheriff turned pale; then examined the warrant and the writ closely.
Turning to the miserable clerk, he said: “Didn’t you notice that was against myself?”
He admitted that he did.
“Well, why th’ hell didn’t you tell me?” he growled, “the sheriff should have signed it!”
Solemn, mysterious, humorous thing is a jury panel in the drawing—and sometimes before the drawing, and long after it, too. The Jury Act, a barbarous old thing, that to some extent has recently been civilised—provided for a multitude of things to be observed by the Sheriff in the drawing of a panel at the risk of being heavily fined or metaphorically beheaded if he neglected their observance. And if all the things “set forth therein” were not carried out, the chances were, “according to the statoot,” the panel wouldn’t be worth tuppence, and those truly tried and faithfully convicted would be robbed of their fine, or life-sentence, or their right to be properly hanged.
Theoretically, and every other way, the jury system that we knew was a wonderful invention, a marvellous piece of Parliamentary ingenuity. One Attorney-General called it the “foundation of justice.” To me it was the malediction of legal mirth. The “system” consisted of a set of books containing the names of the qualified jurymen of our country, with a number opposite each name. A set of parchment tickets each with a number corresponding with one in the jury book. Say there were two thousand names in the book, numbered consecutively, then there would be—I mean should be—two thousand parchment tickets numbered in the same way, but occasions there wasn’t, because sometimes the cockroaches and silverfish ate half them and left the numbers “faked," No. 20 would be turned into No. 2, and so on. These tickets were “shuffled” once a year and spilt into a box constructed to fit into a stand. Then the box was locked—that is if the key wasn’t lost, or borrowed by some one to wind up his watch with—and put away behind a musty, mysterious looking green curtain that suggested hidden crimes.
* * *
Before a jury panel could be well and truly drawn, a notice informing the public that a precept had been received from his Honour Mr. Justice So-an’-So, commanding the Sheriff to forthwith proceed , to summon 48—or as many more as would be necessary—common miserable jurymen to attend the court on a certain day—and that day had at least to be fixed a month in advance of the summons, so as to give the juror lots of time to brighten up his Sunday clothes and arrange for some one to look after his job while he would be in town giving his services to his country.
Also it was to give the public the opportunity of coming along to view the lottery and satisfying themselves that all was square and aboveboard, and that those who didn’t speculate as ratepayers, didn’t win, “an’ luck attend th’ r’yal juryman.” But, of course, the public didn’t care two straws about the drawing of a jury panel. According to the statutes, it was to be drawn by the sheriff. But it wasn’t always convenient for him to draw it, or for the under-sheriff, either. There were times when they had other things to do, besides sitting there for hours, twirling and spinning a silly box stuffed with parchment cards that stuck together like glue and rarely separated themselves. That wasn’t to their fancy—it was too much like an invention to amuse babies with and keep them from bawling. When the official had spun it round for “three minutes,” he would insert his hand and draw out one ticket—at least that’s what he should have done, but rarely did less than six come out at a time. Then he’d return five of them—at least, that’s what he should have done—and the number in the book corresponding with the number on the ticket he had retained would be that of the juror whose name would be the first to be written on the panel. Of course, if the cockroaches had eaten the number right off the ticket, he would have drawn a blank, and would have to dip again!
And all this was monotonous employment for a sheriff, and made him miserable as the clerk and unhappy, and helped to shorten his days in the land of the law.
* * *
Once when the sheriffs were tremendously busy in several courts at the same time, the miserable clerk was entrusted with notifying everybody concerned, that, “in pursuance of a precept received from Mr. Justice Blank,” the sheriff would proceed on a certain day to draw a panel of 48 faithful jurors.” The notice was filled in, and duly staked to the office door with several pins and as many broken nibs. And there it remained for every one to see until the wind or some daring humorist carried it away, when it was unlawfully forgotten, and so was the drawing of the panel until the bailiff, whose pleasant duty it was to run all over the land in a state of profanity and perspiration, serving the summonses—discovered that the day of the sittings was only a week away, and he hadn’t received a solitary summons to serve! At the quickest, it usually took him three weeks to serve 48 jury summonses…
“Jerusalem!” he said, “here’s a hell of a mess! … It’s contempt of court and a fine for th’ lot of us! And gaol! and the sack! My G—”!
The clerk said, “I put up the notice, anyway!”
Then the sheriff was let into the secret. He went white, and clutched the edge of his table for support. Then he raved, and stormed, and shed tears. He sent for the under-sheriff—sent the miserable clerk. The miserable clerk went with feelings of relief. They both had on their court paraphernalia, ready to collect the judges and escort them into court out of harm’s way. The under-sheriff was astounded that such a thing could happen. “The first time in thirty years,” he moaned, and reckoned that only he “had been so damnably busy in court it never would have happened.” He, too, saw contempt of court, and a big fine, and th’ sack! Then he contributed a few tears to the calamity, and blamed the bailiff and the miserable clerk for it all!
“But, what’s to be done?” the sheriff, coming to reason, asked. “Had I better go and tell the judge?”
“My G—d no, don’t; draw the panel now, and get the bailiff who knows them all to do the best he can...”
“But neither you or I can draw it—we have both got to go into court!”
“Let the clerk and the bailiff draw it, and say nothing about it!” The under-sheriff was a daring official—particularly, when he knew that others would have to share the responsibility of his daring!
“Oh my! my! my!” and the sheriff went off to meet his judge.
And so it came to pass that the bailiff and the miserable clerk, which was not at all in accordance with the “statoot,” presided over the drawing of the jury panel. The bailiff spun the box with great glee, and drew out the tickets, and called out the numbers on them to the miserable clerk. The miserable clerk would turn up the corresponding numbers in the book, and read them out to the bailiff. Of course, if the bailiff thought any of them didn’t live near enough to Queen-street for his liking, or if he thought any of them would be pretty sure to rightly refuse service on account of short notice, he might have returned those tickets to the box, and dipped again. I say he might have done so—but, as a serious, conscientious official who always felt he was overpaid, the miserable clerk would never have allowed it!
Anyway, when the panel was completed, it was a good panel. The summonses were the easiest lot to serve that ever the bailiff handled, and he had handled a million. Such is the luck of the ballot! They all attended too, without demur, and the sheriff and the under-sheriff breathed freely, and slept well, and made jokes with each other again… So did the bailiff and the miserable clerk.
It sometimes happened that when the Sheriff and the Under-Sheriff were engaged in different courts at the same time the signature of one or the other would be required to a document of particular importance. Generally it was a youthful solicitor, who perhaps had lodged his first writ on Fi. Fa., and was in a tearing hurry to have it executed and get his costs back, “with interest thereon at the rate of eight per cent, per annum.” So the miserable clerk, being a soft-hearted sort of menial, would leave his desk, and make his way up into court to procure the Sheriff’s signature to the warrant, or whatever it was. To do this he had to climb a wide staircase on either side of which was an absurd notice and a finger-point pointing out: “Barristers, solicitors and magistrates only.” How jurors and witnesses and policemen and bailiffs and all the rest were to arrive in court when they would be required wasn’t explained! Anyway, the miserable clerk would mount those stairs, amble along a corridor, cautiously and silently open the court door, and glance in to reconnoitre before entering and pushing his way through the crowd on the floor of the court, past the Bar and the Press, and up to the bench, where he would take the warrant, or whatever he had, up to the Sheriff, with an accompanying memo, explaining the why and the wherefore of all the haste. If it happened that the Sheriff was enjoying a snooze—and there was nothing in court, not all the eloquence or bellowing and wrangling of Bar and Bench, that could prevent him from snoozing when he was in the mood—the miserable clerk wouldn’t for a fee of a hundred guineas disturb him. The clerk had a wonderful respect for the Sheriff when he was in the throes of slumber. Besides, to reach up and tug at his toe or trouser-leg to waken him would mean bringing him out of his sleep with a bound that would put a wallaby surprised in the long grass in the background! And how his Honour might at the moment regard such a piece of comedy no one could tell!—a judge couldn’t very well tell himself—and the chances were he wouldn’t see the comedy, any way. He might only see red, or scarlet, and regard the miserable clerk as an intruder and a criminal—and call upon him, right where he stood, to show cause why he shouldn’t be sent to Boggo-road Gaol for twenty years or so… Judges in those days were little Czars, and touchy as tiger-cats.
They are not to-day, because the “Proletariat” will not stand for it.
But the Sheriff wasn’t always slumbering. He would be sitting erect with his eyes wide open, on some occasions, taking stock of all and sundry in court. Then the clerk would forge his way in, give the solemn sergeant of police posted inside the door a vicious pinch, just to see how he’d take it, and reaching the bench, where the Sheriff in grim silence would be watching his approach, would hand up the documents. The Sheriff would reach nervously for them, fearing all the while that even the sound of their rustling might draw fire from his Honour. Sheriffs lived, or vegetated, in constant terror of the judges. When his chief had signed and passed the documents cautiously back, with one eye on the judge all the time, the miserable clerk would make a retreat, and as he passed out the aggrieved sergeant at the door would whisper hoarsely into his ear: “Pinch me like that when ye come in again, and I’ll whack you on th’—ear!”
One afternoon the clerk was hurrying up to court to procure the Sheriff’s signature to a cheque. Standing on the ground floor in the centre of the hollow square were two lost-looking Chinamen. They were pointing this way, and that way, and gesticulating and deliberating in their own melodious language. As the miserable clerk passed they seized upon him.
“No savee,” he grinned.
They gesticulated, and waved their hands more and more.
The clerk got a brain-wave.
“You want to see the Registrar?” he said. They smiled, and gesticulated more, and tears of joy ran out of their slant eyes—“Legeelah,” they echoed happily—
“Down there, John,” the clerk said, pointing to a corridor, on either side of which, commencing with the taxing-master, were the offices of the Registrar of the court. ‘‘You’ll find him down there,” the clerk added, but he forgot to mention that if they followed that corridor to its bitter end, they would collide with a private staircase leading to the bench, and a staircase that was sacred to the judges.
The Chinamen made for that corridor; the miserable clerk made upstairs for the court.
As usual, he paused at the door to take stock of the Sheriff. And—great Scott!—while he was taking stock of the Sheriff, the two lost wandering Chinamen wandered on to the bench, and stood like two celestial visions right behind his Honour! No two Chows, and no Supreme Court sittings ever got a bigger shock! Which was the more startled or the more confounded would be hard to say. All those in court gasped, his Honour glanced round suspiciously. He saw the two Mongolians… Revenge, murder, assassination, rushed to his legal mind! He ducked over his desk as though he had seen a bullet coming! The Sheriff woke up, and started to take in the situation. The miserable Chows, filled with astonishment, turned and flew back down the stairs. The Sheriff rose heroically from his chair and hobbled feebly in pursuit… The police sergeant at the door, followed by the bailiffs and the miserable clerk, rushed out and down the broad stairway to intercept the fugitives. They intercepted them in the “hollow square.” The wretched Chinamen proclaimed their innocence in tears, and all kinds of unintelligible language— They pointed incriminatingly to the miserable clerk. The miserable clerk grinned upon them in silence. Finally, they were both discharged without a stain upon their characters.
It was a few minutes to four o’clock, and four o’clock in those days, was knock-off time. An articled clerk from Foxburn and Curlew rushed into the office out of breath… Articled clerks were mostly out of breath or something in those good-bad days.
“We want the office kept open—” he gasped.
“There’s a writ of Ca. Re. to be lodged. Mr. Foxburn is with the judge now, applying for the order; and it must be executed to-night, as the defendant is going to leave for Sydney by the mail-train to-morrow morning.”
The clerk said, “There’ll be an extra fee of a guinea for keeping the office open.”
“Right,” he gasped again, and ran back to attend Mr. Foxburn.
Presently he burst in again with the writ of Ca. Re., and a fistful of fees.
“The defendant, Peter Simon,” he explained— (that wasn’t his name, but it will serve the purpose as well as any other)—“is a slippery customer; he’s an actor performing in a company at the Opera House, and we want your officer to be very careful else he’ll get slipped up—”
The miserable clerk said, “All right,” and took possession of the court documents. “He has a brother in the company,” he added, “but his name is Bill Simon.”
“In any case,” the clerk explained, “our officer won’t arrest him unless he’s pointed out as the right man by some one from your office.”
“I’ll do that,” he said, “I know him; I served the writ of summons on him—”
Just then the assistant bailiff happened along, and while the miserable clerk prepared a warrant for the Sheriff to sign, he and the articled clerk discussed the adventure, and agreed to meet at the back entrance of the Opera House, in Elizabeth-street, and interview the defendant when leaving the theatre after the performance.
A cautious, peace-loving Irishman was the assistant bailiff, who detested executing writs of any kind, but once on the job he’d go through fire and water to complete it.
“Come back after you get your tea,” he said, for the clerk’s benefit, “and come along with me. It will be an experience for ye, and ye can see that I don’t make a mistake and serve the wrong copies on him.”
The clerk said he would, and the three of them met at 10 p.m. at the appointed place. There, away from the gas-lamps, they waited and watched in the cold for the show to finish and for Peter Simon to make his appearance... At intervals the assistant bailiff would caution the articled clerk and the miserable clerk not to talk so loudly. He knew the business of arresting men for debt better than they did. The debtors in a Ca. Re., he reckoned, possessed the instincts of a hunted kangaroo with the wind in its favour. So they kept silent.
But casual passers-by seemed to regard them with suspicion, and gave them all the footway. Who they thought they were I don’t know, but garrotters and garrotting flourished in Brisbane in those days.
So as no mistake would be made, the assistant bailiff at intervals asked the articled clerk in a whisper to describe the defendant to him again. He must have described him a dozen times.
At 10.30 (about) some one came from the theatre, looked up and down the street, and went back again.
“It’s all up,” the assistant bailiff choked; “that fellow was sent out to spy!”
A lump came into the articled clerk’s throat, and he coughed hard.
