an ebook published by Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: We Kaytons
Author: Steele Rudd
eBook No.: 2400231h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: 2024
Most recent update: 2024
This eBook was produced by: Walter Moore
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.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Back in the 60’s we yoked up the dray and started for the gold mines two hundred miles off. All of us, except those who drove the team, rode on the dray, and sat amongst the furniture. The old brown cat, and a hen and a rooster, sat in one of the tubs.
Two hundred miles was a long way to ride on a dray; how long the journey took I don’t remember—I never knew. But I do remember the “creak-crock” of that dreary jolting, cranky, unreliable, old conveyance, and the rattle of the pots and pans, and the snatching of the horse chains that accompanied it. And John and William used to whine like the Israelites till a stop would be made, and the basket containing the provender dragged from its place and emptied beside the road. At every creek-crossing, stoney pinch and bog-hole, we also stopped, when everyone would get down and shove—everyone but John. He was the youngest of the family, and had no shove in him. At night, after we had supper, Mother would strip us in the light of the blazing camp-fire and put us to bed under the dray, and when the night birds would start calling, she would warn us to “hush, and cover your heads over or they will catch you.” And we would hush—and sleep, too, till morning.
Once, we were joined by a mob of blacks —bare-headed blacks, with no boots on. They had no shirts or trousers on either; but they didn’t attempt to molest us. They helped shove the dray through a bog and went on their way rejoicing —went on their way and lived without working. We went on our way, too, but worked without living.
Our arrival at the mines caused no demonstration of any kind. It wasn’t marked with any band-playing, or flag-flapping, or fire-works. The horses were marked though, marked from one end to the other, and long horses some of them were too!
We didn’t get excited and begin right away to fill our buckets and the dray with gold, and leave again; we filled the latter with sheets of stringy bark and built ourselves a humpy. Then Father bought a pick and shovel and tin dish at the store and went out early every morning and came home late and tired every evening. For three months Father went out early and came home late and tried.
One morning he didn’t go out at all; he sat in the sun on an empty gin-case and rested his head in his hands, and thought. Mother asked him what was the matter?” It’s no use, Alice,” he said, “there’s nothing to be made here—nothing!” So we didn’t stay long at the mines. We packed our belongings again and leaving the bark humpy empty and open, took once more to the creaking, crankey, old dray, and never looked back.
“Off again!” Mother sighed, as we climbed to the top of the load and took our seats amongst the “things.”
“Never mind!” Father answered with an effort. “We’ll strike something yet—
Come on ... Punch ...” Then he flicked his whip and away we rolled at the rate of a hundred mile a fortnight.
* * * * *
EVENING: Peaceful shades of night falling over the wide, silent bushland; all of us tired, weary, hungry, silent.
“Here we are,” joyously from Father. We woke up, and through the dim twilight saw our new home—a two-hundred-acre homestead, that Father by chance had taken up before he took gold fever. We stared hard for glimpses of the building, but it was not a very imposing edifice. Not a soul came out to greet us, not a sign of life was there: no light, no sound, no dog, no cat, no earthly animal or thing whatever—never did pioneer family enter a gloomier, lonelier, more forbidding looking home than did we that evening now so far arrear!
Surrounded by great clumps of gums that bent and swayed and creaked and moaned in the wind, that old slab hut, roofed with bark, sat grim and motionless. No garden was attached; no back-yard; no fence, no nothing! Father and Mother and the girls set to and dragged the things from the dray and crowded the humpy with them, till there wasn’t any standing room.
“Dear me,” Mother said, when Father lit up the home with a match and startled a pair of lizzards, “is this the place you have brought us to!”
“This is it,” and Father’s voice rang with the pride of ownership. Father was a socialist and a great believer in everyone owning their own home. The rest of us said nothing. John and William dropped down on the first mattress that was carried in and said they were hungry. They had been saying it all through the long hot afternoon.
“Wait till everything is off the dray, then we’ll light a fire and get supper for you,” Mother assured them. But the unloading of the dray seemed to take a year—a long year, too!
At last a fire blazed beside a big log outside and illumined the trees above, and revealed a family of birds roosting there. Moo and Mabel suddenly became interested in the birds and neglecting the supper, started throwing good firewood at them. One of the missiles unexpectedly rebounded and fell on Father’s neck when he was stooping to lift the boiler.
“Damn it,” he shouted— “let the birds alone, do y’ want to kill a man?”
The girls let the birds alone, and ran and put on the kettle.
When the tea was made and everything ready Moo discovered we were short of bread.
Mother became distracted. “It won’t take a minute to make some scones,” Moo said, rolling up her sleeves. Moo was a born cook and could prepare a meal out of nothing.
John and William again reminded them that we were hungry. “Well, have patience,” Mabel snapped, “and you’ll get something when it’s ready.”
It was as hard to have patience as it was to have supper!
A few minutes later: “Was the bag with the flour in taken off the dray Father?” Moo called. Father said it wasn’t.
“Well, it isn’t on it now.”
“What! What!” And Father let fall a portion of a wooden bed he was trying to erect and ran out to the dray.
“It must be,” he added, and began pulling the miscellaneous things about that were left in the bottom of it. The horse bell “tankled-tonkled” every time he tossed and retossed them about.
“Damn that thing,” and he savagely heaved the bell at the house. But it didn’t go towards the house, it went up above his head and the strap to which it was attached caught in the branches of a tree and there it dangled and “tonkled.”
Mabel enjoyed the bell; and after watching it for quite a while threw a stick to knock it down. She made it ring more, and the stick came back and lodged on Father’s head.
“Damn it,” he burst out again and rushed at Mabel; and Mabel, in her haste to avoid him, knocked the bucket of water over that we brought with us from the last creek we crossed, and nearly put the fire out.
“Surely to goodness the flour didn’t fall off along the road?” Mother said, when everything was quiet again.
“Yes,” Father confirmed, sadly— “it must have dropped off coming up the bank of that d— crick.”
Then Mother burst into tears and said she was sorry we ever left the gold mines; that Father was doing nothing but dragging us round the country, and going from bad to worse!
But Jessie, the youngest and quietest of our girls, consoled her. “It will be all right! Father will find it,” she said—and put her arm round Mother.
“I’ll go back and get it, it won’t take me long— it’s only a few miles,” and tightening up his belt determinedly, Father disappeared in the darkness.
“Don’t stand there in the light girls, where anyone can see y’,” Mother said warningly. Whom she meant by “anyone” goodness only knows!
Moo and Mabel and Pearle and Bella left the fire and came into the humpy and fastened the door as securely as was possible.
Mother looked anxiously round the crude walls of our starlit home and wondered how long Father would be!
Curlews in scores began screaming all round, and the coo-ee of dingoes started our dog whimpering outside with fear.
“Lie down Prince,” Pearle called to him.
Several dingoes howled together. Prince bounded in through a temporary bark window and filled us all with terror, and put his paws in the bucket of tea that Moo carried in from the fire, and yelped.
“My God,” Mother said.
The girls tried to laugh when they saw Prince wasn’t a man and asked Mother what she was afraid of.
“Come here to me children,” Mother cried to us. William and John crept close to her. “Your Father won’t be long,” she said soothingly.
Then there was a long silence and they fell asleep—William and John, not Mother or the girls.
When they woke in the morning Father was standing beside a roaring fire outside, scrubbing his face with a towel; and Moo was calling:
“Breakfast—Fish-o.”
(Two Chinamen who were fishing in the bend of the creek when Father blundered down the bank in search of the flour, ran for their lives and left their “catch” behind them. That was how we came to have fish).
Our first breakfast over, Father put on his hat and went out to round the horses up. The rest of us helped Mother to arrange the furniture and carry in stones to finish the fireplace with.
Father, lame and excited, his face clammy with dust and perspiration, returned at midday.
“They’ve cleared!” he said. “Every damn one of them. That black mare has led them back!”
Then he snatched up a pair of winkers and started off again in hot pursuit.
* * * * * *
“If we can manage the rest of the things and put up our bed and make a couple of shelves out of something or other,” Moo said, “there won’t be much for Father to do when he comes back with the horses.”
Moo always had a kindly thought for Father.
“Then to-morrow,” she added— “we could start and tidy up outside and make the place a bit more civilised looking.”
“Can we manage the beds?” Mother questioned. “Some fork-sticks have to be cut and driven into the ground for it.”
“I’ll soon cut the fork-sticks”—and taking the axe on her shoulder Pearle went off and wandered among the tall saplings like a timber-getter. Next moment she stood, and striking an attitude, spat on her hands and told John and William to “stand away.”
The first sapling she cut refused to fall; it tilted and leaned against another for support. William and John applauded the sapling.
Pearle attacked the other sapling. It also refused to fall; both of them tilted some more and leaned against a third.
John joyously rolled over in the long grass. Pearle mentally measured the size of the third sapling, a stout one, then commenced on it. At intervals she paused for breath and leaned on the axe-handle. Eventually all three saplings came down with a “swish” on top of John and buried him beneath their thick foliage.
In tears and terror Pearle chopped him out, and when he saw blood on himself he bellowed. Pearle took him in her lap and hugged him, and promised him everything she had in the world if he would only stop crying. John cried harder.
Mother and Moo came running from the house. “Did you chop him with the axe,” they screamed.
John became worse.
“Show me, show me, my child,” and Mother took possession of him.
But failing to find anything more than a few scratches on him, she seemed relieved, and went cold again.
Father, hat in hand, suddenly rushed on the scene. “What in the name of Heaven is the matter now?” he shouted and gazed at John as though he were a corpse.
Moo and Pearle explained. Father dropped down on the end of a sapling and seemed broken hearted.
Mother left John and turned to Father.
“Are you not well Ben,” she asked.
“I am tired and sick of everything,” he said— “that is all!”
“Couldn’t you find the horses, father?” Moo enquired sympathetically.
“They’re gone,” he groaned.
All of us but John sat and thought of the horses. John found his feet again and taking up the axe began lopping limbs off the fallen saplings.
“Put that axe down,” Moo commanded. John chopped harder.
Presently father looked up and saw the horses poking enquiringly about the humpy.
“Well I’m d— ,” he said, rising to his feet and grinning cheerfully.
Mother and the girls sprang to their feet and started laughing with joy.
Suddenly a scream came from John and he started hopping round on one foot while half the big toe on the other dangled by the skin and squirted red over the green grass.
“There, I told him to put it down!” Moo cried. Mother fainted, and Father threw up his hands and groaned. Then he ran to John, then to Mother, and from Mother back to John, and threw up his hands some more. “A rag! some water!” he bellowed and ran half way to the house and ran back again and groaned “My God!” Mother came round; and when she opened her eyes and moaned, “it’s nothing; I’m all right,” Father’s presence of mind returned and he said “Well, what th’ devil did y’ want goin’ off like that for and frightening everybody?”
Then he ran to John again to render first aid. But when Moo and Pearle said “It’s all right Father, we’ve stopped the bleeding,” he shook John by the neck and roared. “Blarst y’, you’re alez gettin’ into mischief, you are!”
“Must watch them closer after this”—Father said next day when referring to the horses, “an’ see they don’t get away any more.”
And sometimes he would leave off helping Mother and the girls, and trot up the ridge and down the gully to turn the brutes back, and Mother would often go out with a crust of bread in her hand and call “cerp cerp” to bribe them into remaining about the home.
As a further precaution Father hobbled the black mare at night and tied a bell round old Hollowback’s neck, and through the long evenings we would sit till bed time counting the stars and listening to the “tankle-tonkle” of that erratic old bell. And by the sound of it Father could tell exactly where the horses were, and what old Hollowback was “up to.”
At intervals he would remark:
“He’s heading this way … shaking himself … having a roll now …”
It was wonderful what Father knew about the habits of animals and things of the Bush.
Once in the middle of the night he sat up in bed and listened with his ear to a crack in the wall.
“Someone’s driving them,” he gasped and bounding up, put his feet into a pair of boots, and rushed outside. We jumped up too, and lit the lamp and listened nervously at the door.
After a while we heard sounds of animals blundering over fallen timber, and the voice of someone swearing.
“That’s Father,” John said.
Mother silenced him. We listened again.
A kangaroo rat knawing a bone a short distance from the door sneezed.
The girls sprang inside, and giggled. “What are you afraid of?” Mother said, shaking with fear herself. Then Father in his shirt appeared.
“D— scoundrels,” he growled, “stole the hobbles and the bell off them.”
The interior of our new home at first made a bad impression on Mother and the girls. Its appearance worried them and they began planning and plotting alterations, and additions to it— suggested things to Father, too, about it, that made him irritable.
“Oh, I dunno,” he’d say— “most places in the Bush are built like it now, and y’ can’t expect to start with a two-storied brick house with a stone wall all round it on a selection, can y’? All that and a lot more will come by-and-bye.”
Mother and the girls said they only wanted to make it look a bit decent.
“Anyhow,” Father went on, “making alterations and improvements to it now is only wasting time and money. Much better wait a while and put up a new place altogether.”
Mother and the girls waited a week, then ransacked the boxes and clothes bags and dug up an old tent-fly and some disused dressing material, and a chaff-bag or two, and with the aid of the shears began lining the walls. When the front room was finished Moo ran out and called Father.
“Yairs—yairs—very good—very good,” he commented, looking in at the open door.
“Don’t you think it’s a big improvement?” Mother enthused.
“It’s better, a good deal better—undoubtedly,” Father admitted.
“It’s ever so much better,” from Bella.
“Just as I said before”—Father reminded them—“the place can be made as comfor’able an’ cozy as any in th’ land, with a bit o’ linin’ an’ a bit o’ care.”
“If we only had some newspapers, to paste over th’ lining, Mother observed covetously, “it would be a greater improvement still.”
The girls said there wasn’t a bit of paper of any kind about the place.
“Must send in and take the ‘Times’ soon as I got some clearin’ done,” and Father withdrew.
Father always withdrew from a debate when improvements came up for discussion.
“Wonder if Mrs. McPherson could let us have a few?” And Mother looked at the girls.
“If she had any,” Pearle thought, “she’d want them for herself.”
“Perhaps we could give her something for them?” Mother suggested—“not money, because we haven’t any.”
“I’ll make a soda damper and take it over and then ask her,” said Moo, and settled it.
Then Moo rolled up her sleeves and made a damper. Moo was the best damper maker in the country—so Father reckoned. And there was no better judge of a damper anywhere than Father. No one ever devoured more damper than he did— that was why.
When Moo, in a white dress and with a blue ribbon round her neck, went off with the damper under her arm to Mrs. McPherson’s, Mother and the others prepared a large supply of home-made paste. Then they put a few sticks on the fire to keep it burning and went along the track to meet Moo.
John came in and was interested in the home-made paste. John had never seen paste before. He look hold of the spoon that stood in the pot and stirred the stuff round and round. Then he dabbed it on the seats of the old chairs, and plastered the cat with it, and laughed joyously.
Father, hopping on one leg and screwing his face about, appeared.
“Oh-h!?’ he groaned, flopping down on a chair and holding out his foot. “Pull that boot off, boy, quick!”
John jerked the boot off and grinned.
Father examined his bare foot, and after blaming the adze, seemed easier.
Feeling the damp coming through his pants, though, he rose quickly and eyed the chair and felt himself suspiciously. John grinned.
“What!” Father roared, grabbing up his boot.
But John got out the door before the boot.
* * * * * *
When the horses had settled down and the home was fixed up Father went out and marked off a patch to clear for cultivation. He “stepped” about 15 acres down in the hollow where there was a billabong that sometimes held water. “The old lucerne Paddock,” we call it now, whoever thought then that it would ever become a lucerne Paddock? Massive yellow-jacks and collibahs grew there, and bleached bones of station stock, relics of droughts gone by, were strewn plentifully among the grass. At one end an acre or two of trees, rung by pioneer shepherds, were dead and bare of bark as the bones beneath them were of flesh.
Father began on those green yellow-jacks and collibahs with the grubbing tools, and worked furiously; Mother and the girls attacked the dead ones with fire-sticks; John and William assaulted the “Jumper” ants that tried to jump them out of the shade whenever they felt tired and weary.
Once when a huge yellow-jack that Father undermined fell with a crash that woke the bush for miles around, John was found missing.
“Where is he?” Mother cried anxiously.
John, crouching in a stump-hole near by, grinned hard in her direction.
“He was here a while ago,” Bella answered. Then everyone called him by name.
John grinned more.
“My God,” Mother concluded, “the tree has fallen on him.”
Father rushed to the head of it and poked among the bushes and broken limbs, peering anxiously for John’s mangled remains.
“Not at all,” he said, swallowing a lump that came into his throat— “nothing of the sort.”
“Well, where is he?” And Mother wrung her hands distractedly.
“Here I am,” and John sprang triumphantly from the stump hole.
“You young wretch, be off out o’ here,” and Father threw the axe after John and pursued him right to the house.
* * * * * * *
Night and day Father toiled clearing those fifteen acres. And what a demon he was with the axe! When he stood up to a big tree and let himself out you couldn’t see him for chips. They flew round him like chaff. Tree after tree disappeared, till there wasn’t a stump or stick left.
Then Father talked about ploughing.
Neither Father nor the old horses had ever done any ploughing, and they found it hard work breaking up those fifteen acres.
When the last land was finished and the headlands squared off, Mother and the girls would stand and admire the expanse of rough brown clods, and talk of clearing another twenty acres.
“There’s only the seeds to put in now,” Father said, one day, “and rain to come, then I wonder how much we’ll get from it?
“I don’t know what we’ll do if we don’t get something from it,” Mother answered, “we can’t manage much longer without money and we can’t afford to sell any more of the horses.”
“Don’t worry your head, Mother,” the girls advised, “we won’t starve, we’ll live somehow or other; besides Providence will look after us.”
* * * * * *
Father sowed the fifteen acres with corn and pumpkins; then one morning put his blankets on the dray and went off to Boggy Plains to carry out a road contract he had secured from the Divisional Board. In those days the Divis’onal Board was the Government ’way out West.
“If any rain comes to bring the corn up,” he said to Mother when departing, “the girls can keep the weeds out of it with the hoes till I come back.”
And how Mother and the girls watched and studied the sky every day, and hoped and hoped for rain! At last it came and fell in torrents and sheets; and the corn grew and grew till you couldn’t see them hoeing it.
* * * * * *
One moonlight night we heard the “creak-crock” of the old dray coming along through the timber and all of us hurried out to meet Father. Father was so overjoyed that he forgot to return our greetings. He had come past the corn crop, and hadn’t recovered from the surprise it gave him.
“Had anyone told me there was such a crop,” he said, “I wouldn’t have believed them, I thought it were a great stone wall.”
“But wait till you see the pumpkins,” Mother told him, “they’re in thousands, and you couldn’t imagine the size of them.”
When Father unyoked and came in and had supper, Mother and he sat and talked nearly all night, about the different things they would buy with the money the corn was to bring in.
* * * * * *
When the crop was ripe, and while we were all busy pulling it, the teamsters going West found it out and came miles out of their way to buy loads of it in the cob for horse feed. It was a dry season, there was no grass along the stock routes, and they gave Father whatever figure he asked of them. And Father asked a high figure and we did well.
Mother and the girls were often lonely and afraid when Father was away; somehow they dreaded the approach of night, no matter how moonlight or starlight, it held nothing but terrors for them.
When tea was over they would wash up hurriedly, bolt the door, and crowd inside, and stare hard at each other, and listen nervously to the slightest sound. To them, every bit of noise was a man, or a snake, or a ghost, or a demon of some kind or other.
For protection they would take down Father’s unreliable old shot gun and stand it against the table, where anyone coming in could snatch it up and point it at the lot of us if they had a mind to.
In their dreams Mother and the girls sometimes saw a man, or a snake, or a ghost, and would often wake with a shout and take shivering fits the rest of the night. But John and William were never like that. Their slumbers were never sounder than when Father was away.
One afternoon a traveller came and camped on the creek. The creek, when it wasn’t in flood, had only two holes in it, and they were in our property. And when Mother and the girls discovered his presence they couldn’t do any work; they let everything slide and watched the traveller’s movements through the window and half-open door, fervently hoping every moment he would take up his swag and go. But the traveller was tired and in no hurry. As sunset approached he was still tired, and Mother and the girls didn’t know what do to about him. After a while they held a whispered consultation. Moo thought if someone—looking at Mother—went out and told him we were by ourselves and didn’t want anyone camping about, that he would have the decency to move on.
“No! No! No-h-h!” Mother objected. “You don’t know men like I do!”
It started to get dusk.
The traveller rose from his swag, threw some wood on the fire, then stood over it and looked up hard and curiously at our house. We saw he had black whiskers and a bald head. That was fatal. We were always afraid of men with black whiskers and bald heads.
“Whatever does he mean?” and Mother began to tremble.
“If he comes here,” Moo said, stretching her hand towards the gun, “I’ll shoot him dead!”
“No, No, girl, don’t,” Mother cried, “we’d all be hung if you did.”
“If he saw a man about the place I believe he would go,” and Bella suggested putting on a pair of Father’s trousers and walking around the house a few times in them.
“Perhaps he would take more notice if Mother put them on?” from Pearle. “She’s bigger, and would look more like Father.”
“No, N—n—no,” and Mother’s teeth rattled.
“I’ll do it,” and Moo walked firmly into the bedroom and came out in pants, shirt and hat of Father’s.
“Oh-h-h,” Mother gasped, holding up her hands. “Be careful girl, oh be careful!”
William and John laughed.
“Sh-sh-sh!” the others hissed warningly at them, and they shut up.
Moo, trembling at the knees—you could see her knees through two big holes in Father’s pants— stepped to the door and stood gazing cautiously out.
The cat, who wasn’t in our confidence, suddenly sprang half way up the wall, in pursuit of a mouse. Moo gave a squeal, and jumped back.
Mother delivered the cat a kick, and Bella threw things at it. The cat flew into Mother’s bedroom, mounted the bed post, sprang on to the partition, and sat grinning down cynically upon the lot of us.
Once more Moo went to the door and looked out.
“Be careful, now, Oh, be careful!” Mother shuddered.
“Take the gun with you, Moo,” Pearle advised.
“My God, no, it might go off,” and Mother shifted the old fowling piece to the other end of the table.
Moo coughed nervously.
“Don’t go out if you feel afraid,” Mother counselled her, earnestly.
“I’ll just see if he is still there,” Moo whispered, and leaning forward put her head out the door. Mother and Pearle, looking into each others faces and listening intently, stood behind her.
“Me—ow,” came in a deep base voice from the cat above. The three of them jumped right out the door, and jumped in again and clutched each other, and stared about the room until the cat “meowd” some more, and gave itself away.
“My heavens! I did get a fright,” Moo gasped, and Mother shed tears and abused Father in his absence for going away and leaving us in danger.
Recovering her nerve, Moo braced herself up and went out and walked boldly round the house.
The traveller, bending over his swag, didn’t see her.
Moo reached the door again and reported progress.
“Go down the hill a little way and then perhaps he’ll see you,” Mother said.
Summoning more courage, Moo, with uncertain stride, strode unsteadily down the hill for about fifty yards.
The traveller saw her.
“Heigh, Jack,” he shouted, “Here, I want you.”
Moo turned and flew for her life.
“Hold on, half a minute,” and the traveller started trotting after her.
Moo screamed and nearly flew out of Father’s pants.
“My God!” Mother cried, “the wretch is chasing her,” and in terror banged the door and shut Moo out.
Coming with a rush, Moo threw herself hard against the door and screamed “Let me in, let me in.”
Mother tried hard to let her in, but couldn’t.
“Oh, girls! girls!” she cried helplessly.
Bella discovered the peg was in the door, and pulled it out.
Then Mother opened it, and Moo, terror-stricken, and holding Father’s pants up with her hands rushed in and knocked her and Bella and the gun flying under the table, and rolled under the sofa herself. The gun went off with a loud report, and shot the clock and made it strike twenty-seven— it hadn’t struck any for ten years—and filled the house with smoke and the smell of powder, and frightened the cat into the bush, and we never saw or heard of “Tom” again—nor the traveller either.
* * * * * *
A roasting hot day, Father still away; Mother and the girls weeding corn. They threw down the hoes, fanned their faces with their hats, and wondered if the next world could really be any hotter.
Moo reckoned it would be a lot cooler over in the water-hole.
“Why not go in for a swim?” Mother suggested, “I’ll sit on the bank and keep watch for you.”
Then the girls hurried to the house to get a towel. A few minutes later two small heaps of clothes lay on the bank of the creek, while Moo and Bella and Pearle and Mabel flapped and squealed and joyously ducked each other in the water.
Mother and William and John sat on the bank keeping a look-out for strangers.
“Come on in, Mother,” Bella shouted, standing in the shallow and tossing her wet hair over her shoulder, “it’s beautiful.”
Mother smiled. Mother was tempted.
“Go on, Mother,” John and William urged. John and William felt if Mother went in we’d have a chance too.
Mother looked suspiciously about.
“In y’ go, Mother,” John said, “don’t be frightent; we’ll watch for y’.”
“Look at me,” Moo called; and when we looked she was holding one of her big toes in each hand and turning over and over in the water like a hoop.
“Oh-h!” Mother gasped, “Moo!”
We laughed. We enjoyed Moo, and if Mother hadn’t pulled us back we might have tumbled over the bank with joy.
“Do it again, Moo,” John called out. “We’ll watch.” And Moo did it again and made us laugh more.
“Again, Moo,” we urged further.
But Moo refused to respond the third time, refused because Mabel, who had collected a fist-full of clay while she was revolving, hit her hard with it and some of it stuck to her skin. Mabel was always spoiling sport on Moo.
“Ain’t y’ goin’ in?” we said again to Mother, and again Mother turned her head and looked suspiciously about.
Suddenly Pearle sprang astride Moo’s back and sunk her like a destroyer, and when Moo appeared above water again she gasped and gurgled and choked, and accused Pearle of having dug her big toe-nail into her back.
Mother started to take off her boots, and made us happy.
“Now mind you both sit here and call out loud if you see anyone coming,” she instructed us.
“Mother’s coming in! Mother’s coming in!” Moo shouted, and started swimming round the hole. Bella struck out in pursuit of her.
We stood up to see which would win; Mother ordered us to sit down.
Moo fouled a grass-tree floating round and got astride it. The grass-tree slipped from between her legs and bobbed up behind her.
Mother dragged her stockings off.
Mabel noisily disputed possession of the grass tree with Moo.
Mother stepped out of her dress.
John, overcome with joy, started to undress too. Suddenly there came the yelp of a dog.
Mother jumped round in alarm.
“Heavens!” she gasped, and grabbed a handful of her clothes.
We turned our heads quickly. A kangaroo with a dog hot in pursuit was bounding straight for us. Mother squealed and raced for a tree.
The ’roo, glancing back at the dog, bounded over our heads and landed with a mighty splash in the water hole.
Moo and Mabel and Pearle and Bella screamed and struck out in different directions; Mabel reached the shallow end in record time: the ’roo, though, seemed to think Moo was a dog, and reached for her with his long, hairy paws. Moo, squealing “Help!” ducked and twisted and hit out for the steep bank. She clutched the limb of a tree that hung over the water and tried to pull herself out, heels first. The ’roo grabbed her by the hair. Moo screamed more. We cried and howled in her interests and ran helplessly about the bank.
“My heavens, it’s killing her,” Mother cried, and appealed to Mabel, “for God’s sake hurry.” Mabel, without waiting to dress herself, ran round and attacked the marsupial with a portion of her underclothing—she slashed him over the face with both legs of it. The ’roo released his grip of Moo, and seized hold of Mabel’s under-garment. Then Mabel pulled, and the ’roo pulled, and while they engaged in a tug-o’-war, Mother assisted Moo to swing clear and land safely on the bank. Then all threw their weight in with Mabel. But the ’roo planted both his feet against the bank and hung back. They hung back too—hung back till the garment broke in two. They all fell just when John shouted,
“Here’s a lot of men comin’.”
“Mercy!” Mother screamed, gathering herself together, “run girls, run.”
And didn’t the girls run! So did Mother!
Then old Patterson and his three sons arrived, armed with sticks, and gathering round the waterhole, commenced a fresh offensive on the ’roo.
* * * * * *
Mid-day a week later:
Dinner over, at least, with Mother and the girls; William and John found a quantity of good food on the other plates and were delayed. Mother thought she heard a dray rattling, and went out to see if it was Father. She had hardly gone when she came dancing in again and bumped the table, and hung to the edge of it for support, and gasped:
“Oh-h! it nearly bit me.”
John almost swallowed the spoon he was shovelling pudding into himself with. Moo ran to Mother to prevent her from falling. Bella looked cautiously out the door and saw a brown snake, larger than any she had ever seen in her dreams, lying motionless on the patch of sun-baked earth that we had tramped bare with our feet, and kept clean with a broom.
“My goodness!” she exclaimed, “get some hot water Moo, quick! there’s a snake.”
“What? where? show us!” we said, scrambling from the table.
“Keep back, children,” Mother cried, recovering from her fright. Moo ran to the fireplace and lifted the kettle, but there was no hot water in it.
“Get your Father’s gun, girls, and shoot it,” excitedly from Mother.
It was wonderful the faith Mother reposed in Father’s cranky old gun.
“You get it,” Moo answered, “the snake will go if I take my eyes off it.”
Then Bella rushed into the room and returned, holding the weapon in a dead line for Mother’s apron string. Mother screamed and fell away into a corner, with her hands above her head, like a Hun. Her screams disturbed the snake.
“It’s going, it’s going,” Moo cried, “get a stone and hit it,” and in her excitement, ran out herself and tried to lift a mighty boulder. Pearle ran out too, and threw an empty kerosene tin after the reptile. The tin rolled down the hill and made a great noise. Mother snatched the gun from Bella and ran out and pointed it at Moo.
Moo screamed and ran. The snake made for a huge gum tree, standing fifty paces from the home, and leisurely exploited the butt of it. Mother and the girls surrounded the tree and took up triangular positions at safe distances from the enemy.
“Don’t shoot yet, Mother,” Moo counselled, “it’s coming round this side.”
Then raising several pounds of blue metal above her head she stole towards the tree, and letting fly, retreated, squealing.
Mabel signalled a miss, and approaching the foe with set teeth and a stone in her hand, made a dint in the soft bark of the tree. The missile rolled on the snake and caused it to lift its head and look enquiringly about. Mother and the girls screamed, and retreated up the hill.
“You hit it, Pearle,” Mother said, encouragingly, “you hit it.”
Next, Mother herself prepared for action.
“Watch it now,” she cautioned, advancing with a heavy stick in place of the gun. We all watched, mother continued to advance.
“Be careful, now,” the others warned. Mother paused, shortened her grip of the stick, and looked round at us.
“Look out, its comin’,” John shouted. Mother squealed, and dropped the stick and fled. The girls fled too, but didn’t catch up to Mother till they reached the house.
John and William engaged the snake at long range with small stones until the others returned. Then Mother lifted the gun and started to aim at the reptile. The girls ran behind trees and waited for the report. Mother closed both eyes and pulled hard at the trigger. Moo and Mabel peeped round trees to see when the gun was going to go off. All at once it went off: Bang! and Mother fell flop on the ground, and under cover of the smoke, which was heavy, owing to the weapon having been loaded for a number of years, the snake escaped to its dug-out.
Father came home that night brimful of information about the vast area of unoccupied Government lands we were surrounded with. He said he could secure the lease of a hundred thousand acres, that would take in the river, for a song, and was off in a day or two to see about it.