The miserable clerk suggested the defendant might leave the theatre per Queen-street.
“Then, if he do”—and the assistant bailiff fixed a mercenary eye on the articled clerk—“I’m going to charge ye’r office for the time I’ve wasted here to-night.”
The articled clerk was silent. Legal minds mostly are when a fee is likely to accrue or has accrued against themselves.
Meantime the curtain fell on the last scene of the play in the theatre. There was some applause, then “God save the Queen.”
The assistant bailiff and the articled clerk faced the gateway, and drew quick, short breaths. More than once the assistant bailiff was nearly murdered when arresting a man under warrant on Ca. Re. The articled clerk knew of this. So did the miserable clerk. He kept well back in the shadow of the street on the strength of it, and tried to look as if he didn’t belong to the party.
Members of the company started to leave the theatre, and passed out into the street in twos and threes.
The assistant bailiff and the articled clerk scanned them closely. They returned the scrutiny. The miserable clerk was intensely interested. Sixteen or seventeen must have passed out. Then there was a lull. The assistant bailiff became anxious.
“Are you sure he wasn’t one of thim that went out?” he asked of the articled clerk.
The articled clerk was positive. The assistant bailiff was pessimistic. He shook his head, and again referred to payment for his wasted evening. And again the legal mind of the articled clerk courted silence. But presently there was a clatter of shoe heels, and three more—all males—came sailing out at a brisk walk.
The articled clerk peered hard at them as they approached. He touched the assistant bailiff nervously, and whispered “He’s one of these, I think.”
“Now, make sure!” warningly from the assistant bailiff.
“Yes, this is him; the chap in the middle with a straw hat on.”
Then the assistant bailiff accosted him.
“Pardon me,” he said, “I’m a sheriff’s officer, and I’d like to have a word with you.”
“A sheriff’s officer?” the other echoed, looking up into his face, his two professional brothers doing likewise.
“Your name is Peter Simon, isn’t it?” And the assistant bailiff took the warrant and other documents from his breast pocket.
“No, it isn’t old cock!” cheekily from the man in the straw hat. “I’m Bill Simon, his brother. Ask my two friends here, smartie!”
His two friends promptly and indignantly endorsed his statement.
“Do you point this man out as Peter Simon, the defendant named in this warrant?” the assistant bailiff asked of the articled clerk.
The articled clerk did, and added that he knew him by the clothes he was wearing. The man in the straw hat sprang at him, and looked close into his face, and called him a liar and an (unprintable) idiot, and asked what sort of a crimson swine he was? And when he couldn’t say any more, his two friends took a hand and called the articled clerk a blithering ass, and an unclean swine, and struck stage attitudes and gladiatorial crouches before him and the assistant bailiff, and wanted to know, what “this insult to their friend was all about?”
You can’t beat the “profession” for protesting in vulgar, blustering, bellicose, real Shakespearian fashion when there’s trouble to face.
“I am only doing my duty,” said the assistant bailiff, “and if it becomes necessary I have the power to call upon the police to help me carry it out.”
Then he read the warrant, and asked Mr. Simon to part with £80 in hard cash.
Mr. Simon—whether Peter or Bill—jeered at the idea, and his two friends laughed boisterously. Perhaps they saw some humour in it that was not obvious to the rest.
“Very well, then.” And, placing his hand on Mr. Simon’s shoulder, the assistant bailiff made him his prisoner, and handed him a fistful of documents, all of which he flung from him as though they were poison.
“You must come along with me to the sheriff, who is waiting in his office.”
He went quietly enough. His two friends and the articled clerk and the miserable clerk followed.
The sheriff listened attentively while the arrested one and his friends protested that he was not Peter Simon, but his brother Bill, and threatened an action for wrongful arrest, and all the rest. Then he listened to the articled clerk, who stubbornly stuck to his guns.
Finally, the sheriff, smiling sympathetically, as sheriffs are supposed to do, said: “Well, I am afraid, Simon, if you can’t find the money, you must go to gaol to-night, and send for your solicitor in the morning.”
Bill Simon went to gaol, for “Bill” he really was, and not Peter! And later, in an action taken against the sheriff for wrongful arrest, and claiming thousands of pounds damages, the judge found that, as Bill had agreed to take Peter’s place where the bailiff was concerned, by changing clothes in the theatre with Peter, and going out instead of him, the sheriff had really done him no harm by also allowing him to take Peter’s place in the gaol.
Numbers of jurymen, when drawn on a panel, blasphemed and anathemed and blamed the Sheriff and his staff for the misfortune. They considered their time far too valuable to be wasted hanging round a court of law waiting to “be called,” or, having been called, sitting in a box all day listening to dull or hysterical witnesses giving their evidence, and the “felons’ friends” spinning out the proceedings with an eye to further fees like spiders spinning their webs to catch flies.
“Who’s to look after my business while I’m away?” they’d grumble. “All very fine for you! But I can’t put anybody in my place, and if I could they wouldn’t know what to do! It means a big loss to me!”
And there were others who took it as an injustice and were aggrieved when they were not summoned to attend a sitting. “There’s something crook about it,” they reckoned. “It’s always the big men who don’t want the money that seem to get on the jury” —they’d complain to the bailiffs, or the bailiff’s man. “Nothing of that kind ever comes my way, and I could do with a quid or two just now.”
Then there was always some one having been summoned, who wanted to be excused from attending—and would advance every reason for it but the right one. But, according to the “statoot,” no one on earth only the presiding judge could, in the days I’m writing of, excuse a juror from attending—that is, “according to the Act.” Yet similar results are often arrived at by different ways—the correct answers to sums worked out by different methods. And so, in those days—but I do not say in these good, virtuous days—a juror might arrive at his exemption quite in his own way. But no Sheriff, on his life, would take such a responsibility. And when a juror had the temerity to get up in open court and apply for an exemption, his Honour, in nine cases out of ten, would glare through his glasses and snap: “Certainly not! That is no reason!” Whenever he did exempt a juror it was most likely because the gentleman was so incapacitated that he could neither see nor hear, nor understand nor write his name. If a juror died, however, before the sittings commenced, he was rarely fined for not attending; and that really was the surest way of getting exemption. But, if the expired juror didn’t die in the limelight, and let every one know about it, and when his name was called in court three times, and there was no one to answer “Dead, your Honour,” he’d be fined three pounds for a certainty, and three more if he didn’t make his appearance with a fitting apology after being given, say, an hour to show up… And when, after much excitement and sending of messages, the real cause of the juror’s disrespect to the court was announced his Honour would direct his wrath to the Sheriff. And when the Sheriff came down off the Bench he would have a few reproachful words to say to the Bailiff, and the Bailiff would, in turn, think it “strange that the miserable clerk didn’t hear something about the juror being dead!”
Important business men though, at times, exempted themselves by not getting a jury summons. And when you didn’t get a summons there was no reason to answer it. Apart from that when the bailiff’s man entrusted with the service of summonses returned a number of them, some marked “Dead,” some “Left the State,” and so on, the jury box would be started spinning again, and fresh names added to the panel, and fresh summonses issued.
On one occasion the bailiff’s man, with a summons in his pocket, walked into the shop of a big blustering business man, one Mr. Delaney (Delaney wasn’t his name, but it will do). The bailiff’s man had served summonses on him before, and received a storm of violent language for his trouble, and in the hearing of numerous shop-hands. This time, however, Mr. Delaney, anticipating the object of the other’s visit, received him with an affectionate handshake, and an eloquent greeting filled with mirth and welcome. “Come over here,” he concluded, “We’ve a splendid line of men’s hats in, an’ I’m going to make ye a prisintation of one for th’ sake of old times—what’s the size of your cranium?
With a surprised grin the bailiff’s man told him— “Thry on that one!”
The bailiff’s man tried the hat on.
“The very thing,” approved Mr. Delaney, “Look at yourself in the glass—”
The bailiff’s man viewed himself cheerfully. “Take it away with ye,” said Mr. Delaney, patting him on the shoulder. “And now listen to me; I’ll be goin’ away to Melbun, and I don’t want to see ye here again till I come back.” And once more gave him his hand.
The bailiff’s man hesitatingly turned to the door and with his hand in his breast pocket, fumbling the summons for Mr. Delaney, walked out of the shop. Then he returned to the office, thinking that “James Delaney was in Melbourne,” and—
It was a heavy calendar, and the first four days or so of the sittings saw a number of cases disposed of to the satisfaction of every one but the losers and in most of them the winners were amongst the losers. A day of two later the judge discharged one jury with the thanks of the country because he thought that after a lengthy case they had done their share of toil; while the jury on the one that followed retired to consider things his Honour decided to go ahead with the next business. And the next business, according to the newspapers, was a matter of wonderful importance to big business people. And the newspapers must have been well informed, for no sooner was the case called than business men of the city came tip-toeing and puffing into court till the place was packed with them. The case was unexpectedly brief, and while the jury retired his Honour, feeling in good form, called for the next one. But when it came to empanelling the jury there wasn’t enough to go round. There was a brief consultation between Bench and Bar, and the Bench and Sheriff. Then running his eye covetously over the crowd in court the judge ordered the doors to be closed, and no one to be allowed to escape till as many additional jurors as was required to carry on with be chosen from amongst them. ’Twas a legal bomb that filled those business men with consternation. For a moment or two the floor of the court was silence. Then whispered imprecations began to be heaped upon the action of his Honour. But down stepped the Sheriff, and with his officers went amongst those business men, paper and pencil in hand, like the Apostles going down amongst the sinners. The first one they seized upon and enlisted was Mr. Delaney, the big man who “was away in Melbourne.”
“Dammit all,” he flustered into the ear of the bailiff, “I don’t think a judge can do what he is doing—’tis tyranny!”
’Twas in the nineties, when men who had money, and men who hadn’t money, rushed to every land sale around the city to speculate in allotments. The man with the money, or the purchasing power, secured all the corner and high and dry allotments; the man who hadn’t money beyond his “screw” bought whatever was left— bought on time-payment until his monthly instalment bill was a magnificent possession in comparison to his monthly screw… The rest of the community, the section that despised land speculation, rushed the sharebrokers, or any one with a mine to sell, and couldn’t exchange their hard cash fast enough for shares. It mattered little to them what sort of a gold mine it was so long as it was floated—whether it was salted or fictitious didn’t matter a straw… And the demand for shares in gold mines fell so thickly around those responsible for the gamble that new gold mines, each richer than anything ever known on earth had to be discovered nearly every day—and were discovered.
When the demand was met and the rush and excitement stemmed, the community settled down to take its meals regularly and orderly, and to watch the newspapers for reports of rises in shares. And they hadn’t long to watch either… Shares rose with sensational rapidity, and those who held them shook hands with themselves and were hopeful they would go on rising till they ascended into Heaven, or some place right out of sight and above the clouds. In fact, mining and land investments went up at such a pace that there was no time to provide anything at the top for them to hang on to, and of course they slipped and came down a hundred times faster than they went up, and hit the bottom so hard that they were never able to get up again…
Then the banks got “nervy,” and for a while were “doctored” and stimulated and kept on their feet. Eventually most of them began to totter and crumble till at last they came down with crashes and groans that made more noise than the fall of Jericho.
A little later the legal imps, the crows, and parasites, the agents of Old Nick and the missionaries of Hades, took a hand, and poured sheaves of writs against sinners and delinquents and the deluded into the sheriff’s office… They raced and tumbled over one another in their legal haste and hunger and greed to get in early and register “priority.” Priority gave them the cheerful privilege, where there were more than one writ against the same unhappy defendant, of ordering others to stand off, or stand by, while they fleeced the miserable victim to his last thread, and patch, and drained the last from him in satisfaction of their toil!
To cope with the rain of writs of fi. fa. alone the staff for some time went as fast as men on a threshing machine. Every bailiff in the court went forth each morning with pockets bulging with warrants commanding him (or them), in the name of the Queen and the sheriff, and the law, to seize and grab and take of the lands, goods, chattels, tenements, hereditaments, moneys, bank-notes, and the Lord knows what, of this defendant, and that defendant, and other defendants, “if he be found in my bailiwick,” the sum of (anything from fifty pounds upwards)… And, every other day or so, the bailiffs would return, as the ravens did to Noah’s romantic old Ark, with sheaves of soiled, crumpled, worn and torn warrants, endorsed “Nulla Bona!” And “nulla bona” meant that the miserable defendant hadn’t a bean to bless himself with, and that a lot of legal ammunition had been thrown away which the plaintiffs would ultimately have to pay, themselves!
“Nulla Bona!” the imps would shriek when they’d call at the office to inquire if the victim had paid up.
“That’s ridiculous—your officer must be mad… Why, this man (the wretched defendant) was seen having an oyster lunch only the day before yesterday; and his wife goes about the street in a new hat, and a dress that at least must have cost two or three guineas! And we have private information that he owns the verandah chairs in the house he is living in, as well as the three beds, and two oil paintings.”
And so the tender-hearted, well-meaning bailiff would be called upon to interview the defendant again, and, in the name of the Queen, and the law, and all concerned, to grab the verandah chairs, and the beds, and the paintings, and sit on them, and hold them down tight till the debt was paid, or until his charges for sitting on them, and holding them down, at 7/6 a day, ran up so high that the imps got frightened, and deemed it advisable to order his withdrawal lest a writ against themselves for “possession money” might be issued, and the bailiff take possession of their writing desks and diplomas.
And so the “rush” ran on till Christmas—ran on till country delinquents were drawn into the clutches of the legal whirlpool…
“We want your officers to execute this writ at once,” said a perspiring lawyer, handing the clerk a writ of fi. fa. against a struggling selector domiciled not more than 80 miles from the city. “He has more than enough machinery on his farm to satisfy it; but, unless the bailiff gets possession at once, he’s one of those fellows who’ll remove it at night time if he gets wind of a writ being issued against him.”
The clerk said, “All right,” and when the lawyer had gone read the writ carefully: “Take of the goods, chattels, and other property of James M’Smith, of Ironbark Gully, if he be found in your bailiwick, the sum of £150.”
James M’Smith, of Ironbark Gully, was well known to the miserable clerk. A hundred times and more had he been in the old man’s humble selection home, and enjoyed his family’s hospitality. Well did he know and remember his brave, big-hearted wife, his rollicking, kindly daughters, and his slow-speaking, hard-working sons. And he knew old James M’Smith to be one of the dauntless pioneers, a generous neighbour, and, in the ever-recurring life’s battle against flood and fire and drought, one who would never despond—never give in.
To send a bailiff to take possession of the home of old James M’Smith on Christmas Eve was a crime that others might commit if they would, but it was not for the miserable clerk, in receipt of £125 per annum, to take a hand in it! It was for him to prevent the crime being committed if he could, and upon that he set his mind. So he tossed the contemptible writ aside, and, by giving precedence to everything else that came in during the day, did his best to forget it.
Before the closing hour an urgent message came from the lawyer who had lodged it. It was to remind the sheriff that the only train by which the bailiff could reach Ironbark Gully in time to put a man in possession of James M’Smith’s home on Christmas Eve left the city at 7 a.m. on the following morning. Also, that the lawyer was prepared to advance the bailiff any sum he might require in the way of expenses. But for him to catch the 7 a.m. train was imperative.
So the clerk reluctantly prepared a warrant against old James M’Smith, and placed it, along with numerous other documents, before the sheriff for signature.
While the sheriff was signing them the bailiff came into the clerk’s room. The miserable clerk took him into his confidence.
“Would you put a man in possession of a selector’s home on Christmas Eve?” he asked.
“I would have to do so if I were given the warrant,” was the answer.
“Have you enough unexecuted warrants to keep you going till Christmas Day?”
“More than enough.”
“Then you won’t be in again till when?”
“Till 4 o’clock on Christmas Eve.”
And he wasn’t… But on Christmas Eve, instead of housing a stranger and a bum, and moping round their selection with heavy, aching hearts, the M’Smiths forgathered beneath the roof of the old home, scented and adorned with gum boughs and appletree blossoms, and with light hearts charged their glasses with their own-made brew, called “A Merry Christmas” to the passing few, and laughed and danced the whole day through, while down in the city the plaintiff, and the plaintiff’s solicitors, and the judges and the sheriff, charged their glasses with champagne, and emptied them, and charged them again, and emptied them again, and didn’t care a tinker’s damn whether the bailiff was in possession of old James M’Smith’s home, or whether he wasn’t.
’Twas a memorable morning. All the court staff were in a state of perspiration and anxiety and excitement. The Estimates for the new financial year had been delivered in Parliament the evening before, and copies had arrived from the Government Printer. “Have I got an increase in screw?” That was the question. And every one wanted to be informed at the same time. Few doubted that they deserved an increase; none doubted he needed it. The Sheriff himself took charge of the office copy, and turned its pages over curiously, slowly. Standing expectantly and breathlessly around his table were the under sheriff, the chief bailiff, the governor of the gaol, the clerk of prisons, and the Sheriff’s miserable clerk.
“Under Secretary for Justice”—read the Sheriff —“increase from £650 to £750.”
“Oh, good Lord!” some one gasped in amazement. Some one who, apparently, was not a good Christian, and didn’t love his enemies. But the Sheriff made no comment—just ran his eye along to the next item. The Sheriff was a tactful and discreet official, as Sheriffs in those days mostly were… And one wouldn’t be surprised if they are to-day…
“Chief Clerk to Justice Department—£450 to £500… ”
“Moses!” from some other heathen. “He got a rise last year!” Still the Sheriff was not to be drawn. Departmentally he was a trinity—loyalty, etiquette, dignity, all in one.
He read on: “Governor of the Gaol, £400 to £450.” There was a murmur of approval, and all looked at the “governor” as though he had drawn first prize in Tattersall’s sweep. He took a little while to get over the shock. It was so seldom that a whole fifty pounds came in one lump to a public servant that even the heart of a governor of a gaol was softened, and thrown out several beats…
“Congratulations, old chap,” and the under sheriff gave him his hand.
“But I owe it to you, Mr. Sheriff,” the “governor” acknowledged gratefully, “for the way you recommended it. I am very thankful.”
The Sheriff bowed, and set fire to a cigarette. “Under Sheriff, £425 to £450.”
All eyes were turned to the U.S. The governor of the gaol extended his hand in reciprocation, but the other couldn’t see it. “£25!” he grunted. “They broke their hearts! ... It won’t keep me in tobacco!” And, turning on his heel, he went back to his room.
“Chief Bailiff, £350 to £375.”
“And that’s a lot more than I expected from them,” responded the chief bailiff, a genial Irishman from County Galway, “but I suppose ’tis better than a poke in the eye.”
“Clerk of Prisons, £125 to £150.”
A pleasant shock for the clerk of prisons. His big blue eyes ran over, and glistened like miniature lakes. The Sheriff nodded his approval to him; the governor of the gaol, with a fellow-feeling, shook hands with him; the miserable clerk, too overwhelmed with anxiety, was unable to express feeling of any kind. The clerk of prisons, his voice full of emotion, thanked every one concerned for his windfall, and said he somehow felt that he didn’t deserve it, and was a sinner in accepting it.
“Tut! tut!” from the chief bailiff. “Of course, you deserve it; every man in this world deserves all he can get, and a lot that he doesn’t get.”
“Even those who get sentenced upstairs?” the Sheriff suggested; at which every one laughed— every one but the miserable clerk. His risible faculties, if he had ever developed any, seemed seered; besides, just then, he was awaiting his own sentence.
It came.
“The Sheriff’s Clerk, £100—” The Sheriff paused, and looked up—looked up disappointedly— sympathetically. “There’s nothing down for you, Rudd,” he said, “I’m very sorry.”
The miserable clerk felt a hundred times more miserable, and his heart sank almost into his boots.
“Haven’t given him anything?” exclaimed the chief bailiff. “Bless my soul, he’s the one officer who should have got a £50 increase.”
The Sheriff looked down at the Estimates, and reflected. The others looked sorrowfully at the miserable clerk, and said nothing. He wished to the Lord they had said they were glad and joyful. And with lumps rising one after the other in his throat like bubbles travelling up the neck of a bottle, he mumbled, “It doesn’t matter.” Then, striving to look as though money was the last thing in the world he thought of, turned, and went back to his high stool.
“What increase did you get, Rudd?” the under sheriff, sucking at his pipe, asked.
The miserable clerk, his eyes fixed on the kalsomined wall, made no answer. He COULDN’T make any answer.
The question was repeated.
Another silent shake of the head.
The under-sheriff bounced out of his chair, and put his hand on the clerk’s shoulder.
“Didn’t they give you a rise at all?” he repeated. Again a silent shake of the head.
“Well, that’s a—”
Suddenly he was interrupted by the voice and presence of the hangman.
“Have you seen the Estimates, Mr. Rudd?” he asked, with his hat in one hand and his walking stick in the other.
“Not exactly; but the sheriff has them.”
“Am I down for an increase?”
“YOU?”
“Yes—ME ... I had an application in—”
The Under-Sheriff was inclined to be cynical; but he dare not. Under-sheriffs, as well as sheriffs, deemed it wise to humour the public executioner. They never knew what might ruffle him into throwing up his job, and leaving it upon their hands. .
“I really couldn’t say”—he smiled—“the sheriff will tell you . . But with all these executions coming on, you shouldn’t be looking for a rise.”
(Three poor wretches were then occupying condemned cells at the gaol!)
“That’s only a flash in the pan,” the Public Executioner demurred. “If I could reckon on the same number every month or so it would make a difference, of course—”
“In the population?” grinned the Under Sheriff.
“In the criminal population,” corrected the hangman.
Then, after a pause:
“One of them, I see, is a woman? Do you think the Executive Council will reprieve her?”
“Well, if they don’t, I hope to heaven I won’t have to go over to the gaol to see her executed!” And the U.S. shifted uneasily in his chair …
“Are you partial to ladies, sir?” grinned the hangman.
“Damn it! That’s enough talk about it. . The Sheriff will tell you if there’s anything on the Estimates.” And the U.S. fumbled a batch of papers irritably.
The hangman went out and knocked on the Sheriff’s door…
“Afraid the woman will be reprieved, and lose him his five pounds!” And, putting on his hat, the U.S. went out to soothe his disgust in whisky and soda.
When he returned the Public Executioner was comfortably seated in his chair endeavouring to engage the gloomy, miserable clerk in conversation.
‘Who the devil told you to sit in that chair? barked the U.S.
“No one.”
Well, get out of it—and never sit in it again.”
The hangman, talking all the while, rose slowly out of it. “The Sheriff tells me,” he said grievously, “that my name and office doesn’t appear on the Estimates at all?”
“I don’t suppose they do!” grunted the U S.
“You don’t suppose they do!” snapped the hangman. “Then I’m off!”
And away he went..
Favourite rendezvous for human types was the sheriff’s office… Hale, hearty, broad-chested, wide-trousered warriors of warders, with no more sentiment about them than bull-ants or a skinned bullock hanging on a gallows, would saunter in with a role of “returns” in their hands, and yarn and make mirth with the miserable clerk—always ending with a pressing invitation for him to “come over to the gaol and see the next hanging for the experience of it. You might be sheriff some day,” they’d grin, “and to know all about it before hand would be useful.” As a special inducement they’d promise after the “business” was over, to provide him with the “best breakfast of ham and eggs ever he had in his life”—all the eggs “laid on St. Helena,” and the ham “raised and cured there by skilled prison labour.”
At intervals gentlemen who had “graduated” at the gaol and won their degrees and rewards for good behaviour, looked in with noticeable temerity and conversed with the miserable clerk in monosyllables and subdued voices. They wore clean shaves and cropped hair; were mostly hard-mouthed and dull-eyed; regarded the surroundings, too, with animal-like strangeness, and saluted as a matter of training and breeding instead of saying “good-day,” or “thanks,” or “so long”—and many of them carried a small bundle under their arm, containing the whole of their worldly possessions… That was one of the benefits of serving a term at the gaol—one didn’t accumulate a lot of cumbersome boxes and leather bags and suit cases and things. You could always “travel light,” and shift from one domicile to another without hiring delivery vans or cabs.
"Who’s that chap?” lawyers and lawyers’ clerks and common ordinary citizens would frequently inquire. And when told he was a “chap just out of gaol” would rush to the door to get a good view of him as he took his leave... It was wonderful the interest people took in a chap who was just out of gaol. Yet any one of themselves with a bit of push might easily have enjoyed the same degree of popularity.
Patriarchs, too, frizzled and frisky, old veterans, fresh from Dunwich, would limp in complaining of lumbago, rheumatism, and gout, and the like— pensioned-off bailiff’s men some were, anxious to renew acquaintance with scenes of their past greatness, and to see if things were going on all right, and to inquire of the clerk “who the Sheriff was now?” and “what sort of a boss he was?” and “who was given all the writs to serve?”
“Ah! those were the busy days,” they’d sigh, dreamily. Then, waking up suddenly, would remind him that “he wasn’t in the office, then.” Those grey-haired accessories were curiously jealous of their claims to be regarded as infallible men of reference where official history came in. No one would pinch their priority, or write “nulla bona” to their reminiscences—not if they knew it!
The Sheriff’s office, too, often became the temporary abode of dilapidated members of the “profession”—members who briefed themselves to plead for fills of tobacco or the price of a drink, or a “pair of boots that you didn’t want”—professional gentlemen who seemed to have lived for the purpose of contradicting Lawson’s philosophy: “There’s nothing heaps the trouble on your mind like the knowledge that your trousers badly need a patch behind.” Though their trousers often needed a patch behind, sometimes two or more patches, there was little or no visible trouble heaped upon their minds. But their’s were legal minds, which, of course, might have made a difference. And when they hobbled along the corridors of the courts, or through the crowded thoroughfares of the city beside (not inside) the broken shoe-leather that partially covered their feet, their tattered coat-tails flicking them along, their blazing faces and bulby noses conducting them like magnets to the nearest pub—the gaping public would nudge each other and whisper: “See that cove? … That’s Charlie Juley, the most brilliant man at the Bar. If he liked he could be making his five thousand a year.” That he preferred five shillings a day which was made by somebody else never seemed to occur to those genius-worshippers.
On Full Court days, the days when budding barristers and solicitors were “admitted” with the blessings of the court—the days when all members of the profession, whether briefed or briefless, turned out in all their war and law paint to make a good show, and when the pa’s and the ma’s and the sweethearts and sisters and friends of those to be admitted came along in great force to witness the ceremony—the dilapidated ones, spruced-up, in soiled and ill-used, rickety-looking wigs and remnants of silken gowns that uncovered their familiar rags, would be the first to arrive and rush the most prominent seats. And when the courtroom filled, and flowed over into the jury-box, and every other box, and the business commenced, these red-billed, unconscious humourists became the central features of attraction.
One of them at a criminal sittings one morning appeared in the defence of a burglar, and when he rose at the Bar table and glanced around he was the only individual in court who wasn’t wearing a huge grin. The unemployed in the gallery were in danger of slipping a joint in their necks trying to catch a glimpse of him.
“Juley’s going to address the jury,” they whispered. “Now we’ll hear something.” With the dead-beats about town Juley was a rare favourite and a human wonder. He was deeper in their pride and affections than a ’orse. So Juley adjusted his quaint looking wig, which wasn’t unlike the lining of a magpie’s nest, flourished the remnant of a gown resembling a divided shirt divided in about fourteen places, and wagged a long, thin finger silently at the jury to hold their attention and keep them occupied while he collected his thoughts… Then, in a voice that inflected and modulated and varied between the call of a wild goose and the whistle of an engine, he pleaded aggressively for half an hour or so for the acquittal of his friend, the burglar.