Joy! We went to bed late, and dreamed of mobs of cattle, gold mines, and a trip to the City.
Ten years passed.
We were station people now, so were the Montagues. They were relations of ours. Emuwood, we called our run, and all of us, from Moo, the eldest, to John, the youngest, helped to work it.
Year after year we worked, mustering, branding, breaking, fencing, making yards, dams, and fighting bush fires and droughts. Eight of us without the old people, five girls and three boys, and some of the girls were better men than the boys.
Station life is more romantic than farm life or prison life, but it, too, has its hard dull days and dreary rounds. Often, after long, hot days, when riding in from the mustering yards late in the evening, tired and dusty, the moon rising in front of them, the horses tripping and stumbling, the girls would wonder if ever a run of good seasons would come and cattle take a rise, and set Father free from the banks and let us all get out and go to the City.
“As long as I can remember,” William, who was always looked up to by the girls, would say, “Father’s been doing nothing but going deeper an’ deeper into the bank, either for improvements or stocking-up after a confounded drought. He’s all right!”
“Poor Father!” The girls would laugh, and ride along silently, noting the moon creeping higher over the trees, or the quick movement of rat or opossum, as the vermin, on it’s nightly rounds, shot across the dimly lighted track.
On reaching the Station, Father would come to the stables and ask how the cattle had mustered on the South Branch; and if there were any fats among the mob running on Black Duck, and what was the grass like at the Lime Tree Flats? Getting cheerful answers, he would return to the house and tell Mother and Jessie (Jessie was a quiet, thoughtful girl, who preferred housework to flying about the run) that “they were back from the yards and would be in for tea in a minute.” And when all were gathered together, a cheerful, merry place was our old West home.
A time came, though, when the seasons changed, when dust storms and drought stricken sunsets were almost as rare on those western plains as ships in full sail. Large healthy meat companies—some called them trusts and combines—came along and started operating in the cities. Agents and buyers whirled through the land in motor cars, visiting every station, and cattle-holding in the West. Talk about excitement, we did get excited! Ten pounds apiece Father was offered for as many quality bullocks as we could muster. Some of the girls urged him to sell before the prices fell; others wouldn’t sell a single hoof; they were sure cattle “were going a lot higher,”—they had read so in the paper.
Mother, though, “wasn’t sure that she’d like to leave the old place.”
Father ran about the Station, like a tame kangaroo, striving to decide what to do. He dragged at his whiskers; recalled years when he sold cattle for what seemed a good price, and they rose two pounds and three pounds a few weeks after. Also he remembered times when he refused eight pounds for a lot of steers, and a year later sold half of them for four pounds, and saw the other half perish for want of grass.
“Now, what is th’ safe thing to do this time?” and he ran round the stables and back into the garden. All of us gathered round, forming a sort of “bull in th’ ring,” with him as the bull. And a quaint looking Hereford he made, too, with his bald head and curly whiskers.
“Well, I’d only sell some of them, Father,” Mother suggested.
“Some of them,” he repeated, tremblingly.
“Two hundred of them, Dad,” from Moo.
“And what do you boys think—you ought to know something about it?” and Father gesticulated impatiently at us boys.
“William and John said “They were blowed if they knew.”
“Wait till I see the bank book,” and breaking out of the ring, Father rushed into the house.
“I’ll sell three hundred head at ten pounds,” he said, running out again. “Three hundred head, that’ll leave me a thousand pounds to the good.”
That settled it, and we made the muster.
The price of cattle continued to rise, and fats went up like flying machines.
Father became ill with excitement and caused us a lot of anxiety. Mother put him to bed and gave him gruel, and put hot flannels on him.
Anxious buyers came along and had to go away disappointed.
“A good job too,” the girls used to say, when talking of it afterwards.
In the middle, of it all word came that a muster had been made of Boondoolunda, a property adjoining Emuwood, and three thousand head, carrying our brand, were among the count. If Father was nearly mad with joy beforehand, he was real mad with it now. We had turned all our cattle on to Boondoolunda in the “big” drought, and being able to muster only a few hundred when the rain came, Father wrote the others off as “dead.”
“Lord,” he said, “three thousand of them, and they must all be seven-year-old bullocks.”
Mother said she was sorry he was told about them at all: but Father survived the shock and pulled through; and one day the representative of a big firm called and offered him twelve pounds a head all round for the Emuwood cattle, two thousand pounds for the lease and improvements, and seven pounds a head for the horses.
Talk about a gold mine! Father had struck a diamond field.
“Oh, take it, take it, Father,” the girls urged anxiously, “and let us all go to the City.”
“I think you’d better,” William added, and John said the same. But Mother was still doubtful, and Uncle Rube, who appeared on the scene, said, “Don’t let the lease go, for you never know!”
So Father only sold the stock, and the muster showed twenty thousand cattle and three hundred horses. Not one of us could work it out for excitement.
When the deal was fixed and the cheque handed over, Dad smiled and said, “The City for us now, where we’ll be someone after this, believe me.” Mother, though, still shook her head and seemed sad and doubtful.
But off in the coach we went, ten of us, taking nothing but our clothes and plans for the future.
I will never forget our parting with poor old Uncle Rube, though, and old Rainmaker, the faithful black fellow, the last of his tribe, who worked with us for twenty years.
“Neber see Rainmaker any more,” and he blubbered like a bear.
At Charleville, where we caught the mail and secured seats in a first-class carriage long before anyone else looked in, Father purchased gold watches for the boys and one for himself, and gold bracelets and bangles for Mother and the girls.
Then we began to realise we were someone. Seated beside each other in the carriage, waiting for the train to start, the girls noticed people walking up and down the platform staring in at us.
They’ve all been told who we are, Mother,” Mabel, the third eldest said, “and they know that Father’s got two hundred and forty thousand pounds. You can tell by the way they’re looking.
“Sit up straight and proper, then,” Moo snapped, “and don’t let us be like people who haven’t a shilling.” And clasping her hands before her in a way that set off the bracelet and bangle, she sat “straight and proper.” The rest sat up, too, and us boys played with our gold chains, and William said, “It’s all right.”
“That’s right, girls,” Father approved, “for when we get to the City and buy ourselves a mansion and the newspapers get writing about us, we’ll have to do things out in style.”
Then all of us posed as if being photographed— all except Jessie. She was different to the others.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “What matter if we have a lot of money, that doesn’t make us any better than we were when we had hardly any.”
At every station on the way in, whether daylight or gaslight, fresh faces appeared at the windows and stared at us.
The train rushed into the big railway station midst a blaze of light and a swarm of human beings.
“This is it,’ Father said, “this is where we’ll have a big say in things directly.”
“Just look at the lot that’s come to see us,” the girls chuckled, “look at them.”
We all looked.
Leaving the platform with our baggage we were surrounded by another crowd, calling, “A cab, sir,”
“A taxi, sir?”
“The best hotel in the City for us—the Grand Hyperian,” from Father, and off we went in two taxis, whirling after each other round corners and down dazzling streets, and waving to one another.
Out we got, and into the hotel one after the other.
When Father had consulted the manager and hired rooms for three months, up we went in a lift, and started to make ourselves at home. We had hardly looked round when all the servants in the establishment came flying round, suggesting hot baths, and wanting to know what they could get us, and if we wanted supper brought up.
“Anything that money can buy we want,” Father told them.
Talk about enthusiasm! Kangaroos trying to escape pursuit by dogs never put half the enthusiasm into their work that those waiters and waitresses put into their movements when Dad mentioned money!
“Worth working for all our lives, wasn’t it? ’’ declared William, throwing himself down in an easy chair in his room, and holding a glass of refreshments in his hand that a waiter brought on a tray. “It’s all right.”
“Worth dying in a drought for,” and John started puffing a big shilling cigar, looking like a chap who meant to live every minute of his life to the very last.
Next morning:
“Now listen to me,” Moo said, assembling us all before going down to breakfast. “There are a lot of things we’ll have to alter from this out amongst ourselves; and first we must call Father and Mother ‘Pa’ and ‘Mamma.’”
“Right,” we agreed, “Pa” and “Mamma” now we’re in society. And “Pa” and “Mamma” it was ever after.
Going down in the lift we kept repeating “Pa” and “Mamma” to ourselves, to get used to it.
And after taking our seats and the waiters got busy, Dad and Mother came stalking in.
“Good morning, Pa, good morning, Mamma,” Moo said, in a voice that drew the attention of all in the room, and made them pause over their omelettes and stare. We all grinned, except Jessie. Father and Mother looked surprised. Jessie hung her head and looked along her nose.
Then Pa sat down, and taking out his gold watch to see the time, dropped it in his porridge.
“Damme!” he roared. “Look what I’ve done with your ‘Pa’ and your ‘Mamma!’”
A month passed in the City, and what a difference it made in us! If the Bush “has moods and changes that the townsfolk never know,” we found the City had moods and changes that bushfolk didn’t know either.
Mr. Gaffery, and Sooney Hawkins, and Bandy McPherson, in from the West to see their sons to the grammar school, passed us several times in the street and didn’t know who we were—didn’t know us from crows. And when glancing in the shop windows we didn’t know ourselves. The greatest change was in Mamma and the girls. Their transformation was wonderful. They placed themselves in the hands of a dressmaker—the best dressmaker in the City—so the head maid, or whatever she was, at the Hyperian said, and left everything to her— everything except the account. That was reserved for Pa. A wonderful job she made of them, too! Real works of art. That the Lord achieved great things when he created us men must be admitted, but nothing ever He did could compare with the finishing touches those dressmakers gave to Mamma and the girls!
The first morning that they discarded their old skirts and station hats and complexions, and came tripping down to breakfast in a blaze of silk and ribbons, with pencilled eyebrows, red lips, powdered, and reeking with perfume, we boys looked up and gasped in astonishment. But they seemed scarcely conscious of our presence, to say nothing of our surprise. They took their seats as ladylike as you please, and putting on gold rimmed glasses, that we never saw them in before, calmly looked through them at the other guests across the room. The other guests straightened up and looked at them.
The girls and Mamma didn’t have it all their own way, though. Pa and William and John had been to the leading tailors. A newspaper proprietor took them there and introduced them. He got an advertising contract signed for his newspaper for introducing them. Splendid tailors they were, too; they took a lot of trouble over Pa and the boys. A horse trainer couldn’t have taken more pains over a cup winner. They measured them all over and gave them a lot of information about the right sort of clothes to wear, and advised them to take three pairs of pants, and a hat and umbrella to match each suit.
They ordered six suits each, and when fitted and fixed up and turned out, with creases down the legs of their pants, and tucks in the bottom of them, and splits in the tails of their coats, and tan boots and flash ties, and canes, and kid gloves in their hands, the boys and Pa weren’t far behind the girls. The only difference was the girls got rid of their freckles and sunburnt skins and the others didn’t.
Pa and the boys went to the barber’s, too, and got a shave and a hair cut. At least, Pa didn’t get his hair cut—he hadn’t any to cut.
Being tall, though a bit bent, Pa looked well in a shave. He would have looked better, though, if he hadn’t been so wrinkled and leathery under the chin. In the West they called him a “leatherneck.”
It was wonderful how soon we became known to everyone in the City. In less than two months more people knew us than we would ever have heard of in the Bush in two hundred years. And talk about correspondence! You should have seen the letters we got. Every morning fresh bundles of them arrived. Pa used to spread them on a table— not the people, the letters—and we’d all gather round and tear them open. You’d think we were husking corn cobs. Once there were nearly a hundred letters, and none of us knew the handwriting of one of them. It was exciting, looking to see what each was about. And they were nearly all about money.
“H’m,” Pa would grunt, at the end of those he waded through, “H’m.”
The rest of us reached for this one and that one and the other, eager to find one with something different in it. For a good while the only ones that contained anything different were those from land and estate agents; and they were full of information about splendid mansions for sale, real cheap, on account of the owners having to leave the country. The last dozen or so were all from amateur sporting clubs, informing Pa that he had been appointed a vice-president of the club. He must have been made a vice-president of fourteen clubs altogether; and a “P.S.” to each told him what the annual subscription was. The subscriptions ranged from one to eight guineas. The one from the Imperial Rowing Club gave a lot of friendly information. It said that its annual regatta would be held in a few weeks on the reach at the Quay, and it was hoped Pa would attend and bring his wife and daughters. Tickets were also enclosed for Pa “and ladies.” And the hon. secretary signed himself, “Lambert Fordyce.”
“John Carr-Carter Kayton, Esq.,” Pa repeated, looking at the tickets. “Now, how did they find out my real name?”
None of us could answer him; but the regatta business got the girls excited, and they started composing an acceptance of the invitation and the rest of the correspondence was forgotten.
“Mr. John Carr Carter Kayton, Esq., and wife and daughters and sons,” they scribbled, “has decided to accept the invitation to regatta, with great pleasure,” and making no reference to the vice-presidency, or the subscription fee, which was eight guineas, gave it to Pa to sign.
“I s’pose it’s all right,” he said, and flourishing the pen over the paper, same as he would a knife over a ration sheep, put his name to it in heavy thick letters, with a flourish at the end, which made it look like a black and white drawing of a young goanna. Then he put the pen down carefully, and smudged the signature almost beyond recognition with his starched cuff.
“Just look at that, now,” he grunted. “See what I done.” Moo looked across quickly to see what he had done.
“Oh, hell! Pa,” she said, staring at the accident.
“Moo! Moo!” reprimandingly from Mamma, while Jessie said “For shame.”
“Beg pardon, ladies,” and taking pen and paper, Moo was about to re-write the invitation when John came to the rescue with his new six-bladed knife. He shaved out the smudge, leaving a “window” in the paper, with Pa’s signature looking through it. John was always a handy man with a knife, or a branding iron.
Some days later.
Pa and Mamma and the girls just returned after a motor drive to the reservoir, where dogs and ducks and kids were bogeying in the water supply; William and John in the billiard room, learning to play billiards; the hon. secretary of the Imperial Rowing Club waiting in the hall to see Pa. A tall affable, self-confident swell was Mr. Lambert Fordyce, with long feet and a bunch of wallflowers in his coat.
“I got your reply alright, Mr. Kayton,” he said, shoving his card into Pa’s hand, “and jolly pleased you’re going to bring your daughters along to see our regatta.”
“I don’t know much about scoolin’ or boat racin’,” Pa told him, “horses an’ cattle’s more in my line. But we’re all comin’ to have a look at y’.”
Fordyce was delighted, and told Pa he had often heard about him.
“I keep in touch with all the squatters in the State,” he added, “though there’s always some, like yourself, who I don’t often get a chance of meeting.”
Pa, too, was pleased, and took to Mr. Lambert Fordyce like a brother.
“Come up and squat down for a while,” he said, and taking the visitor upstairs, introduced him to Mamma and the girls.
“This is the chap,” he said, “who sent the tickets for the rowin’—and this is my wife and them’s my daughters,” and he swept the atmosphere with his long western arm.
Mr. Fordyce bowed to Mamma, then to the girls; and the girls all stood to and bowed to him.
“You live here, I suppose, sir?” Mamma said. Mr. Fordyce had lived in the City all his life.
“Fancy!” and Mamma ducked her head and held it to one side, like a pink-eyed scrub pigeon watching a fool with a gun.
The girls played with their gold bangles and poked their flash shoes out from under their skirts.
“And we been in the Bush nearly all our lives,” Pa put in.
“Yes, among cattle and bush fires and blacks,” Moo added.
The others laughed.
“Not among blacks, Moo!” Jessie corrected.
“Well, pretty near it,” and Moo curled her lip, and fanned herself vigorously.
“And a jolly good time you all had too, I bet?” Mr. Fordyce reckoned. “You won’t like the City so well.”
The girls seemed surprised, and Moo said, “Pull off!”
“Moo! Moo!” indignantly from Mother and Jessie. Even Pa had to put on his spectacles and look at Moo.
But Mr. Lambert Fordyce with a loud “Ha! Ha! Ha!” jumped about the room and stamped his feet on the carpet till the others had to laugh with him.
Approaching Moo he said, “Shake hands. I like to hear a young lady say what she thinks.”
Moo shook hands with him, and shook so hard that he doubled up.
Then we all laughed more.
After that Mr. Fordyce became quite at home. He chaffed the girls, begged a flower from each of them, and persuaded them to pin it in his coat.
But when he told us he was a personal friend of the Governor’s, and spoke of introducing us to Government House, Pa just put his hand on the bell, and ordered champagne. And when the waiter pranced in, balancing the tray in his hand, like an angel, how the champagne flowed over the necks of the bottles and down Mr. Fordyce’s and Pa’s throats! The girls at first said they wouldn’t have any; but Pa urged them to “take a drop,” and when Fordyce mentioned that all society ladies took some, they consented “to take just a sip.”
Then they giggled and drank half a glass, and said they liked it, and disgusted Jessie.
When the bottles were empty, Mr. Fordyce rose and shook hands with all of us except Pa.
“I’d like to have a private word with you for a minute, Mr. Kayton,” he said, speaking into Pa’s ear like a galah parrot.
“Certainly!” And Pa followed him into the hall.
A few minutes later Pa returned and told Moo to “fill in a cheque for eight guineas, subscription to Imperial Rowin’ Club.”
“Th’ first society gent, that’s called on us so far,” Pa, with a gratified look, remarked when Mr. Fordyce had departed with the eight guineas. “Wonder who’ll be th’ next?”
The girls had no idea who would be next, but they all agreed that Mr. Fordyce was “a splendid sort of fellow.”
“Though there was something about him,” Pearle reckoned, “that she couldn’t quite describe.
“A nice gentleman,” from Mamma, and “a fine style o’ man,” from Pa, as he rose and left the room.
“But Moo needn’t have been rude to him,” Jessie reminded, and Mamma looked at Moo and told her to “remember when we were in the City we weren’t on the Station.”
“Oh, my little wowser sister,” and suddenly grabbing Jessie and pulling her across her knee, Moo started mawling and tickling her. Jessie squealed and struggled and cried, “Stop it!”
Then Bella and Pearle and Mabel took a hand. They pinched and squeezed the wriggling Jessie in a catch-as-catch-can fashion, till she squealed more, and kicked and slipped from Moo to the floor.
“For goodness sake, girls, do have a little sense and remember where you are.” And Mamma cast an alarmed look at the door.
“Well, swear then; swear!” the others demanded of Jessie, “and we’ll let you alone.”
“Never, never!” Jessie gurgled.
“But you will; you must; you shall!” they insisted. “Say ‘Damn!’ Say it! Say it! Say it!”
“Such nonsense from grown-up women. Behave yourselves, do!” angrily from Mamma.
“You’ll have to say it, too, for siding with her.” And Moo, assisted by Mabel, seized Mamma, and commenced tormenting her.
“My goodness me! Stop! Stop! Stop!” Mamma shrieked. But all in vain.
In a moment she, too, was sprawling and rolling over the carpet. And the two of them wriggled and choked and kicked, displaying abundance of frill and furbelows and white silk stocking. All the while, Moo and Mabel and Bella and Pearle cheerfully commanded them to say “Damn!”
All at once the door opened, and the hotel manager, with a startled look, appeared.
“Hello! What’s up?” he said.
“Cripes!” Moo shrieked, and dropped into a chair; Mamma and Jessie clutching at their clothes, scrambled to their feet.
“Oh, my heavens!” Mamma gasped.
But when she turned her eyes to the door, the manager had gone.
Moo, Mabel, Bella and Pearle went with Pa to the regatta; William and John “had something else on,” Mamma and Jessie remained at the hotel to receive the lady editor of one of the daily journals, who wrote saying “she had only just heard about us, and would be calling for an interview.”
Deciding to walk, Pa and the girls took their way to the Quay. The Quay is where the rowing sheds are, and where a lot of rowing goes on, and where a lot should go on that doesn’t. Also, it is where a burial ground was once, when, instead of city youths sporting themselves on the water below, the ghosts of manacled heart-broken convicts haunted the graves above. And it is here, facing the river, where the gray, solemn looking Law Courts stand, within whose walls “Their Honours” preside, and in voices tuned to emotion, send law-breakers through the gallows to eternity, with a prayer to the Lord to have mercy on their souls! Here, too the Victoria Bridge, once hurled to the bottom by an act of Providence, and defiantly raised again by the hand of man, spans the sleepy river. Here also the “leading” funerals of the City often take their way to the “last resting place” of someone—or “no-one.”
One was slowly taking its way there as Pa and the girls came out of Ann Street, and prevented them reaching the river bank. They stood and watched it go by. And as they watched, the steamer, engaged to follow the boat races, blew a warning whistle to late-comers to speed up. But the funeral took its time—it’s no use trying to hustle a funeral—and Pa and the girls contented themselves counting the vehicles and studying the occupants.
Excepting those in the mourning coaches, scarcely a face showed traces of grief or sorrow. All were as radiant as the sun. Much more sorrowful looking processions were to be seen rolling back from the racecourse any Saturday evening.
“Seems to be a pretty lively funeral,” Pa remarked. “They’re all laughin’ and talkin’ and smokin’.”
A cabful of straw-hatted, high collared youths smiled at the girls.
“Look at those fellows!” Moo said, amusedly. The others were looking.
“What fellows?” and Pa looked the wrong way. None of the girls answered him.
One of the “straw-hats” started talking on his fingers. Pearle, who understood the “finger language,” talked back to him, and wagged her head. You’d think Pearle had found an old Station acquaintance.
“What’s he saying?” the others asked.
“Is that your old man with you?” Pearle giggled into their ears. “Meet you in the Gardens Sunday afternoon.”
Then they all giggled and asked, “Would she?”
“Here, what’s up with yer? Can’t you watch a funeral without goin’ on with humbug?” And Pa frowned on all of them.
The steamer whistled again, but they didn’t hear it.
“It’s a long funeral,” restlessly from Pa, “Wonder whose it be?”
A shabbily dressed man, strolling past, with dirt and a week’s growth of hair on his face, torn boots on his feet, his hands in the pockets of a ragged coat made for a larger person, stopped on overhearing Pa and stuttered, “It’s a pub-pub-pub-lic fruneral, sir.”
Pa and the girls displayed increased interest.
“Ah-h!” the former said, and stared harder.
“N-n-none o’ them bub-bub-blokes,” the derelict continued, “would be r-r-ridin’ in cabs, if they had to pup-pup-part up for it.”
Pa didn’t quite grasp his meaning, and turned his best ear to the man of rags. Pa had one good ear as well as one good leg.
“He w-was a pup-pup-politician, who died,” the other explained, “and they’re all mum-mum-members of parliament and c-c-c-civil s-s-s-ser-vants that’s f-f-follerin’ and w-w-weepin’ for him. And it’ll be y-you and me s-s-sir, who’ll have to pup-pup-pay for all their tears and grief.
Pa was enlightened.
“Same way with S-s-tate dinners. No one only c-c-civil s-s-servants gets a chance to leave their m-m-mark on them.”
“Oh, I see,” Pa said, scowling at the funeral, and shoving both hands deep into his pockets.
Encouraged by the cheerful looks on the faces of the girls, the loafer changed the subject and proceeded to unfold a tale of woe.
“Les I c-c-can get m-m-money enough to s-s-see a doctor with pretty s-s-soon, I’ll be havin’ a f-f-f-fruneral o’ me own one o’ these b-b-bright days,” he said, sadly.
“Will you?” and Pa looked hard at him.
“It’s pup-pup-pretty hard when you haven’t a s-s-sixpence to bub-bub-bless yourself with, and don’t know w-w-where you’re gug-gug-goin’ to gug-gug-get the next m-m-meal from, ain’t it?”
Pa said he knew it was. He’d been in the position more than once.
The city waster brightened up.
“Y-y-yes?” he grinned, “but y’ d-d-don’t look l-l-like it now, s-s-sir!”
Pa just grinned, and turned his attention to the funeral again.
“I had n-n-nothin’ for me bub-bub-breakfast this morn’, an’ th’ s-s-same for l-l-l-lunch. I don’t know w-what to d-d-do about it.”
“Can’t y’ go to a bank?” and Pa looked to see if the end of the procession was-approaching.
“Gug-gug-go to what bub-bub-bank?”
“Any bank,” and Pa looked the other way.
“Any bub-bub-bank, be d—.” The derelict broke off suddenly, and eagerly clutched at a shilling that Bella, the soft-hearted one of our family, handed him.
“M-m-may you n-n-never know the w-w-want of one y-y-yourself, m-m-miss!” and breathing on the coin “for luck,” dropped it into his pocket, where it clinked musically with others already there.
Then turning to Pa:
“And m-m-may you benef-f-f-fit by her good es-s-sample, sir. Bub-bub-but I don’t th-think she can be a d-d-daughter of yours f-f-for all that!”
“Off to hell out of this!” Pa barked. “You don’t know who you’re talkin’ to.” And only that he could never depend on his right leg in emergencies, he might have kicked him off. Pa had a hot temper when he was roused.
The beggar raised his hat to Bella and went off.
“Talking like that to me—a man he never saw in his life before!” and Pa looked as if he would follow him and have it out.
“And fancy Bella giving him a shilling!” Moo put in.
“What did y’ want doin’ that for?” Pa said to Bella, “giving him a shilling! An I.W.W. skunk, I’d give him a d—n good kickin’!”
The last of the funeral passed, and the girls hustled Pa across to the river bank, and down to the boat sheds. The steamer was just moving from the pontoon. Mr. Fordyce saw them, and jumping excitedly about the deck, shouted to the skipper to “Hold on! Put back! there’s more coming.”
The skipper growled, and reversing engines, put back for the third time in fifteen minutes.
The crowd on board stared hard at Pa and the girls as they descended the steps leading to the water’s edge. The girls could feel them staring, but it made no difference to Pa. There was no self-consciousness about Pa.
“These are the Kaytons,” Mrs. Cashmore, a sprightly society dame, powdered and painted, informed a circle of female acquaintances, all of whom were decorated with the Imperial Rowing Club’s colours. “They’re Station people come to live in Brisbane; enormously rich, and ‘Lammie’ is going to introduce them directly,” lowering her voice, “and they all swear like bullock-drivers.”
“Really? Oh, how delightful!” from her friends, all of whom took a closer view of our girls.
“Jolly near missed it!” cheerfully from Mr. Fordyce, or “Lammie” as his friends called him. Another minute and we were away without you.”
Then helping Pa and the girls aboard, he shook hands warmly with them.
Pa proceeded to blame the funeral, but Lammie, all excitement, had no time for funerals.
“Come along,” he said, “I’ve a party of jolly nice friends on board waiting to meet you. Dashed sorry His Excellency couldn’t put in an appearance to-day.”
Pa and the girls followed him forward to where the sprightly dame and her party stood gabbing and gushing, and watching their approach out of the tails of their eyes.
“Mrs. Cashmore, let me introduce my friends, Mr. Kayton, of Emuwood Station, and the Miss Kaytons … Mrs. Jules Cashmore, Mr. Kayton.”
Mrs. Jules Cashmore bowed and said “How do you do?” to Pa; ditto to the girls. Then her powdered friends bowed and said, “How do you do?” Also our girls bowed—splendidly, too. But it was no credit to them. They had been practising all the week on the hotel mirrors and on each other. Moo and Pearle gave them the tips of their fingers to shake; and Pa got in a lot of attractive work with his black hard hat. Then all their tongues started wagging, and Mrs. Jules Cashmore in no time learnt from our girls all about our Station career, and our plans for the future, and if any of us played bridge or poker, or went to races, or believed in wowsers. Before the girls knew where they were she had pumped them dry.
“Look after these young ladies, Mrs. Cashmore,” Mr. Fordyce broke in, “while I take Mr. Kayton below to meet some of our gentlemen sports.”
“Sure, and Mrs. Cashmore bowed again.
Lammie raised his hat—but Pa didn’t, and as the steamer passed under the bridge and headed for the starting point off Garden Reach, they disappeared below.
“A dear old boy, Lammie, isn’t he?” Mrs. Jules Cashmore sighed, looking after him. “What would society be without him? Oh dear!” and she sighed again.
Her friends “simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like. There would be no regattas, no balls, no card parties, no nothing without him.”
“And would you believe it,” Mrs. Jules Cashmore said to our girls, “the dear man neglects all his business to look after our enjoyment, and never receives any payment for it.”
“Not a fraction!” her friends endorsed.
“He seems an alright sort from what we’ve seen of him,” from Moo, on behalf of her sisters.
“Oh-h,” and Mrs. Cashmore opened her mouth wide to show the gold in her teeth, “if you only knew him as I do, my dears, Oh-h!” Then she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, as if dreaming of her honeymoon or something.
“But what about last evening?” one of her friends suddenly reminded her.
Mrs. Jules Cashmore woke up again.
“Oh!” she gushed, “wasn’t it horrible.”
Then, for the benefit of our girls: “Poor Lammie was one of our opera party, and a low common brute in the pit shouted his name so as everyone in the theatre could hear, and asked “which of them bought you the dress suit, Lammie?” and “Was it the fair one shouted you in?”
“That was me, th’ wretch,” Miss Bung-Brown explained aside to Pearle.
“And, oh-h,” Mrs. Jules Cashmore went on, “the way some of them idiots laughed! Well, you just felt you could stick a knife in them.”
“What a damn shame!” Moo said.
Mrs. Jules Cashmore and her friends suddenly looked at Moo, then burst into shrieks of mirth.
“Oh, my dear!” they gasped, “you’ve said just what we would liked to have said ourselves.”
Lammie returned, but Pa wasn’t with him. A number of well groomed swells, with crooked sticks hanging to their arms, accompanied him. He introduced them to our girls; our girls bowed beautifully again. The swells raised their hats and asked if they “were very fond of regattahs?”
The girls didn’t know. “Horse races, they reckoned, would be more in our line.”
“How jollay!” one of the swells said, “and no doubt you can all ride a hoss?”
“Bai jove, I bet they can!” from another.
“Ride anything with a hide on it,” Mabel laughed.
Then all the swells roared, and Mrs. Jules Cashmore and her lady friends shared in the mirth. And while the hilarity was at its loudest another swell shouted into Lammie’s ear, “Gad, she’ll do me, old chappie!”
But the crews were all out and drawing into line, and the first race about to start. All on deck crowded to the sides, and the excitement commenced.
“Come up a little, Blues!” the starter, standing pistol in hand, shouted, “Back half a stroke, Reds! Back, Reds!”
Reds advanced some.
Lammie, who knew nothing of rowing, and didn’t want to know, anyway, never missed a chance to “show off” his bogus knowledge of the sport to ladies, lifted his voice and bawled: “Heigh, you there, bow, what the devil do you want coming out in wrong costumes for—that won’t do, you know!”
“Oh, shut up!” bow shouted back, and everyone began laughing, everyone except Lammie.
“What a shame!” Mrs. Jules Cashmore moaned when calm was restored. “Poor Lammie.”
But the starter’s voice rang out again, “Come up Imperials! Up a lot yet!”
In their excitement the Imperials remained at the “ready.”
“Imperials! Why don’t you come up when you’re told. Come up!” Lammie yelled.
“Stroke” of the Imperials glanced over his shoulder and yelled back, “Go to the devil!” Great merriment, in the middle of which the starter informed Lammie that “he would be much obliged if he wouldn’t interfere with the crews.’’
Lammie denied having interfered with them, and the merriment was renewed.
“I say, Lammie, old fellah! Look here! Look heah!” and one of the swells started pushing his way through the crowd of ladies to reach the secretary, when the pistol went.