“Now, gentlemen,” he concluded, “take a good look at the prisoner—look closely at him” (the jury had been looking closely at him all the time—they couldn’t well avoid looking at him because he had a corrugated nose, half an ear missing, and his face as punctured and scarred as the disc of a rifle target) “and ask yourself is that the face of a man who would break into your house? Of course it ain’t! Wouldn’t you rather say it’s the face of a hero? That man would no more think of breaking into your house than I would, unless he saw it was on fire and some one trapped in it was likely to perish in the flames; then nothing would stop him! Anyway, gentlemen, I leave him in your hands with confidence that you’ll find him not guilty without leaving your box.”
Then Juley collected his papers, glided out of court, “disrobed,” and made for the nearest threepenny bar. When he returned, which wasn’t for a few hours, he met the miserable clerk at the court door.
“What did they do with that chap I defended?” he asked.
“Gave him three years.”
“Serve him damn well—hic—right; he ought to got six!”
And Nehemiah Bartley used to hover round the Sheriff’s Office. When Henry, as he called the Under Sheriff, wasn’t available he would discourse to the miserable clerk on pretty women and dainty ankles, and riding buckjumpers. He had a square, boney frame had Nehemiah; walked with a stoop; wore a mustard coloured helmet; carried a long straw between his teeth, and an iron spur on one heel; and “hanging up” to the fence on the North Quay side of the courts he always left a wobbly, ill-shaped quadruped, to doze and dream of pastures green and corn and chaff that were, and which never, never would be again—not for him!
“And you reckon you could ride a buckjumper?” the miserable clerk, running a doubting eye over Nehemiah, sniggered one afternoon.
“Young man,” he answered severely, “horses that have come in after a six-months’ spell, have bucked with me all over the Darling Downs, and never threw me.”
“How did they buck?” grinned the miserable clerk; “straight ahead? in a circle? backwards? or how?”
“Confound you! the way that all horses buck, of course!”
“But all horses don’t buck the same way; they all buck their own way.”
“Tut! What do you a clerk here in a Government office, know about bucking horses?”
“Not much,” grinned the miserable clerk, “but any horse you could ever ride in a saddle and with a top-rail or a monkey-strap, I could ride bareback, and face its tail.”
“Never mind what you could do—you are like all the rest of the boasting colonials. Here, put your name down on this,” and from his pocket he drew a list of names as long as a carpet snake. “I’m getting out a book of my early experiences. They are all names of leading people; and the first to head the list, look for yourself, is Sir Samuel Griffith.”
“Oh, well,” the miserable clerk drawled, “if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me,” and without a thought as to where the half-guinea would come from, subscribed his name for a copy of “Opals and Agates,” by Nehemiah Bartley. Peace to his ashes!
The winter was gone, and the trees and flowers in the Court gardens were budding and blooming; the sparrows were chirping and doing their best to seem glad they were alive; and the voice of the turtle, I suppose, was heard somewhere, by some one, in the land. Inside the office the voice of a woman was heard—a pale-faced, hollow-cheeked, care-worn woman, with little more than a few shillings’ worth of clothes on her back, a baby in her arms, another at her knee. She was pleading with the Under-Sheriff for time, for sympathy, for mercy. She might as well have pleaded with a pawnbroker. Under a warrant on fi. fa., a bailiff was in possession of her home—the debt was not hers, but her husband’s, and it ran into four hundred pounds.
“For God’s sake, sir, don’t let them sell everything on me; the piano is all I have left to make a living for myself and my children with!”
It was nothing new to the Under-Sheriff; and for 20 years and more he had been callously explaining that he had no voice or power in such matters— that she would have to consult Brown and Brown, the plaintiff’s solicitors. So, sobbing aloud, the woman went out, taking her babies and her worries with her.
“A damn shame!” murmured the Under-Sheriff, who wasn’t, notwithstanding the callousness of his office, entirely without sympathy, “to take the bit of furniture under a judgment for four hundred pounds!”
And the miserable clerk, with the woman’s sobs ringing in his ears, fervently wished he had lost the writ when it was lodged, or set fire to it, or did anything other than prepare a warrant under it for the Sheriff to sign, and for the bailiff to “seize and take,” and the lord knows what!
“If she could only get the man in possession, which ever one of them it is,” the Under-Sheriff mumbled on, as he pulled on a dress coat, and took a hurried draw or two from his pipe before proceeding to the judge’s chambers to escort his Honour into court, “to leave the place, and go down town for something or other, and then lock him out, she wouldn’t have much to worry about, but it wasn’t for me to tell her anything like that.” Then, as he went out the door: “If anything important comes in bring it up for me to sign.”
Nothing of importance came in for nearly an hour; then Bantry, a bailiff’s man, “off duty,” stole stealthily and respectfully in.
“Have you got any writs or jury summonses that want serving that’ll keep me going till to-morrow?” he whispered into the miserable clerk’s ear, and breathed the breath of beer upon him. Bailiff’s men always whispered when they came into the office. They seemed to think it was sacrilege or contempt of court to lift their voices and talk, or sing unto the clerk. “And if you haven’t.” he added dexterously, “lend me a shilling till some does come in.”
The miserable clerk hadn’t any summonses that wanted serving; but he scraped from his pockets two threepenny bits and a sixpence he had hoarded there for several weeks in hopes of a rainy day. The sight and sound of them brightened the eyes of the bailiff’s man.
“I’ll return it to you as soon as I’m paid for my next job,” he whispered feelingly; “my God, you’ll see if I don’t.”
But just then the miserable clerk wasn’t at all concerned about the loan, or the chances of its being met when it fell due. He was thinking of the woman and her babies, and the bit of furniture that was going to be sold from under them. Also of the significant words of the Under-Sheriff: “If she could only get the man in possession to leave the place, and go down town for something or other, and then lock him out.”
Suddenly he asked, “Who’s in possession at Burn’s place? Brown v. Burns?”
“Penhalligan, and a fine thing he’s got on,” chuckled Bantry. “He’ll be there till Christmas if they let him. The defendant has nothing but the furniture, and Penhalligan is occupying the best part of that. He was lying there like a dook, reading a book on the sofa, when I went to relieve him for an hour or two yesterday.”
“Whereabouts is the place?”
Bantry told him; and, hurriedly repeating his promise to redeeem the loan when it matured, went off to invest it in beer.
The wretched clerk took up a Rockhampton jury pay-sheet, and absent-mindedly started checking the payments. He didn’t care tuppence what errors or omissions they might contain, or whether he missed them, or whether he didn’t; and in those hilarious days the Rockhampton jury pay-sheets, and all Circuit Court jury pay-sheets, were comic opera, mingled with anathema, beer, and booze. Having finished checking the alleged pay-sheet, he put on his hat, an old black felt, with a red cord round it to keep it in shape, affixed a memo on the door intimating to all and sundry that he would be back “in ten minutes”—a piece of fiction revelled in even more to-day than then—locked the office, and rushed away to see a trusted friend meanly and miserably employed in a large and prosperous drapery business. When he returned, after an hour or so, two talkative law clerks from rival firms, each with a writ on fi. fa. to lodge against the same defendant, were waiting for him at the closed door. He made no apology; he was a clerk of few words. He merely opened shop again, and mounted his high stool.
“I was here 10 minutes, at least, before my friend,” said Tomkins, representing Grab and Steal, “and you must give us priority, Mr. Rudd. It wasn’t my fault that you were not in.”
“Not on your life!” objected Markson, representing Foot and Fleece, “I was here as soon as you were—my legal oath wasn’t I! You don’t put those monkey tricks across me!”
“Well, I’m going to mark the writs as lodged simultaneously,” decided the clerk, “and you can fight it out between yourselves.” And he proceeded to mark them.
“Do you say you were here as soon as I was?” Tomkins, with a perky, cocks-comb dignity, demanded angrily of Markson.
“Certainly I do! What else? Do you expect me to say that I wasn’t?”
“Well, then, you’re a liar?”
“And you’re a— liar!”
Then, without further argument, Tomkins hit Markson in the eye. Markson was so astonished, and so indignant, that he hit Tomkins in the mouth. Then at each other they went, plugging, sparring, getting into holts, gurgling, hissing, and swearing, and falling up against the wall and over the furniture. The miserable clerk, from the elevation of his stool, looked down impartially upon them, and grinned. At the end of the first round they stood with bleeding noses, bulging eyes, and outstretched necks, contemplating each other feelingly. “Bastard!” Tomkins missed, and Markson sprang upon him, forced him across the Under-Sheriff’s table, and, with both hands at his throat, was strangling the life out of him, when the public executioner, wondering what all the noise and struggling were about, came slinking in.
“Look at these coves, here; what they’re at!” the clerk called to him.
“He’s strangling him—and you’re looking at him!” and like a Christian the public executioner sprang to the rescue of Tomkins. “Let the chap up!” he ordered, taking Markson by the chin and the back of his head, and nearly breaking his neck. Markson let him up, and when he (Markson) recovered enough breath, and was sure his neck wasn’t broken, complained that Tomkins had called him a bastard! And while he was complaining, Tomkins broke loose again, and delivered him one on the jaw. Then the public executioner got the grip on Tomkins, and gave his neck a twist.
“Enough of it, now!” he commanded, “or it’ll end by the two of you falling into my hands!”
“Who the devil are you!” both combatants demanded in baffled, defiant tones.
“Who am I?” the public executioner chuckled. “They want to know who I am?” he added, turning to the clerk with a wink and a grin.
“He’s the blanky hangman,” the miserable clerk said; and, forgetting all about their writs and “priority,” Tomkins and Markson snatched up each other’s hats and ran.
* * *
Next day. The Chief Bailiff sat discussing the day’s programme with the Under-Sheriff. The miserable clerk, leaning over his high desk, was recording the “returns” to a bundle of warrants. Penhalligan, hat in hand, and pale and agitated, crept in.
“What the devil brings you here?” and the Chief Bailiff rose to his feet, “didn’t I leave you in possession of Burn’s place?”
Penhalligan trembled. “I got a message, sir,” he stammered, “that my wife met with an accident, and, without thinking anything, I—I left the place, and hurried home.”
“Well, I’m d—d!” broke in the Chief Bailiff.
"And when I went back.” concluded Panhalligan in tears, “they had locked me out, and won’t let me in again.”
“And there’s no way of making them,” adjudged the Under-Sheriff, “the warrant is dead now!”
“Who sent you the message that your wife met with an accident?” the Chief Bailiff questioned.
Penhalligan didn’t know.
“And you never will know!” grunted the Under-Sheriff. And, leaning further over his desk, and absent-mindedly making crosses and strokes and things in the “register of warrants on fi. fa.,” the miserable clerk hoped to the Lord the U.S. would prove a good prophet.
The clerk had spent three years in the Sheriff’s Office before seeing the inside walls of Boggo-road Gaol, or St. Helena. The rest of the staff, though, had been inside them many times.
“Have you never witnessed an execution?” the Sheriff of those days, a dapper little captain, who wore perfect clothes, and a wall flower in his coat that annoyed me—asked one morning.
The clerk grinned, “he hadn’t.”
“Well, don’t, if you can help it”
For quite a while he managed to help it.
He had no gruesome anxiety to see what the scaffold was like, or how a condemned man faced eternity. You see he didn’t know that he wouldn’t have to face it some day himself, when he reckoned it would be quite time enough to take stock of the paraphernalia and the beautiful surroundings. But a number of clerks who “quill-drived” in other departments held different views. Their taste for entertainment was different to his. And, perhaps, ’tis well ’twas so. A young nation requires to be stimulated with a variety of taste and sentiment, just as it requires a variety of industries, or animals, or poultry, or politicians… These clerks of other departments used to seek his influence with the Sheriff in obtaining passes to attend “hanging-matches,” as they called them. He doesn’t remember that any of them ever asked for a “double pass,” to include a lady.
“There’s nothing in it,” one of them confided to the miserable clerk, after seeing an execution. He could go and look at one every morning.” Nothing in it? No! not for HIM—but for the other fellow. Ah, well!
* * *
One morning, perched on his high stool, examining ancient records while waiting for writs and processes to drop in, the miserable clerk became absorbed in a document bearing the signature of Griffen, P.M.—the same Griffen who poisoned the officers of the Peak Downs gold escort and swung for it in the Brisbane Gaol. He was thinking his signature, which was a flash one, would look well on a cheque for a million, and was trying to make a facsimilie of it, when a dignified, silver-haired gent, with a walking-stick and a frown, marched in on him. Without removing his hat, he asked if “the Sheriff was doing anything about that fellow over there?”
"Hulloa!” the miserable clerk answered, recognising his distinguished brother officer, Master of the Rope, Public Executioner and Principal Flagellator. “I was just thinking of you. Look at that.” And he showed him Griffen’s signature. “Did he give you much trouble?”
“Before my time, boy!” he snapped, “but he wouldn’t have given me any trouble if he wasn’t— not a bit of him.”
I thought that he wouldn’t, too, for our hangman was a competent chap, a man of action—a business man, and no dreamer. He knew his job, and every one in the community thought a lot of him—every one who hadn’t committed murder or robbed somebody, but there were very few of the latter.
Then he told the miserable clerk that he wanted to see the Sheriff personally. He told him he couldn’t see him personally, or impersonally, or any other way, because he wasn’t about.
“Well, tell him, when he comes in, that Mr. W— called in answer to his note, and that I’ll meet him at the Gaol to-morrow, promptly at 3 o’clock, to see that everything is all right and in working order.” The miserable clerk wrote down the message: he turned on his walking-stick, and the clerk gave him the Masonic sign with his fingers when he was out the door.