“They’re off!” the crowd shouted, and away splashed the crews, tearing the oars through the water and ripping into the struggle as if it were a wood chopping competition. Sliding seats rushed backwards and forwards; rollers rattled, heads, arms, knees and bodies went at a furious pace; coxswains yapped “Now! Now! Now!” to every stroke; varying it to “Give it to them, Stick to them!” and “Now yer have them!”
The steamer, as all steamers contrive to do under similar circumstances, steered across the boats of two of the visiting crews and swamped them out of sight. Then the spectators, all of whom were supporters and barrackers of the “Imperials,” frantically waved their handkerchiefs and hats, and howled and roared, “Go it, Imperials! Go it Imperials! Imperials! Imperials! Imperials!” And nothing else but “Imperials” could be heard till the end of the tussle. Then the voice of the judge was heard:
“Spring Hill crew, first: West End, second; Kangaroos, third;” and he didn’t mention the Imperials at all.
Sighs, groans, murmurings, and loud manifestations of disappointment broke out on board.
“Does he mean to say our boys didn’t win?” all the females asked; then answered the question themselves with “Downright ridiculous!”
Lammie was appealed to, and he “was certain from where he was standing the Imperials won by three lengths.’ ’
“So they did. It’s scandalous!” Mrs. Jules Cashmore declared, “Scandalous!”
“The very same thing happened last year,” Miss Bung-Brown remembered, “and my brother said he’d never row again, and he hasn’t.”
“They’ve always got our fellows set,” Lammie growled, “and I’m getting full of it.”
Just then the Imperial crew, their heads dropping on their chests, and looking ill, paddled feebly past on their way to the dressing shed.
“McGroogie! McGroogie!” a score of voices called to the stroke, “who won that?”
“We didn’t, anyway,” sullenly from McGroogie. “In a rotten boat like this we hadn’t a chance!”
“Ah-h!” and “Oh-h!” and the crowd subsided.
Then Lammie and his staff of waitresses got busy with afternoon tea, and everyone became cheerful and sociable again.
Pa came from below in company with a manager of a city bank, a retired squatter like himself, a judge of the district court, and a liberal politician, and introduced them to “his daughters.”
After the tea another race; another dispute over the judge’s decision, and some more tea.
And when it was all over and our girls arrived back at the hotel, they talked of the glorious time they had, and told Mamma and Jessie the names of all the society ladies they were introduced to and the sort of dresses they wore.
“Better than bein’ on Emuwood?” John asked, with a grin.
“Emuwood!” and the girls “touted” and turned their backs on him in disgust. “Pshaw! Emuwood!”
For weeks and weeks Mamma and the girls careered round looking at houses offered for sale. Pa and the boys inspected fully a dozen, too; but no one seemed to have the sort of house we had all agreed upon possessing. Some were too old; some too small; some too far out of the City, and nearly all of them, Pa reckoned, far too dear.
One morning after breakfast a foreign-faced, well-dressed man, with a huge cigar, a diamond stud, and a German accent, who introduced himself with a business card inscribed “The Real Property and Finance Agency, Ltd., Izackke Daniel, Manager,” called at the hotel, and rubbing his hands together, told Pa he had “a magnificent place close handy, near to ze tram, cheap, four acre, twelve room, peautiful garden flower, and stables for ze horse and ze motor car, only vone thousand pound for ze lot and ze deed all clear from mortgage.” And was so eager and friendly and excited about it that Pa ordered a car right away and started off with him to inspect the place.
“Fairst ve drife to my offis round ze back street for ze key,” and the agent took a seat beside Pa.
“Ze most lofly big place in Breesbane,” he enthused on the way round. “Ze peautiful river vind by ze front and tall big brick vall around two side like ze vall of Jerusalem.”
Then whispering into Pa’s ear, he warned him, in his own interests, “not to tell no vone till he make ze bargain safe.”
Pa shook his head and said he knew too much about business to show his hand and let anyone know what he was doing.
The car stopped before a crumbling stone rookery in a disused part of a back street, where even at that hour of the morning groups of wretched fallen females gathered on the footway flaunting their rags, their misery, and their shame, in the very heart of one of Australia’s fairest cities and within sight and sound of churches, cathedrals, mission homes and Parliament House! Over the door of the rookery was the sign “Izackke Daniel, Land and Commission Agent,” while in the dusty windows were numerous notices purporting to afford full particulars of houses and properties in the tenant’s hands, for rental or sale on lowest terms.
Mr. Izackke Daniel hopped out, and telling Pa he wouldn’t “be von meenute,” quickly entered his weird looking den.
“Is he goin’ to sell you a house, Mister?” the driver, with a meaning twinkle in his eye, asked.
Remembering the agent’s warning, Pa shook his head and silently and deliberately lied.
“Oh, that’s all right; because if he is I was to give y’ a bit of advice not—”
“Young man,” Pa said, looking at him slowly, “I’m payin’ you to drive this car, not to give me advice.”
Returning with the keys in his pocket and a cigarette in his mouth, Mr. Izackke Daniel said, “Now to ze Breakfas’ Creeka Road so fast as you can fly,” and took his seat again.
Away flew the car, followed by a whirlpool of dust, into Elizabeth Street, across Edward Street, up Eagle Street, around the Bight and along Wickham Parade, Pa leaning back like a State governor, the Jew leaning forward to advertise himself to the pedestrians who stared curiously as the machine flashed on.
Stopping before a brand new palatial looking residence off Breakfast Creek Road, Pa sat staring at it with open eyes till the agent flung wide the door and hustled him out.
“Are you quite sure this is the place?” Pa said when they entered the newly laid out grounds and were out of hearing of the driver.
Izackke Daniel laughed at Pa’s surprise, and mounting the verandah, opened the door with a key, and invited him, with a sweep of the hand, to feast his eyes on “ze most wonderful cheap bargain.”
“Only a thousand pounds for this!” Pa gasped moving about in astonishment from room to room.
“Vell!” Izackke gesticulated, making passes with his hands, “If you vould sooner gif feefteen hundred, I say all right, very veil.”
“No, no,” Pa quickly protested, “I didn’t mean that. A thousand was the bargain. I’m satisfied. It will do me. Come on back to town and I’ll pay you the money.”
“Oh, dere is not a geereat hurry for ze moneey; but if you vant to pay, all right, I go,” the cute agent answered.
Reaching the City again, Pa followed the Jew closely into his dingy, dirty office. He was determined not to let him out of sight until the deal was closed and everything fixed up. Pa prided himself on being a shrewd man of business.
“Thank you,” and Izackke rubbed his hands and smiled when folding up Pa’s cheque for a thousand pounds—“Ze plessing of God of Abraham vill be upon yeou.”
“Everything’s all right now,” Pa answered, stuffing the deeds and other papers handed to him into his pocket, “and I can shift into the house whenever I like?”
“Quite right,” the smirky Daniel assured him. ‘Yeou can go in venever yeou please, and some day I vill pay yeou a veesit to see how you like ze cheap bargain.” Then giving Pa a curled, lean eagle-like claw to shake, showed him politely to the door.
* * * * * *
When Pa returned to the hotel and told us about the splendid deal he had made—a magnificent house and grounds for only a thousand pounds, and showed us the deeds, the girls and Mamma were delighted, and “dying to see it.”
“It don’t take me long to buy a place,” he boasted, “when I make up me mind about it.” After taking refreshments, Pa engaged another car, and with the keys of the purchase in his pocket, drove Mamma and the girls to see it. They didn’t expect to find it nearly so grand. It was “simply lovely, beautiful! And a large bedroom for each of us, looking on to the river.” They spent two hours admiring it.
That evening we gave the hotel manager notice and told him we now had a home of our own; and next day Mamma and Jessie and Moo went round all the big shops, selecting the best and most up-to-date furniture; and splendid furniture it was, too!
A few days later the van men got busy delivering it to the new house. Emuwood we called it, in memory of the old home in the West.
On the same day, and the same hour, a train of other van men arrived with furniture that didn’t belong to us at all, and wanted to put it into our new house. Our van men stood up and objected on behalf of Pa. The other men insisted on behalf of someone they called Hartfield—a retired merchant, who, they said, was on his way from Sandgate. Our van men said the house belonged to Kayton; the others said it belonged to Hartfield. Our van men called the others liars; the others, called ours d— liars! Then there was a fight on the front verandah and a lot of casualties happened to the furniture. Nearly all of it was thrown down the steps; some over the palasading where it lay in big, battered heaps. Then they started throwing one another over, and some were yelling “Murder!” when two policemen and a tram conductor and a number of civilians rushed on the scene and stopped the fight.
While some were washing the blood off themselves at the water tap, the police telephoned for Pa.
When he arrived our van men all gathered excitedly round him.
“It’s my house,” Pa yelled. “I paid a thousand pounds for it. Put my furniture in and—”
“A thousand pounds?” said Hartfield’s man. “Strike me— the old bloke’s loony. Why, my boss paid five thousand to build this blinkin’ ’ouse, and paid twelve hundred pounds for the bloomin’ land.”
Pa paused and gaped, but before he could recover from his astonishment, Hartfleld himself jumped out of a car and came walking in.
He was a big girthed man, with a bell-topper on, and a cigar between his teeth.
“What the h— does this mean?” he said.
“Haven’t you put the furniture in yet?”
His van men gathered round him and wildly explained.
Then Hartfield swore, and ordered Pa off. Pa swore back and ordered him off, and started rolling up his sleeves.
“Take him in charge!” Hartfield roared to the police.
The police shook their heads, and said there was a misunderstanding somewhere.
“He’s trespassing!” Hartfield bellowed.
“I’ll soon see who’s trespassin’, and angrily walking off, Pa jumped into the car and whirled back to town to bring Izackke Daniel to bear witness. But when he arrived at his office the door was closed and Daniel was not there.
Pa, scratching his head, drove into Queen Street, and went to the office of Trot and McTrotter, solicitors. He was received by McTrotter, a heavy, well-groomed man, who toyed and fondled a table telephone, sometimes talking into it, sometimes talking to Pa. Pa unfolded his tale of woe, told how he bought the place, and wanted a summons taken out against Hartfield and his van men for damages.
“Izackke Daniel,” McTrotter said, “has cleared out. We have a warrant out for him on another matter, but he can’t be found. He’s the biggest vagabond in the City. What did you go to him for? You ought to have had more sense!”
Pa got a great shock. “Well, I’m—” was all he could say.
McTrotter looked at the deed and transfer and handed them to a clerk to make enquiries.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see your thousand pounds again,” he chuckled, “or Izackke Daniel either.”
“Well, that’s a nice thing!” Pa answered, “what am I going to do?”
“First thing to do is to see a reliable firm and let them get you another house, and don’t go fooling round with pavement sharks. The City is full of them. After that we’ll advise you what action to take.”
A few minutes later McTrotter and Pa were making their way through the busy streets together, towards Adelaide Street, the lawyer a little in advance, with a bundle of legal papers under his arm, taking short, springy steps; Pa taking long, slow strides, with bent back, and silently nodding an accompaniment to the movement of his feet.
* * * * * *
Four days after, Trot and McTrotter wrote, advising Pa that the property Izackke Daniel had sold him was that of a swampy allotment in the same locality, nearly adjoining the disputed house, worth about twenty pounds, with ten pounds due on it for rates and arrears.
Pa put the letter in his pocket and never told us anything about it.
We were in Darobolpal now, our big new suburban residence. A grand place it was, and cost seven thousand pounds. Fifteen rooms in it, with a spacious kitchen and accommodation for six servants. A lot of people reckoned it was the finest place in the City; but the girls weren’t satisfied for all that. It was built of hardwood and pine with a roof of tiles, and they thought Pa should have invested in a stone residence with high walls and iron railings all round—something more in keeping with our position.
“Oh, it’s quite good enough—it’s too good,” Mamma, in her endeavours to humour them, would say. “We had a lot worse at Emuwood—a hundred times worse.”
“But if we had,” the girls admitted, “we didn’t have two hundred and forty thousand pounds at Emuwood; and we didn’t have to hold receptions there, or entertain people.”
But when Pa one day bought a thousand guinea motor car for them to fly through the City in, with their gorgeous veils fluttering in the wind, they gave up grumbling and made up their minds to make the most of the “old wooden place.”
In less than a year we were the best known family in the City. A lot of people admired us, too—and a lot didn’t. Those who didn’t hadn’t seven thousand pound houses to live in, or thousand-guinea motor cars to tear through the streets in, and, of course, were jealous.
It was the wealthy people with marriageable sons and daughters who paid us the most respect and took the greatest notice of us. Wealthy people are better bred and better mannered than the other crowd. They have the most brains, too, and the most patriotism—so they say. William and John could have been married, too—and married well— twenty times over in as many weeks if they had desired—so Mamma reckoned. The only persons who didn’t reckon so were William and John themselves. But Mamma didn’t boast so much about the girls. There was a slump in them. And of course, it’s always different with girls. They’re not on the same footing as boys. They won’t keep, and time is always against them. Besides, males have always a better chance of getting married than females. Girls grow anxious about getting left on the shelf. The “shelf” looms up in their lives like a gallows, and they know if they must escape they mustn’t be too particular. It’s the only period of their lives when they can’t afford to waste time bargaining. Anyone can see that by the husbands some of them get. And it’s the only period in a man’s life when he feels he should take time to do his own matrimonial shopping, and do it economically and well. This fact is rarely demonstrated, though, in the wives some of them get. Still, that doesn’t matter. They get through the world just the same.
And in the society world of the City it was wonderful how popular Pa became. Scarcely a club or institution or, union—excepting temperance or labour, or lawyers’ unions—was there that he wasn’t made a member of.
And it wasn’t everyone some of them would admit as members, either. One club, they assured Pa, rejected a judge, and another a member of parliament. But all of them seemed ready to conscribe Pa. And a coursing club that had been revived in an aristocratic suburb made him its president.
Next morning, at breakfast, he told us all about it.
“They elected me unanimous,” he said, covering himself up to the neck in a table napkin. “Not one in the room would go again me,” putting nearly the whole of a boiled egg in his mouth to celebrate the occasion.
Mamma, who somehow wasn’t looking as pleased about the matter as Pa, tinkled the bell sharply for Annie, the new maid, who the girls were breaking in to attend the table according to advice given them by Mrs. Cashmore, a great authority on housekeeping and etiquette, and how to conduct costly dinners and parties cheaply.
“And I see they made the Hon. Mr. McSquint and Judge Juggems vice-presidents?” from John, who had fallen into the habit of reading the morning paper and munching toast at the same time, as if it were natural to him.
“Only vice-president, and they made you president, Pa?” And Moo regarded her parent with pride.
Pa wagged his head joyously in the affirmative; then turning to the sideboard, that cost fifty guineas, watched himself eating in the mirror.
“How did you manage that, Dad?” William, searching the board with his eye for the sugar bowl, enquired.
“Dad! Pa, William, Pa.” Mabel corrected; then, taking up the bell, tinkled it harder than Mamma had done, and grumbled about the slowness of the new maid.
“How did I manage it?” and Pa swallowed another egg. Pa could swallow six or seven eggs at a meal, and often when we had company recalled with pride the time he ate thirteen scrub turkey’s eggs, half a gohanna, and some damper, for lunch, at Emuwood.
“By giving another big subscription, I suppose!” Mamma interjected, with a frown, and lifting the bell again, rang it as though it was Pa’s ear she had hold of.
“Oh, no! I gave them fifty pounds this time, that was all,” and taking up his knife and fork Pa started on a pair of fat mutton chops.
“Fifty pounds!” we all echoed, and stared over the table at him.
Mamma, who seemed to lose her voice, lifted the bell once more, but instead of ringing it, banged it down hard on the cloth.
Pa looked up at her.
“You seem to forget I got a weak heart, Alice,” he said. Pa, for years, imagined he had a weak heart.
“If that’s how you are going to go on, John,’’ she complained, “there’ll soon be nothing left.”
“Nonsense! he answered, “what rubbish.”
Annie, carrying a tray laden with cups of tea and a reinforcement of chops and cutlets came limping in, with a scowl on her face.
“Oh, at last!” Moo murmured.
The rest of the girls, except Jessie, curled their lips in silent condemnation of the servant.
“You’s all seem to be mighty fond of ringin’ the bell. Are yous practisin’ for the circus or what?” And Annie commenced distributing the provender as though it were baits she were laying for dingoes.
Talk about a surprise! You’d think Mamma and the girls were struck with lightning. Pa was staggered, too. He suddenly stopped eating, and pricked his ears.
“Lucky it ain’t a bullock-bell,” John grinned.
“I quite agree with you,” and Annie leaned heavily over Pa’s shoulder to remove his plate. “Yous all know more about ringing them sort of bells, I dare say.”
Quiet and easy-going as he seemed to be, Pa was a sensitive man, and had a violent temper when properly put out. He was properly out now, and bellowed suddenly and furiously into Annie’s ear, and filled it with fragments of munched egg.
Not expecting a rebuke in that form, Annie nearly jumped on top of the breakfast table with surprise and disgust. In her alarm she fouled John’s elbow.
“Holy war!” he cried, bounding to his feet, “me new eight guinea suit!” and stood gazing mournfully down, shaking the scalding hot coffee from his unmentionables on to the costly linoleum.
“Your fault it was,” and Annie turned on Pa like a wild cat.
“You old, ignorant bush swell!” applying her apron to the side of her head. “Spittin’ in a girl’s ear, too. Oh, yer beast!”
Pa was on his feet like a shot, so were we all— all except William. He sat and grinned at John’s distress, and said, “It’s all right.”
“Don’t interfere with her, Pa,” Mamma screamed, while Moo, remembering Mrs. Cashmore’s injunctions, called: “Annie, how dare you!” and stamped her foot. Jessie, after appealing to them all to behave, hung her head and commenced to shed tears.
But Pa was a hard man to stop when he got a go on.
“What, you hip-down! you red nose!” he spluttered, “who are you abusing?” and reaching with his long arms for a grip of her, he pursued Annie round the table. Excitement! Had it been a raid by the police we were resisting, there couldn’t have been greater alarm and confusion. Annie, squealing, flung the furniture out of her way, and it fell in the road of Pa.
“You tiger cat!” he yelled, after sprawling over the legs of a chair. “You’ll pay for this.”
Becoming blown, and overpowered by Mamma and the girls, he stood oscillating in the centre of them and shook a napkin menacingly at the new maid. She brazenly faced him over the table.
“Don’t you stay in this house another minute,” he foamed, “I’m master here.” Then, suddenly remembering his weak heart, he gasped “Oh!” and doubled up.
“I’d sooner stay in the gaol,” Annie screamed back. “I would, you flash old scrub pig! You bear! You dirty old cattle tick!”
Pa forgot about his heart.
Dragging Mamma and the girls and the end of the table with him, he started off after Annie again. But this time she reached the door leading to the kitchen, and showing him an inch of her tongue, disappeared, and we never saw her any more.
Under Pa’s presidency, the Metropolitan Coursing Club became a live institution. The sport was the talk and attraction of the City. Cultivation paddocks and open grass fields of the country were exploited for hares, and the captives railed by the caseful to the great metropolis. Members of the club hurried south and north to secure pedigreed greyhounds, and staghounds, and any old hound with a reputation for fleet-footedness. And a “pedigree” was all the qualifications for coursing that many of the mongrels possessed. And to the virtues of the shivering brutes, as they arrived per train and steamer, were given more space in the newspapers than years later were given to regiments of soldiers departing for the front.
Even Pa invested in four of the brutes, which John and William, with rare manifestation of enthusiasm, undertook to care for. They ordered supplies of choice morsels from the butchers; exercised them morning and evening and physicked them regularly with sulphur and salts. And on Sunday afternoon, when the coursing ground was thronged with spectators and vehicles, and all astir with officials and bookmakers and men leading hounds strung in pairs, it was a sight for the gods to see, Pa and Mamma and the girls whirling on to the scene in our great flashing motor car. Talk about cutting a dash! It was enough to make the big squatters of past four-in-hand days turn in their graves with envy.
At the end of the day the committee would gather round and call for “three cheers for Mr. Kayton,” in which the spectators joined; and Pa would nearly wear the rim off his hat lifting it. And how Mamma and the girls gloried in Pa being made an idol! There they would sit in the car looking as though it were a wedding they were celebrating.
No other branch of sport in the City had a president so popular as Pa, and members of the club wondered what the chances were of his standing for Parliament. You’d think Parliament was the place where people were crowned lords of everything—where virtue, and brains, and boodle received their great and lasting reward! Not a place where any “old woman” or smooger could go and take a seat if he had a mind to!
One morning, McLines, the horse auctioneer and leading member of the coursing club, came motoring out to Darobolpal (that was the blacks’ name for our mansion. It meant “camping ground” so Pa said) with a staghound beside him, which he presented to Pa. It was a hound that McLines had been feeding and trying to head hares with for two years, and at last concluded he could head a hare quicker himself. He was a fine looking hound, though, and came all the way from Victoria, and was called “Sir Walter.” Pa didn’t want to accept the gift because he had four hounds of his own. But McLines would have him take it as a memento of all the Emuwood horses he sold for him in the old days. On those grounds Pa couldn’t very well refuse.
When the girls saw the brute they got excited over it, and reckoned it was kind of Mr. McLines to present such a pretty dog to Pa. And William and John never saw a better made staghound anywhere; were sure, too, it could catch anythin’ that ever jumped out of the grass.
Next day, when McLines was dining at the Squatter’s, with brother members of the coursing club, he told them how he “managed to get rid of that useless (unprintable) staghound of his, ‘Sir Walter!’” and they all laughed. “I told the President,” McLines added, “that if he kept ‘Sir Walter’ well housed and gave him some chipped potatoes and a little oyster soup every morning, he’d catch the next Waterloo Cup with him,” and the others laughed harder and said “it was a d— shame.”
Then one after another they remembered they too had a deerhound or a greyhound or some sort of hound not worth feeding.
“Make a present of it to the new President,” McLines advised, “same as I did with ‘Sir Walter.’”
They laughed some more and “wondered if he would really appreciate the gift?”
“Appreciate it!”—and forgetting he wasn’t in the sale box—McLines hit the table hard with his fist and broke some of the crockery, and told the waitress to charge it up to the profit and loss account—“appreciate it! Old Kayton can appreciate anything that’ll bite a bit of meat. You city bipeds have no idea how these old cattle fiends from away out the back o’ blaises love a mob of mongrel dogs around them. They’re their zoo, their museum, their art gallery. Take all you don’t want out to him, and he’ll just have time to enter them along with ‘Sir Walter’ for the next Waterloo.”
* * * * * *
Every morning or so after that, one or other of those members came walking up the gravelled drive that encircled Darabolpal, leading a worthless hound as a gift to Pa.
“Well, I never!” Pa said at last. “What am I going to do with all these dogs!” And William and John came to the conclusion that he had better employ a man to look after them. The girls though, said they’d give a hand to care for them; so Pa had a new yard and additional houses built to accommodate the pack—ten altogether.
At first the manager of the State butcher’s shop demurred supplying our increased orders. He reckoned it wasn’t a part of the Government’s policy to find cheap meat for dogs. But Pa reminded the manager that he (Pa) was vice-president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and threatened, if our order wasn’t supplied, to use his prerogative.
There came a week, however, when the supply of stock to Newmarket fell off, and a shortage of meat resulted.
For days the hounds were put on a short allowance. After the second day they noisily objected, and from morning till night howled and barked and moaned in protest. People in the suburb blamed Pa; said he wasn’t feeding them; wrote letters to the papers about “a dog nuisance.” Pa flung those newspapers on the floor and swore, and told William and John to get rid of those (unprintable) dogs at once—to give them away to anyone who would take them.
But no one would take them, and next day William and John, in response to an invitation to go on a fishing expedition to Stradbroke Island, slipped away without giving any warning.
“Heavens!” Mamma said, holding her ears, “just listen to those dogs. A good job they’re shut up; they’re going mad!”
Pa listened to them, but only for about half a minute. Then he put on his hat, and hurrying to the terminus caught a tram and went off to the City to do business at the bank, and forgot all about them. After business he was invited by an ex-State squatter premier to dine at the Squatters’ Club along with Judge Juggems. He dined: then to a political meeting in the Centennial Hall, where he supported a liberal candidate with loud applause. After the meeting, to the Club again, and cards and dominoes and whisky and soda till midnight.
Whirling along on the way out to Darabolpal through the empty deserted streets Pa leaned back in the taxi and sang himself snatches of patriotic airs, breaking off at intervals to inform the chauffeur that “this was a (hic) lot better than the old bug-(hic)-buggies we drove in out West.”
Dismissing the taxi on the road, he walked to the iron gate at the front of Darabolpal. But he made no attempt to open it. Pandimonium greeted his approach. “My ghost!” he gasped, “Them d— dogs are out!”
Out of the yard they were, and the starving, howling pack scoured round the house like a tribe of roaming, ravaging wolves, and gathered at the gate. Some reared their front feet on top of it, their pointed ugly snouts thrust over the bars, their long white bared fangs gleaming in the moonlight; others barking and “boofing” and racing ferociously up and down the palings in search of a hole to get through; others tackling and tearing each other—rearing, falling and rolling on the lawn in a confused, blood-curdling struggle to kill and eat one another. Pa stood and shuddered.
From the highest windows in the mansion Mamma and the girls and the servants screamed to Pa “not to come in, for goodness sake, or the dogs would kill him! They’ve been biting and killing each other all day, and we’ve shut ourselves in!”
But Pa didn’t hear a word they said, and it wasn’t necessary to warn him against coming in, anyway. He turned and fled for the City, looking back over his shoulder at intervals, lest the pack had scaled the fence and were in full gallop on his scent.
No cab or taxi came his way, and between running and walking and worrying, he was exhausted and done in when he reached the Valley. With the proprietor of the Shamrock Hotel he was well acquainted. He would call there and ring up Darabalpal, and explain the position. Turning into Brunswick Street he found the front door of the hotel closed, and something was wrong with the night bell. Wiping the perspiration from his face and neck, he went to the side entrance, where there was a high gate carefully locked. He threw off his coat and started to climb. He had succeeded in placing one foot on top of the gate, when from the shadows of the street a lurking policeman glided and grabbed his other leg.
Pa thought it was the hounds. “Down! Down! Murder!” he yelled.
“I’ll down yer,” and the policeman jerked him on to the footpath.
Pa jumped up and wanted to know what he meant?
“I mean to arrest you,” and John grabbed hold of Pa. Pa resisted and bellowed “Help!”
The proprietor of the Shamrock, an alderman, sprang out of his bed in his pyjamas, and identified Pa.
The policeman apologised, but it was some time before Pa could get back enough wind to tell his story.
“Heavens above, man!” the proprietor gasped. “It’s a wonder they didn’t get you and tear you to ribbons! What are you going to do? Come in till we see about it.”
Pa and the policeman followed him into the hotel. “There’s no gettin’ into the place while they’re loose. I’d give fifty pounds to get rid of them,” Pa groaned, sitting down.
“Dead or alive?” from the policeman.
“Any d— how!” from Pa. The policeman looked at his watch, and said he’d be off duty in ten minutes, and if Pa would stay where he was till six a.m., he’d find everything quiet when he reached home.
Pa reached home in a taxi at 6.30 a.m., and found a van load of still and silenced hounds leaving by the gate, and the policeman on the verandah waiting for his fifty pounds.
William and John had become acquainted with Mr. Calliope. They were introduced to him in the City. An affable, agreeable swell, “practising at the bar,” with chambers in Bungil buildings. His practice was to sit in his chambers from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m. waiting for briefs, and yawning and listening hopefully to footsteps outside his door.
William and John were proud of the friendship of a barrister-at-law, and Mr Calliope was the first member of the bar they had had the privilege of knowing, to say nothing of becoming pally with. When in the West they had often heard and read in the papers about barristers, and of their “astuteness” and “powers of penetration,” and of the wonderful discerning way they examined witnesses and won hopeless looking cases. And when he dropped the “mister” and addressed them by their Christian names, they were prepared to crawl to the other end of the earth over broken glass bottles, to serve him. And Mr. Calliope enjoyed their society, because he knew how well off Pa was. To become wealthy himself was his ambition, and wherever the boodle was there were Mr. Calliope’s hopes and aspirations and energies. Not having a wide social influence, briefs failed to come his way through the ordinary channels of his profession, and his prospect of rising to affluence at the bar were what he himself called a “fair cow.” Any old newsmonger or bottle-o’ man had just as good a chance! There was one other medium, though, through which he might rise, could he only lay his plans deep and skillfully enough—the medium of politics. So Mr. Calliope decided to become a member of Parliament. After that—a cabinet minister; then a judge. What political party he would attach himself to didn’t matter tuppence; which ever presented the line of least resistance would receive his support.
Pally and all as William and John became with Mr. Calliope, he never confided these plans for the future to them. In a careless, distinguished sort of way he would sometimes mention politics and express a desire to go West with them for a trip whenever he could afford the time.
Some days William and John would call to see him at his chambers, where “Mr. Calliope,” in large, fearsome letters, was printed on his door. Outside the door, seated in idleness, at a small table in the shades of a cold, uncharitable hall, was a cock-eyed boy, the co-operative servant of some ten or a dozen members of the profession inhabiting the same gloomy floor, who blew his nose noisily in a grimy rag to hide his amusement whenever anyone approached to inquire if Mr. Calliope was busy? The boys would have called for a chat with Mr Calliope every day, but he was always deeply engrossed in large heavy law books, or drafting opinions on involved legal points submitted urgently to him by the Crown—so he used to say. And William and John were not the men to waste a friend’s valuable time. Once when they called in a hurry the cock-eyed boy wasn’t at his post, and without being announced they poked in and found Mr. Calliope with his coat off, delivering an impressive oration to the jury.
“Dammit!” he said, breaking off in surprise. “Wasn’t that (adjective) fool of a boy there?”
* * * * * *
One day at luncheon William and John announced that Mr. Calliope was coming to Darabolpal for dinner. Talk about a fuss! The coming of Father Christmas couldn’t have raised more joy or curiosity in the minds of a lot of kids! Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel all stopped eating and gasped “Mister Calliope!”
They had often heard about him, and knew he was a barrister-at-law. Amongst themselves they had often discussed him too, and wondered if he were single or married. Now when he was coming to the house they could scarce keep from going into hysterics. They wanted to know everything about him; if he was “a proud or bashful sort of man?” and if he “put on jam?”
“There’s nothing proud about him,” John assured them; and William claimed that Mr. Calliope “was a great barrister, anyway,” and added, “My word, you should hear him make a speech! He’s all right.”
Fresh outbursts of joy from the girls; and Pearle said “she loved to listen to clever men talking.”
“He’ll just be the man to decide an argument I was having in the club last night, about who first started breedin’ Black Polls in the country!” Pa said. Pa’s mind was always running on Black Polls, or Devon, or Shorthorn, or some other breed of cattle.
John reckoned their legal friend was just the man who could decide an argument, or anything that Pa liked to mention, while William, his eyes shining with enthusiasm, declared “He was all right.”
Then John described the shelf-loads of great law books in Calliope’s chambers, every one of which he had to study before he could become a barrister; and “he knew every word of them off by heart.”
“Wonderful how clever some men are!” Mamma murmured in admiration. And Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel gushed endorsement of her sentiments.
Jessie, who rarely enthused or lost her head, smiled, and said she thought it was more wonderful how foolish some men were!
“Mean that for me?” and turning suddenly to Jessie, seated next to him, John took her by the ear and threatened to sever it with his butter knife if she did.
Jessie said she didn’t.
“Is Mr. Calliope married or single?” Pa inquired, and the eyes and ears of Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel, all of whom had risen from the table and were leaning on the backs of their chairs, suddenly opened wide. All of them glanced eagerly from William to John. It was the one question they themselves had itched to ask and have answered. And when William drawled “single,” they smiled, and romped away like girls let out of school.
A few moments later they were whistling popular airs and hustling the servants into planning and preparing a great dinner for Mr. Calliope.
* * * * * * *
“He’s come! He’s come!” the girls whispered to each other when William and John arrived with Mr. Calliope in the motor car. Flying upstairs, they took up positions behind window curtains and peeped to see what sort of a man he was.
“You’ve a splendid place here,” Calliope said, swinging his stick about and running his eye over the lawn and flower beds—“it must have taken a few bullocks to pay for all this?”
“Not a great many—less than a thousand,” John reckoned.
“At twelve pounds a head, I suppose it could be a bit less,” and Mr. Calliope broke into an amused chuckle.
“But it looks a lot better inside,” and John led the way in through the wide hall, where Pa and Mamma, with the girls lurking in the background, were waiting to receive the distinguished visitor. William and John, in their eagerness, both introduced him at the same time, and William, in admiration added “He’s all right.” But Mr. Calliope didn’t require much introducing. He wasn’t a shy man. He met us all without turning a hair, and said something different and complimentary to each. In no time he was quite at home, laughing and chatting with the girls, telling funny stories about people in high places; of Government House gossip, and of queer answers witnesses from the Bush often gave to questions he himself put to them in court cases, which of course didn’t happen, because he never had any cases, and recited passages from “Our Old West Home,” and said he knew Will Jones, the author of it. The girls had never met such a nice man as Mr. Calliope. They didn’t expect to find him “half so nice.” They expected a barrister-at-law to be a serious, solemn person, who talked learnedly about everything; instead, he was “the plainest, the pleasantest, the friendliest, the jolliest man ever they met,” and so kind and polite with it all. Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel dragged him out into the garden and showed him the grounds and the roses, and the vines and fruit trees; and dragged him inside again and showed him the pictures, family albums with photos of themselves and old Emuwood homestead adjoining, and told him all about the West and their friends we left behind there.
Jessie was the only one who didn’t seem to be breaking her heart about Mr. Calliope; yet somehow it was to her that his looks and glances kept shifting and wandering.
After dinner—and a great dinner it was, too!— no eatable you could mention that wasn’t on the table, and nothing in the way of costly cutlery and silver dishes that wasn’t displayed—Pa’s turn came. He took Mr. Calliope into his “private den,” where the rest of us were forbidden to enter, and opening a box of cigars, started talking about bullocks and grazing country. Mr. Calliope leaned back in his chair and puffed a cigar. After a while he began tugging restlessly at his moustache and pricking his ears whenever he heard voices coming from the drawing-room, and meeting everything Pa said with, “Well, well.”… “I see.” … “You don’t say so.” … “Is that a fact?” … “I never knew that before.” … “You astound me, Mr. Kayton!” But when he confessed he didn’t know who was the first man to breed Black Polls in Queensland, or anything about that class of cattle, it was Pa who was astonished.
“I thought yous was supposed to know all about them things in the law?” and he stared at Calliope.
“Well, I can look it up for you,” and taking out his note book, Mr. Calliope made a memo of the point.
“When y’ do,” Pa informed him, confidently, “you’ll see it was me.” And leaning proudly back he shoved out his chest as if expecting the Victoria cross to be pinned on it.
“Now, that’s very interesting, Mr. Kayton,” Mr. Calliope lied, listening to sounds of voices coming again from the drawing-room. “Not many people are aware of that, I’ll bet.”
“Sixty-five heifers and two young eighteen month old bulls,” and leaning forward, Pa tapped Mr. Calliope impressively on the knee with his long, bony finger to assure closer attention, “and we travelled ’em five hundred miles in a dry time without losin’ a head, and only myself and a black boy.” Pa leaned heavily back again and eyed the other with a look of great self-satisfaction.
“Five hundred miles!” Mr. Calliope echoed, with more artlessness and guile than astonishment, or interest either.
“Of course, they was all picked cattle, with good strong consteetootions,” Pa hastened to inform him.
“Were they?” And Mr. Calliope didn’t care tuppence whether they were or whether they were not.
“You couldn’t have done a trip like that?” Pa grinned, as a sort of challenge, “five hundred mile and only a black boy?”
“No, I’m blessed if I could,” and Mr. Calliope broke into a burst of genuine mirth, in which Pa joined heartily.
Meanwhile the girls, moping in the drawing-room, started grumbling and blessing Pa for keeping Mr. Calliope shut up all the evening in his “smoky old den.” “It’s too bad,” Moo said, flying into a passion, and scattering papers and post cards and things about the room.
“What a thing to do!” Jessie protested, but Mabel and Bella sympathised with Moo.
“Well,” they grumbled, “Pa has no right to keep Mr. Calliope there all night, talking about nothing.”
“I’ll soon fix him!” And going into the hall, where the ’phone was, John rang up Pa in his den.
Pa jumped when the call came.
“Just wait a bit, Calliope,” he said, “till I see who’s here, then I’ll tell you a good story about the first mob of bullocks I ever bought in my life.”
Mr. Calliope waited impatiently. He didn’t want to hear any more about bullocks, he was dying to rejoin the girls.
“Eh? Who? What? Judge Juggems?” Pa shouted, and Mr. Calliope immediately became interested.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Certainly! Certainly! Certainly!” Pa rattled on. “I’ll come and see you at once—this minute, Judge. I’m doing nothin’ particular. No, there’s no one here much.”
Then turning excitedly to the visitor:
“Judge Juggems wants me to go over and see him. You’ll get on all right without me, Calliope— come out and talk to the family. They’ll keep you company.”
“But he’s away on circuit!” Mr. Calliope said.
“No, he’s at home. I just been talkin’ to him.” And hurrying to the drawing-room with Mr. Calliope at his heels, Pa hurriedly explained the turn things had taken to Mamma; then rushed off down the steps and went out the front gate.
Once more the girls were happy with Mr. Calliope. John was happy, too. He took William into the dining room and whispered into his ear. William burst into mirth, and said “It’s all right.” Then they both roared and went out and loitered in the moonlight waiting for Pa’s speedy return. But Pa didn’t return till nearly twelve o’clock—till Mr. Calliope was leaving to catch the last city-bound tram.
“How did you get on with the old Judge?” John asked when Pa sauntered in. “Did you spend a good evenin’ with him?”
William turned away to hide a guilty grin.
“Very good—very good,” Pa answered, leisurely placing his hat and stick on the rack. “Won thirty-five shillings playin’ (hic) bridge.”
“Which of them was it rang up for yer?” John asked further. “Was it the old Judge himself?”
“No, he don’t ring anyone (hic) up; he strings them (hic) up. Don’t he, Callio-(hic)-pe?”
“That’s right, Mr. Kayton,” Calliope answered, laughing. “Good-night.”
“But the Judge wasn’t at home, was he?” and John grinned at Pa again.
“No, but the ser-(hic)-vants was.”
And Pa sat down and grinned.
Evening at Darabolpal; the house ablaze with electric light; some of us reading; some talking; some smoking; Jessie at the piano; Moo and Pearle, who now “took lessons in singing,” trying a duet—and trying us, too!
Pa remarked the prices bullocks were fetching at Newmarket—fifteen to twenty pounds a head— “and,” said he, “we sold out of Emuwood far too cheap.” None of us agreed or disagreed with him. The duet came to a violent end; the piano stopped.
“Here’s the photo of Will Jones, who wrote ‘Our Old West Home’ and, Mr. Calliope says, used to work for us on Emuwood,” John, turning over the pages of an Australian magazine exclaimed.
“Where’s his photo? Show us!” and the girls all scrambled across the room and clustered round John.
One by one we recognised in the picture the face of a Bush stripling, who, years ago, came to Emuwood with White, the drover, and remained to stock ride for us for eighteen months—all of us except Moo. She couldn’t place him at all.
“He was a long, thin fellow, about seventeen, and very quiet,” William remembered.
“Fancy Will Jones being the writer of ‘Our Old West Home!’” Mabel and Bella repeated in astonishment.
“A shy boy he was,” Jessie put in.
“Don’t you remember a horse fell on him and he wouldn’t let us bathe his foot for ever so long?” from Mamma, for Moo’s benefit.
“The hell, yes!” and Moo, suddenly remembering, grabbed at the magazine.
“No need to swear about it!” Jessie rebuked.
The rest of us laughed.
“He’s the chap the horse ‘Brewer’ bucked into the garden with,” William added.
“But he never had no schoolin’, how did he manage to write books?” Pa puzzled.
“He tells all about that himself, in here. You’re th’ best reader,” and John placed the magazine in Jessie’s hand.
The rest of us settled down to listen.
“Contemporaneous with Paterson, Boake, Quinn, Daley, Lawson and others,” Jessie commenced, “I struck the trail and blew into the ranks of Australian writers. My address then was the sheriff’s office. A grim, humorous sort of office it was, rife with excitement and dramatic situations. But considering the Bush training I had had— mustering stock, often holding and drafting them at the gallows gate; running one in to kill occasionally; roping colts and outlaws, the jargon of this office came easily enough to me, especially when the roping and gallows element entered into it. Life’s other side of the picture, however, was curiously revealed here, when I found myself dealing in writs of execution, summonses and warrants, and each day forming quaint friendships with the bailiffs—men who, in my Bush days, held nothing but terrors for me and many of my friends— men whose chief qualifications for success in the world were a chronic affability and an idler’s disregard for time. In meekness and humility those bailiffs were a collection of masterpieces. On mornings when business was dull, the amiable old hangman too, used to saunter serenely in to sprawl his legs beneath my table and spin yarns and spend a pleasant hour. The hangman and I got on well together, so well, in fact, that we were as friendly as brothers for months before I became aware of the important office he held in the Department. And then only when the under-sheriff, a laconic, cynical person said to me one day: ‘If you want to get on in this world, young man, you had better drop him, or else he might drop you into the next!’ was it that I realized I had been entertaining an angel unawares. I don’t know what hangmen are like to-day, but this old star acquaintance of mine was a mixture of milk and vinegar, who had lost or missed a multitude of fortunes. He mostly missed them, I fancy. As I remember him, he wore a Teutonic whisker, talked like a politician, parted his hair in the centre, and wore a tragic countenance. Being from the Bush, perhaps, it was his flowing beard that drew me to him. What drew him to me I have never been able to find out. He certainly had a daughter on hand, and used to shed large parental tears on my table when speaking of her accomplishments, and his anxiety for her future. But as I was quiet and shy, he might only have thought I was fretting my head off, and merely wished to preserve it for something higher up. Putting him aside, I remember in that weird office many pathetic reflections came to me. As a boy on a selection, reared amongst a brave band of struggling selectors, I had learned how a warrant or the sight of a bailiff filled the hearts of the strongest men and women with a dread of having to walk the roads in poverty. And when, often enough, only a skeleton was in their cupboard; and they had a hell’s own struggle with a couple of mad horses and a cranky plough to cultivate a patch of wild primitive land, and sow it with grain for the marsupials to raid the moment it showed above the ground—was it any wonder? In those hard, marketless days, I had seen bailiffs come and drive away the few cows that kept the homes in milk and a bit of butter; and had shared the sorrows and vain regrets of sad little bands, who stood and watched to the last—till the dense belts of heavy box trees and seedling saplings closed behind the parting animals, and shut them from view for ever. Now I was on the other side of the range. I was a cheerful official, hurriedly filling in warrant forms that commanded the bailiff to go forth into the Bush and seize and take all goods and chattels, every hoof and stick he could find on the homestead of those big hearted men, of those kindly neighbours and boon companions I had left behind, and to fail not in the good work at his peril! Such food for reflection was surely enough to inspire even a wooden man to literary effort of some kind or other.
“Years later there came, too, a time when I received promotion in the sheriff’s office, by my salary being raised from eighty to one hundred pounds a year. Talk about Anzac day; or the King’s birthday; or St. Patrick’s day! None of those days were to be compared to the day when I received that promotion. The honour and glory of it all seemed to be reflected by nearly everyone in the Department! The under-sheriff called me into his room, and breaking the news gently warned me that I wasn’t to breathe a word to a single soul, until the under secretary himself told me about it. The under secretary was the great oracle of the Department, and nothing so important as a rise of screw was to be mentioned above a whisper until he spoke. Then the under sheriff took me into the sheriff, a dapper, jovial little captain, who assured me it was dinkum, and hoped I wouldn’t lose my head over it. Next a telephone message summoned me to the under secretary, with an instruction to first wait on the chief clerk. I waited on the chief clerk, who told me, in confidence, what I already knew, and expressed the opinion that I should consider myself very fortunate, because a lot of real smart fellows in the Department, who were well educated, hadn’t received any rises at all. Putting down his pen, he escorted me through a private door, with great gravity and impressiveness, to the under-secretary himself.
“‘I sent for you,’ the U.S. said, ‘to tell you that you are down on the Estimates for a rise of ten pounds.’ Of course, I tried to look surprised. I was already looking unmistakably amazed, though the amount of official awe I was passing through was detracting from the pleasure. ‘And,’ he went on, ‘considering the state of the finances and increased expenditure of the Department and the very bad seasons in the country, reckon yourself a lucky man to get so much. Now come in and see the minister for justice, for ’tis he who really gave it to you!’ For a mere clerk to be permitted to see the ministerial head was indeed a rare concession, and I followed him with wildly beating heart to the minister’s room, where, to keep their memories green lest their public actions failed to accomplish that laudable purpose, the walls were decorated with enlarged photos of all and sundry who had suffered and bled in presiding there for a thousand a year.
“‘This is one of the clerks who got a ten pounds rise,’ the under-secretary proudly explained. ‘He has come to thank you for it.’
“The minister smiled and bowed to me, like one to whom large items of increased expenditure were nothing. I bowed to him, and as a hint that the ceremony was over, the under-secretary said, ‘that’ll do, Jones.’ Then I tripped over a heavy rich mat, which upended under foot when I turned to the door, and recovering somewhere in the next room, flew back excitedly to my den in the Supreme Court Buildings.
“Next day, two others who had been as lucky as myself, came along, and we shook each other hard by the hand and rejoiced like the only surviving heroes of a great and victorious battle, and extolled the Government as a good and wise Government, and the minister of justice as the right man in the right job. Others in the Department—the real smart fellows with good educations, who didn’t get any rises at all, and whose disappointment seemed intensified with suppressed envy—passed me by as though I were an interloper, or a stuffed kangaroo.
“But the hangman was not one of these. He was candid and out-spoken. He paid me a special visit, and vigorously aired his wrath at being passed over by the Government. The office wasn’t nearly large enough to hold all his wrath. He declared his treatment amounted to a public scandal. ‘For seven years now, Jones,’ he stormed, ‘I’ve been kept at the same starvation salary; no notice is ever taken of the responsible work I have to carry out, and no credit ever given me for the way I carry it out, and there’s no encouragement held out for a man to take an interest in his billet. This Government, I say, has done things that no other Government ever did. In six months, as the records will show, they reprieved no less than four men, which meant a loss to me of twenty pounds. But what does any of them care? Not one of them cares that much!’ And he snapped his finger.
“I was so elated over my own windfall that this grim grievance of the hangman filled me with the idea for the perpetrating of my first joke—if I have ever perpetrated a joke at all.
“‘What you should do,’ I suggested to him, ‘is to write a letter to the home secretary, pointing out the amount of emoluments you have lost by the Government’s action in reprieving these men, and telling him that unless the difference is made up to you in salary he’ll have to take the job on himself.’
“To this he agreed, and I cheerfully drafted the letter for him to sign. And I am sure that nothing I have drafted since has given me half so much joy.
“Some weeks later the premier passed the hangman’s protest round the floor of the House, while the lobbyists and strangers in the gallery looked on and wondered what all the merriment was about.
“Acquaintances have often said to me: ‘But how came you to get a post in the public service?
And going by the looks of some of their faces I have sometimes fancied they regarded my entrance into it on a par with a bushranger breaking gaol. Well, I didn’t find it at all hard to get into the service. On account of departmental and political love and affection I am finding it hard to stay there. Away back in the fifties and long before I was born my parents formed a lasting friendship with the family of old Drayton. And when in after years one of the boys became a politician and was made attorney-general, my parents sent word to him that they had a lot of sons, one of whom they wished to make something more than a Bush worker.
“‘Bring him to Brisbane and let me have a look at him,’ was the answer that came back. But it was not so easy to bring him to Brisbane as it seemed. I was eighteen years of age then, and for six years had been away from our old West home tossing about the Bush, sharing the romance and dangers of station life. I owned a horse too, and a dog. The horse and dog were treasures, though not of great commercial value. The horse especially, one that old Kayton, of Emuwood Station, gave me instead of wages, was a well preserved relic of Bush antiquity.”
(Here we all broke into roars of mirth, and it was quite a while before Jessie could proceed.)
“I had been on droving trips, and like Barcroft Boake, had taken my turn in long, lonely night-watches on cattle camps, seeing the polished horns gleaming in the moonlight and listening to the strange breathing of the mob while down and resting. I knew, too, what it was to run dingoes down, and to ‘wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard.’ Besides, with a band of boon companions, youths whose lives I subsequently recorded in the pages of my first book, ‘Our Old West Home,’ even to using their real names, I had arranged to go down the Western rivers, where twenty-five shillings a week was being offered to stockmen, with the free run of their knives and a lonely shallow grave to sleep in when they chanced to break their necks.
“So when my parents put the case for the City, with its alluring white shirts and starched collars, and soft hands, a gentleman’s life, and a big salary always on the horizon, the influence that the Bushland had over me began to assert itself. Mates whom I understood and could trust and be trusted by; plenty of flash horses to ride, and a life free from cares were all that was at the back of my head. For weeks this idea of going to work in the City made me as miserable as a bandicoot. More than once I started out to join those boon, companions, but each time hesitated and turned back. Finally I temporized, and decided to go and see what Brisbane was like, anyway. My mother didn’t allow the grass to grow under her feet then. She hustled me into the first train, and together we came to Brisbane to look for the attorney-general. I was as tall then as I am now, and being the first time I had seen the inside of an office, I was so absorbed in the imposing surroundings that I failed to remove my hat, until a quiet pinch from my parent woke me up. I fancy my appearance didn’t make a great impression on Mr. —. He seemed to get a surprise when he saw me, and a greater one when he learned I had been out of school for six years. But peace to his ashes! He was a staunch friend, a kindly man, and overlooking much, bundled me into the Intestacy and Insanity Office as the junior clerk and message boy, at fifty-two pounds per annum.
“When the morning came to go along and report myself to the head of that department, indescribable feelings of funk worked themselves up and took possession of my very soul. My heart fluttered and thumped like that of a bird or wild animal made captive. How was I to know the boss of the Department when I saw him? How was I to tell him who I was? What would I be given to do first? And would I be able to do it? These fears and apprehensions made a helpless coward of me. Making my uncertain way through the busy streets I met and passed hundreds of faces, all of them strange, indifferent, cold, unresponsive, unsympathetic. For me there wasn’t a symbol of recognition, nor a ray of hope or encouragement on one of them. In the Bush everyone would have said ‘Good-day,’ and stopped and had a yarn.
“Passing through the heavy iron gates, and mounting the stone steps of the Supreme Court Buildings I entered a long, cold corridor. My terrors increased so that I nearly collapsed. No criminal who ever entered there ever shook more than I. With trembling hand on a door-knob, beneath which was printed in large letters, ‘Intestacy Office,’ I paused, wondering if at the last moment it wouldn’t be wise to turn and fly back to the Bush. Had some humourist the night before been prompted to scrawl the line, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here,’ on that door, where I might have seen it, nothing would ever have been heard of me in the public service, or in the realm of Australian literature either —which might not have been a great loss anyway.
“But as I stood there hesitating, and shaking like a rat on that mat, the door was suddenly opened from within by one of the staff, and I was discovered and taken in.
“And there, behind those walls of brick and mortar, amongst pens, ink, and paper, breathing the atmosphere of sealing-wax, official letters, affidavits of death and intestacy, judges’ callous orders, soiled and flood-stained reports of country police officers, torn and pocket-worn private papers, and pathetic packets of personal effects of friendless, unknown souls who fell by the roadside in the rush for gold, or were victims of thirst and privation way out where the ‘rains had ceased to flow,’ and when ‘all things living had drooped and died’ on the burning frontiers of the broad Bushlands— there, I say, I was left to graduate and to vegetate. And there, too, cabined within those official walls, I found ample time to brood and reflect upon all that in fancy ever kept taking me back to those days at Hornet Bank, at Langlo, and at Emuwood where the boss’s daughters could ride and use a whip like men.”
(Here again Jessie had to pause till our enthusiasm subsided.)
“Those days when we crossed the rolling plains in the dragging, creaking, dray; where the great trees towered and the long grass waved above our heads; where the rafters shook to gay Bush songs, and we danced, and danced, the whole night through—where our hearts beat free and merriment mocked at adversity.
“For months I was supplied with a desk all to my own cheek, with unlimited supplies of stationery at hand, and full permission from those around me to set sums for myself, or draw horses, or dogs, or kangaroos, or to write love letters to my best Bush girl, and with nothing before me in the shape of scenery or inspiration but the bare kalsomined ink-splashed walls.
“Somehow, none of the staff seemed to regard my ‘fist’ as artistic enough to appear in the records or books of the Department. And moments came when the mental strain of it all was so great, that resting my head upon my arms, I would fall to sleep at the desk and snore and dream, until the deputy or the accountant or someone, with the jingle of a coin, roused me to run out and buy him a tomato or a hot-pie for his lunch. Sometimes it would be a bus fare and a note to take to his wife, telling her how hard he was working, and that he couldn’t possibly be home that evening for tea!
“For long enough I was neither a financial nor artistic success in running these domestic messages. While I would have been at home among gum trees, the geography of the City was all wrong and confusing to me. On that account I had often to return without having been able to find the house.
“‘Couldn’t find it!’ they’d snarl, ‘where did you go?’ And when I explained that there was no part of the City to which I hadn’t gone, they’d snatch a sheet of foolscap and hastily sketch a map of the suburb, showing the school, and the police barracks, and the wood depot, and the place where some men were taking up a drain pipe, and the bus I went out on flying round a right hand corner that was three corners from the left hand corner, where I would see the corner of the garden allotment standing by itself not far from the corner where the bus stopped dead, and, supplying another fare, would send me out again, like Noah despatching the dove from the Ark, that would have saved a lot of worry if it had been torpedoed and sent to the bottom.
“A year or two later I was given more clerical work to do, less private messages to run, and time to look like a man. But one day when Gordon’s poems fell into my hands, the line, ‘We never know the worth of a thing until we have thrown it away,’ rekindled all my old love and longings for the Bush-land. I read and re-read Gordon; then borrowed and bought everything and anything written of the Australian Bush. I thought Bush, talked Bush, swore by the Bush, till one day an inspiration came to me and I started writing Bush. Then all the life of my boyhood came whirling into my brain, unfolding itself like a picture reel. Vividly I saw again the old home where I was reared, with its shingle-roof and slab walls standing among the box trees; I saw fond, familiar faces and figures, just as I had so often, oh, so often, seen them in the years so far away! And then, one by one, those grand old pioneers who gave our country birth revealed themselves again to me—those brave old pioneers, whose names, whose giant enterprise, whose deeds of fortitude and daring were never engraved on tablet or tombstone; who strove through the silences of the Bushlands and made them ours; who delved and toiled in loneliness through years that had faded away; who had no place in the history of our country so far as it was yet written; who had done most for this land; for whom few in the march of settlement, in the turmoil of busy city life now appeared to care. And for them, and to them I wrote ‘Our Old West Home.’”
Jessie put down the magazine, but none of us spoke. We had no desire to. We, too, were back once again in the wide, open West, making a home for ourselves, fighting Bush fires, hoping and watching for rain, wheeling the rushing mobs, ringing them and “bringing them up to the wings of a yard.”
Amongst the letters the postman brought one morning was one from Auntie Montague. Auntie Montague was Mamma’s sister, and her husband, old Uncle Frank, owned a small grazing selection, about fifteen miles from Emuwood. Though they were our only relations, we never got on well with any of them, nor they with us. Auntie Montague was always catechising Mamma, and telling her how she ought to bring us up, and reproving her for allowing the girls to talk to men working on the Station, and permitting them to assist in mustering the stock. Her own daughters, she always reminded her, were never allowed to do anything other than housework, nor go out of her sight a minute. That none of them was able to do anything other than housework never entered into the argument. And somehow Auntie Montague thought a lot more of us, and was far friendlier when Pa lost heavily in a drought. Our adversities always strengthened her attachment for us.
She sympathised with us in our losses, but in a way that her commiseration made us feel we were the poorest beggars on the face of the earth. She said it was “awful hard on people when they worked and worked for so many years, denying themselves of proper food and clothing the way we did, to be hit so heavily in the end.”
But when it happened that we got more rain over our way than they got, and our cattle were “picking up” faster than their few head, or when Pa received a better price for bullocks than he usually got, Auntie Montague would sneer and say that “money wasn’t everything in the world;” that they themselves were “quite satisfied to get enough to pay their way with and make an honest living.” People who lived just for the sake of making money, she reckoned, “couldn’t be happy,” and were “never thought much of by other people, anyway.” So long as her family made what little they had honestly, and none of her daughters could be “talked about,” that was all Auntie Montague professed to care.
And whenever she heard of City tourists, or Bush missionaries, or a political party having called and stayed a night with us, without having visited their homestead, Auntie would turn up her nose and laugh and say she was glad they didn’t come near her, for she had heard that hardly any of them were any good; that some of their old fathers had only been tinkers and greengrocers in the City.
And her husband, old Uncle Frank Montague, a quiet, easy-going man, whose smile was always hidden beneath his whiskers, and who never differed or argued with anyone, whenever he came to our place used to make mental notes of everything he saw and heard, and retail them to Auntie when he went home. No mistake, our girls disliked old Uncle Frank—they reckoned he made all the bullets and she fired them. Still, they could never pick a quarrel with him, because it wasn’t his nature to quarrel. He was always nice to them, and they knew by the motion of his whiskers, that he was smiling at them, and though they knew it was he who used to tell Auntie all the ugly, nasty things about them—they couldn’t swear to it.
But Auntie Montague whenever she came to see us, or in the notes she would send across to Mamma, would never say a word to compromise or implicate old Uncle Frank. At the end of a note she would scribble, as though the idea had just occurred to her: “I believe Moo and Mabel and Bella and Pearle were trying their hardest to pull strings with those townies you had at Emuwood! And on the next page would “suppose they are getting frightened now of never getting chaps to have them; but it’s a pity if they don’t soon get someone.”
Then to hear the girls go on about their Auntie! It was no use Mamma trying to check Moo from swearing on those occasions! And Pearle, or Bella, or Mabel would snatch the letter and throw it on the fire.
Once Auntie sent an urgent letter by Cousin Tom, her eldest son, who came to Emuwood one day for some steers of theirs that we mustered, in which she “talked to” Mamma for allowing the girls “to ride about the run in breeches and boots like men, and getting themselves talked about all over the country, even by old swaggies going along the roads!” “My girls,” she concluded, “might be poor, and haven’t always got swell people stopping at their place playing an old piano for them and singing silly songs; but one thing, they’ll never be seen wearing men’s clothes about the Bush. Never! And your’s wouldn’t either, Alice, if you had brought them up as you should have when they were young. It’s too late now, when they are all old maids.
“Send the letter back to her, Mamma!” Moo ordered, with scorn. “Send it back!” And her three sisters excitedly supported her.
But Mamma didn’t. She folded it up and quietly forgot about it.
Another time, when Auntie Montague managed to save a few pounds from the sale of some horses, and was in a proud, provident mood, she wrote Mamma saying if she was in her place, and had her chances with girls who could do the work of men she would have hundreds and hundreds of pounds in the bank, a new house, not an old barn (she always likened our Emuwood home to a barn), and her daughters would be at college learning to be doctors, not going about an old station like blacks.”
“In that case,” Pa said, when Mamma showed him the letter, “I married the wrong one out of your family. I should have taken Jemima (that was Auntie’s name), and I could have had her easy enough, too, even after she made up her mind to marry Frank.”
And when Moo maliciously wrote back, instead of Mamma, and told her what Pa had said about her, Auntie sent Mamma a hot letter of four sheets, accusing her of betraying confidences, and calling Pa an old liar, and threatening in future to keep anything she had to say to herself. “When one’s own sister can’t be trusted,” she ended, “the world is coming to something!”
But when Pa sold out of Emuwood for two hundred and forty thousand pounds, it was nearly the death of Auntie Montague. At first she was disposed to blame the Almighty for it, and to lose faith in him altogether, and instead of congratulating us on our good luck, she disapproved of it, and refused to share in our joy.
“Flash! Won’t they be flash!” she said to her daughters, “but I’m never going to visit them again. They can come here if they like, and I’ll be civil to them, but never a step will I take to go near them—never!”
So when Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel saw Auntie Montague’s writing on a letter for the first time since we came to the City, they stared and wondered what had stung “the old snake.”
“My dear Sister,” Auntie wrote. “As you all seem to be too proud and flash now to write to your poor relations, I am writing to you to tell you that we are all well, except Mary Ella, thank God. It was very lonely up here and we missed you all so much after you went away. I made up my mind at last to get away from this dreary life for a while, and take a run to the City for a few weeks. I think I will take Mary Ella with me, as she hasn’t been feeling well for a good while, and isn’t looking too good at all, and is always complaining of headache. It will be a good change for her, and always being stuck here in the Bush, a girl, particular about herself like she is, will never get a proper chance. I suppose all your girls will be making great matches for themselves down there? Bush chaps wouldn’t be good enough for them now. We see their names figuring in the social news, among the big bugs. We heard, too, I don’t know who it was told us—that Moo was engaged to a judge, an old widower with a big family of boys, some older than herself.”
(Loud laughter from all except Moo. She said Auntie “was a liar, that she never heard anything of the sort from anyone.”)
“But, of course, we don’t know yet, how true it is. You’ll be glad that some of them have at last made a start to go off your hands, for we all know what a great anxiety girls are; though I must say my own daughters, on account of the strict way I brought them up, and the example I always set them myself, have never given any cause of trouble, and I am sure never will, not like some, please God.”
“Well, I never!” the girls gasped.
“I don’t know,” the letter went on, “where we will stay in the City, it’s so many years since I was there. I don’t like hotels; you don’t know what sort of people are staying in them; and the boarding houses, I believe, are nearly always full. If you ain’t too busy, perhaps some of you would meet us at the train, and take us to a respectable place that wouldn’t be too dear. Don’t forget to write and let me know if you could, and perhaps some of the girls might write to Mary Ella about it. She would be pleased to get a letter from any of them, and it would cheer her up.
“P.S.—We all had a good laugh at the funny name you call your place, Darabolpal. Whatever made you call it that?”
“The impudence of her!” “The dirt of her!” And Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel stamped defiantly round the dining room. “All she wants is to be asked to stop here, but she’s not going to! She’s not! She’s not! She’s not!”
But Mamma couldn’t agree with the girls. Hers was a humble, kindly, forgiving disposition. She said there was plenty of room for all, and thought it best to take no notice of anything Auntie Montague had said in the past, but to forget all about it.