On the morrow the Sheriff cabbed it to the Gaol in a “hansom,” and gave the miserable clerk a seat beside him for the good of his health. It was his first visit to the gaol, and, of course, it was different going there in a hansom, beside the Sheriff, to going there in Black Maria, with two policemen on the box seat and some more clinging on behind. All the same, the big iron gates swung open, and a warrior of a warder with a bunch of jangling keys hanging to him, in ferocious tones announced “THE SHERIFF OF QUEENSLAND”—and the Governor of the Gaol saluted, and the chief warder and the senior warders saluted, and they started in pairs to cross the big, gloomy yard that seemed to suggest tombs and hidden mysteries. The miserable clerk didn’t feel that he was sharing any greater pleasure or privilege than if he had arrived per the Black Maria… An unearthly, unhealthy, solemnity pervaded this open-air interior, walled on every side with brick and mortar… It gave one the creeps, filled you with a feeling of having been captured by bushrangers, and were now lodged at headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief. The man facing the tower with a gun, and looking as if he didn’t know where to get down, was the only object of relief.
“What’s he doing up there?” the miserable clerk asked of Warder Sneyd—
Instead of answering, he grinned at Warder MacDonald, and said, “he wants to know what th’ sentry is doing on the tower?”
“If ever we get him over here for good”— responded the other—“and he tries to jump the wall, he’ll know what he’s doing there—
* * *
They crossed into a cold solitary passage lined with cells—cells, into which suffering sinners to whom “each day was like a year—a year whose days were long”—retired nightly to commune with themselves, and wonder, “could they have the same life over, would they live the same again?” And at the end of this cold, solitary corridor a square where there was a stair-case leading to the gallows.
* * *
“There you are,” said the senior warder, pointing to the murderous contraption for the clerk’s benefit, “how would you like to take a drop off that?” Cheerful, jolly old beggars were these warders who could make jests on a gallows!
But here was the great man, himself, the public executioner, waiting to give an exhibition of his terrible skill… He had his coat off, and was in his element, and in full charge of his department. No Governor of a gaol or chief warder dare meddle with HIS duties; To the sheriff only would he bow, or bend a knee, or take an instruction… Standing aloft on the scaffold, he stroked his flowing whisker and said;—“Now, Mister Sheriff, you will see for yourself that everything is in the safest working order—”
Then, putting the rope round a “dummy,” formed of sand and canvas, he tied the knot behind its ear. Dispensing with the mockery of asking it if it had anything to say before taking the leap, he stepped back, drew the bolt holding the trap door, and with a harsh grating and a thump that was audible over the gaol, the dummy dangled before them all, and nothing ever looked more lifeless or comical in death. And within hearing, in the condemned cell, languished the miserable prisoner himself in whose interests this gruesome “trial” was being enacted!
“May the Lord have mercy on your soul,” said the judge, when sentencing him to death. But the law, itself, had no mercy on his last few breaths of life! For the one who is judged and convicted there is no mercy!
There had been a change of Government, and a new set of Ministers went into office; and when a new set of Ministers held the fort a lot of rejoicing was heard in the corridors and on the door-mats of the Service—and a lot of disappointment and despondency, too. In every out-going Minister some one or other lost his departmental prop, his political pull, his medium of hope and advancement—and in every incoming one lots more recognised a friend, a patron, and knew their chance of being fired over the heads of some one else into a bigger job had come to them at long last… Glory be to the new-born Minister! was the song they used to sing by day and by night. He was their Moses—their Aaron, also their Messiah…
The despondent ones had no song to sing, not as much as a dirge or a Dead March. They could only think and wonder; and they mostly wondered what on earth the electors were thinking of when they returned such a crowd to power! They reckoned the country was going right straight to the devil, and shook their heads to the accompaniment of their sad, selfish reflections… The jubilant ones, on the other hand, were delighted that the electors had at last become sane and wise, and saw great hopes for the country’s future—and for their own, more particularly their own. Big billets, long been held by the other fellows, would now be theirs, or big new billets created for them, which would come to much the same thing. And again, “Glory be to the new-born Minister.”
The Minister whom the staff of the Sheriff’s office was concerned about was the Attorney-General—sometimes they called him the Minister for Justice, or the Solicitor-General—a distinction without any difference, but not without any salary or big fees. Such trifling omissions were never made by a new Minister. He was always most exact in small monetary matters, and a sticker for detail. And what a wonderful event was the coming of a new Attorney-General to the department. Not only did this mighty official atom bring great hopes and bright expectations, deep sorrows and sad disappointments to the departments, but like a shining orb he shed the same mixed influences and emotions over the whole of the legal profession. My stars he did! Government briefs, departmental pickings, and Ministerial patronage became his to distribute amongst the members of it—like passing around blankets to the blacks… They wanted them all in those days, too—my legal oath they did! And those of them who, for want of foresight, had had professional differences with him, or disliked his person or politics, hung their lips, and went into sackcloth and ashes. But those who “whiskied” with him, or had been to school with him, or “knew him when he was in Spain, and the fever strong upon him,” entered his office upon their hands and knees, so to speak, and paid him homage for favours that were to come. His success at the polls, they assured him—his brilliant advocacy in Parliament, his forensic oratory, were dazzling gifts, and his elevation to the Bench would happen the moment he, himself, said, “let my will be done.” Not only was such a consummation desired by his friends, they told him, but by his enemies, by the whole people of the country, of the universe, in fact—and they, too, lifted up their voices and sang, “Glory be—”
It was an “off-day” at the Sheriff’s office. The Under-Sheriff smoked harder than usual, and leaned further back in his chair; the miserable clerk, perched on his high stool, rested his brow in the palms of his hands, and pondered for the most effective form of wording an application for a rise in screw. (He had been wording applications for six or seven years for a rise in his screw, but never could draw any blood with any of them). The Sheriff himself, giving his dignity a bit of a holiday, came and sat on the corner of the Under-Sheriff’s table and entered into disconnected yarns reminiscent of his adventures and activities for half a century agone… He was just warming up to the romantic, element in himself when word came that the new Attorney-General, chaperoned by the Under Secretary, was “going round all the offices to make the acquaintance of every one in them.” The Sheriff shut up like a book and hobbled out and across the passage to his own den. There he surveyed himself in a mirror, adjusted his collar and tie, brushed the dust from his boots and the sleeves of his coat. Then sitting upright at his roller desk, waited the coming of the mighty one… The Under-Sheriff put the pipe he had been smoking away in a draw, piled papers of little importance upon his table to give it a busy appearance, then, ordering the miserable clerk to hand him down the “Suitors’ ledger,” placed that weighty volume before him, and, pencil in hand, began checking the entries, a mental effort he hadn’t attempted for some years. The miserable clerk, thinking it probable there would be some hand-shaking in the reception, eyed the palms of his hands closely, and rubbed them hard on his thighs.
“Now, you be doing something,” the Under-Sheriff grunted, “and don’t be sitting there idle, when he comes in!”
“Oh, I’VE got plenty to do,” the clerk answered, in truth, and with just as much or as little sarcasm as he dared put into it… for he was a moody cynical clerk with a soul seered with the pangs of adversity and the love of irony.
“Well, see you’re doing it, that’s all!” and the other went on with his sham-audit of the Suitors’ ledger …
Presently voices were heard in the Sheriff’s room, followed by a few rounds of forced mirth.
“There he is,” the Under-Sheriff mumbled, more for his own information than for the miserable clerk’s.
A little later the Sheriff, smiling affably, and flushed and heightened with the pride of personal and official importance, followed by the new Attorney-General, wearing a brand new tailor-made suit and a bunch of violets in his coat, and the Under Secretary entered. The Under-Sheriff rose hurriedly to his feet, and in his confusion dropped his glasses on the floor and put his foot on them without knowing it. “The new Attorney-General, Mr. —” the Sheriff gushed—and they shook hands like brothers, and the new Attorney-General observed that the Under-Sheriff must have been one of the oldest officers in the service.
“The oldest in this department,” the Under-Sheriff claimed, with a flush of pride.
“Well, if he’s not the oldest, he’s one of the best,” the Under Secretary put in, without meaning a word of it.
The miserable clerk glanced slyly over his shoulder and wondered when his turn was going to come. But it didn’t come at all. He wasn’t anybody! The new Attorney-General turned to the Sheriff and asked him where he housed the hangman, and if he kept him on a rope or on a chain? A jest at which the others laughed excessively. The miserable clerk, alone, remained solemn and imperturbed—he never could get any enjoyment for himself out of laughing to oblige people—not even a new Attorney-General. Then a parting word to the Under-Sheriff, never a glance or a grunt at the menial of a clerk, and the new Attorney-General withdrew and was conducted to the next office.
“My word, he’s a splendid fellow,” gushed the Under-Sheriff, the blushes and flushes of vanity and pride rising from his features like morning mists unveiling a mountain peak.
“Do y’ think so!” and, with a cynical grin the miserable clerk descended from his stool and took charge of the suitors’ ledger again.
The Sheriff, having seen them off the premises, tottered in again. His face was aglow, and his eyes danced in the hollows of his head.
“Well, and how did he impress you —?” he asked proudly.
“A grand fellow—he’ll make a great Attorney-General,” enthused the Under-Sheriff.
The Sheriff turned to the clerk:
“And you—er—Rudd; what did you think of him?”
“I thought the violets in his coat smelled beautiful, sir,” and the miserable clerk went on with his application for a rise in screw.
Often enough, when a sore-footed, sad-eyed, advertising canvasser has sought a word with the boss of a big firm, the said boss has been far too busy either to come out, or to clear the way for the hard-yackering one to go in. Frequently the big Joss would send out an emissary, in the person of a little Joss—a pale, solemn-faced churchman—to inform the vendor of advertising space that he, the big Joss, wasn’t anywhere on the premises, and that only Providence could say with any measure of accuracy when he would be… In the days, though, when the scribe knew the sheriff’s office as well as he knew his prayers, the mere word from a bailiff, or a ’phone from the miserable clerk, intimating to the biggest of the big commercial josses that a judge had fined him three guineas for not answering his name as a juror when called, and was likely to make it six in another ten minutes or so, would bring that biggest of commercial josses flying from his den, trying in haste to drag his hat on upside down, bumping the pious little josses, and tumbling into the nearest cab, and off, as though he were answering a call to the throne of Heaven. It was droll— excessively droll—and wonderfully funny to see the preference and attention the big business man would extend to a judge! Noblesse oblige; but it always made the miserable clerk yearn to be a judge—a whole judge—if only for a couple of sittings—just for the humour of it.
* * *
One court morning a huge business magnate came puffing and blowing along the corridor, taking all the “roadway” to himself, walking as fast as he could with one leg, and running as hard as he could with the other. The miserable clerk, who had an idea he would be seen arriving, was standing at the office door ready to welcome him with a grin.
“Oh, my God!” he gasped, “what’s to be done? I never thought for a moment about the blasted summons till the message came! Oh, dear! oh, dear! I wouldn’t have let it slip me for a hundred pounds!”
“Well, hurry up, Mr. Blank, and tell the judge, else he might make it six! It’ll be all the same to him. He doesn’t mind how much he gives when its in fines and not kind.”
“I don’t mind that—I don’t mind that—it’s the stupidity of it, and the humiliation. Oh, dear! but what judge is it, young fellow?”
“Old Harky,” and the clerk, who sometimes gave the judges homely appellations, instead of their cumbersome titles when talking of them, grinned a grin that didn’t impart a great deal of hope or assurance to the joss of commerce.
“Oh, my! I’d sooner it was one of the others.”
“So would I. But you better hurry.”
“And what must I do—speak for myself or get a lawyer?”
“I’d speak for myself, if I were you; lawyers can’t speak, anyway—they only mag,” and in the subconscious soul of that menial clerk a humorous chord began to attune itself.
“What a forgetful fool I was!” and off up the stairs rocked the big business man.
The miserable clerk stood watching till the last of him had reached the top, then up the stairs he went himself, and was in the court-room almost as soon as the other.
The man of business squeezed his way as best he could through the crowd on the floor till no one was in his eye but the judge and a table of heads bristling with wigs and gowns that rustled like a mild breeze fanning a cornfield. For a moment he stood gazing at his Honour like a man about to address a large temperance audience. His Honour was leaning forward tapping his notebook with his pincenez, and telling counsel that in “all his lengthy and—er varied experience at the Bar he had never known of such an extraordinary procedure.” To butt in on him at such a moment, when he was in such a mood, was something no legal light or mighty official would take on for a lot of money. The huge man of commerce was neither legal light nor mighty official, but he had a lot of money, so, lifting his voice to a high, hoarse pitch, he said: “Your Honour—”
Consternation! It was as if Moses himself had spoken from the clouded ceiling. The Bar jumped round in amazement. The Under-Sheriff stood to his feet; the Press ceased taking notes; the crowd on the floor wondered what was up; two bailiffs and three policemen made advance movements from their respective corners; his Honour himself sat bolt upright, looking the god of austerity, and the victim of outraged rule and usurped authority all in one. “Arrest that man!” fairly rang from him. The Under-Sheriff signalled to his officers. Then the bailiffs and the police pushed every one who stood in their way of advance, and surrounded the offender.
“Your Honour—” he began again.
“Silence, sir! Arrest him!”
Then hurried, hoarse whispers were exchanged between the officials and the “prisoner,” and between two members of the Bar and the prisoner. Explanations were “submitted.”
“Why did you not answer to your name when it was called?” in tones a degree or two milder from his Honour; but the fire in eye not abated.
“I wasn’t here, your Honour.”
Quite a number felt like giving way to loud mirth, but knew they might just as well give way to a burst of profanity.
“That is no answer—at least, I cannot take it as one.”
Then the big business man, dulled with awe and confusion, explained with all the humility he could command how he meant no disrespect to the court by forgetting all about it, and assured his Honour that it had never happened with him before, and never would again—on his oath it wouldn’t!
“Well, you are fined three guineas. I might have fined you more. You are a very lucky man.”
“Thank you, your Honour.”
Then the commercial man was allowed to withdraw without being handcuffed, and to pass out in peace, to herd discontentedly with the rest of his fellow jurors not empanelled.