“No!” the girls insisted—and appealed to Pa when he returned from a meeting of the political association; but he said he wouldn’t interfere in any of their family squabbles, and wanted to know if Auntie Montague had said anything about what rain they had up there, and how the stock were looking, and if Uncle Rube and old Rainmaker were still alive.
“Well, if Mamma brings them here,” the girls threatened, “we’ll go and stay somewhere else!”
When the time came, however, Mamma and Jessie met Auntie Montague and Mary Ella at the Central Station and drove them to Darabolpal in a cab. And when Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel met them on the verandah, Auntie, dropping her old-fashioned hand-bag and her faded parasol, and raising her gossamer, and effervescing with joy, threw her arms around them and kissed them.
Race day; the first day of the big winter meeting. Also the first day that Pa and Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel had been to the Farm. Often they had been to Bush race meetings—meetings where Pa acted as judge and the girls as jockies. The girls often used to win, too; but whenever they won there was always a rumpus. They always won when Pa was judge.
None of them was offered a mount at the Farm. Horse owners didn’t know them there. Racing was conducted differently too, to what it was in the West. No one but boys were put on horses at the Farm—boys who came out in silken jackets and squatted in the saddles like green frogs in a spout waiting to jump off. But it was in its crowds of people that the Farm surpassed the Bush. People poured out of trams and trains and cabs and motor cars and flocked over the lawns like mobs of sheep. A wonderful sight it was to Pa and the girls. Such a conglomeration of humanity! All different in dress and physiognomy; yet united in their love and worship and ignorance of the horse! To them, the stiff quadruped was a world, the world a stiff quadruped. And the excitement of this galaxy of “sports” when the horses came on to the course was wonderful. All seemed to possess the same set of emotions which acted automatically. Race books came into action, pencils started scratching and scribbling; heads in twos and threes bobbed together, here, there, and everywhere; “tips” and information” were swapped and compared, believed and disbelieved; “bookies” jumped up like mushrooms and bellowed with leather lungs. Suddenly the “consultations” ended and the crowd hurried backwards and forwards and round about like a nest of disturbed ants.
“Just look at them!” and the girls clutched Pa by his coat sleeves. “Look at them! Oh, look at them!”
Pa said he “never saw people like it in his life before. Never!” Mr. Fordyce, wandering about in a tall hat discovered them; lifted his bell-topper, shook hands, and asked Pa what he was going to back?
Pa didn’t know that he was going to back anything. Betting was out of his line. He had never put sixpence on a horse in his life.
“Put something on Ventilation,” Fordyce advised earnestly; “I’m telling you in confidence. I got it straight from the jockey. He’s going to win for a certainty.”
“That’s quite a different thing,” and Pa started feeling for his pocket book. “If he’s goin’ to win for a certainty I ain’t likely to lose, am I?”
“The surest thing in the world, a moral. You can’t go wrong: I’m going now to put a hundred on him for a friend of mine who sent me a wire from Rockhampton.”
“I’ll go with you, then,” Pa said, and put a tenner on him.”
“And put something on for us, Pa.” And Moo and Pearle, catching the gambling spirit, produced a sovereign each. Bella and Mabel hesitated. They weren’t so readily tempted as their sisters. But Pa was too occupied sorting his bank notes to attend to them.
“Give it to him,” and he indicated Fordyce with a nod of his head. Mr. Fordyce put the sovereigns in his pocket. Then, with Pa at his heels, disappeared in the throng.
“You wicked children. Fancy meeting you!”
The girls looked round and saw Mrs. Jules Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown holding their hands out in greeting.
They were delighted.
“What are you backing, my dears?” and Mrs. Cashmore started to consult her race-book.
Moo and Pearle whispered Ventilation, and added that Mabel and Bella hadn’t backed anything.
“Do come in with us, darlings, and share a pound ticket on Dirtyfeet—that’s Judge Juggems’ horse,” and Mrs. Cashmore looked pleadingly at Mabel and Bella. “The Judge told us to be sure and put something on, for he’s absolutely sure to win.”
“That’s what Mr. Fordyce told Pa about Ventilation.” And Moo and Pearle began to feel uneasy.
“Oh, poor old Lammie,” Mrs. Jules Cashmore laughed, “he doesn’t know the least bit about racing.” And Miss Bung-Brown added: “and he believes everything anyone tells him, no matter who it is, and runs away and puts money on.
Moo started thinking.
“There’s nothing like that about the Judge,” Mrs. Cashmore assured them. “Whenever he says his horse is going to win, you can bet your stockings he’ll win, dears.”
All agreed to subscribe to a pound ticket on Dirtyfeet, and Mrs. Cashmore ran off to find a male acquaintance to execute the commission.
“It looks so dreadful bad,” she said, “for a lady to go to the machine herself.”
“Look at those two passing,” and Miss Bung-Brown gave our girls a nudge and a knowing look. “Did ever you see such ferocity in colour?”
The girls turned their heads and beheld John— their brother John—who at breakfast said he was going to spend the day down the bay—in company with a magnificently dressed woman! They did get a surprise.
“If I were a man,” Miss Bung-Brown added, turning up her nose, “I wouldn’t be seen in public with a woman with a taste that she has.”
Mrs. Thirtyman, a dashing little widow, whose husband had been dead nearly three months, suddenly appeared.
“Two gentlemen,” she said, “who always win such a lot of money, told me to be sure and back Wild William. Do come in with me in a ten shilling ticket, dears, there’s just time left to get it! Do!”
“Wild William?” the others repeated.
“Yes, Wild William. Quick! Do! There’s no other horse in it but him! You’ll all be sorry if you don’t!”
The others had no wish to be sorry, and promptly made up the ten shillings. Then the little widow hurried away to invest.
Pa, with a broad smile on his face, returned and told the girls that Mr. Fordyce would see them again after the race and bring Moo and Pearle their dividends.
“It’s all right,” he chuckled confidently, “Ventilation is going to win easy.”
“What!” from Mrs. Jules Cashmore, who had returned. “And we have all just backed Dirty-feet!”
“Well, I just seen the owner put a hundred on Ventilation,” and Pa shook his head wisely.
Mrs. Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown lost confidence in Judge Juggems and his horse Dirtyfeet, and implored Pa to save five shillings with them.
“All right,” he agreed. “If Dirtyfeet wins, yous two will owe me five bob each. If Ventilation wins, which he is sure to, I’ll owe each of you five bob.”
Mrs. Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown drew long deep breaths and were buoyant and hopeful again.
“They’re off! They’re off!” One half the multitude stampeded for the white fence to view the race; the other half rushed the grandstand. Pa and his lot were amongst the other half.
Then the real excitement commenced.
“Which is Ventilation? Which is Ventilation?” the girls clamoured, while Mrs. Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown in loud shrieks announced to everyone that “‘Dirtyfeet’ was leading.”
Pa, shaking so hard that he couldn’t keep the field glasses to his eyes, told them to “wait a bit and you’ll soon see Ventilation in front.”
Bella and Mabel were the only two people on the course who weren’t making fools of themselves. They remained composed, and watched the race in silence. And a great race it was, too!
All at once thousands of voices shouted: Ventilation! Ventilation! And the people along the fence started waving and jumping about. Pa jumped on a form, and waving his field glasses, shouted Ventilation louder than any one.
The field started changing places, some going up and some falling back, and for a second there was a lull Then a roar of Dirtyfeet! Dirtyfeet! broke out.
Mrs. Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown cheered and danced about and screamed “Dirtyfeet,” and tugging Pa’s coat shrieked: “Didn’t we tell you he’d win?”
Then Mabel and Bella suddenly joined in the excitement and cried “Dirtyfeet! Dirtyfeet We’ve got Dirtyfeet!”
A cynic who had backed the wrong horse, pointed to them and said, “They’ve got Dirtyfeet!” And raised a laugh amongst his downhearted companions.
When the race was over Pa swore, and said: “Ventilation never was in it all! Fordyce must be a ass!”
“Well, we told you Dirtyfeet would win Mr Kayton,” Mrs. Cashmore reminded him again, “but you wouldn’t believe us!”
“Wait till I see Fordyce!” Pa growled.
But no time during the day did he see Mr. Fordyce again.
Mrs. Cashmore’s male friend who executed the commission came with the dividend—thirty shillings.
“Five shillings for each of you, my dears. Ah, how lovely!” and she started to divide the spoils.
“But hold on,” Pa said, arresting the distribution. “Yous two promised to save five shillings each with me on Dirtyfeet, didn’t you?”
Mrs. Cashmore and Miss Bung-Brown, in the excitement, had forgotten about it. Their bottom lips hung and their hopes fell again.
“Come on,” Pa grinned, holding out his hand. “Five bob from each of you—shell out!”
“Oh, Pa!” Moo protested. But Pa kept his hand extended till the money was put into it. Then he stuffed it in his pocket and invited them all to have ice creams.
In the interval the best dressed people paraded the lawns for others to admire them. And a great sight they were, too. Oh, the pretty socks and lovely tailored suits the men had on! Their hats and walking sticks, too! And the ankles the ladies displayed beneath their short frocks would keep you from sleeping. They were dreams and poems! and how they walked! So lightly, daintily and elegantly! Anyone who didn’t know better might have thought they had all dropped from heaven. The Farm, though, was the wrong place to find people who didn’t know better or who dropped from heaven.
Prominent amongst the paraders were John and his magnificent female companion; she leaned heavily on his arm and smiled and talked up at him. John was a long-limbed Australian.
“My goodness, just look!” And Moo nudged her sisters. But John never saw them. He had no eyes or ears for any but that gorgeous high-stepping female. And for every smile she gave him he returned her half a dozen. What he would have returned her had it been kisses no one living could tell.
John must have seen Pa, though, because he came to him just before the steeplechase started, and talking as if he had just dropped in to see what was going on, asked if he had a tenner to spare? Pa had. John fled with it, and rejoining the lady treated her to champagne.
The steeplechase came on, and Pa, with malice in his heart, came out of his shell and put a hundred pounds on Rainbow with the books. Rainbow was an outsider, and Pa stood to win two thousand pounds.
Out the horses came. Stockdale first, Rainbow and Billy Hughes (the favourite) together, the others in a bunch.
Pa glanced at them as they faced the barriers; then starting to tremble, handed his field glasses to Moo and turned his back on the course. He was too excited to watch the race.
“Off!”
Pa closed his eyes and shook like an earth-tremor.
Opposite the stand was the first hurdle. Pa, though he wasn’t looking, knew it was there. He heard the horses racing at it, and shook more and more. A mighty “Oh-h” went up, as the leader rapped the timber and floundered.
“What’s up? Is Rainbow over?” Pa gasped.
“All over!”
Pa clutched at his heart and throat and took a deep breath.
On raced the horses.
“Whitefoot in front,” Moo, looking steadily through the glasses, announced.
“Where’s Rainbow?” Pa, half choking, asked.
“Rainbow, nearly last,” from Moo.
“Good heavens!” from Pa.
Another loud “Oh-h” and “Two down!” … “Three down!” … “Four down!”
“Eh, what’s down? Is Rainbow down?” from Pa.
“Rainbow, second last,” from Moo.
Pa gulped and clutched at the atmosphere with both hands, and changed his weight from one foot to the other.
“Here they come! Stockdale in front! … Another round to go!”
Pa took another deep breath.
“The favourite goes up!”
“What goes up?” from Pa.
“The favourite, Billy Hughes,” Moo told him.
“Damn th’ favourite. Where’s Rainbow?” And Pa closed his eyes tighter.
“The favourite! The favourite!”
Pa clapped his hands over his ears and groaned.
“He’s down! He’s down!”
“What—what th’ devil’s down?” and Pa stamped both feet as if standing on a hot grid-iron.
“Billy Hughes,” from Moo.
“A d— good good job; may he stop down!” and Pa drew several deep breaths.
“Rainbow going up!”
“What’s (Pa nearly choked) going up?”
“Rainbow,” Moo cried. “Rainbow.”
Then Pa started to ride Rainbow and to pray for him alternately.
“My heavens, look at your Pa!” Mrs. Cashmore called to the girls.
The girls looked, and seeing Pa in a pious attitude commenced laughing.
“He’s off!”
“What’s off? Who’s off?” from Pa.
“Rainbow’s rider! What a shame!” from Moo.
Then Pa collapsed.
Whirling out of the gate in the motor car when the races were over, he cast back a sad, reproachful look at the Farm, and mumbled “The first and last time for me.”
Auntie Montague and Mary Ella were flies in our ointment.
“Burst them!” Moo would grumble. “I don’t know what Mamma wanted inviting them here for!”
And John reckoned he would sooner see the plague in the home.
“This is far too grand for us,” Auntie said, when Mamma showed them the room they were to occupy. “We’re not swells like you folk, we’re only common Bush people. Haven’t you got some old place at the back you could put us in?”
Of course Mamma hadn’t. There were no “old places” at Darabolpal; all the rooms were new and large and airy and lavishly furnished. And when Mamma hoped they would be comfortable and sleep well, and said “good-night,” Auntie fingered and scrutinised everything in the room and was sure that what they had cost would have furnished a whole house, and furnished it quite well enough for anyone who didn’t want to be flash and make people believe they were a lot better than they really were!
“Goodness me!” she sneered. “They must find it awful hard to get out of such beds in the morning!”
“You feel as if you don’t like to touch anything for fear of soiling something!” Mary Ella, in a thin voice, remarked.
“So you do,” Auntie sniggered. “And wouldn’t you think they would have gone in for something sensible! They never had rooms like this at Emuwood. Do y’ mind the old hovels that the girls used to sleep in?”
“I don’t think they ever slept much in them— not from what I remember of the bites I got one night I stayed there.” And Mary Ella surveyed herself in the wardrobe mirror.
Auntie chuckled; and emptying her carpet-bag of the clothes she brought with her selected a “nightie” and hung the rest up. Mary Ella followed her mother’s example. And when the former had counted the money in her purse, and placed their return tickets to Charleville in it for safety, she carefully hid the lot between the mattresses. Then cautiously locking doors and windows before undressing, they jumped into bed and slept like angels.
In the morning Auntie was up before Mamma or the girls, and finding her way to the kitchen, introduced herself to the servants and asked them for a dish and towel and soap to wash her face with. The servants got a surprise and began to apologise.
“No—no!” Auntie said, “but I’d sooner wash myself out here. I’m just a common Bush person you know, and don’t believe in all this flashness. I don’t want to try and make myself big by having other people to wait on me!”
“Well, there’s the bathroom, Mrs. Montague,” Jane suggested, “with basins and hot and cold water and everything in it.” And led the way to it,
“Oh, goodness!” Auntie exclaimed when she saw the inside of the bathroom. “I might just as well washed in the bedroom.”
Then confidentially into Jane’s ear: “Wouldn’t y’ think it was the king and queen, and all the royal family, that was living here in their castle, and not common people reared in the Bush just like myself?”
But Jane was a tactful servant, and wasn’t to be drawn.
In the afternoon Pa said he’d take Auntie and Mary Ella and Mamma and Jessie for a drive in the motor car and show the visitors the sights of the City.
“What!” Auntie protested to Mamma and Pa, “Mary Ella and me in your grand motor car? And in these common old dresses of ours? Surely you’ve got an old dog-cart or something you could take us out in?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your clothes, they’re quite good enough!” Mamma assured her. “And you will look as well in the car as anyone else.”
Jessie agreed with Mamma, and was certain her relatives would enjoy the car.
“Yes, and when we go home,” Auntie continued, “and have to go back to our old horse and cart, we’ll be disgusted.”
All the same, when the car was ready, Auntie took a front seat in it, and as it whirled off and entered the streets, sat back holding her hat, and smiled complacently on the crowds.
A few days later, though, when there was no one to drive the car and Mamma decided they would all go to town by tram, Auntie pinched Mary Ella slyly on the arm and “supposed they don’t like to be seen driving the motor car again with us in it.”
For malevolence and uncharitableness Auntie Montague was the last word!
William came from town one day and said that Mr. Calliope, the barrister, was coming to spend the evening with us and would bring a friend with him.
The girls were delighted. They spoke of Mr. Calliope as though they had known him all their lives; and wondered who his friend would be, and if he were as nice and clever as himself.
Auntie Montague pricked her ears and looked significantly at Mary Ella.
“This Mr. Calliope that you’re always talking so much about,” Auntie asked, “what is he—is he a lawyer?”
“A barrister-at-the-bar,” from Moo.
“And the cleverest in Brisbane,” from William, who knew a lot more about the merits of bullocks than barristers.
“All those sort of people are clever,” Auntie admitted sneeringly, “but they’re such drunkards and they lie so awful! Don’t they?”
“Not Mr. Calliope!”
“No one can say that about him!’’ and the girls appealed to William.
“Oh, he’s all right!” William drawled. William was a real Australian—a man of few words.
“Of course, I don’t know about him,” Auntie admitted, “but I don’t suppose he’s any exception.”
Later in the day Auntie told Mamma that she and Mary Ella thought they would go into town to get their tea and stay for the night. “You have a lot of swells coming to visit you,” she said, “and we don’t want to be in the way.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mamma answered. “You’ll stay where you are, no matter who’s coming. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Yes, but—“ Auntie laughed, “we’ve not got grand things to put on like the rest of you; and we’ll look so odd. I don’t mind for myself, but what a poor thing Mary Ella will look beside your girls!”
“Well, I’ll give Mary Ella one of my girls’ dresses to wear, if she’ll take it,” Mamma suggested, “and I’m sure she’ll look as well as any of them, and perhaps a lot better.”
Auntie Montague asked Mary Ella what she thought? Would she like to wear one?”
Mary Ella smiled, and said she would.
* * * * * *
Will Jones it was whom Mr. Calliope brought with him—the author of “Our Old West Home.” We were all proud to know him again, too, and asked him if he remembered the time he worked for us on Emuwood? He said he did; but he didn’t tell us anything he remembered. In fact, he hardly talked at all. He sat studying everyone around him, thinking and silently sifting the conversation for ideas and inspirations.
When Mamma came in to meet the visitors, she had on her worst dress—a worse one by far than Auntie Montague’s old rag.
And when Auntie came in and was introduced, she laughed and said to Will Jones: “And so you’ve turned out a City swell too?”
“Where’s Mary Ella?” Pa asked, noticing her absence.
“Maybe she’s got a bit bashful!” And Auntie went off to hurry her along.
“Ain’t you ready yet, Mary Ella?” she called at the door of the bedroom. “They’re waiting to introduce you to the swells.”
Then Mary Ella, with Moo’s grand twenty guinea evening dress on, her face powdered, a ribbon in her hair, and the weather-line plainly showing where the white skin of her chest met her sun-tanned face and neck, and smiling and blushing, stalked in nervously and faced the company. We did get a surprise! For the moment none of us seemed to recognise her. Will Jones and Mr. Calliope rose from their seats and stood waiting for the introduction. William and John didn’t stand at all. They sat and stared. Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel gaped with open mouths. Pa put on his glasses and glowered through them. Mamma and Jessie, who were in the know, looked pleased, and Auntie Montague, for once in her life, smiled a broad proud smile of motherly triumph.
“My niece, Miss Montague,” Mamma said, introducing Mary Ella.
Mary Ella blushed more and ducked her head, and flopped down near Moo.
Moo turned her head and stared at her, and at the dress. Then whispered angrily:
“For two pins, me lady, I’d tear it off you!”
While Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel never missed a race meeting or a “first night” at the theatre, or anything that drew the crowds, Mamma and Jessie rarely went anywhere. They mostly stayed at home crocheting and darning, or interested themselves in the garden or Snookes. Snookes was the gardener—a courteous, talkative man, brimful of enthusiasm and information: and whenever Mamma and Jessie asked him anything about a tree, a rose, or anything, Snookes would drop the fork or the hoe, or whatever he was working with, and deliver them a whole lecture on it. When it wasn’t Snookes they were gathering information from, it was Mrs. Bates, the washerwoman. She turned up every Monday morning with all the “latest” lies about the doings of society and fresh grievances against her husband—“that man of hers.” All day long, while at the tubs or the boiler, Mrs. Bate’s tongue kept wagging.
“They got him to join the temp’rance just ten days tomorrow,” she said one day, “an’ ever since he’s been worse than he’s ever been in all his life.”
“That’s curious,” Mamma murmured.
“Worse?” Jessie repeated, wonderingly.
“Ever s’ much. Pshaw! This temp’rance don’t do a man no good who’s been given to it since ever he learned to suck! Drink! Blessed mercy, he’s been a hundred times worse’n if they had let him alone altogether.”
“Dear, dear!” from Mamma: and Jessie looked sorry for Mrs. Bates.
“Never marry a man what drinks, Miss,” and Mrs. Bates shook her head warningly at Jessie. Jessie blushed.
“One time,” Mrs. Bates went on, “that man o’ mine didn’t used to drink nothing like he do, though he could always take his drop, but now—oh, my gracious!”
She was interrupted by Snookes, who came poking round in search of a lost garden tool.
“Well, I know,” Snookes said, “that your old man wer’ a stric teetotaller before he married you, Mrs. Bates.” Her old man was a pal of Snookes.
For several seconds there was an awkward silence. Then Mrs. Bates took her two hands out of the tub, and shaking them at Snookes and spraying him with suds shouted: “Well, it’s more’n ever you were, Snookes; I seen you an’ him rollin’ out of pubs often enough together as drunk as fiddlers, th’ two of you.”
Snookes found the lost garden tool and hurried away.
Regaining her good humour and dipping her hands deep into the tub again, Mrs. Bates went on: “That was the plain truth I told y’—may I drop dead if it wasn’t. That man o’ mine would drink this tub dry if he smelt beer in it, and then look for more.”
Mamma and Jessie smiled.
“Ah, well,” Mrs. Bates sighed, changing her tone, “when all’s said and done, perhaps I ain’t the worst off in the world! There’s Mrs. Tamber over near me with her fourteen children cooped up in a four-roomed house like fowls: none of ’em with what y’ could call a bed to lie on. Oh, dear! When I goes over there an’ sees th’ responserbility that woman has on her shoulders with all them children, it makes me cry, it do”—and Mrs. Bates broke into a sob.
The hearts of Mamma and Jessie were touched. They nearly sobbed too.
“And is her husband alive?” the former asked.
“It’s about all as can be said about him,” and Mrs. Bates put more clothes into the boiler. “He’s had something wrong with his liver, so the doctor said, but them doctors will say anythin’; and whenever he does a day’s hard work he has to have three days’ spell to get over the effects of it.”
“And is the poor woman herself strong?” from Mamma.
“For the last four years, Ma’am, she’s hardly been a day without neuralgy or the toothache.”
“Fourteen of a family, and delicate herself!” And Mrs. Bates stirred the clothes in the boiler and wiped the perspiration from her big red face with her apron.
“It would be a Christian charity to help people like that,” Jessie suggested, and started Mamma thinking. Mamma thought she would pay a visit to the Tamber family, if Mrs. Bates would direct her to the place.
Mrs. Bates would, as soon as she finished the washing, and added; “Tamber has had some kind o’ job lately, but neither him nor her will say what it is he’s doing.”
Then Mamma and Jessie left her and went upstairs.
Meantime, Mrs. Bates lowered the lines and hung out the clothes, all the while humming and whistling broken tunes. Mrs. Bates was a cheerful washerwoman when all was going well.
A broad-framed black fellow, with bent back and half a head of grey hair, came to the side entrance and stood staring curiously at the house and grounds and at Mrs. Bates. The latter, her back turned to him, went on humming and whistling. He called twice to her. She didn’t hear him. Then he sauntered across the grounds, carrying his hat in his hand.
“You belongen this place?” he asked. Mrs. Bates turned quickly, saw a black man, then screamed, and abandoning the clothes fled upstairs into the house.
Moo and Pearle appeared cautiously on the verandah; but when they saw the old black fellow they cried “Rainmaker! Rainmaker!” and hurried down the steps to greet him. Behind them ran Mamma and the others. And such a greeting: never did face on this orb ever look happier than Rainmaker’s when they flocked round him, asking when and how he came, and ruffling his hair and tugging at his red shirt sleeves. But Rainmaker was too overjoyed to talk. Tucking his head between his knees and making front feet of his long arms, he started “pig jumping” over the lawn.
Snookes, standing by, with the rake on his shoulder, tossed his head back and broke into loud mirth.
“What is he doing that for?” Mrs. Bates, who had timidly joined the others, questioned. “Have he gone mad do you think?”
“That’s what he used to do when we were all small at ‘Our Old West Home,’” the girls explained, “and used to ride on his back.”
“He must think he’s a horse?” further from Mrs. Bates.
“A horse!” Snookes said, “he’s more like a hass!” And walked off.
Then Mamma and the girls took Rainmaker into the kitchen and introduced him to Mary Ann and told her to give him as much as ever he could eat while they “looked for a change of clothes for him.”
Mary Ann set a leg of mutton and a dish of cold vegetables and a loaf of bread and a quantity of jam and butter before Rainmaker; then, to give him a chance went out of the kitchen for an hour. When she returned Rainmaker was still there, but the leg of mutton and the vegetables had all disappeared.
* * * * * *
The motor car left Darabolpal with Mrs. Bates in it, perched majestically beside Mamma and Jessie, her two hands clasped over her head to hold her hat on, and whirled along the broad, dusty, sun-lit roadway. Suddenly taking a northerly course and running in and out a number of narrow by-ways and short streets where stray stock grazed unmolested on the “footpaths,” they came to a dusty, hollow bend in the Gympie Road. It was a spot where, half a century or so ago, when the great gold mine “was luring crowds from the Capital,” anyone with bushranging aspirations might have selected as a suitable spot for sticking up the coach or the gold escort.
Mrs. Bates suddenly became excited and called out “Stop! Stop!”
The motor stopped.
“I can show you from here where their place is,” she said, scrambling clumsily out. “You see the house standing over there by itself?” pointing to the humble-looking abode several hundred paces off.
Mother and Jessie saw it.
“Well, that’s where the Tambers live; but it wouldn’t do for me to go right there with yous, you know, because she’s very touchy, is Mrs. Tamber, and might put a wrong meanin’ to it, if yous can understand.”
Mamma and Jessie thought they understood, and smiled and nodded.
“Well, good evenin’,” and the washerwoman made off.
The car buzzed on again and stopped in front of Tamber’s house.
Meanwhile Mrs. Bates turned into a narrow lane where her cottage stood, and pausing at the gate watched Mamma and Jessie alight and mount the steps of Mrs. Tamber’s place.
“Hello, Mrs. Bates!” two of the young Tambers, ragged and breathless, suddenly appearing, cried. “You was in a motor car, was y’? We seen y’ get out. Has it gone to our place?”
“Hello!” Mrs. Bates snapped—and opening her gate hurried inside to take observations from a side window.
The ragged youngsters ran home, their eyes hard fixed on the motor car glistening at the gate.
Mamma approached the door and knocked. Jessie stood and gazed feelingly at the dull-looking walls, the bare verandah boards and the cheerless window with the curtains drawn.
The two youngsters came up and stared at the car and at Johnson, the chauffeur. But Johnson, a serious, silent man, disregarded their presence as though he were deaf, dumb and stone blind.
Receiving no response Mamma wondered if anyone were at home.
“Let me give a knock,” and approaching the door, Jessie rapped it hard and loud.
Mrs. Bates leaned half-wav out her window and grinned. The young Tambers looked up, then, taking in the situation, moved to the foot of the steps.
“Are you Mrs. Tamber’s little boys?” Mamma inquired.
“Me mother ain’t at home,” the bigger one answered, “she’s away workin’. But me father is.” And round to the back of the house both of them scampered.
A short interval passed. Mamma looked at Jessie, and was thinking of abandoning the visit, when the door suddenly opened, and Tamber, with the two youngsters close at his heels, presented himself in bare feet, shirt and pants, and a dark, ugly scowl. He wasn’t the pale, delicate, wasted man at all that they had pictured in their minds, and Mamma and Jessie both stared in surprise.
“Oh!” Mamma gasped, recoiling, “it was Mrs. Tamber we came to see!”
“I suppose it was!” Tamber growled, looking first at them, then out at the car; “no doubt about that!”
Then angrily to the youngsters, who started crowding round his legs:
“Will yous clear out of here and play somewhere, or do y’ want me to kick yous out?”
The youngsters cleared out. In the excitement one knocked over a chair.
“That’s right,” Tamber shouted after him; “break the d— furniture!”
Mamma and Jessie glanced nervously back over their shoulders and mentally measured the distance between themselves and the car.
“Yes,” Tamber proceeded, facing them again, “like them other two smilin’ petticoats who come here to see her last week, with a mouthful o’ lies, and then went off, after pumpin’ her dry about me and put me photo in th’ ‘Evenin’ Spectator,’ and told everyone me address, and said I took blood in me tea instead o’ milk, and a lot o’ other lyin’ yarns about me!”
“I’m sure there must be some mistake!” and Mamma looked very pale.
“Oh, there must be!” Jessie gasped.
“No, there musn’t be!” Tamber sneered defiantly, and scratching his left instep with the big toe of his right foot. “I didn’t come out in the next ship, you know. Yous are two spyin’ noospapers’ women, same as the other two was. But I don’t know what I did to any of y’ or your noospapers. I’m makin’ me livin’ honest, ain’t I? The job was empty and I got it in fair competition, out of a hundred applications. Wasn’t that straight and respectable enough?”
“But we are not from a newspaper!” Mamma protested earnestly. “I am Mrs. Kayton, and this is my daughter. We heard from a friend of your wife’s that you were a poor family, struggling very hard, and we came to see if we could—”
“You heard that I was th’ hangman now, didn’t y’?” Tamber interrupted, and dipping his hands in his pockets leered fiendishly at them.
“Oh-h!” And Mamma put her hands to her ears, and Jessie choked: “The hangman!”
“Yes, the hangman, that’s me, now that everybody knows it! And here’s me whisker and me next rope if yous would like to write somethin’ about them.” And he stepped back to a table in the room.
Mamma and Jessie rushed down the steps and threw themselves into the car. And when the silent Johnson looked up to ascertain the cause of their alarm, the public executioner was standing on the verandah, holding a long black whisker in one hand and a stiff rope with a noose on it in the other.
“Home, Johnson, home!” Mamma cried, and Jessie added, “Quick! Quick!” But Johnson wanted no urging. He had once witnessed an execution; and next instant that motor car was fairly jumping along the Gympie Road.
* * * * * *
“Well, on me honor, Ma’am, and if I was to be struck down dead here at these tubs for tellin’ a fib,” Mrs. Bates lyingly assured Mamma, the following washing day, “I never hed th’ least hidea that Tom Tamber—and God knows I’ve knowed him long enough—was th’ noo hangman!”
It was the morning Auntie Montague and Mary Ella left Darabolpal in the motor car, to catch the Western train. A perfect Brisbane summer morning it was too—bright, breezeless, close, and muggy. The garden, crowded with rose bushes, shrubs and trees, was ablaze with buds and blooms of every hue and fragrance, and in the shady nooks of it, Snookes, the gardener, was working hard. It was wonderful how hard Snookes could work in the shaded corners of the garden. But Snookes was an experienced gardener.
Pa, in a loud-striped smoking jacket, flannel pants and slippers, looking more like the captain of a cricket team than a retired squatter, lounged lazily in his den and smoked; at intervals gazing through the French lights that opened on to the verandah at the heat shimmering on the green lawns, and grunting to himself, “Hot, terrible hot!” Then closing his eyes he would think and dream, and live all the old life and struggles of the West over again, till he began to snore. Whenever Pa began to snore his slumbers and dreams were o’er, because he always woke himself up, and woke everybody else up who happened to be asleep in the house, or in the same street.
In the drawing-room, Moo, who had taken lessons in singing, and taken them and herself seriously, was making havoc with “The Heart Bowed Down,” while Mabel, crazy on “learning the piano properly,” banged and thumped the accompaniment as though she were beating out a bush-fire or punching the pelt off a sheep.
“The heart bowed down by weight of woe,” Moo sang, in tones that sounded like a curlew wailing at night in the wilderness for lost souls, “To weak-est hopes will cl-ing.”
“Listen!” John shouted to William and Bella, who with himself were in the ball-room practising the steps of the “Turkey-trot” as demonstrated to them the evening before by Madame Belle Signori, the great dancing teacher, from whom they were receiving lessons two nights a week, “Listen!”
The others listened and giggled; then the trio crept to the open door of the drawing-room and listened and giggled some more.
“With those ex-cit-ing scen-es will—“ Here Moo broke off suddenly and said “Damn!” and charged Mabel with “playing it all wrong and putting her out.”
“It’s you that’s singing it wrong!” Mabel flung back. Then there was a barney.
“Well, how was it that Mrs. Cashmore could sing it so well the other evening when I played for her?” and Mabel wagged her head proudly.
“You must have played it a lot different to what you played it just now,” and Moo banged “The Heart Bowed Down” hard on top of the piano.
John poked William in the ribs, and William nudged Bella, and Bella stifled her mirth with her hand.
“Well, you play it”—and Mabel jumped off the piano stool—“and I’ll sing it.”
“Well, sing it then, if it’ll do you any good,” and squatting on the stool and adjusting the music, Moo gave the keyboard a punch with both hands, then looking up at Mabel asked her “when was she going to start?” Mabel had started. Simultaneously she bellowed “Th’ heart bowed—”
“My godfather!” she snapped, breaking off suddenly—“Why don’t you play, not talk.”
That was too much for the audience. John and William and Bella burst boisterously into the room and started “Turkey-trotting” over the carpet, and bellowing “The heart bowed down” in voices akin to Moo’s.
“A lot of silly-billies,” and Moo bounded angrily from the room.
In the chorus of mirth that followed, Mabel’s voice was lifted highest, and the new parlor maid and the new servant (they were always new at Darabolpal) with their heads shoved close together at the end of the hall, cynically reckoned it was a fine thing to have plenty of money and nothing to do.
A few minutes later Moo’s voice was heard calling cheerfully to the others from the door of the room that Auntie Montague and Mary Ella had just vacated, to “come here; for goodness sake, come quick!”
The four of them went as quick as they could, wondering what new thing Moo had discovered in so short a time.
“Blest if they didn’t have their photos taken, Moo screamed, “and both left one in the room for us.”
“No! What?” And squeals of merriment filled the house.
“Well, they’re all right!” William, regarding the photos of his relations with open mouth, remarked.
John snatched Auntie’s picture, and holding it up for inspection, laughed at the wart on her nose, and said it came out better than any other part of her.
More mirth and jumping about.
“But look at Mary Ella,” Bella giggled, and they all turned their attention to Mary Ella.
“Oh, isn’t she sitting up straight and trying to look nice,” Mabel sneered.
“And doesn’t she look bushy!” And Bella made a face at the photo.
“She looks just what she is an’ nothing else— a real sneak,” and Moo snapped her finger in Mary Ella’s face.
“She’s all right,” William grinned.
“Pshaw!” and taking out a pencil Moo scribbled “Good riddens to bad rubbish, you old mischief maker,” across the face of Auntie.
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” John said, and borrowing Moo’s pencil, wet the lead on his tongue and scrawled, “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed—and ain’t never likely to be,” across Mary Ella.
Great joy. Then William arranged the photos in prominent places in the room for everyone to see when they came in.
Meanwhile, a suburban, youthful looking parson rang the door bell, and sent in his card by the new maid.
William and John and the three girls quickly gathered round Mamma to help read the name on the card.
“The Rev. John Pilot,” all of them gasped, and opening their eyes wide, stared at each other.
“He’s all right,” William said.
“And you an’ me’ll be all right too,” John added, “if we get away into the billiard room— come on.” And off he went, dragging his brother after him.
“A parson?” and the others looked concerned and hard at Mamma.
“But you must see him, Mamma,” Jessie, coming from the library, put in.
“Of course she will,” Moo, superseding Mamma, answered, “but he must be received in the right way; we’re in society now, you know.”
“Society,” Jessie smiled; “Just go and see him yourself, Mamma.
“No, no, no, Miss Jessie, that won’t do. I’ve been studying the rules of eteekate and finding out all about it from people who know, and you haven’t!” from Moo.
“Well, what am I to do—quickly?” And Mamma put herself in the hands of Moo.
“Well, what Mrs. Cashmore does, is this:
“Oh rubbish!” impatiently from Jessie.
“No it isn’t rubbish. Now, Mamma,” Moo went on, “you sit in the centre of the room; you others (Mabel and Pearle and Bella) sit over here, and I’ll sit near the piano, and be looking at some music.”
Jessie shook her head and went back to the library.
When all were seated, Moo called to the new maid: “Now, Julia, tell the gentleman to come in and Mrs. Kayton will see him.”
“Yes, Miss Kayton,” and Julia went off with a broad grin on her face.
Next minute the parson strode in, and when he found so many females at home, and all sitting silent, erect and expectant was struck speechless for several seconds.
“I hope you’ll excuse me for calling so early in the day, Mrs. Kayton,” he stammered at last, “but I have only just entered upon my church duties in this suburb and am almost a stranger to everyone in it.”
“Yes,” Mamma murmured, and Moo bowed acquiescence.
“And of course,” the parson went on, feeling his ground, “I don’t know yet who’s who, though I belong to the Church of England myself.” Then he paused, and looked inquiringly from one to the other.
“Yes,” Mamma murmured again; Bella was going to say something at the same moment, and they both closed up suddenly, and said nothing.
“We’re all Protees here,” Moo informed him, jauntily.
“And Church of England, the grand old Church?” And carried away with delight, the parson stood up and awaited a reply with a pair of sparkling eyes.
“Oh, yes, it was Church of England whenever we went,” Mamma answered.
“Give me your hands, everyone of you,” and the church gave them all a warm hearty shake, and seating himself again, felt quite at home.
“Well, now,” he commenced again—“I hope to see you all at service next Sabbath, and if Mr. Kayton would join our committee of management his influence would be a great help to the church, and the young ladies here, meaning Moo and Mabel and Bella and Pearle, must come along and join the choir. And we have a few vacancies for teachers in the Sunday School.”
Mabel and Bella and Pearle tittered and stole sly looks at Moo.
“What do you say about it, Miss Kayton?” and the parson smiled persuasively on her.
“Teach Sunday School?” Moo broke out in her loud masculine voice,—“Christmas, somebody would have to teach me first, I reckon.”
“You don’t mean that, I’m sure,” and the parson smiled more.
“I sing a bit,” Moo informed him, “when I get anyone who can play me accompaniment.”
“Indeed!” Mabel interrupted, with a curl of protest in her lip.
“But I couldn’t teach kids any more than a blooming jew-lizard,” Moo added.
The parson held his sides and rocked in his chair with merriment.
“Perhaps I could play the accompaniment for you, Miss Kayton?” he said, recovering himself. Would you sing something now?”
“Oh-h, I’ll have a try if you like,” and with tremendous confidence Moo rose and opened the piano. Mabel and Bella and Pearle looked amused; Mamma delighted.
“What are the pieces you sing?” the parson, seating himself at the piano, inquired.
“I think I’ll have a go at this. Have y’ ever heard it?” Moo placed “The Heart Bowed Down” before him.
“Oh-h!” and the parson nodded approval, and ran his fingers lightly over the keyboard. The parson was a musician.
Then Moo lifted her voice and put in some vigorous work. In a couple of bars she had the parson in difficulties. Musician and all as he was, she lost him. He couldn’t keep up with her. At intervals the piano couldn’t be heard at all, but Moo wagged her head, and shouted her loudest to the last note.
“Very good, Miss Kayton,” the parson lied, rising when Moo had finished. “Very good indeed. But I’m out of practice myself.”
Moo bowed in acknowledgment, like a professional.
“She has a powerful voice,” Mamma, her face flushed with filial pride, suggested.
“Very powerful,” the parson agreed, with a smile—“very!”
“She sings too,” and Mamma nodded proudly to Mabel. Mabel looked suggestively at the piano.
“Oh?” the parson said, but he didn’t rush Mabel. He looked at his watch, and when Moo, turning over more pages of music, murmured “There’s another song here somewhere that I used to sing,” he suddenly remembered having other calls to make, and, shaking hands all round again, and promising to call another time, when he hoped to have the pleasure of hearing Miss Mabel singing something, and of meeting the head of the house,” took his departure hurriedly.
As the Rev. Pilot went out one gate the motor car buzzed in through the other, returning Auntie Montague and Mary Ella and their luggage to Darabolpal.
“We missed the train,” they called cheerfully to Mamma and the girls, when the latter appeared on the verandah. “You’ve got to have us another night.”
“Missed it!” Pa said, coming from his den.
“It’s been altered, and goes half an hour earlier now,” and entering the hall, Auntie Montague and Mary Ella hurried to the room, the same old room, to deposit their belongings in it.
“Pity we didn’t send them off to catch it at daybreak,” Mabel moaned.
“Oh, damn!” and for once Mamma failed to check Moo for swearing.
No sooner had Auntie and Mary Ella entered the room, than their eyes rested on their disfigured photograph.
“It’s been wrote on!” Auntie cried, looking at her own.
“Good riddens to bad rubbish, you old mischief maker,” she read, with pale, contorted features.
“But just look at the lies they wrote on me!”
And Mary Ella threw herself on the bed and started weeping.
Auntie looked quickly and read:
“Sweet sixteen an’ never been kissed an’ ain’t never likely to be.”
“Come on!” she squealed, snatching up the luggage again—“out of here, my girl; this is no place for you and me, leave them their dirty old house! Oh, the rubbish!”
And out Auntie Montague went, white with rage, dragging Mary Ella after her.
“We know now what you think of us—we know now—oh, we know it all now!” she shrieked at Pa and Mamma, who were quietly waiting to be rejoined by them in the hall. “You’re a insincere, dirty, ill-bred lot, that’s all you are!”
“Good heavens, what’s the matter?” Pa stammered. And Mamma cried: “Auntie? Auntie?”
But Auntie treated them with disdain. Down the steps she went and along the gravelled path, with Mary Ella close at her heels.
Pa and Mamma hurried after them as far as the gate, calling, imploring them to return. But all they heard in response was: “Don’t mind them, Mary Ella; don’t mind them.”
Pa, filled with rage and dark suspicions of all kinds, ran back to the house, and hunting through every room roared at the top of his voice “What the h— does all this mean?”
But no one but Jessie and the servants were there to hear him.
Another month passed.
“Here’s the latest Rudd Magazine,” John announced cheerfully one evening, “an’ there’s a lot more in it by Will Jones. He’s mentioned Emuwood in it again.”
Next minute we had all gathered from every part of the mansion, and with beaming faces, and wide open ears were listening eagerly while Jessie read the “continuation.”
“As explained in the last chapter, before making the acquaintance of the jovial hangman and those miracles of workmanship, the meek and mild bailiffs ever lurking and loitering along gloomy corridors, and beneath darkened stairways in wait for breath of some ill-wind to blow them a ‘service-free’ or a ‘day’s possession money,’ I was entombed within the four walls of the Intestacy and Insanity Office. In truth, I was buried alive there in its official cemetery of ever-increasing intestate estates! Later, when four months went by, and I was entrusted with some of the ‘responsibilities’ of that institution, piles of papers and legal documents and ‘private effects’ were handed me every morning to file and put away. And such papers and documents and private effects! Many of them snatched from the dead bodies or the rotted swags of all sorts and conditions of unfortunate victims! ‘Re John Smith, deceased, of Limly Gully;’ ‘re Mary Jones-Malone, deceased, of Brisbane;’ ‘re John Flaherty (otherwise Flarty) deceased, of Emuwood’ (‘old Jack Flaherty’ all of us gasped in surprise); were a few of the headings I used to scribble in red ink to distinguish the tattered letter, or the frayed pocket book, or some other tender trifling relic, of one poor soul’s from another! Never till then had I any idea that this was the end of the personal treasures that many of my friends,—those big rough, silent hearts of the Bushland—kept jealously concealed in the old tin box at the hut, or in the folds of their blankets! Much less had I dreamed I would one day sit in a Government office, privileged to gaze at the faded photo of the girl of whom old John Flaherty in life never spoke, or to ponder the tattered letter of hers which revealed the secret of his life, and explained his many moods and changes so strange and unfathomable to us then! (‘Well, well!’ Pa interrupted sadly—old Jack Flaherty! I alez thought there was somethin’ in his life’)” “And here I learn’t, too” Jessie went on, “that others there were besides the denizens of the Bushland, who had gone out and lost and fallen and died in their tracks by the wayside! Estates of men who started life with all the advantages that education and social position could procure—medical men, ex-members of parliament, men of law and letters, were all administered there by the one cold common process! And one there was whom everyone in that building, except myself, seemed to remember and to think of with a passing sigh. ‘Re F— S— , deceased, late of Croydon, barrister-at-law’ was scrawled on a label attached to a tin box; and in the box a horse-hair wig and a torn black gown, representing his total personal estate! ‘Heigh-ho’ the deputy curator sighed as he placed the box on my table and walked thoughtfully out again. The deputy curator’s room was ‘upstairs.’
“And one could do no other than sit and think of the ‘good undone, and gifts misspent, and resolutions vain,’ so sadly reflected here; and for the moment it seemed sacrilege to expose such relics to the gaze of cold, heartless, official eyes—within the very precincts, too, of the court where, but a few years back, the fallen one, on the motion of the leader of the bar, and in the presence of a swarm of brother barristers, of proud parents, of a crush of officials, of law-students, articled clerks and a gorgeous array of fashionable females adorning the jury box and other available parts of the court— was admitted to practise as a member of the Queensland Bar! All too obvious was the career so well begun so soon and so sadly ended! And while in the midst of these reflections the senior clerk in Intestacy, a towering, twinkling-eyed, well groomed city man of three and twenty, rose from his table and approached mine.
“‘Put them on, Jones,’ he grinned, ‘and see how you look in them.’
“Endowed with a mind ever swaying between the sublime and the ridiculous, I grinned my first real cold official grin, and promptly placed the wig on my head, and pulled the gown over my shoulders.
“‘Here,’ and the senior clerk of Intestacy shoved a volume of the statutes under my arm to complete the picture. Then in the robe of a full fledged barrister, I strutted proudly round the room.
“‘I say, Mr. Devero,’ the senior clerk in Intestacy called to the chief clerk in Insanity, a touchy, crochety, dignified, old bachelor, seated at a table facing the largest and aireist window in the room— ‘Gad, look here at Jones!’
“‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Leslie,’ and the dignified chief-clerk in Insanity turned on his chair, and removing his spectacles, cast his eyes inquiringly round the room. Observing the ‘barrister’ in the middle of the floor, he rose promptly and said, ‘How d’ y’ do,’ and ran to procure a chair for me to sit on. Then it was that the loud hilarity of Mr. Leslie, the senior clerk in Intestacy, roused his suspicions.
“Pausing and looking closely at me, he suddenly went crimson.
“‘Oh!’ he said, in disdain, and hurriedly returning to his table, dropped into his chair. Taking up his red ink pen, he dipped it into the blue-black ink. ‘Damn it!’ and he threw the pen out the window, and took up a blue-black one and dipped it into the copying ink. ‘Blast it!’ and he threw that one out also.
“Two weary bum-bailiffs seated beneath the window, silently cogitating and bemoaning the dullness of the ‘Fi, Fa,’ and ‘Ha, Fa,’ and ‘Ca, Re,’ world, slowly rose up to enquire who was assaulting them with stationery. On seeing a barrister in the room they ducked down again. Bailiffs, somehow, never like to be seen in the presence of barristers. Humble as they are, there’s a lot of pride about bailiffs.
“Then the chief clerk in Insanity savagely destroyed a letter he had been composing, and threw the pieces into the waste paper basket, and kicked the basket under the table.
“The senior clerk in Intestacy broke into fresh mirth, in which he tried hard to induce me to join. But a feeling of remorse had taken possession of me, and I stood as if riveted to the floor. Suddenly, the door flew open, and the curator himself, with a fist full of private letters for me to deliver in every part of the City, rushed in. He was always rushing in with a fist full of private letters for me to deliver in every part of the City! Sometimes with two fists full! But this time he looked disappointed when I wasn’t at my post, and observing a ‘barrister’ in the room, quickly ‘begged pardon,’ and flew out as abruptly as he had flown in.
“‘Did you notice that, Mr. Devero?’ the senior clerk in Intestacy cheerfully enquired of the chief clerk in Insanity—‘Hanged if the old curator didn’t think Jones was the attorney general, and begged his pardon for intruding, and ran out again.’
“Then he leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“‘Mr. Leslie,’ the chief clerk in Insanity snapped, ‘I wish you wouldn’t interrupt me, when you see I’m engaged in important work.’
“Mr. Leslie laughed some more.
“‘All this tomfoolery might be very interesting to you and Jones, but I see nothing amusing in taking liberties with a dead man’s court clothes!’ And the chief clerk in Insanity rose suddenly, turned the leather cushion of his chair over, and sat down hard and angrily on it again.
“‘I didn’t ask you to preach a sermon about it,’ and Mr. Leslie started sharpening a new pencil, and thinking hard.
“Scenting trouble, I stole across the floor to my table, and starting disrobing.
“‘And if you will pardon me, Jones,’—the old bachelor wheeled on his chair and faced me as I replaced the wig—‘you should remember that you are commencing a career in a government office, not qualifying yourself for a post in a circus or a travelling show.’
“Here Mr. Leslie laughed by himself.
“I was crushed like an egg.
“But the senior clerk in Intestacy rose to a fresh fit of merriment. He laughed while he wrote the address of the nearest next of kin of some deceased on a long ‘O.H.M.S.’ envelope: he laughed while he folded the enclosure for it, and he laughed while he licked the envelope and gummed it.
(John laughed by himself, and Jessie waited for him to finish before proceeding.)
“Then the chief clerk in Insanity shoved his chair back violently, and bounded into the middle of the room.
“‘If there’s going to be any more of this, Mr. Leslie,’ he foamed—‘I shall report it to the curator.
“‘You can report it to whoever the — you like, Mr. Devero,’ and Mr. Leslie sniggered while he addressed another envelope.
“‘Very well! Now Jones,’ and old Devero approached my table like an eruption falling out of Vesuvius, ‘You heard what Mr. Leslie said?’
“I said ‘Eh?’ and looked up nervously.
“‘You might have the manners to say, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Devero—but very well,’ and dragging open the door off he went to execute his threat.
“‘Isn’t he an old ass?’ and the senior clerk in Intestacy looked across to me,— ‘what he wants is a tartar of a wife who would lay him across her knees now and again and give him a good spanking.’
“Then the door opened again, and the curator, worried and worn looking, with the chief clerk in Insanity, snorting and dancing at his heels, entered.
“I lowered my head over the table, and assumed a busy attitude.
“‘What’s all this fuss about, old chap?’ and the curator, with a kindly light in his eye, approached Mr. Leslie.
“‘Only this, sir, that I’m not going to put up with any bullying from Mr. Devero,’ and the senior clerk rose to his feet and towered over the chief clerk in Insanity and the curator also.
“‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Leslie!’ and the chief clerk, to make up for his shortness of stature, squared his shoulders, put out his chest, inflated his cheeks, and looked like a jew-lizzard angrily defying a mob of bullocks to walk over him in the grass.
“‘And I beg your pardon, Mr. Devero’ and the senior clerk put his hands in his pockets and grinned down with quiet indifference.
“‘Oh, do try and pull together, like good fellows,’ the poor curator, who, without notice, was called upon to arbitrate in such quarrels about once in every twenty-four hours, implored, with a pained and troubled brow.
“‘Mr. Oldman’ (that was the curator’s name), and the chief clerk in Insanity looked him right between the two eyes— ‘you must be aware, from the volume of correspondence that passes through my hands, that I have no time either for quarrelling, or for rehearsing plays in the office, and therefore—”
“He was interrupted by Mr. Leslie.
“‘Look here, Mr. Devero,’ the latter said, with fight in his eye, ‘there’s more intestacy correspondence goes through my hands in one day than you put through the Insanity office in a whole year.’
“‘Well, I don’t want to call you a liar, Mr. Leslie,’ and the chief clerk in Insanity turned up his nose and looked all round the room.
“‘No, and if you’re wise, Mr. Devero, you won’t,’ and Mr. Leslie smiled confidently at the curator, then across in my direction. I didn’t see him smiling; but I could feel him.
“The curator put his fingers in his ears, and moaned, ‘when will all this end?’ and I began to think that I could see some humour in the public service; still, I deemed it expedient to maintain a busy and disinterested attitude, and lowered my head another inch or two over my desk.
“‘The trouble is this, sir,’ Mr. Leslie explained— ‘Mr. Devero is so full of —’
“‘What I was stating to you, sir, when Mr. Leslie interrupted with his nonsense,’ Mr. Devero went on, ‘was that, unlike him and Jones, I have something more important to do than to spend government time capering round the office in a wig and gown for the foolish edification of no one in particular.
“I could feel the rope going round my neck, and shuddered.
“‘That’s another lie, Mr. Devero,’ the senior clerk in Intestacy cheerfully protested, ‘you never saw me with a wig and gown on. You saw Jones.’
(Here we all laughed, and John reckoned Will Jones must have been in a devil of a funk.)
Jessie read on:
“‘Do you state I am telling the curator a deliberate falsehood, Mr. Leslie?’ And Mr. Devero threw out his chest, and inflated his red cheeks more and more.
“‘If you say I had on a wig and gown, Mr. Devero,’ retorted Mr. Leslie, now warming to the wrangle, ‘I don’t only state that you are telling the curator a deliberate falsehood, but I’ll pick you up and throw you through the window.’
“Oh, do stop this, like a pair of good fellows, do stop it,’ the curator appealed piteously. ‘If you don’t you’ll force me to report the whole matter to the attorney general, and you know that will mean an inquiry. Oh, why can’t you agree!’
“‘Well, ask Jones there, sir, who had the wig and gown on; he’ll tell you,’ and the senior clerk in Intestacy pointed severely to me.
“Then a terrible moment broke over me with dramatic suddenness. Laws, why didn’t I jump through the window while the storm was raging, and slither back to the Bush! All too late now! I heard the curator’s footsteps approaching, and felt his hand on my shoulder. Then I stabbed and proded, and sliced the blotting pad before me revengefully with an office knife I had been toying with mechanically, and nerved myself for the worst. But instead of a ranting, roaring interrogation bursting on my ear, his voice, if not the voice of Jacob, was good to hear,
“‘Was it you who had on the wig and gown, old chap,’ he murmured softly.
“I nodded and stabbed the blotting pad in several fresh places, and it was all over. My part of the great eruption was ended. The curator turned cheerfully to the complainant. ‘There’s been a little misunderstanding, Mr. Devero—that’s all that’s the matter,’ he said. ‘Now shake hands, like good fellows, the two of you, and be friends, and bury the hatchet,’ and he patted both the chief clerk in Insanity, and the senior clerk in Intestacy fondly and persuasively on the back.
“Then they smiled and shook hands, and buried the hatchet,—but left the handle sticking out.— To be Continued.”
Jessie put down the magazine, and John said, ‘‘ Cripes, it’s gettin’ interestin’, ain’t it?”
“It’s all right,” from William: while once more the girls expressed a desire to see Will Jones again.
What a time we were having! Especially William and John! And what girls they knew! Superior society girls, butterflies who supped and sipped and did the block at proper, regulated hours. It was inspiring to see William and John, about 4 p.m., being escorted up the street by a guard of fashionable females. Others, passing down would smile and bow to them; some more from whirling motor cars would claim their acquaintance, and odd ones in riding coats and boots and breeches, astride well-groomed, prancing hacks, their hands firmly holding the reins well down on the withers, looking ready and fit to rush the gee-gees over the moon, even though they weren’t, would throw side glances and smiles across the street to them. At favoured street corners, where they could all share in a more equal distribution of William and John, the girls would stand and ring round them.
Like roley-poley grass gathering in strength, fresh beauties would join in and be introduced to William and John; and when they bowed and said “How d’ y’ do, Mr. Kayton?” William never failed to tell them that he was “all right,” while John always inquired “how they were comin’ up themselves?”
“Both station boys from the West,” those who knew William and John longest would whisper to the others, “marriageable too, and ver’, ver’ rich, darling.”
From the streets they would adjourn, at John’s invitation (never at William’s) to the most costly cafe in the City, and, amidst a rattle of plates and tea cups, pandemonium, small talk, jostling and hurry-scurrying of busy waitresses, would explore the institution high and low, rejecting this table and that table, until one suitable was available. Then they would scramble into empty chairs, tittering, giggling, and demanding of each other the privilege of sitting next to William and John. And how those talkative, slender-waisted creatures could eat! And the dainty style they went about it! The skill with which they could handle a knife and fork, or carry a loaded spoon to their mouths and empty it without any effort, and without spilling any, was a work of art. Fruit salads, cream puffs, ice-creams and chocolates seemed to melt the moment they touched them; and every time they melted, John, amidst much mirth, would stand up full length, and call “Heigh” to the waitress.
But when the feast was over and the reckoning came, John, in solemn silence, always signalled the waitress to give the ticket to William.
“You’re all right!” And William would drag a bulky leather purse from his pocket, and while the girls smiled and craned their necks to see into it, would forage amongst a load of jingling gold and silver with his big fingers.
But the evening we gave our first society ball and supper at Darabolpal, that was the evening for girls! John and William will never forget it— neither will Pa—the evening, not the girls. He had to pay for it all.
The ball, though, was a great success, but it might have been a great failure if Pa hadn’t gone the right way about it. He wisely took Mr. Calliope’s advise and handed the management of it over to “Lammie,” and gave him a free hand. Lammie exercised a free hand, too.
“He’s the only man in the City,” Calliope assured Pa, “who knows how to carry out a social function in style, besides, he knows the best people personally, and who to invite and who not to invite, so you can’t go wrong; Kayton, you can’t go wrong.”
And when Mrs. Cashmore heard we were going to give a great ball and supper, she rushed out to Darabolpal in a motor car, and hugged the girls and Mamma, and gave them a lot of hints and information in regard to running their side of it.
“Looking after the guests properly,” she made strong features of. In fact, by the time Mrs. Cashmore had finished explaining and re-explaining all the fearful things the rules of society required should be observed on such occasions, the girls and Mamma were pale and nervous looking. But when Mrs. Cashmore explained the order in which the guests should enter and attack the supper, and the places of honor to be reserved for the mayor and mayoress, for Judge and Mrs. Juggens, for Sir Henry This, and Sir James That, for the Hon. Bung-Smith and the Misses Bung-Smith, and all the rest, Mamma and the girls got cold shivers.
“Girls, we better let Mrs. Cashmore do it all?” Mamma murmured.
The girls agreed with her.
“Well, my dears,” and Mrs. Cashmore threw up her eyebrows and pulled a long face in an effort to conceal her delight— it’s a terrible ordeal and a fearful responsibility for one to take and Pearle pleaded, “You know how it should be done, and we don’t.”
For a few moments Mrs. Cashmore camouflaged, frowned at the ceiling, and pretended to be deep in thought; then: “Very well, I will, my dears; you can leave it all to me.”
And they left it all to her. Mamma became cheerful again, and like one acquitted on a charge of having killed someone, threw herself on Mrs. Cashmore, and hugged her; the girls all shook her by the hand, then scampered to their rooms to pin ivy leaves on their dresses and nightgowns. They pinned them on at Mrs. Cashmore’s advice. She said if they wore an ivy leaf continuously for three days preceding the ball, the first gentleman they shook hands with that evening would be the man they would marry. Laws, wasn’t Moo excited about it; so excited that she nearly spoilt her chance altogether. She pinned two leaves on her “nighty,” and wouldn’t have noticed the mistake only for Bella and Pearle.
The great evening came round, and an hour to go before the guests would arrive.
“How do I look,” John grinned, promenading in the hall in a dinner jacket, and a white front heavily jewelled in the centre and an abundance of red silk handkerchief showing inside his vest.
“You’re all right,” and William, in a long-tailed dress coat, grinned at himself, and turned round and round, like a dog endeavouring to have a word with its tail.
Moo, coming from her room “all over powder,” swept along the hall in a startling low-necked gown, with a fearsome train to it, the ivy leaf pinned to her bosom, and a band of white ribbon round her head.
“Look at him,” she gasped, bumping into John, “with his dinner jacket on.”
“Well, I got me other clothes on as well, ain’t I,” cheerfully from John.
“But it’s your other coat you should have on for the ball—the long one.”
“The claw hammer?” John grinned.
“Same as mine,” and William waddled about to show his to advantage.
“Yes, the same as Williams’—go and change yourself,” and Moo started shoving John.
“Change myself?” John repeated. “But look at him,” pointing to William, “he looks like an old man kangaroo hoppin’ about. Think I want to be taken for an old man kangaroo?”
“Pity you wouldn’t be—someone might snare you then, and take your scalp,” and, holding her head and her train up Moo went to see how Bella and Mabel and Pearle were getting along.
“Think Moo is likely to snare anyone?” John, looking after his sister, asked of William, and William chuckled and said “She’s all right.”
“Everything is ready, Kayton,” Lammie, got up in perfect ball room gear, reported to Pa— “I don’t think I have forgotten anything. That room there,” he explained, “I’ve reserved for the gentlemen, and Mrs. Cashmore has taken the next one for the ladies’ cloak room.
“I see,” and Pa put both his big gloved hands behind his back, and wagged the tail of his tremendous dress coat. (Moo reckoned that evening dress just suited Pa.)
“Everything ought to go off splendidly,” and taking a scrap of paper from his pocket, Mr. Fordyce mentioned the names of a few friends not on the “official list” whom he had invited on his own account.
“They don’t belong to the best circles, you know,” he told Pa apologetically, “but quite decent chaps for all that, and good sports some of them, too.”
“Oh, that’s all right—that’s all right,” and Pa wagged his coat some more.
Just then Pa wouldn’t have worried if Lammie had invited the whole City; but Lammie didn’t explain that those “sports” had a “pull” over him in various social and financial ways, and that whenever they solicited a favour of any kind for themselves or their friends, he daren’t refuse.
The blazing lights of motor cars started streaming through the wide-flung gates, then a procession of cars in twos and threes rolled in till Darabolpal, like a brilliant open air garage, was surrounded with machines.
“Now, Kayton,” Lammie said, pulling at his white gloves like a racehorse champing the bit, “you and Mrs. Kayton receive them on the verandah, and I’ll introduce any you don’t know.”
“Just so,” and Pa coughed nervously, while Mamma hung on his arm for support. You’d think they were both about to be married or “sentenced for life,” which is much the same thing.
“Where’s John?” and Lammie looked about hurriedly. John, along with William, was cutting capers in the hall, and passing discouraging remarks on the dresses Mabel and Bella showed out in.
“Here, John, come and give a hand to attend to the guests; look sharp, they’re coming now.”
“Who, me?” John grinned.
“Go on when you’re called,” and Bella shoved him.