Out in the corridor a knot of mirthful sympathisers gathered round him, and, as the miserable clerk, with guilt stains on his conscience, crept past them, he heard the “discharged prisoner” explain how “he wouldn’t have done it only for the chap down in the office telling him it was the proper procedure.”
* * *
Then the clerk ascended the stairs in three bounds like a ’roo taking three water jumps in quick succession, and, rushing into the office to mount his high stool again, and be away from the madding creepiness of the law court and all its flummery, found his sullen, silvery-haired brother official, the public executioner, waiting to “see the sheriff.”
“In the Criminal Court,” jerked the clerk; “won’t be down till 1, ’less the jury retire before that.”
“What are they trying? Those fellows for assaulting that woman?”
The miserable clerk believed it was.
“They deserve hanging, those fellows.” And the callous eyes of the common hangman began to glitter, and fill and flow over with the sense of justice that was buried deep down in his soul. And, leaving the chair he had helped himself to, crossed the floor, and tapped the clerk’s desk argumentatively with his walking stick. “Any man who assaults a woman ought to be hanged,” he went on; “there’s far too much of it going on in this country, and it’s only the rope that will steady fellows who have no respect for women; and it’s a deterrent— the only deterrent—”
“Yes. it’ll steady them all right, so long as it don’t break when they hang on it.” And out of the corner of his eye the miserable clerk watched the stick tap-tapping his desk.
“It won’t break, not it—not if I have the putting of it on.” And a gleeful chuckle that sounded like a horse that hadn’t seen water for three or four days having a drink escaped the public executioner. “And if I was the judge I’d send them all up— every damn one of them.”
“Up on to the gallows?” shuddered the miserable clerk.
“And down off it, too, but in a different way to the one they went up.” And, making a “clicking” noise with the double of his tongue, the hangman placed his icy hand on the back of the miserable clerk’s neck and squeezed it covetously. Stars and pillars of fire! Never did man or cat or monkey leave a high stool, or a low one either, with such suddenness as did that clerk! Facing the lover of rope, he struck an aggressive attitude in the centre of the floor.
“Try that on again,” he flashed, “and I’ll drop you, you neck breaker!”
And he meant it.
An agitation had been on foot for the reprieve of the wretched woman languishing in Boggo-road Gaol under sentence of death, and a letter came from the Home Secretary stating that the Executive, “after carefully considering all the facts and circumstances, &c., &c., had decided to let the law take its course.’’ The law mostly does take its course—and, like a running stream, always down hill. And so, for an hour or two, at least, there was gloom in the office of the Sheriff. The hurling of fellow-men into eternity, however justifiable on “a life for a life” mandate, or at the will of Government, had become a duty hard and terrible enough, God knows; but putting a rope around a woman’s neck—and a frail little thing at that, and not without modesty or without beauty, and precipitating her into a world “from whose bourne no traveller returns,” was quite another matter, a conscience-smiting matter, verily!… With features “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” the Sheriff sat at his desk and penned a “private” note to the hangman. (He always penned a private note to the hangman on the eve of an execution, and that responsible officer would promptly arrive at his office door, and knock on it as though his knuckles were weighted with lead, and with the confidence of a Prime Minister). This time he knocked as though his knuckles were weighted with gold, and with the confidence of two Prime Ministers… because, perhaps, along with the wretched woman, a man, her confederate in the crime she had been convicted of, was to take his place upon the gallows! Hence he arrived with a feeling of double importance! But what the Sheriff required him for was to discuss the “arrangements” and assure himself against any mishap or omission in the execution. The discussion lasted not half an hour, and on the Sheriff’s side was strictly confidential. On the hangman’s side it was also strictly confidential—till he left the room and crossed the corridor to pay his respects to the miserable clerk before hastening to the gaol to give the gallows and the rest of the paraphernalia a final over-hauling.
“Well, young man,” he grinned cheerfully, “are you coming over on Monday morning?”
The miserable clerk, feeling the warm breath of him in his ear, and recognising the voice, clutched his desk to prevent himself falling off the high stool, and hissed:
“What would I want going over for?”
“To see what you’ll never get the chance of seeing again, my boy—”
“I can see plenty here, without going over there —get away from me and sit down, somewhere!”
“You can’t see a man and a woman taking the drop at the same time, my boy, by sitting here,” and the hangman rubbed his hands together like Shylock.
“Christ! Are they going to hang the two together?” shuddered the clerk.
“THEY? No, not THEY, but ME, I, my boy. No one interferes with yours truly in the duty of his office—ah, no! None of that for me—doing nothing but looking on, and then claiming all the credit afterwards. Ha, ha, no!”
The miserable clerk gazed at the wall in front of him, and unconsciously spurred the legs of the high stool with his heels.
“It will be something altogether unique, my boy, I assure you… Such a spectacle as a man and a woman taking the great plunge together has never happened in the annals of our profession before. And it will be starred and featured in all the leading newspapers.”
A cold shiver crept down the back of the miserable clerk; crept slowly up again, and nestled amongst his hair, till it stood right up on end.
“As I explained to the Sheriff, to send them off together is quite the right thing; it will expedite everything—and better for them, and better for ourselves. Sending them off one after the other would mean a dreadful suspense to one of them, and it would be cruelty to human beings with the same feelings as ourselves—”
“Christ!” the miserable clerk hissed again.
“And, as I told the Sheriff, in the execution of our duty it is for us to show as much sympathy as we can.”
The poor clerk turned his head, and asked: “What—have YOU got any sympathy?”
“ME? Don’t you make any mistake about that, my boy; but what was worrying the Sheriff is this”—here the hangman lowered his voice to a whisper—“how I reckon I can carry out a double execution without something going wrong? … Well, of course, you know as well as I do that he has never studied the art of executions scientifically, and is only a baby where hanging people is concerned.”
The miserable clerk stared thoughtfully into the twinkling grey eyes.
“He doesn’t know that executions, like everything else in the world, are ruled by figures. The length of rope to give persons is all a matter of weights and measures, and what he’s most anxious about” —here he paused to turn a suspicious eye to the open door—“is that Mrs. What’s-her-name, weighing only about seven stone, might still be alive and kicking after the drop, and that I couldn’t swing on her legs, as I sometimes do with a man when he isn’t quite dead—”
In horror the miserable clerk threw up his two hands, overbalanced, and fell from his high stool to the floor, bumping his head against the leg of the Under-Sheriff’s table; then scrambling to his feet, half-stunned, and pointing to the door, hissed: “To hell out of this!”
“I can see,” the hangman chuckled, “that it would never do for them to appoint you my assistant,” and away he went to catch the Boggo-road ’bus.
It was not on the suggestion of the hangman, or at the invitation of the genial warders, or for the prospects of a beautiful breakfast of the choicest ham and eggs—but on the instructions of the Sheriff, that the miserable clerk found himself knocking at the iron gate of Boggo-road Gaol with a roll of official documents hidden in his breast pocket, early on the morning of the double execution… And what a memorable morning! The huge bunch of keys dangling to the waist of Warder B—jangled fittingly as the gate creaked and swung open to allow the clerk to enter. Pallid, and panting like a captured animal, he paused and eyed the surroundings curiously. Had he entered the gates of Hell itself, he couldn’t have felt more uncertain, more abandoned. There is a gloom, an awe, mingled with a dread that you might never get out again, that takes possession of you the first time you find yourself within the walls of a gaol and the gate closes and is locked behind you… But handed from one warder to another, all of whom on this morning had lost their usual joviality, the miserable clerk was soon in the office of the Governor of the institution.
There, seated at the table were the Sheriff, the Governor aforesaid, the visiting Medical Surgeon, and a “distinguished visitor” or two. Few of them were talking; all of them were smoking, and at intervals their eyes were directed to the clock. They resembled an assemblage of relations called to a deathbed, rather than stern gaol officials occupying an office where records and particulars of criminals sentenced to imprisonment or to death were stored and preserved. Except for the tramping of warders upon the flag-stones—the grating of bolts and bars as the prisoners were closed in their cells, to remain there in case of “trouble” till the execution was over, the gaol was almost as silent as a tomb, and for the moment it was indeed a tomb, the tomb of the living, and the erring.
At intervals, a senior warder, well versed in the preliminaries of an execution, entered the office, saluted his chiefs, and announced the progress of arrangements. The miserable clerk having delivered his roll of documents, withdrew to join the small gloomy band of pressmen and public, over whom some members of the Police Force kept a guardian eye, waiting in a cold corridor, waiting anxiously and restlessly, and watching the movements of the warders as they crossed and re-crossed from yard to yard.
Presently two clergymen with bared heads, accompanied by a warder crossed the “square” and involuntarily more than one pair of lips muttered, as though answering for themselves a question they had not deigned to ask, “That’s where the condemned prisoners are.”
Then, more unexpected than anything, and following a slight commotion at the entrance gate, two empty coffins were carried in and conveyed across. “My God! Look at that!” and a visiting Labor member of Parliament, finding he hadn’t the nerve he thought he had, turned his tanned and hardened face to the skylights.
A few minutes more, and a funeral bell that seemed to toll from the depths of Eternity itself gave warning that the hour of doom was nigh… No heart there that didn’t speed up at the dread sound—no human that didn’t shudder… into the cell of every prisoner this gong of horror penetrated with awesome effect… But unto the doomed miserables themselves, waiting, waiting, for the great secret—God! What a message!
Ten minutes more—minutes that seemed hours, and again the death-bell tolled.
The great moment had arrived! The moment that the condemned souls for three weeks and more, knew, hung over them. The sheriffs, and the Governor of the Gaol with the medical surgeon, left the office. Those who had come merely to see “what an execution was like,” now would fain fly the gates. But all too late! Instead, they were taken in hand by the officials, and shown where they must stand—in full view of the execution, and so as not to be “in the road”—and “block the way.” They obeyed like people in a trance.
The Sheriffs, there were two of them, and the medical surgeon, took up positions between the spectators and the gallows, and near to the “drop.” Hidden somewhere upon the gallows, was a lurking figure that no eye there could discern. Sighs heaved and fell—a pin might have been heard to drop. The sheriff took out his watch, and in closing it, the “click” might have been heard in No. 5 yard. Then, from the other side of the square, where the condemned cells were, began a procession… a procession setting out for Eternity without music, without banners, but with pale, uncertain faces, with subdued voices, and with prayer books. The clergy came first, leading as a kindly light, next, between two warders, the condemned man, calm, pale, courageous; behind him in a grey gown, accompanied by two “ministering angels,” comforters of her own sex, walked the frail wretched woman, lightly veiled, and with firmer steps than any. They passed to the stairs, up the steps of which, perhaps half a hundred before them had staggered to their end. And as they mounted them, step by step, the voices of the clergy in prayer for the salvation of their souls intoned and rang above the gloom. They reached the scaffold without revealing signs of any emotion, and side by side the doomed pair stood upon the trap-door. Then the hidden figure of the executioner glided from his place of concealment. He was disguised in goggles and hideous black beard. Ned Kelly in his armour on the grey dawn of his capture could not have been more eerie or terrifying. With trembling hands he began adjusting the nooses loosely round the necks of the victims. A huge policeman amongst the spectators fell in a faint on the flagstones, and was carried away. The droning voice of the clergy never ceased. The executioner completed the nooses. Asked if they had anything to say before meeting their Maker? The condemned made no answer—The knees of the executioner shook and knocked together as he drew the white caps over their faces, tightened the loops, and bound their arms to their sides. He stepped away, placed both hands on the lever that worked the trap-door, then pausing, glanced down at the Sheriff for the final instruction. The Sheriff took a handkerchief from his pocket. The lever was pulled, the trap fell with a bang that echoed over the gaol—and there before the eyes of the spectators, their feet within a foot of the floor, hung a man and woman! The man never moved, but the woman—Ah, well! On with the dance of civilization, let the spirit of Christians and the will of the law be unconfined.
It wasn’t only with the hanging of people, or the pursuing them with writs and bailiff’s, that the staff of the Sheriff’s Office was concerned. The members of it had other joys and relaxations, and their relaxations were in great variety.
Next to the Under-Sheriff’s room was the hilarious den of an official known as “J.O.N.,” a droll individual, who carried few cares on his head; had an over-weening predilection for guns and fire-arms of all descriptions. All the happiest hunting-places and most profitable shooting-grounds within reach of the city he was conversant with. All his holidays and half-holidays, and “pinched” holidays, were spent poking about scrubs, and along creeks, and around lagoons. In his den he would sit at his table and recount his kills and misses, and fondle and toy with a gun in preference to a pen… The windows of his den looked out across a gravel drive that led to the chambers of one of the judges, an irascible, severe, fastidious, conscientious magnate… And, as J.O.N., like the Wild Colonial Boy, when he stuck up, or didn’t stick up, Judge Somebody-or-other, toyed fondly with his favourite little gun, the miserable clerk, entering his room, exclaimed: “Look at th’ rat, sir! Two of them!”
J.O.N. bounded to the window, and, seeing two of the vermin suspiciously nosing a stray crust, or something, in the centre of the gravelled path, was immediately in his element. Providence had favoured him; and he rose to the occasion.
“Watch me pick that cove off on the left,” he said, and levelled the gun. The miserable clerk watched willingly and breathlessly. Bang! went the gun, and as it rang out and the pair of rodents skedaddled, first one way and then another, his Honour, closely followed by his faithful associate, stepped out of his door on his way home. Between the gun-report, and the shower of gravel the bullet raised and flung in his face, the judge, as judges are liable to do, took alarm, and jumped back so hard, and so suddenly, that he knocked the associate back through the door and fell on him.
“My Stars! the Judge!” J.O.N. gasped, and dropped in hiding below the window. The miserable clerk, not knowing whether the judge was shot dead or only wounded, fled from the office and raced down the corridor to his own quarters, like a burglar taking to a back-lane to escape the law. Then, for a quarter of an hour, while the court sergeant investigated matters, all was consternation, uncertainty, awe and suspense. But no one was gaoled or hanged; and when J.O.N. began to breathe freely again, he toyed with the gun some more, and wondered “how the dickens it was he missed the beggaring rat!”