“Yes, look slick,” Lammie added, “and show any of the gentlemen that I mightn’t have time to look after, where to put their coats, or change their shoes, and that sort of thing.”
“Are we going to do a bit of brandin’ and draftin’?” and John slouched off with the tails of his coat swaying and keeping time behind him.
The orchestra started playing “Men of Harlech”. William, in ungainly strides, started waltzing to it. The girls giggled and pointed at him.
“It’s all right,” William assured them.
Up the steps came cloaked and coated, and hatless guests; some linked arm in arm, some on the heels of each other, all in the gayest of spirits.
Lammie was in his element. One of the great moments of his life had arrived. He shook hands with every guest, frequently with two at a time, addressed many of them by their Christian names, laughed, joked, gushed over them; told them how delighted he was they had come along; hoped they would have a good evening, and forgot that Pa and Ma ever existed.
When some “dude,” who had arrived alone, would catch his eye and ask where he could change his shoes or something, Lammie would “beg pardon, old fellow,” then look about and call indignantly for John. But he might as well have called for Julius Caesar. Girls whom John had invited himself kept arriving in numbers, and were so effusive and demonstrative in their greetings, that they carried him right along the verandah and formed a reception of their own.
“Nice sort of thing for him to be away like this!” Lammie would grumble. “Just wait a minute, old chap.” Then he’d turn, and shaking a fresh lot of guests by the hand, would laugh and gush some more and inquire if “they had got over Thursday night yet?” and forgot the “old chap” waiting.
Then a half dozen solitary dudes, twisting restlessly at their moustaches, nudged him, and Lammie beckoned to William and insisted on his taking John’s place.
“You’re all right,” William said, and going slowly forward, took charge of the stragglers.
But when the ball opened with the grand march, that was the sight! A wonderful spectacle it was; a dazzling triumph in bald heads, beautiful dresses and assorted manhood! Pa and Mamma, linked arm in arm, led it, and led it well, too. Pa said he had never led anything like it since he led “the finest mob of Aberdeen Agnus bulls over Balonne Brige at St. George!”
Moo, at first, looked upset and disappointed. Mr. Calliope was the first gentleman she shook hands with, and she expected the great barrister would select her for his partner; but he did neither of these things. He selected Bella, but only when he found Jessie was not available. John always reckoned that Calliope had a “sneaking regard” for Jessie, and it looked as if John was a prophet. Before the grand march was ended, though, Moo recovered, and was more elated than anyone in the room. Mr. Skutt, one of the “sports” whom Mr. Fordyce had invited, and wearing a naval officer’s uniform, took a great fancy for Moo. Not only did he partner her in the grand march, but danced with her nearly the whole evening, then took her to supper.
Laws! Moo had no time or eyes for anyone else after that! She proudly introduced him to the other girls as “Captain Skutt,” and between dances talked and laughed with him behind a large fan. Once, when Mr. Calliope approached and asked for her programme, she told him he was “far too late,” that the Captain had it filled right to the last dance.”
Calliope bowed, and crossing the floor, asked Lammie “who was that Captain Skutt talking to Miss Kayton?”
“I’m bloomin’ well annoyed with him!” Lammie growled— “He’s carrying things too jolly far!” and instead of answering the question, added: “Bring all the boys with you, Calliope, I’ve got some rare champagne reserved in the gentlemen’s room for a few of us.”
Next day, though, when Moo learned that “Captain Skutt” was a cook at the Grand Cafe, she swore, and said she’d give him a smack in the mouth if ever he spoke to her again.”
When it was all over, the guests thanked Pa and Mamma for the splendid evening, and Tomkins’ another of Lammie’s “good sports,” thumped Pa hard on the back and hiccoughed: “Bravo on y’ ole cobber. Thash away to show (hic) th’ city swellish how (hic) do it, eh!”
But it was a wonderful ball, and next day all our names, and the names of the guests, except those who were “amongst others” were printed in the morning papers. And Pa sent to town for fifty extra copies to send to our Western friends.
It was also a wonderful account that Lammie handed Pa to pay—four hundred pounds altogether. But he didn’t charge him anything for the management of it. He spoke to William and John “Privately” about that: told them just to mention quietly to the old man that he always got a small honorarium for his services — generally about fifty or sixty pounds, according to circumstances.”
“Damm-im!” Pa grunted—taking out his cheque book—“I thought he didn’t want anything.”
When Rainmaker found himself in tweed pants and coats, several sizes too large, that Mamma selected from amongst discarded suits of Pa’s, and had a good look round Darabolpal, he decided to stay with us altogether.
“Rainmaker too ole to work alonga station now,” he told the girls, and started shamming, and complaining of a lame leg and a “tired bingy.” “By cripe, I askit Boss for it pension,” he concluded determinedly.
The girls were delighted. They regarded the old black’s ideas for the future as “just splendid— so like what he always was,” and implored Pa to keep him at Darabalpol for the rest of his life.
“He can do lots of little odd jobs for us about the place,” they argued, “and help in the kitchen.”
“All right,” Pa said, “if Lawton will let him stay?”
Lawton was a Westerner who brought Rainmaker to the metropolis in charge of some new stock. But when Lawton heard of the suggestion, he seemed only too pleased to be rid of Rainmaker, and returned West without him.
And what a fuss the girls made of him! How they patted and pampered the old native, and dolled him up in all sorts of colours and extravagant decorations! You’d think they were always getting him up to compete in a patriotic procession! And it was wonderful how much of it Rainmaker could stand! In addition to spending lots of pocket money on gorgeous haberdashery—they used to purloin articles of clothing from William and John’s wardrobe to present to him. Between the attention of them all, Rainmaker, when he went out anywhere, was the most conspicuously dressed person in the City. And the girls or Pa rarely went anywhere without him. Wherever the motor went, Rainmaker had a seat in it till City people knew him better by sight than they knew many leading public men or policemen. But they didn’t know him as “Rainmaker”—they all spoke of him as “Kayton’s nigger.” The first time the car went whirling swiftly down a steep hill, though, with him in it, we nearly lost him.
“By cripe, him bolt! Look out!” he shouted, and jumped out over Pa’s head and rolled under a passing spring-cart like a big porcupine decorated with ribbons.
But it was at home at Darabolpal where he was made most of. He was a little black god there. Moo and Bella and Mabel and Pearle would never allow visitors to leave without being introduced to Rainmaker. He was the greatest curiosity we had about the place. He was our museum. The girls couldn’t have made more of him if he had been a new baby.
“He’s isn’t dangerous, is he?” some of the society dames, keeping a close eye on Rainmaker, would enquire. “He’s quite civilised?”
“And Christianised, too,” and the girls would proudly invite him to sing “The Lord is my Shepherd.”
Rolling his white eyes round like billiard balls, and dilating his wide, flat nostrils, Rainmaker, in a hollow, fractured voice, that sounded like the lamentations of Jeremiah, would suddenly bellow, “Dear Load dis my asheppid I awont want—” and the dames would gasp and splutter, and exclaim, “How lovely! divine!” It was wonderful how the fashionable folk who frequented Darabolpal could lie to a man’s face! But to his honour be it said, the black always refrained from appropriating to himself all the credit for his vocal ability. He was an unselfish artist.
“Missa Moo, she show it me how to sing,” he informed Mrs. Judge Juggems, one day. And the Judge’s wife, who always gave her friends a sly pinch whenever Moo rose to sing or play, at her place, complimented her upon having taught the nigger “to sing so splendidly. He’s a credit to you, dear,” she lied—and added: “What patience it must have taken to teach him?”
“Not a grite deal,” Moo drawled— “th’ blacks have all good ears, y’ know.”
“By cripe, yair,” Rainmaker himself promptly endorsed, “black fellow got it ear like it kangaroo,” and he proceeded to give a practical illustration of a kangaroo detecting the sound of the softest footstep, and struck such awe-inspiring attitudes, that for a while Mrs. Juggems wasn’t quite sure if he was planning an attack on her or not. But when Rainmaker emerged from the “Kangaroo” and became himself again and all danger seemed past, she made big “cheerful mouths” and said; “How very interesting! And can he still speak his own language?”
“Can he what? I should rather!” And Moo forthwith requested the aboriginal to “let Mrs. Juggems hear him say something” in his own tongue.
The black grinned and showed his white teeth, and sullenly suggested that she “talk it blackfeller, herself.”
“And can you? the Judge’s wife inquired of Moo, in surprise.
“Oh, I used to do a bit of it, when we were on the station,” Moo answered, modestly. “So used Miss Bella, and Miss Mabel, and Miss Pearle.”
“How awfully interesting!” And all at once Mrs. Judge Juggems seemed to regard the girls as great linguists.
“I heard him swearing in his own language at the cook this morning,” Bella put in, with an indicting glance at Rainmaker.
The culprit shook his head in contradiction.
“Yes, I did.”
“And could you understand him?” Mrs Juggems asked in amazement.
The girls laughed at the soft impeachment, and, to Rainmaker’s discomforture, Bella, in her own tongue, repeated the profanity.
“By cripe!” he protested, “I not been say him! That been Snooka.”
“Go on with you!” all three scoffed.
“Snookes don’t know black fellow’s language!”
“My wor, I been show him!”
Rainmaker, like some public men, when pledging their word to support a subordinate’s application or a position they have earmarked for one of “themselves,” was a most inartistic and transparent liar.
Just then a flock of domestic pigeons—some of those lovely, innocent birds, against the heartless slaughter of which to make a city holiday no “Humane Society” seems to have sufficient courage to raise its feeble voice—alighted gracefully upon the lawn.
“Look, Rainmaker!” And Moo drew his attention to the birds. “Yabberapper?” (bronzewing pigeon).
Rainmaker shook his head in the negative.
“Moomoomby?” (squatter pigeon) from Bella.
Another shake of his head.
“Well, what sort then?” from Mabel.
“Plurry tame pijjin!” And Rainmaker turned and slouched sulkily off to his quarters.
The girls rejoiced noisily, while Mrs. Juggems clutched at their arms and inquired what he meant by “plurry.” When Moo enlightened her, she shrieked: “Oh, my godfather, wait till I go home and tell the Judge.”
* * * * * *
A year passed, and Rainmaker didn’t seem as happy or contented as he was wont to be. His association with Snookes and some more of the proletariate who laboured in the vineyard at Daralbolpal developed a mercenary and democratic spirit in him. They maliciously, and with evil and humorous intent, filled him with labour and socialistic germs, till one day he waylaid Pa in the garden and demanded “twelve bob a day” from him, and threatened if it wasn’t forthcoming to “call a men out on a strike.”
“Go to th’ devil!” Pa answered. “What would I give you twelve bob a day for?”
“By cripe, you know, I got it wibe an’ family alonga Emuwood, Boss.”
“Well, go back to Emuwood and look after them!” And Pa walked off and left him standing.
* * * * * *
Three months later. Snookes and his friends one rainy day filled Rainmaker with rum and a fresh set of arguments, and sent him to make a final appeal for the twelve bob a-day. Swinging his arms about confidently, and carrying himself with a dignified swagger, he mounted the verandah and addressed Pa through the open door of his den.
“Who th’ devil’s been giving you drink?” Pa yelled at him. Pa knew that whenever Rainmaker took special pains to walk erect he was as drunk as forty cats.
“By cripe, Boss,” he hiccoughed loud and imperatively, “I gibit you a plurry talkin’ to!”
“What’s this?” And Pa jumped to his feet and put his head out the door.
“You been plurry robber!” Rainmaker staggered one pace to the left and two to the right— “You took it my poo’ ol’ Fader’s country, an’ make it fortune. By cripe, you don’t dubbit out my share I muster all a my coun’ry mun in big feller mob an’ make it reb’lution! By cripe! look it out I been a join I.W.W.!”
“Rainmaker! Rainmaker!” the girls and Mamma, running on to the verandah, almost blubbered. “Whatever is the matter?”
“A plurry reb’lution!” And the rebellious black rocked round and blundered down the steps.
* * * * * *
Next day Pa took Rainmaker to the Central Station and put him on board the Western mail, with a single ticket to Charleville in his pocket, and it was five years before we saw the old chap again.
A wet morning. For three weeks there had been nothing but wet mornings. The postman came with the mail and brought exciting news of a flood in the river. He said it was rising at the rate of two feet an hour. But Darabolpal, being high and dry, we were more interested in his letter bag. Amongst a bundle of papers he handed in was a Rudd’s Magazine. Jessie seized it and made off to the reading room; we followed, and collecting around her didn’t care two straws whether the river was rising two feet an hour or twenty-two feet a minute.
Jessie hurriedly turned the pages over till she found “Will Jones—Continued,”—then read:
“One morning, with the office mail came a letter for me from Steve B—, one of the boon companions of my Bush days. It wasn’t exactly written ‘with a thumb nail dipped in tar,’ but it looked peculiarly like it.
“‘And so I believe old chum yous is in Brisbin, a bloomint tof in a judges ofis,’ he wrote— ‘Eddy told us about it when we seen him at Dirrinbandy and we was all pleased about you. But hoap you won’t get to flash and forget to rite sometime to a poor blanky bloke what’s off with Jim Brown and Jack Dent to the West again next week as soon as we can get ready, drovin’ a mob of bloomin’ short horn bulls.’
“I sat turning the letter over and over, thinking and dreaming—dreaming on ‘the Limestone Cattle Camp;’ of the reckless, thoughtless days and nights spent with Steve; of his drifting out again across the rolling Western plains behind those bulls; of the camps he’d help to pitch along the way; of the songs Jim Brown and Jack Dent would sing beneath those star-strewn Western skies; of the joy, the ‘life’ I would miss by sticking to the office—when the door opened and a middle-aged, shortish man, with long jaw, hard-set, clean-shaven face streaked with wrinkles, and a pair of dark, quick eyes labored in on one sound leg and a lame one.
“‘Oh,’ he drawled, in apology, ‘I opened the wrong door. I hope I won’t make the same mistake when I’m going to heaven,’ and propelling himself out again with his sound leg, entered the curator’s room.
“He had scarcely disappeared, when the senior clerk in Intestacy burst into loud mirth.
“‘That was Judge Peter,’ he said, ‘the humorous old dog.’
“‘What was it he said, Mr. Leslie?’ and Mr. Devero, the chief clerk in Insanity, turned cheerfully round from his table.
“Mr. Leslie repeated the judge’s remark, and went into a second fit of mirth.
“But Mr. Devero saw no humour in it. He pulled a disappointed face, and went on writing
“Just then the electric bell rang ‘burr! bur-r! bur-r!’
“‘Three bells, Jones, that’s for you—the curator wants you.’
“Answering those office bells had more terrors for me than a young horse or a scrub bull ever had in the Bush! Whenever I went into his room I found a howling swell, or a group of gorgeous females with the curator, and somehow I fancied they were only there to gape at me. So when I nervously pushed the door open and entered, Judge Peter was there, squatting in an easy chair. Finding his eyes fixed on me, I became confused.
“‘Jones,’ the curator said, handing a letter to me, ‘I want you, like a good fellow, to take this to Judge Peter’s place as fast as you can go, and wait for an answer.’
“More private messages! Heavens! How I regretted ever having seen an office.
“‘You know where my place is?’ the Judge chipped in, in a hard, raspy sort of voice.
“I shook my head in the negative, at the same time experiencing a sudden sinking in the stomach.
“‘Oh, you don’t.’ And I thought by the sarcasm in his voice that he regarded me with suspicion.
“Then the curator told me where I would find it, somewhere in the vicinity of New Farm, and gave me a lot of confusing directions, and in my own interests explained to the Judge that I was ‘from the Bush.’
“‘Oh,’ the latter drawled, and ran his eye over me again as if I was a curiosity.
“‘But do you know where New Farm is?’ the curator inquired as an afterthought.
“No more than the man in the moon did I know where it was, but deemed it expedient to say I did. (Years after I was delighted to read in Carlyle or somewhere that all men were liars.)
“‘If ever he has taken a girl out for a walk he must know where New Farm is,’ solemnly from the Judge, while his dark eyes twinkled curiously.
“The curator laughed. Heads of departments always regard it as one of the duties of their office to laugh when a judge or a minister of the crown makes a joke. But I didn’t laugh. I wished the floor would open up and swallow every bit of me.
“‘Never mind, Jones,’ the curator said, apologetically, ‘when you get to New Farm, just follow the directions I have given you, and then ask anyone you see to show you Judge Peter’s place.’
“‘It’s a new house, and different to the others down that way, and at a distance it might strike you as being anything,’ the judge added, laconically.
“I backed silently out the door, like a crawfish.
“Out in the corridor, my bosom swelling with resentment at being made a lob-lollie-boy of for everyone, I hissed ‘d— them! Why can’t they run their own messages! May I never be able to find New Farm or his rotten old house!’ Then blundering back into the clerks’ room, I put on my hat, an old black felt with a red string round it.
“‘Are you going a message for the curator, Jones?’ the first clerk in Intestacy inquired.
“‘For Judge Peter,’ I mumbled, turning my head away to conceal the tears of resentment that were rushing into my eyes.
“‘Well, when you are coming back, bring me a dozen cavendish bananas for lunch,’ and he tossed a coin over his shoulder for me to make the purchase with.
“For several seconds I stood grinding my teeth at the back of his head, then slowly stooped and picked up the coin.
“‘At that rate then, Jones,’ and the chief clerk in Insanity rose from his chair and began fumbling his pockets, ‘you might kill three birds with one stone, and bring me a couple of meat rolls.’
“My humiliation was complete. That moment, anything could have happened. On the impulse I might have thrown some of the furniture at those clerks, and heaped profanity upon their heads, and then rushed out and slithered away to the Bush. But I did none of these things. I merely bit my lip, set my teeth, hurried into the street, and proceeded on my way to New Farm.”
(“I would have flung the furniture at them,” John interrupted, and Pearle remembered that at Emuwood, Will Jones threw a branding iron at Pa and hit him on the shin with it. Pa remembered too, and we all laughed.)
“First thing I did,” Jessie read on, “was to cool myself down with a multum in parvo, the popular soft drink in those days, which cost me threepence. Then climbing into the box seat of a New Farm bus, away I rolled and rocked down Queen Street, along Wickham Street, and out through the Valley. And while the driver flapped the reins and flicked and cracked his whip at the three staggery, stiff-jointed quadrupeds in front of him, and blew a shrill whistle to attract custom, and in a sing-song voice called ‘Valleyarn Street, Noofahm,’ I kept a sharp and constant look-out for a house that might resemble anything at a distance. No such domicile, however, came in sight.
At the terminus, when the driver held out his hand for my fare, I asked him if he knew where Judge Peter’s place was?
“‘Well, I can’t say I’ve seen it yet,’ he answered cheerfully, ‘though I promised to take the wife a good few Sundays to see it. He fetched it all the way from Japan, and they tells me it looks more like a chow’s joss than anything else.’
“Then using the whip handle, he pointed round the corner of several streets and up and down two or three more, and mentioned a vacant allotment where the kiddies played cricket, and said I couldn’t mistake it.
“Away I went, and was so pleased with the headway I was making, that I began whistling. I kept on whistling until a brat of a boy, not half my size, with a tweed cap on the back of his head, asked me ‘hadn’t I a bit of string’ I stopped, and said ‘I thought I had some about me somewhere,’ and began fossicking my pockets. ‘Well, tie your whistle up with it,’ and he bolted from me, laughing.”
(By cripes,” John put in, “me and William was had be a young dorg like that,” and Pa shook his head and said, “there wer’ some cheeky young wretches in the City.”)
“After wandering about New Farm for an hour,” Jessie proceeded, “making inquiries from every man, woman and child I met, I turned a corner, the twentieth or more, and suddenly came in sight of the quaintest looking domicile I had ever set eyes on, before or since. There was no mistaking it, it was Judge Peter’s place sure enough. My worries were at an end. I approached the place with a light heart. Entering the gate I looked for the front door, but no front door was visible, nor a back door, or an end door, or any sort of door, so far as I could make out.
Remembering the Bush habit of ascertaining if any bees are at home in a tree, I knocked hard on the wall nearest to me. Suddenly a part of the Joss slided away, leaving a square hole in the side of it, and a lady standing, looking straight at me.
“‘Yes?’ she said.
“‘Oh,’ I stammered, and started fumbling for the letter. It wasn’t in my pocket. I searched every pocket I had about me—searched them twice and three times, exposing bits of string, a pocket knife, a piece of sealing wax, some orange peel and Steve B’s letter, but nothing more.
“‘I must have lost it,’ I gasped.
“‘Lost what?’ and the lady smiled.
“‘The letter Judge Peter gave me to bring.’
“‘Oh,’ and she pulled a serious face, and suggested I look inside my hat, and inside my shirt, and the tops of my socks.
“I did, and then looked as if I was going to be hanged.
“‘Must have dropped it somewhere,’ and back I hurried to search the streets; but no sign of that letter was there anywhere round New Farm.
“The sweat and funk the absence of it threw me into I shall never forget. I would have cheerfully forfeited ten years of my miserable existence to anyone who would have taken my place and gone back and faced the curator and Judge Peter instead of me. Burning hot tears ran down my cheeks, and lump after lump took a strangle hold of my throat. Every person, old and young, whom I passed on my way to the bus seemed cheerful and happy, and glad to be alive, while I was the one friendless, miserable, unhappy being in the whole city who wished himself dead.
“Returning to the City, and pausing for a moment before the iron gates of the Supreme Court yard, the stone walls of that building seemed gloomier to me than the morgue.
“What excuse to offer other than I had lost the letter, I could not conceive, and had Dante’s warning, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here,’ been emblazoned over the wooden door of the court building, I could not have suffered greater alarm; and as one walking in his sleep I kept ahead, neither glancing to the right or to the left, and entered the office.
“No sooner had I done so than the senior clerk in Intestacy remarked the time I had been away, and wanted to know if I had brought his cavendish bananas, and looked sulky.
“The chief clerk in Insanity cast his eye on the clock, and hoped I hadn’t forgotten his meat rolls.
“Laws! I couldn’t speak. No thought of bananas or meat rolls had come into my head. In silence I returned them their money; then dropping into my chair rested my arms on the table and hid my face
“‘What’s up, Jones,’ and the senior clerk in Intestacy came and stood by my side.
“With great difficulty I told him I had lost the judge’s letter.
“‘Why you fool,’ he laughed, ‘you left it on your table, and I got it.’
“I lifted my head and saw it in his hand.
“‘The curator is out at lunch now,’ he added, ‘so you better streak back like blaises to the judge’s place before he returns,’
“I grabbed the letter and streaked back.” (Jessie put down the magazine with a sigh, and Bella, the big, soft-hearted one of the family, looked up with tears in her eyes and said “It was lovely.”)
At the squatters’ Club, Pa made the acquaintance of a suave company promoter, whose instincts were the same as his own, and a rare friendship sprang up between them. They lunched at the same table together; smoked and “refreshed” together; read the newspapers and discussed the wonderful natural resources and undiscovered wealth of the country together.
“A fine man was John Chattington, very far-seeing,” Pa used to tell Mamma—“knows everything—everything you like to mention!”
“If you want to make a bit of money,” Chattington said to Pa one day, “I can put you on to something good, Kayton.”
Pa did. And Chattington secured for him a parcel of twenty thousand shares in a gold mine, the price of which was “sure to double itself in six weeks.” And it was only because Pa was “such a great friend of his” that Chattington was doing him this good turn. “Several other leading men here whom you know well,” he told Pa, “would rush this chance if I gave them the hint.”
“I daresay they would,” Pa agreed, wisely, and rushed it himself.
While at the bank, arranging for payment of the money, his banker asked him if he knew anything about the mine and the sort of man Chattington was.
“A lot more’n I’d even care to tell you, just now,” Pa answered. “But I don’t want to say anything about it till everything is fixed.”
“Then what you won’t say about it won’t be worth anyone else’s while trying to say,” and the banker put his tongue in his cheek and gave Pa his head.
When six weeks had passed the price Pa paid for the shares doubled itself alright—doubled itself backwards. Pa suddenly discovered that he had lost fifty thousand pounds! He never got such a shock in his life. He got the shock, too, just when John wanted a hundred pounds to pay “Professor Moonlight, and his assistant, “Billy, the Bantum,” for lessons given in boxing.
Law! How Pa roared and raged when John put it across him. He threatened to tear Darabolpal down, and looked like doing it, too.
Of course, John didn’t know, nor did any of us, that Pa had lost fifty thousand pounds.
“Well, I owe it,” John pleaded, calmly, “and it’ll have to be paid somehow—though I hope to get it all back and a lot more as well.”
“Don’t pester me!” Pa yelled, “don’t! don’t!”
And dropping into a low chair, covered his face with his two big hands and rested his elbows on his knees.
John went away, and stripping off, started exercising with the gloves.
“It’s all right,” William said, approaching Pa in John’s interests.
“What th’ devil’s all right?” And Pa lifted his head and started as though he had just come out of a nightmare.
“Th’ hundred quid John owes. He’ll get it back all right. Professor Moonlight is trainin’ him to fight Hurricane Harry for two hundred pounds and th’ championship.
“What?” And Pa glared harder.
“He’ll win it, too,” William added calmly. “John has come on wonderful with the gloves. He’s all right.”
“Eh?” in loud astonishment from Pa.
“He’s a great fighter and a comin’ champion,” in the same calm tone from William.
“He wouldn’t be a son of mine if he wasn’t, would he?”
“Anyway, I’m not thinkin’ about that!” And Pa covered his face in his hands again.
“I thought you was. Oh, you’re all right,” and William grinned to himself.
“I’m damwell all wrong!” And up jumped Pa and walked aimlessly about the room.
“Anyway,” William continued, in quiet persistence, “everyone reckons it’s a hundred to one on John beatin’ Hurricane Harry. Th’ whole town is talkin’ about it.”
Like the pillar of fire that appeared to Moses by night, a brilliant idea came to Pa.
“Do you tell me he can fight that much,” he asked, suddenly stopping and confronting William.
“If you saw him with them on you wouldn’t want to ask that question. He’s all right.” And William’s face filled with a smile of brotherly pride for John.
“Could he win fifty thousand pounds if he was backed for it?” in a voice of desperate earnestness, from Pa.
“Yes. And fifty million,” answered William. “I tell y’ he’s all right.”
“Then you go and back him for me. Here!” And recklessly dragging his cheque book from his pocket Pa ran to the writing table and drew out a cheque for five thousand pounds. “There, put it all on him—every penny!”
“My oath! But you haven’t seen John boxin’ yet, have y’?” William said, folding the cheque and stuffing it into his pocket.
Pa hadn’t.
“Well, he’s doin’ a bit of practise now. You better come an’ watch him.”
Pa rose and went with William to a room that John had converted into a private gymnasium. There was John hard at it—stripped to the belt, in short pants and light shoes, side-stepping, countering, ducking, dancing about and punching with all his might at a leather bag suspended from the ceiling.
“That’s no good!” Pa shouted, “Practise fightin’ with a man!” And throwing off his coat, started pulling on the gloves.
“Cripes! You’re all right,” William chuckled; then rushed away to call everyone in the house to “come and see Pa havin’ a go at John with the gloves.”
Everyone, including Miss Jones-Black and Miss St. de Silver, who were guests at Darabolpal, hurried to the door of the gym.
“Why the devil don’t you fight?” Pa yelled. “Fight—fight!” And with his bald head down he went after John like a charging Hereford. John broke ground and ducked, and laughed, and more than once nearly fell over.
“Stand, why don’t y’?” Pa bellowed, swinging his long arms after John like flails. John’s head, notwithstanding all his clever footwork, got in the way of those arms, and before he could rescue it Pa raised a big lump on his left eye. Then John stood, and clenching his teeth, waded into Pa with both hands, and Pa, roaring like a bull, waded into John. It was grand to hear some of those body blows. But the excitement was more than the girls and Mamma could stand. They crowded into the drawing-room and decided to drown their fears in music. Miss Jones-Black sat to the piano and Moo had just begun to sing something when William rushed in, calling out “where’s the whisky an’ some water, quick!”
“Oh, my goodness!” Mamma gasped, “what has happened?”
Moo stopped singing, and the others all stared.
“Oh, nothin’,” William chuckled, “only John got a knock-out blow on to the old man, an’ spread him out on the floor like a pethed bullick. He’s all right!”
Moo snatched up the whisky decanter, William a jug of water, and away they hurried to the gym. John was there sitting in his corner, fanning himself with a towel, while Pa lay prostrate on the floor, his arms and legs spread out.
“A nice way to treat your poor old father!” Moo said, raising Pa’s head and pouring whisky into him.
“Well, he came here lookin’ for it,” John replied.
“He came to get y’ into form,” William corrected.
“An’ he got me into form,” from John.
Presently Pa opened his eyes and looked stupidly about.
“How do you feel after it?” John asked, approaching him sympathisingly. “Did it get y’ hard?”
But Pa didn’t seem to know where he was, or who he was, or what happened. All he seemed to remember was the colour and taste of whisky. He silently reached for the bottle and filled himself out a stiff one.
“He’s all right,” William grinned. And Pa was.
A few more seconds,and he found his feet. Then Moo steadied him, and returning to the house, he retired to his den for the rest of the day.
* * * * * *
One morning the newspapers announced that “John Kayton, son of a well-known retired Western squatter, was matched to meet ‘Hurricane Harry’ at the Stadium for a two hundred pound stake and the championship of the State.”
And didn’t all of us get excited! All except Mamma and Jessie. They didn’t believe in fighting or violence of any kind. And instead of being proud of John they appealed to Pa to persuade him “not to do it.” But Pa was a sport, and deaf to their appeals. Besides, his mind was all on recovering his lost fifty thousand pounds. “One fight won’t hurt,” he said, “and it’ll let them see what he’s made of.” Then William put in his spoke and inquired of Mamma and Jessie if they knew “that Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns made tons of money out of boxing?”
Of course, they didn’t; but “thought that no one ever made anything but a fool of themselves out of it.”
“Well, champions make fortunes,” William assured them, “and so will John. He’s all right.”
And when Mr. Calliope heard that John was going to enter the ring, he shook his head and asked “if he didn’t think he was making himself and the family a bit too cheap?”
John laughed, and said, “if he lost the fight he would be making it pretty dear, because the boss was backing him with five thousand.”
“Oh, hell!” And Calliope broke away and ran up the street.
* * * * *
Another week to go—then the great fight! In all the sporting rendezvous, barbers’ shops and hotel bars, placards showing “Hurricane Harry” and the “Western Emu” (that was John’s ring name) in fighting attitudes were conspicuously displayed. And people, as they passed along the street, paused and crowded round to study them. Moo and Bella and Mabel and Pearle were frequently among the number. And they always let those around them know that the “Western Emu” was a brother of theirs.
Meanwhile, John trained hard and consistently to get into form. At daybreak every mornin’ rose and went for a long walk. When he returned, William, who was his trainer, rubbed him down and gave him a warm bath. During his walks John always called at the Central State Hotel. An attractive barmaid was there, with whom he was acquainted. He mostly entered by the back gate—a heavy corrugated iron arrangement ornamented with spikes, and a square hole that served as an escape door in case of fire—and when the proprietor wasn’t about, would loiter in the yard till Stella slipped out to chat with him. And those chats always seemed to hearten John and do him a lot of good. Stella was the magnificent female with whom John was seen at the races.
When John dropped in, a new lessee had taken possession of the hotel. He was a strongly built, clean-shaven, Irish-Australian, named Barrimore, and with a heavy broom was doing his own yard sweeping.