* * *
It was lunch hour—and to the miserable clerk lunch hour, whenever he had any lunch about him, was the most alluring interval, the supreme delight of his civil servitude. When he had finished his pie, and given up longing in vain for another, he would close the office door and adjourn to the “office club.” The Office Club was the room where the Clerk of Prisons carried on. It was furnished with a lofty set of ungainly pigeon-holes standing with its back to the door, so that the public couldn’t see in; piles of disorderly prison vouchers capsized all about the floor, which was rarely swept; a telephone in which every voice sounded as though the owner of it was speaking from out the depths of a reedy swamp; a spare table at which sat “Old John,” the stolid, stalwart grey-bearded messenger and assistant bailiff, with a pack of cards or a draught board before him. Old John was more or less a pensioner, for at one time he had been a fighting police-sergeant, and a member of the Peak Downs gold escort, under the notorious Griffin. He abhorred running messages, did old John, but loved draughts or a game of euchre. And so these three members of the “club”—the Clerk of Prisons, the Sheriff’s miserable clerk, and the hoary messenger, would in turn study the draughts board and argue and wrangle through the lunch-hour and half-way through the next hour, often enough… If any member of the public chanced along and knocked nervously at the door, Old John would be requested to “go and see who it was.” And he would go, after carefully noting the position of the men on the board, with fury in his hair, just as he would go in his police days to arrest some one. ’Pwhat is it ye want?” he would demand, with a significant wave of what was once a branch of the long arm of the law—“don’t ye know ’tis lunch-time, and that other people wants their lunch as well as ye?”
Old John was an invaluable member of the Sheriff’s Club. He was a good draughts-player, too, and one day, when the miserable clerk won two games out of three from him, he suggested that, if the two clerks would play off, he would make a wager to write the name of the winner, and place it in an envelope before the game commenced. The clerks agreed, and turned their heads away while he wrote the name and sealed it in an envelope.
“There ye are,” he said, jubilantly.
Then the roaming eyes of the miserable clerk rested on his own name, blotted in elegant letters on the pad, and in the joint interests of his opponent and himself decided to play “stiff.”
The match commenced, and Old John, with intense interest, stood over the players watching every move of it. He watched until a series of clumsy moves and omissions on the part of the miserable clerk excited his suspicions, then, taking time by the forelock, with a sweep of his boney hand, he wiped every man from the board, on to the floor, and hissed: “Pshaw! Do ye think ye can take an old Irishman down?”
Just then, M’Canty, bare-headed and excited, rushed into the “club.” M’Canty was the new bailiff, who had gone forth but an hour before to take possession under a warrant of the belongings of one, Mrs. Soapy… As well as excited, he smelled not unlike a ’possum, or a kangaroo-rat, scorched in a bushfire.
The “club” gathered round him, and asked what was the matter?
“Lord, man, but ye’re on fire!” and Old John took the smouldering tail of the bailiff’s long black, greasy coat, and began extinguishing it.
And this is what had been the matter: when the new bailiff marched into the home of Mrs. Soapy, he found that lady seated moodily at the fire nursing many grievances. Writs and warrants, like every other coming event in this world, cast their shadows before, and Mrs. Soapy was little surprised when the shadow of the new bailiff crossed her threshold.
“Well,” she snapped, in reply to his demand, “I haven’t got sixty pounds to give you, so what are you going to do?”
“For the present, Mrs., I’ll have to stay here, that’s all, and make arrangements to have my food brought in to me.”
“You’ll stay here!” she echoed, seizing the poker, which was at white heat, from the fire, and thrusting it at him. In his surprise the new bailiff tried to protect himself with the warrant. But the red-hot poker went right through the warrant, set it ablaze, and branded him on the chest. He dropped the flaring document, jumped back to prevent a hole being burnt right through himself, and turned and made for the door.
“You’ll stay here!” and Mrs. Soapy made after him with the outstretched poker. She thrust it under his flying coat-tails; and, springing off the verandah, eight steps high, into the garden, the new bailiff, with a fire behind him, descended like a falling star.
For quite a lot of years the miserable clerk, instead of taking strong drink, as told to do in Scripture, to forget his worries and remember his miseries no more, took to teaching himself shorthand. He taught himself by candle-light, within the four walls of a bedroom of a boarding house on Spring Hill. He found it as good a way as any to spend spare time when he had no money to spend it any other way with. ’Tis wonderful how industrious you can become when you can’t become anything else! And there’s nothing like poverty for keeping you from becoming a spendthrift. Let circumstances keep you poor, and your acquaintances will keep you humble, and humility is one of the great virtues taught us in the Bible.
What use the miserable clerk had hoped to put his shorthand to, when he had acquired it, was a secret; still, there was plenty of scope for stenographers, for, in those days—the brave days of old, when no mayor or councillors dared to stand on Victoria Bridge and hold it against the flood that carried it away—the country wasn’t plagued and overrun with flocks of typists and shorthand-writers as it is to-day.
But it came to pass that a new Public Service Act was brought in—a new Public Service Act was brought in nearly every year—providing for the appointment of a board of three commissioners— three Commissioners who were really to be three apostles exalted among the heathen. They were to become the rock and the refuge of all other public servants, and by their pens, and their regulations and their mouths were to speak wisdom and discipline and punctuality unto them; and all those who held jobs, even unto the high and the low, and the rich and the poor, were to give ear. Briefly, these three commissioners came into being for the redemption of the official souls of the servants, to soothe and eliminate their murmurings, and give them contentment for ever, and without further corruption.
And it came also to pass that the Sheriff, the one who was a ventriloquist, was appointed to the chairmanship of the board, and he went off, taking with him his appointment, and leaving the public executioner, and the miserable clerk, and the prison’s clerk, and old John, and all his old associates in tears shed of joy, and of great hopes that, in him, as the chief apostle, they now would not perish, but be lifted from the ruck, and out of the bondage of menial jobs into billets of fat to wear iron heels and learn the language of command.
And the ex-sheriff had not been presiding over the board many months when he looked back and remembered the miserable clerk. The board had established an inquiry court, where it inquired by evidence given on oath into charges made against officers of the Service; and, requiring the assistance of a shorthand-writer, the miserable clerk was sent for and paid per folio for taking the evidence and transcribing it in a big round hand. He was sent for on an average of five or six times a year.
The first occasion that he was sent for he arrived early, with notebook and pencil in hand, and out of breath. The court room was a long affair, with a long table in it, and its walls illuminated with photographs of great people, or people who had once been great, but died, instead of living on for ever. Ah me! death has got a sting. A couple of lawyers, there to make hay while the victim’s sun shone, had already taken their seats at the table, and were busying themselves untying weighty bundles of documents and getting ready for the harvest. As time glided on—and time, strange to say, glided on in those days, just as it does in these —several witnesses, with doubt and temerity blushing all over their countenances, crept in to ask if they had come “to the right place?” The officer who was to be “tried” came in and took a seat beside his lawyer. Then two of the commissioners, panting hard after a heavy breakfast off ham and eggs, arrived, and said “good morning” to every one. Every one answered “good morning”—every one except the miserable clerk. It was never a habit of his to do a thing that others took a hand in doing. To him it always seemed superfluous and a waste of energy. The chairman was all that was required now to open the court and start the inquiry going, and he had been required for quite a long while. Every other moment or two the lawyers would consult their watches and shake their heads irritably. When lawyers are at work time means money to them. That’s why they have a great affinity to burglars. And at intervals the two commissioners would gaze at each other and wonder what was keeping the chairman. The miserable clerk didn’t wonder at all. He turned to the back pages of his note-book and made sketches of things that had no shape or meaning. A great silence hung over the court. A heavily built wharf-lumper, a witness in the case, who had been killing time for half an hour studying the photos on the wall, looked back over his shoulder, and, frowning disdainfully on those around the table, said: “Well, this is damn tedious,” and provoked so much mirth that every one became cheerful. Even the miserable clerk sniggered audibly, but cynically.
Then the chairman arrived, and, with twinkles in his eyes, took out his watch and declared the court clock half an hour fast. So the case was opened; and, as Dickens said, there wasn’t much in it when it was opened; and the lawyer for the charged servant made a few preliminary remarks to get his tongue in. Then the first witness was put into the box, and the miserable clerk was put on his mettle. Two of the commissioners asked witness a different question at the same time, and while he was trying to answer one of them, the third commissioner put another one to him, one that was so long and so involved that it sounded like a couple of feet of blank verse. And as that inquiry started, so it kept on, until the miserable clerk, in his efforts to record question and answer, became distracted. He was hopelessly out-distanced, and failed to get a quarter of the first lot of questions. Then, in his excitement, he began to perspire, and perspired so copiously, that the fluid poured on to his notebook and washed away most of the notes that he had secured.
And when, in the quiet of the evening, he sat down to transcribe those shorthand notes, he found he had to fall back upon his own resources and invent a lot of questions and answers to meet the case. But they served the purpose well, for the servant whom the inquiry was all about was found guilty of using strong language towards his superior officer, and warned that he had better not let it happen any more.
After many years many changes happened in the department, and some of those changes were rung in the Sheriff’s office. Senior officers in the service—whether they were sheriffs or under sheriffs, or under secretaries—sometimes took ill and died, or died without taking ill—at least they used to do in the days of long ago. It might not be the case nowadays, so much progress has been made in all walks of life, that it mightn’t be worth any one’s while to die. Anyway, when one did make up his mind to die, then would come the opportunity, the golden opportunity, for some junior to commence to live. And it was his only opportunity to commence! And it became a popular belief in the service that the sooner an application was lodged the more hopeful was the applicant’s chances of being selected for the job, till at last it became dangerous and most unwise for any one to fall ill, or if he fell ill, to remain home nursing himself. So sure as he committed any of these unwise acts the good news would instantly fly through the service, and applications for the sick man’s job would arrive in shoals, per hand, per post, and per wire. And if, whilst under the blankets, he happened to hear of the raid on his job, and didn’t chuck up the ghost right then, it would only be because he was a strong-willed, perverse, obstinate, determined, darn’d invalid, who was afraid to die, and let some one else live!
One fine morning, the miserable clerk’s golden opportunity came; and later in the day an imposing official letter came to him stating that the Attorney-General and the Under Secretary and his Excellency the Governor, on the advice of the Executive Council, were all pleased and proud to appoint him under-sheriff. Never did any one receive such news with such a risk of dropping dead! It was the greatest thrill the miserable clerk had ever experienced—except the thrill the hangman imparted to him when he squeezed the back of his neck with his cold, clammy hand! But there was a “kick” in the tail of the appointment that kept the miserable clerk from getting swelled-head—perhaps it had been designed for that humane purpose. It concluded by intimating, that because he was youthful looking and likely to live a long while, the salary attached to his new job would be two hundred a year less than the screw his predecessor had been in the habit of drawing. Justice! and justices! what a square deal! But the miserable clerk bent his back and bowed his head, and became an undersheriff… Then the Sheriff himself and the chief bailiff and all the meek minor bailiffs, and the clerk of prisons, and the gardener, and Old John surrounded him and shook his hand. A little later, J. F. Archibald, editor of the “Bulletin,” a friend of the miserable clerk’s, wrote him, saying: “I hope you will never have to hang more than six on any one morning.”
Then the miserable clerk, a miserable clerk no longer, handed the high stool and dull wooden desk over to his successor, and wished him good luck with them, and hoped he would love them as fervently as he had done; and taking possession of the under-sheriff’s chair, himself—a large, leather-lined, luxurious piece of furniture—leaned back in it and commenced to smoke enjoyably and contentedly.
Old John entered.
“By damn, my noble Mr. Under-Sheriff,” he gasped, “but ye do look well… Ye haven’t ’ere a cigaar in the drawer, have ye?”
The new under-sheriff hadn’t.
“Well, now, do ye know this”—and Old John took up a pencil and paper—“ye’ll have to buy ye’erself an evening suit to wear when ye go into court with their honours—and that’ll cost ye twelve pounds, and more? Why, ye’ll be no better off than if ye had stayed at the big desk, there!”
“I’ll be this much better off,” grinned the new under-sheriff. “I’ll be your boss—and if you don’t get about your work quicker than you have been doing, you’ll soon know it.”
“Soon know it!” guffawed the old ex-sergeant, drawing himself to full height. “Now, look here, ye promoted ’possum fr’m th’ bush! Start orderhin’ Old John about, and givin’ him other people’s work to do, and he’ll get th’ grip on ye that he used to get on thim when he was in the police force, and thrun ye through th’ window into th’ gaarden— pshaw! Ye and your under-sheriff! but damn me, sittin’ there in ye’er big chair, with ye’er pipe in your gob, if ye don’t look more like the Chief Justice… Can ye dance an Irish jig?… that ye can’t.” Then kicking some chairs out of his way, Old John placed his hands on his hips, raised his chin, and making music with his mouth, took possession of the room, and rattling his boots on the floor knocked the dust and the very devil out of the linoleum. And he Irish-jigged till the Sheriff put his head inside the door and said: “Hello! Hello!” Then Old John broke down, and with a wild laugh “begged pardon,” and explained that he was “celebratin’ the new under-sheriff, glory be to God,” and ran off to his own den.
“It doesn’t seem to be a very busy morning,” smiled the Sheriff, “so perhaps, you had better come along to their chambers, and I’ll introduce you to their Honours.”
To their Honours! Stars and comets and constellations! The heart of the new under-sheriff nearly stopped; then speeded up to galloping pace.
“Have you ever met any of them?”
The under-sheriff hadn’t.
“Well, come along.” And the Sheriff led the way to the Chief Justice’s chambers. The Chief Justice was Samuel Griffith. They found him sitting back in an armchair, with a book in his hand and a pair of pince-nez on his nose. A keen-eyed, hard-featured, good-looking man, with a cropped greyish beard.
“Mr. Rudd, the newly appointed under-sheriff, your Honour.”
“Not altogether unknown—how do you do?” And he rose and extended a small lady-like hand, with gold rings glittering on a finger or two of it.
The under-sheriff shook, and said nothing. The chief offered a few remarks about a book he was reading by a French author, and the introduction ended.
Next was Justice Real… A giant of a man; genial, good-natured, and without any frill, or pose, or severity.
“Yes, oh yes!” he said in a husky voice, “a good many know something about him.” And he, too, extended his hand.
Then came Cooper J., a dark man with autocratic demeanour and a pointed beard; and dressed in the height of fashion. Ladies, perhaps, would have called him handsome.
“Mr. Rudd, the new under-sheriff, your Honour.”
Cooper J. half-turned from his writing desk and bowed; and the introductions to their Honours were ended.
A sigh of relief from the under-sheriff. Then he went back to his office, where, “clothed with a little brief authority,” he commenced signing warrants addressed to the bailiffs “of his bailiwick.” ordering them to take of the goods and chattels and moneys, and one thing and another, of Bill Smith and Tom Brown, and all the rest, all that they could put their hands on; also warrants for the arrest of Bill Robertson and Sam Jones, sworn to be absconding and leaving their best girls, and all that they owed, behind them, and “them safely lodge in Boggo-road Gaol.”
It was delightful, congenial work, and gave the new under-sheriff great enjoyment.
When his first court sittings came along the new under-sheriff was ready with his dress suit to accompany the judge in. The sittings opened at 10 o’clock, and at 9 o’clock the under-sheriff started to change his dress. He started at 9, because a dress suit was strange to him, and he didn’t exactly know how long it would take to get settled in it—or whether he would be able to settle in it at all. But he got into it easily enough, and was regarding himself with feelings of mortification, when Old John walked into the office.
“By damn,” he laughed, “but ye look as pretty as a parrot—turn round till I see how it fits ye in the back?”
The under-sheriff turned round.
“Oh, my! but ye have a pair o’ shoulders and a back on ye like a goanna.”
But the under-sheriff scarcely heard. He was studying his watch and comparing it with the office clock. To be a minute late on the first occasion of accompanying a judge would be fatal.
“There’s plinty of time, man,” Old John assured him! “what are ye so excited about? Give me time to go and tell them all to have a good look at ye. Oh! but ye’er beautiful.” And off he went to pass the word to the occupants of the various rooms along the corridors.
When at last the under-sheriff emerged, and started for his Honours, a display of grinning faces showed at every door, and familiar voices reminded him that he had “got ’em all on.”
Justice Real was the first judge allotted to the new under-sheriff to pilot into court; and it was on the first morning of a Civil Sittings. The big man, minus wig and gown was taking it easy when the U.S. called for him.
“Sit down, Mr. Sheriff, sit down… We have a few minutes yet.”
The under-sheriff sat down and his Honour, in a manner that was simplicity itself, broke right into a homely talk. He talked of his arrival in Queensland as a boy and the loss of his father in Moreton Bay. Then, referring to a certain case, he opined that family relations should have recourse to the law courts for the settlement of their differences. “When I was at the Bar,” he instanced, there was a similar case, and I was briefed to appear for the father, and Sir Samuel Griffith for the son. And out of it sprang a friendship between Sir Samuel and myself that has lasted all our lives.”
“Is that so, your Honour!”
“When I saw what the position was, I went to Sir Samuel, and pointed out that it would never do for him and me to set father and son against each other, and perhaps make them enemies for the rest of their lives.”
“That was a humane suggestion, your Honour!”
“I was going to make the same suggestion to you, said Sir Samuel, and so their differences were settled amicably, and I believe the best of feeling existed between them ever after… Well, now, it’s about time, I think.” And, putting on his wig and gown, he opened the door for the new undersheriff to pass out… The new under-sheriff, of course, should have opened the door for him; and would have done so, freely and gladly, but he didn’t think of it! Just at the moment he was reflecting—wondering how he could convert the judges conversation into a yarn and make a few quid out of it, for in addition to being a public servant he, at intervals of leisure, and intervals that hadn’t any leisure, pursued the literature of his country… Anyway, out in the corridor he took the lead and led the way up the narrow staircase to the bench, his Honour following on his heels and talking huskily all the while.
A loud authoritative “Silence!” and “O yez! O yez!” from the vigilant Haig, the tipstaff, announced the judge’s safe arrival; and the Bar and the Press, and all people that didn’t dwell in court, rose to their feet. His Honour nodded, and took his seat, and proceeded to make himself comfortable. The under-sheriff ignored the whole of them; and taking his seat beside the judge, with “nervy” feelings, viewed the court from the bench for the first time, and wonderfully new and strange it all seemed to him! Here and there amongst the spectators, law clerks, and articled clerks and court officials, when opportunity favoured, would pass him a friendly grimace or a significant wink to test the gravity of his countenance.
When the case opened and argument commenced, the big genial man as judge became a legal magnate —keen, alert, irritable—and a smouldering volcano. As Carlyle was to literature, with whirlwinds of words, and wealth of argument coming hot out of his soul, so was this big judge to law and the judiciary. A big man in every way; his very appointment to the Bench was big. No pandering to party-government for the job!—no mean, truculent wire-pulling!—no societarian class-leverage!—no political mumbo-jumbo was he! He was a man of the hour. The law and its high office called, and he just answered…
And while the court argued, the new under-sheriff sat tight and listened. He could do no other, except do his best to “look pretty,” and alternately gaze at the Bar, the Press, and the spectators. True, there was a desk with pen, ink, and paper before him, but he didn’t feel sufficiently at ease to make use of them, and appear a busy factotum. When first you occupy a seat on the bench, under public gaze, it takes a while to settle down—my stars, don’t it! And the new under-sheriff wasn’t sitting there long when he felt like a boy, upon being brought to Sunday school for the first time, by his big sister or some one. All that was required of him was to “sit still, and listen to the others saying their lessons.” And as he (the U.S.) sat there, hour after hour, looking as though he had lockjaw, in a state of mental suppression and repression, his thoughts gathered and scattered and drifted into castles in the air, and all kinds of visions and dreams (the stuff Shakespeare was mostly made of) and all manners of mystic things…
And being a “nervy” subject, his nervous-self, as the voluble phychologist would explain, began to dominate his eye and his self-determination, and all his other “selves;” and dreaming away he wondered what effect would it have on the court were he to suddenly raise his voice above those of the Bar and the judge and yell like blue murder? No sooner had this mad-humorous notion taken shape in his brain that he was filled with nervous alarm lest, despite himself, and all his other “selves,” he would give utterance to it! And the more the probability of the absurdity forced itself upon his mentality the more his alarm increased… He clutched the sides of the chair, clenched his teeth, and strove to become interested in the proceedings. But it was all to no avail. The idea of yelling out like blue murder was still with him. Once, he almost felt it flying out of him, and only checked it by biting his tongue. His nervous self was giving his self-control the devil’s own time! Take his word for that! But just when he felt there was nothing else for it but to open his mouth and let it go, the solemn-looking tipstaff, advancing from the body of the court, approached the bench on tiptoes, and stealthily passed him up a sheet of folded paper. With surprise and trembling, he reached for it and unfolded it… It was a pencil sketch by Arthur Kingston, a clever, ludicrous caricature executed at the Press table, and beneath which he had scribbled: “Dad Real and Dave Rudd try their first case.”
Looking down (not up) his eye caught the amused, smiling face of the lovable artist. The fear that he would yell like blue murder fled from him.
“I will resume again at 2.30,” the judge said, and the court adjourned.
Another criminal sittings came round. They came round as regularly as a circus. And with them came the sensational trial of the Kenniffs for the murder of Doyle and Dahlke in the solitude of the Carnarvon Ranges. Ah! that was a trial to sit and watch and listen to. The accused men were brothers, and bushmen and horsemen; and they were ‘‘marked” men. One of the murdered men (Doyle) was a constable of police; Dahlke a station manager. Accompanied by a black tracker leading a pack-horse, they went into the ranges to arrest the Kenniffs on a charge of cattle-stealing. On the evidence of the tracker James Kenniff was arrested at the camp, and was in handcuffs when the abo. left the scene. He left the scene because he heard some shots fired, and left in such a hurry, and because he heard bullets whizzing after him, that he saw little else other than his way through the brigalow timber as he flogged and spurred his mount for home—and his home was Morven, the Lord knows how far away! And all that was ever seen afterwards, or recognised, of the unfortunate victims were their burnt ashes and some clothes buttons When found they were being hawked about the ranges in saddle-bags thrown across the back of a horse that had got out of hand. It was put forward, however, that others besides the men on trial were on the scene when the abo. fled. And the great question was: Who did the shooting and the burning of the bodies? An unenviable position truly, for a jury; a trying one for a judge, and one of appalling interest to the public.
Sitting there, a silent official, from day to day, following the train, and threads, and broken threads, of circumstantial evidence, pregnant with materials for another “Robbery Under Arms,” the Under-Sheriff was in his element.
The obvious lack of bush knowledge, the false conception and surprising idea of the habits and instincts of the bush horsemen, and how he would act in an emergency that were displayed by some of the legal minds were to him amazing. On the other hand, the keen and remarkable insight to a life he could have known but little about at first hand displayed by the judge in laying bare by adroit examination damning weaknesses in the defence, amounted to legal genius. To the Under-Sheriff those weaknesses were as obvious as the numerous absurdities put forward by the prosecution.
He, too, had known the bush; as a youth he had associated himself with horsemen and cattlemen; had followed hard and breathlessly on the flying heels of their favourite mounts, knocking sparks from the flint-strewn ranges; knocking the bark from the forest saplings, and “barking” themselves from their shoulders to their shins as they crashed in pursuit of affrighted mobs. Had followed “men who knew the way” into the “Horse Gully”— followed them down mountain spurs and gorges, turning and sliding and wheeling this way and that way till an ancient, suspicious-looking track hacked through the still, silent scrub was reached—a track that led into grazing country inaccessible by any other track—grazing country that was the planting ground for stolen station mares and stallions! Had lain “oft in stilly nights” listening to old hands and middling old hands relating stories of how this mob and that mob were “lifted,” and how the thieves got through with the haul by the skin of their teeth —listening to them recounting night-rides by moonlight and by starlight—of quarrels over horses and women and plunder—of the capture of “Thunderbolt” and of the “Wild Scotchman”—of the murder of So-and-So, and the mysterious disappearance of some one else!
And so, knowing the craft and resources of the bush horsemen as he knew them, it seemed strange to the new Under-Sheriff that sane persons could believe that a pack-horse carrying the bags containing the ashes of the murdered men ever escaped from the hands of either accused, or, having escaped, that either could have failed to secure it again! Ah, no! that packhorse got out of the hands of some one not very clever amongst horses!
But the writer is not dealing with the trial, nor with the finding of the jury. All he knows is that the jury was composed of twelve sober, conscientious men, and that the judge was a great judge.
Both accused were found guilty, and sentenced to death. Then followed days and nights of excitement in Brisbane. The Sheriff and the Under-Sheriff were not as lighthearted as they usually were, and the public executioner changed his address several times, and was difficult to find. That James Kenniff, at least, was not guilty there was in the minds of some a grave doubt. From a lorry in Albert-square the pungent, picturesque oratory of Joe Lesina, the stormy petrel of Parliament, never slackened in fiery appeals to public opinion in favour of a reprieve.
An appeal to the High Court brought from Justice Real in a thunderous voice: “Were I to concur in the sentence passed on James Kenniff I would regard myself guilty of judicial murder!” [Writer is trusting to memory.]
Later, the sentence of death passed upon James Kenniff was commuted to years of hard labour in St. Helena; and the day and hour when Patrick Kenniff would be executed fixed. And it fell to the official lot of the Under-Sheriff to convey the Executive Council’s decision to the prisoners. Curiously enough, the letter conveying the decision was signed by the tender-hearted Brunton Stephens, who professed a horror for trials, gaols, and executions!
The Under-Sheriff was closing his office for the day when the document was delivered, and, hopping into the nearest cab, was in a quarter of an hour knocking on the door of Boggo-road Gaol. And never, were he to live to be a thousand, would he forget that mission to Boggo-road! He hadn’t long to wait at the door before he was accompanied by the genial, kindly Chief Warder MacDonald—himself since passed to his last resting-place—to the condemned cells. Suspecting the purport of the visit, he whispered hoarsely as they entered the cold, shivery, almost lightless corridor: “What is the decision?”
“And not Patrick, too?” he questioned, when he heard it. No other warder was present. And perhaps no one knew the facts of that dreadful tragedy better than did the kindly chief warder.
“Prisoners Patrick and James Kenniff,” he announced in calm official formula, as he opened the cell door—“The Under-Sheriff, to see you— stand forward.” Two pale, worn-looking men stood forward. Their eyes gleamed with anxiety and hope. There was a twitching in the muscles of their faces—their hands clenched and opened. They stood, silent and erect, side by side. Patrick was a bigger man, and his features of more distinctive Irish mould than the other. And thus they waited for the Executive’s decision. In a voice broken with the tremor of emotion, the Under-Sheriff read it to them. When he had finished, James turned to Patrick, who remained motionless and solemn as Eternity itself, and said: “Paddy, I will go with you!”
Then Patrick Kenniff’s lips parted—“No, Jimmy,” he said, “you shall not! One of us is enough!”
In a delirium of despair, Jimmy Kenniff dropped on the floor of the cell at his brother’s feet, and lay there until the chief warder coaxed him to rise and control himself. Then for the last time on this side of the Great Divide the Kenniffs pressed each other’s hands; and the last the Under-Sheriff remembers of Jimmy Kenniff was his voice calling in sobs as he was being escorted to another yard: “So-long, Paddy—so-long!”