“Is the new boss about?” John asked. John didn’t know he was addressing the “boss” himself. He took him to be the new yard man. And Barrimore didn’t know that in John the “Western Emu” was addressing him—a picture of whom was displayed in his front bar, and on whom he had invested a “quid ’’with the books.
“Yes,” he answered, without lifting his eyes, “do you wish to see him?”
“Not exactly,” John grinned, and moving across the yard to the end of the passage leading to the front, gave a short whistle.
The lessee looked up wonderingly, but went on with his work. Presently, Stella, wreathed in smiles and a luxuriant bouquet, came tripping out. John shook her by the hand and they commenced laughing and chatting. Two, three, four and five minutes passed—passed pleasantly with John and the maid. But to the lessee, visions kept coming of thieves sneaking into his front bar and helping themselves, while it was unprotected. At last he could stand it no longer.
“Here,” he said, approaching Stella with the broom on his shoulder, “I haven’t engaged you to be gossiping out here. Go in and look after the bar. That’s your place.”
Stella rushed away and left John standing.
“What right have you to insult that girl?” And John turned and faced the lessee in a threatening attitude.
“I’ve a right to insult you too, as far as that goes,” Barrimore answered, with blood in his eyes.
“Put up your hands!” And John calmly proceeded to cast his sweater, “and I’ll give you the biggest hiding you ever had in your life. You don’t know who you’ve struck!”
Next instant Barrimore was rolling into the “Western Emu” with the yard broom, and with both hands he twirled it like the wheel of a windmill in a gale. John never got such a surprise in his life. In vain did he try to guard his ribs and his head. Suddenly the broom found the point of his jaw, and John staggered and nearly went out. Recovering himself, he turned and fled for the back gate. Barrimore pursued him, and at every stride banging fiercely at the back of the “Western Emu’s” head. In the gateway John tripped and fell, and rolled out into the street.
“Give me a hiding, will you?” And Barrimore triumphantly shook the broom at the “Western Emu,” then closed the gate.
When John arrived back at Darabolpal, he was in pain and in bad humour, and mumbled something to us about an accident. Pa nearly went off his head with anxiety, and ordering the motor car to the door, rushed John off to a doctor. The doctor found he had a broken rib.
“Damit, no! He can’t have!” Pa exclaimed.
The doctor smiled at Pa, and put the arm in splints.
Two days later the Stadium committee found that John had lost the fight.
What Pa said then will be dealt with in the here, after.
“Are you going to listen, Pa?” Pearle asked, as Jessie proceeded to read some more of Will Jones from the pages of Rudd’s Magazine.
“No,” he grunted, “I don’t want to hear it!” And wrapped in a morning gown, wandered out into the garden.
Since Pa had lost a lot of money he never knew what he wanted.
“It’s all right,” William said—read ahead.”
And Jessie read:
“The twenty-eighth of every month was easily the most cheerful day in the public office. That was the day we received our screws and walked on air. Each was given a blue cheque payable to ‘order,’ and a blue voucher to sign and stamp. There was no difference in the size of the cheques, so far as the paper was concerned; one was as big as another, and they were always given to us by the chief clerk in the Crown Law Office. He took great pride in giving them to us too. The knowledge that his gifts made us happy seemed to be all the reward he looked for. He was a real philanthropist.
“My first cheque, I remember, was for four pounds six shillings and eight pence, and so was my twenty-first. The curator’s was for a little more. It was for sixty-four pounds three shillings and four pence, and the first time my eyes rested on the figures, I was amazed to think that anyone on this earth received so much for a month’s work! But there it was, in black and white, sixty-four pounds three shillings and four pence! I placed his cheque beside mine on the blotter and gazed from one to the other. Laws! With his I could have gone back to the Bush and bought the old man out. But with my own—well, I hardly knew what to do with it! Of course, I didn’t know what he would have to pay out of his sixty-four pounds three shillings and four pence; but from my four pounds six shillings and eight pence I knew the lady who kept the humble boarding house where I was lodging, was waiting for three pounds nine shillings and four pence. I knew, because she told me all about the bills she had to meet, and how two ‘swell pups’ who had occupied her best double room for three months, left by the window one night and were never heard of again! I also knew that out of the balance, seventeen shillings and four pence, I would have to keep myself in clothes and pocket money, and give a collection to the church on Sunday, and pay a doctor his fees if I caught the measles, or whatever was going in the way of epidemics. Looking back, though, I thank God that I didn’t catch anything, and I got over the demands of the church by attending open air services at the corner of the street and posting myself well out of range of the money box. Sometimes the preacher would throw out an invitation for his congregation to ‘draw nearer,’ and here and there an isolated straggler would glide from a dark corner to follow the light, but for my part I couldn’t afford to take any such risks. Find myself in clothes, though, I had to, somehow or other! I found them mostly by avoiding outside company, by lying on my bed Saturday afternoons and holidays; by making a recluse of myself and never colliding with invitations to join in a drink or a meal, and by never placing myself under an obligation of shouting luxuries for others. Also by always walking to and from the office, wet or dry, and saving bus fares.
“By no other means that I could see, could I have paid my way and survived in the City; and a dull, lonely, wretched life it was when I had paid my way!
“At the end of six months the scanty stock of ‘hand-me-downs’ which I had brought from the Bush was looking faded and worn; the cane bottom chair, I one day found, had got away with the seat of my best pants, and I was in sad need of a new suit. I also required new shirts, new collars, new socks, and more than anything else, a new hat. My faithful old black felt with a red string around it was done, and now was more and more an object of annoyance to the fastidious old chief clerk in Insanity. Every time I banged it on the rack beside his shiny black pee-wee, it gave him the pip. He’d jump up, snatch his from the peg, and brush it. Then he’d ask me if ‘I ever brushed mine, and if I hadn’t a better one to come to the office in?’ Ah, well, he’s in heaven, or somewhere, now, where crowns and wreaths and things are worn, not hats, so it doesn’t matter! Also, I wanted a box or a portmanteau to put my few belongings in—the frayed and ancient family carpet bag I had arrived in the City with had met with an accident, and stitch it how I would, it refused to hold together any longer.
“It was the fall of the ’Xmas season, too, and I remember one morning receiving a cheerful letter from my mother, urging me to be sure and come home for ’Xmas, if I could afford to do so at all. The letter said my brothers would all be home for the shearing; that my sisters were already busy baking cakes; and there would be a great dance in the old home on boxing night! Ah me! How vividly my fancy pictured them all making preparations for our home-coming! The girls up to their elbows in flour and dough; Joe and little Bill bringing in wood and more wood; Mother sorting out old friends who would gather there on boxing night to dance and sing as though they never knew a care or a sorrow in their lives, or ever looked adversity in the face at all. And had I been free to act, I would there and then have put on my hat and run to catch the first train going West; but there were a few days’ extra leave of absence to be applied for; besides, that home trip would cost me at least two or three pounds. How was I to replenish my wardrobe and take the trip out of seventeen shillings and four pence a month? I didn’t know. So thinking and sighing, and sighing and thinking, I just mooned along and waited to see what would turn up.
“Nothing of any significance turned up till about a week before ’Xmas. Then one afternoon, when I had returned, puffing and perspiring, after running from one end of the City to the other, delivering bundles of private letters—military letters mostly (the curator and the deputy curator and the first clerk in Intestacy were all swagger officers in the Volunteer Army, and whenever they summoned their regiments or battalions for parade or a sham fight or something, they used me as their post office, without additional pay!)—I was told that ‘a chap from the Bush had been looking for me, and would call back again.’
“‘Yes,’ I said, and my heart started speeding up and jumping with a joy I hadn’t known for nearly twelve months.
“‘A perfect Mulga Mick!’ the chief clerk in Insanity chuckled, and the first clerk in Intestacy pointed to a circle of moist spots on the floor, and, in an aggrieved voice said: ‘And he spat all over the d— office.’”
“After pondering whom it might be, I plucked up courage to ask ‘if he said what his name was? ’
“‘Mulga Mick!’ the chief clerk in Insanity repeated again, and the first clerk in Intestacy thought it was ‘Salt Bush Bill.’
“‘Did you notice what he looked like?’ I asked further, in a timid voice.
“‘No, Jones,’ the chief clerk in Insanity answered, without lifting his head from his desk, ‘but we noticed what he smelled like.’
“‘Like a menagerie,’ from the first clerk in Intestacy, and both looked at me and laughed hugely.
“I sat down at my table and scratched at the blotter, and pondered more. And while I scratched and pondered, the door knob moved and rattled ever so faintly. I watched it. You’d think a burglar was trying it on the other side. Slowly, very slowly, that door opened, till it was an inch wide, and a thin strip of clothes and one twinkling eye squinting in, were visible. It remained in that position for several seconds, when it opened fully two more inches.
“‘Well, spare me days,’ a voice I instantly remembered, said, ‘What th’ hell sort o’ work are you up to in there? ’
“Then the door opened wide, and Paddy Maloney, one of the boon companions of my Bush days, walked jauntily in.
“‘Hello, Paddy, how are y’?’ I said. And we shook hands warmly.
“‘But ain’t I glad to see y’,’ and taking his pipe from his mouth, he spat near the chair of the first clerk in Intestacy who had stopped writing to gape in wonder at the warmth of our reunion. ‘Ain’t I jist! ’
“The first clerk in Intestacy suddenly shoved his chair back.
“‘If I stay over there any longer,’ he said, approaching the chief clerk in Insanity, and sitting on the corner of his table, ‘I’ll get a shower bath!’
“‘An’ how do y’ like workin’ in a blanky office?’ Paddy, looking all round the room, enquired of me.
“‘I’ll go out with y’ and have a yarn,’ I answered, reaching suddenly for my hat. I felt that I couldn’t do justice to Paddy in the presence of others who weren’t in sympathy with his style.
“‘Right you are,’ Paddy agreed, ‘an’ we’ll wet it with somethin’! ’
“Then, turning to my superior officers, ‘You know, chaps, me an’ Will has been mates in shearin’ sheds an’ drovin’ camps together sin’ we were only about nine year old.’
“‘Indeed!’ the chief clerk in Insanity said, while the first clerk in Intestacy smiled broadly.
“Out before the iron gates of the court yard, Paddy and I stood and talked of old times and of old mates and old bosses. And when I told him the Kaytons had sold Emuwood for a fortune and were living in the City, he laughed, and said ‘He’d give a quid to have a yarn with the old fellow again.”
(A burst of merriment from John and William and the girls. But Pa, who had returned to listen, only scowled.)
“‘You remember, Will,’ Jessie read on, ‘what a silly old humbug he was amongst stock?’”
(“If that cove Maloney comes here,” Pa interrupted, “I’ll kick him out!” And off he went to his den.)
Jessie, with difficulty, continued: “‘But some of the girls were pretty good men. The eldest one, what was her name? was good in the Brigalow, but she ought to been a man.’”
(Moo turned very red, then swore: the rest of us went wild with joy.)
“‘But that second one, Mabel, I got a bit shook on—”
(We all jumped to our feet and yelled, all except Mabel.)
“‘Comin’ home from the Brigalow yards one evenin’, me an’ her was ridin’ along together, about as far as from here to that shop over there, behind the others, and the spirit, or whatever it was, movin’ me in the moonlight, I put it to her straight.’”
(Roars of laughter at Mabel’s expense.)
“‘Asked her to marry me, and all the money I had was a couple of quid comin’ to me from her old man.’ And holding on to the iron gate, Paddy laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
“‘And what did she say to you?” I asked, with a grin.
“‘She told me to git me head read!’ And cantered off after the others.
“Then changing the subject, Paddy inquired where I was staying, and if I thought there would be any chance of his getting a room at the same place for a couple of days? ‘I’m off to Mackay,’ he explained, ‘to see what things is like up there among th’ Kanakas.’
“I thought there was every chance, and that evening at five o’clock Paddy and I strolled into the boarding house together. The boarding house keeper welcomed him and provided him with a comfortable room, and when tea time came, introduced him to the other boarders as “Mister Maloney.”
“After tea we went out and strolled about the streets together, and looked in all the shop windows, but neither of us bought anything.
“For three days Paddy kept me company at the boarding house, and after settling up with the landlady, and promising to stay there again if ever he came back to Brisbane, carefully studied the contents of his purse and went into financial calculations.
“‘I think you’ss have to lend me a couple of quid,” he said slowly, in case I get stuck.’
“I advanced him three quid. And though I knew nothing was surer than that it would be returned, I knew also that it was the end of my trip to the Bush, and felt sorry for them all at home!”
Five years we had been n the City—five years dressing, feasting, motoring, dancing, bridge-playing, squandering, and lying in bed.
We had seen city life in all its aspects and phases. Had been through the streets at all hours of day and night. From motors and cabs we had observed the “pushes” lurking in dark, suspicious places when the streets were empty and deserted; had witnessed the last pair of drunks staggering homeward at sunrise, each guiding the uncertain footsteps of the other; each striving to sing louder than the other. We had seen the battered, homeless domain dosser coming from his lair at daybreak to catch the early worm—the pot of beer left by Mary Ann at the hotel “side entrance” for her pet policeman when he’d be leaving his beat—five years without performing an atom of hard work, without one of us dying or getting married!
It was a holiday—one of the many Australian public holidays. To us, of course, all days were holidays, common barn-door kind of holidays. This was one of the real holidays.
Johnson, our chauffeur, brought the big blue motor car round to the front door of Darabolpal and “stood” it there.
“The girls will be ready in a moment, Johnson,” Mamma called from the front verandah.
Johnson said, “All right, M’m, I’m five minutes before time,” and lit a cigarette.
“Where are they going to to-day?” and Pa, restlessly pacing the verandah, didn’t even pause for a reply. Pa often paced the verandah now, as if he were training for a walking match or had something on his mind. But whatever he had at the back of his head, he never spoke of it; so none of us felt called upon to share any of his misery. Besides, we hadn’t come to the City to worry about things—we came to live in peace and plenty and enjoy ourselves.
William and John, wearing as much of their wardrobes as they could conveniently carry on their backs, came out laughing and joking; and calling “Ta, ta” to Mamma, descended the steps and hurried away.
Mamma, leaning on the verandah rails, gazed after them with motherly admiration in her eye. Mamma was proud of her big boys.
Pa stopped pacing, and stared after them too. But he hadn’t a look of appreciation in his eye. Somehow, Pa had little appreciation for anything now. Jewellery, and fine fitting clothes, and clean shaves he was gradually losing all respect for. In his tastes and habits, too, he was retrogressing.
“Wonder those fellows don’t get married and settle down,” he grunted, “instead of trotting into town after girls every day of the week.”
“I was just thinking,” Mamma answered reflectively, “What two fine handsome-looking young gentlemen they have grown into.”
And William and John might have been everything Mamma claimed for them; yet all the gold rings and watch chains, and tailor-made clothes, and gloves, and canes, failed to conceal their clumsiness, their long heavy hands, and the freckles as large as sunflowers that they brought with them from the Bush. In speech and gait, and everything else pretty well, William and John still remained Westerners!
“The City is full of handsome lookin’ young gentlemen,” Pa grunted, “and that’s about all that can be said for most of them.” And off he went on the mooch again.
Moo, Pearle, Mabel and Bella, shrouded in motor cloaks and rainbow-coloured veils, came tripping from the house giggling, tittering and pinching each other like school girls. Then, calling “0 revore” to Mamma, stepped into the car and were whirled away.
“I am more anxious to see some of the girls married than the boys,” Mamma gloomily confessed. “They’re getting on in years now, all of them.”
“That’s about all they are getting on in,” sulkily from Pa.
“Whatever on earth is coming over you lately, man?” Mamma snapped, “anyone would think we were back on the station again, with all the stock dying around us.”
“I often wish to God we were!” And, collecting his coat-tails about him, Pa walked round the house and lost himself.
Nothing else happened that morning till eleven o’clock.
Mr. Calliope, twirling a walking stick in an aimless sort of way, sauntered in through the large gate and stepped on to the verandah. For quite a while now, he had developed a habit of dropping in to Darabolpal just when the fit seized him, and remaining for lunch or tea, or whatever was going. When it was the girls he came to see he would ask “if the boys were at home?” And when it was Jessie he desired to have a word with, and it generally was she, he’d inquire, “if the girls were about?” By “the girls” he implied Moo and Pearle and Mabel and Bella.
This day it was Jessie whom he was seeking, and Mamma told him “they had all gone out motoring.”
“All did you say, Mrs. Kayton?” And Calliope chuckled affably.
“Well, Jessie is at home,” Mamma corrected, “but she’s the only one who is.”
“But she’s somebody, isn’t she?” And the barrister chuckled more.
Mamma smiled, and conducting him to the drawing room, called to Jessie that “Mr. Calliope is here.”
Returning to the verandah, she settled herself comfortably in a large chair, and looked down upon the flowers blooming profusely in the garden.
Pa reappeared, and with a groan, flopped down beside her and stretched his legs along the “shafts” of his chair.
Nothing further happened for more than an hour.
Mr. Calliope came from the house and put his hat on back to front, let his walking stick fall on the verandah, and nearly fell over trying to recover it.
“Helloa, Calliope!” Pa said, “where did you spring from?”
The barrister, flushed and confused, stammered, “I’d like to have a word with you before I go, Kayton?”
Mamma took the hint and made herself scarce.
“Well?” Pa said.
“No luck!” And Calliope shook his head dejectedly. “I thought I had the very best chances of becoming your son-in-law, but—well—, goodbye.” And he held out his hand.
“Oh, dammit! Don’t chuck it up.” And Pa rose to his feet. “You’ve plenty other chances, there’s more of them than one!”
“How more than one?” And Calliope stared as though he had never heard of Moo and Pearle and Bella and Mabel.
“Why, my other daughters—what about the eldest one?”
“Ah, well,” Calliope moaned, “we won’t say anything further just now! Goodbye.” And, with a dispirited hand-shake, he turned and descended the steps, and away.
“Dammit!” Pa said again, and, scratching his head, went inside to see Mamma.
Nothing more occurred till six months after.
Will Jones, the author, who had also become a constant visitor to Darabolpal, one Sunday morning shadowed Pa all about the garden and in and out of the house. And when Pa, to escape him, shut himself up in his den, Will Jones seated himself outside the door and became absorbed in the pages of a city directory.
For over an hour Pa remained in the den. Then, hoping the way was clear, he unlocked the door and opened it cautiously.
“Oh—er—Mr. Kayton,” Will Jones stammered, “I’d like—to—er—speak with you.”
Pa opened the door wide and came out with a scowl on his face.
“Well, what?” firmly from Pa.
“Well, I want your consent to marry Jessie.”
Pa’s countenance changed quickly. “I thought you was another wantin’ to borrow a couple of thousand,” he said.
Then they both laughed and shook hands, and Pa said, “Oh, it’s Jessie is it?”
Will Jones said, “It was,” and they both laughed again, and Pa recalled the time when he asked Mamma’s “old man” for her. “A sour-headed, savage old beggar he was too”—and they both laughed more.
Just then Jessie came along, smiling and blushing, and joined them.
“Here,” Pa said, giving each of them an arm, “come into the garden till I talk to the two of y’ and give y’ some good advice.”
Nothing else happened till the end of the year. Then Jessie’s wedding came off. And what a wedding! It took place in St. John’s, where the chiming of the bells could be heard all over the City. All the best people in Brisbane were invited to it, and they attended in crowds. Hundreds who were not invited crowded it, too. Hundreds more, who couldn’t get in, stayed outside. Moo and Pearle and Mabel and Bella were the bridesmaids, and pretty bridesmaids they were— at least, they reckoned so themselves. John would have been best man, but Moo objected to him.
“Doesn’t Will know a friend of his own?” she suggested to Jessie, “who could act? Some nice young fellow who the bridesmaids could have a bit of fun with?”
That was why Tommy Nightt, a jocose, pleasant, plump and curly-headed journalist, was best man.
Jessie made a pretty bride, and she was as good as she was pretty; and when Pa led her forward to give her away, all the single girls craned and strained to catch a good look at her, and some of them whispered that “her father had given her five thousand pounds.” All the single men sat back and sighed.
When the ceremony was over and the party leaving the church, Mr. Calliope posted himself across the street. With one arm around the verandah post, he watched Will Jones and Jessie enter their car and whirl away.
Then he sighed and went back to his chamber.
Next morning, the newspapers printed a long account of the Jones-Kayton wedding, and in another column in large letters was “Death of a well-known Barrister.” But it wasn’t Mr. Calliope. It was a friend of his.
But the wedding breakfast provided at Darabolpal was a magnificent and costly spread. Pa forgot all about his losses, and in Jessie’s interests spared nothing. The great dining room, festooned and draped with flags and ferns and flowers; the tables laden with the best that money could purchase, looked more like a show exhibit than anything else. And talk of city waitresses! They were almost as numerous as the guests. But when the champagne started to flow! Law! You’d wonder where it all came from; where it was all going to, though, you could have no possible doubt. Then the speeches! We never knew till then that good speakers could talk so long and so fast without thinking! Judge Juggems made a great oration, and every time he jerked his head and said Pa “was a man,” and “a sport,” and a “citizen amongst citizens,” Pa called, “Hear! hear!” louder than anyone else. And when Pa, in turn, rose to stutter a few words the old Judge called “three cheers” for him. Pa joined in the cheers. But when it came to Will Jones’ turn, that was the time! Everyone hurriedly emptied their glasses so as to be able to rattle them. Will stood up and smiled and changed his weight from one leg to the other (he had two legs), and coughed, and said, “It gives me pleasure—” Then he paused and coughed more. Glasses rattled again, and Lawrence and the mayor and some more called “Hear! hear!” Then Will told them he wasn’t a speaker, but his friend Tommy Nightt, who was waiting to respond for the bridesmaids, was some talker. (Violent applause, all the glasses charged again, and “The bridesmaids! the bridesmaids!”)
Mr. Nightt, the rosy, rubicund, stubby, curly, black haired best man, rose. Fondling his coat tails with both hands, he shoved out his waistcoat, smiled and nodded half right and left. Moo and Mabel, seated on his right, and Bella and Pearle, on his left, all raised their eyes and stole sly, covetous glances at him. “This is the first time in my social vicissitudes,” he began, and the mayor called out “Your what?” “my social vicissitudes,” he replied— “that I have found myself reduced to the embarassing and—what shall I say—unpleasant necessity of attempting to pay no less than four charming, blushing young bridesmaids (hear! hear! ) pretty compliments at the same time. (Great applause, during which Moo and Bella and Pearle sat erect and looked their very best.) I most assuredly hope and confidently prognosticate (hear! hear! ) and I’m sure the young ladies on each side of me will themselves agree, that the blushing bridesmaids of to-day will be the happy brides of to-morrow. (Gallant applause from the seats and squeals of merriment from the ladies). As an object bound journalist, I know (my aching brain never allows me to forget the fact) that our country’s knottiest question to-day is (“Marriage!” Judge Juggems interrupted, and all the others laughed.) The Judge, I am sure, means “naughtiest.” (Violent applause.) No, our knottiest, not our naughtiest question to-day is: What shall we do with our girls? (“You pop the question to one of the bridesmaids,” the mayor shouted, “and she’ll settle it for you.”) And settle me too, ha! ha!” And Mr. Nightt winked and smiled, and nodding half right and left, sat down again.
Then Moo nudged him with her elbow and told him he spoke beautifully.
“No!” and Mr. Nightt turned his curly head and smiled upon her, and showed all his white teeth.
“Yes!” Moo insisted, “but you did.”
Then the guests began to leave the table, and holding out his arm, Mr. Nightt said:
“Come into the garden, Moo.”
And that was the end of Jessie’s wedding.
Kayton & Kayton v. The “Peddler” Newspaper
The “Peddler,” a weekly publication, with an overweaning predilection for scoffing at society, devoted some space in its columns to us one week. If there were any people who hadn’t heard of us before, they all knew about us now.
“Who are these Kaytons?” it sneered. “Does anyone particularly wish to know? Then we can enlighten them! They are the crowd whom Lambert Fordyce had so many tickets on—flash bullock punchers and brigalow bounders from the West. They bounded off the backs of fat mobs, acquired in a manner peculiar to the Bush, and some years ago landed in this city with sand in their hair, chewing grass-tree gum, and flourishing more bank notes than brains. Old Dad Kayton himself might have been a tolerant enough old bullock puncher and wild pig sticker when at home among the saltbush Bills, but posing as royalty or a rajah in the City—ma conscience! As to his multitudinous young daughters—oh, ma heavens! Especially the eldest, who delights to flirt with the little boys, and answers to the bovine appellation of ‘Moo,’ the ‘Peddler’ thinks it is high time she published her age. One member of its staff is prepared to make oath and say that ‘Moo,’ the giddy little huzzy, will never see fifty-eight again. Ten years ago he had the misfortune to be employed by bullock puncher Kayton for eight weeks (eight weeks too long, he reckoned), and the flirtations he saw little ‘Moo’ engage in—oh, dear children run away!—every old, mad-eyed, sad-eyed, badeyed, bewhiskered, opium-sodden sundowner who struck the Station ‘Moo’ pursued with her cupid’s darts. Poor old bumble-footed beggars! They were compelled, in sheer desperation, to forget their poverty and their palsy and fly—positively fly to escape her.”
One after another we read that “Peddler,” then stared in astonishment at each other. We stared hardest, though, at Moo, but, one glance at her relieved our feelings. She was pale as death. Her eyes were rolling, her teeth chattering, and her chin seemed to be dropping right off.
William and John broke into mirth. Pa, who had turned away in a rage and was brewing like a storm, jumped round and bounded right at them.
“D— you,” he bellowed. “Is it a laughing matter? Is—is taking away my character—an’— an’ her character,” pointing dramatically to Moo, “a laughing matter?”
William and John hung their heads in silence.
“It’s defamation of character.”
“Oh, well, we didn’t look at it like that,” John mumbled, apologetically.
“Well, it is, and by—,” throwing the offending print fiercely on the floor, “I’ll make them pay for it, and with every shilling they have, in a court of law.”
Then he started walking up and down the hall, punching the atmosphere with both fists and railing at the “Peddler.”
Moo suddenly became herself again.
“I’ll horsewhip them,” she squealed, and snatching up the paper, rushed away to her room.
“It’s pretty strong all right,” William admitted.
“It’s wicked,” Jessie gasped, the tears running from her eyes.
“Dreadful!” And Mamma clasped her two hands together and shook her head sadly.
“Bullock punchers and wild pig stickers!” John repeated. “Cripes! Eh!”
“I’ll give them bullock punchin’ and wild pig pinchin’.” And off Pa went to his den.
Then Pearle and Mabel and Bella, who had been silent all the while, started tittering.
“Fancy poor old Moo,” Pearle said, “running after those old sundowners that used to come to Emuwood.”
“But fancy them running away from her,” Bella tittered, and they broke into peals of mirth.
Pa, with hat on and an umbrella in his hand, re-appeared.
“You’ve a lot to giggle at, haven’t you,” he said.
They all scattered, and like scared rats, fled to different parts of the home.
* * * * * *
A month later.
A brilliant morning, scented with the breath of spring. Business folk pouring into the City from tramcars, trains, motor cars and any old conveyance capable of being propelled on wheels. Some wearing kid gloves and top coats. Some with gay flowers in their buttonhole. Some carrying leather bags and walking sticks. Some carrying their lunch, wrapped in paper. Some hampered with nothing but the latest fashion and airs of wonderful importance.
Here and there, professional shoeblacks, surrounded by country clients, vigorously expended elbow grease at threepence a shine. Newsboys, at crowded corners, shoved their wares into the hands of everyone who passed, and brazenly shouted stock perjuries commending their contents. Shopkeepers looked out from doors and windows of their establishment and rubbed their hands in anticipation of early custom. Down Big George Street, where the law courts stand, an activity peculiar to that end of the City, was in progress. The criminal sittings would soon open. The libel action, Kayton and Kayton v. the “Peddler” newspaper was to be heard, and everyone seemed to know that Pa and Moo were claiming ten thousand pounds damages. A miscellaneous collection of humanity had already assembled before the iron gates; a posse of police arrayed in white gloves, white helmets, glossy uniforms and large footwear that shone like new sixpences, marched through the crowd into the court grounds. A juvenile wag, hidden from view behind the broad back of a fish merchant, whistled an air for the police to march to. They marched to it and grinned. The sergeant in charge glanced round in search of the “band.” The broad-backed fish merchant, becoming alarmed, remembered the first law of nature, and turning on the youthful wag, aimed a heavy kick at him.
The “band” side-stepped, guffawed at his assailant, and put the miscellaneous assembly in good humour.
“Gentlemen of the jury” began to arrive, some with summonses in hand, some out of breath, some out of temper. They passed through the gates and collected in small groups before the court door, and sympathised with each other, and hoped they wouldn’t have the misfortune to be empanelled on any of the cases.
Mr. Justice Barkum, who was to take the sittings, sauntered along, accompanied by his associate. A big, silent-looking person was Mr. Justice Barkum, with large eyes, and off the bench, a large heart. He passed through the miscellaneous gathering and groups of staring jurymen with calm indifference, and entered his chambers by a private way.
A stream of bewigged barristers—barristers carrying briefs, barristers without briefs; solicitors, prospective solicitors, solicitors’ clerks, clients, witnesses, typewriters, etc., flowed through the gate and hurried into the Court building. And last, but not least, an indescribable galaxy of unemployed—time-killers, sensation-mongers, and products of profligate resorts, hurried to an angle of the building, where a narrow, wooden, dusty, corkscrew staircase wound its way up to the strangers’ gallery. Few of them, however, could claim to be strangers. They were as familiar with the galleries of those Law Courts as were the swarm of swallows, sparrows and pigeons who, during vocational periods and dies non fouled every corner and cranny of them.
Inside, the Court Room rapidly filled. Soon there was an atmosphere of suppressed animation and a “nervy” silence amounting to awe. At one end of the bar table sat Pa and Moo, the latter dressed in loud striking colours and an abundance of jewellery, beside their solicitors, Messrs. Punch and Pilott. The latter consulted briefly together, then sat up and looked clever and penetrating. Beside them their counsel, Mr. Calliope, in a brand new wig and gown, and a starched immaculate collar of startling dimensions. Only a great black and white artist could convey anything approaching a correct idea of the look of paramount importance that shone in the eyes of Mr. Calliope as he looked round and surveyed the spectators. His professional pose afforded a beautiful and fascinating study.
At the opposite end of the table the defendants, with their solicitors, Messrs. Lucky and Lippy, and counsel, Mr. Bouncim, sat together. A striking young barrister was Mr. Bouncim—brilliant at the university—great orator—and the coming man. He had a head of black hair, black eyes and moustache to match. Boyish in appearance; cheeky, precocious, confident. Mr. Bouncim and Mr. Calliope nodded a nod of professional courtesy with all the gravity becoming “learned” antagonists. Then Mr. Bouncim took up a book, opened it, held it up before him, glanced over the edge of it at the crowded court, much in the same manner and motive that a theatrical manager peeps through a hole in the curtain to survey a full house.
Having attracted every eye and put himself fairly in the limelight, Mr. Bouncim leaned back over his chair, yawned at the ceiling as if to say “Hang it! I wish they would make a start and let me into this.”
An irregular line of pressmen in single file— some tall as lamp posts, others scarcely high enough to reach a glass on a counter—all of them with a morning paper protruding from their coat pockets, trooped in, forced their way silently to the front and dropped into a row of cane-bottomed chairs reserved for them behind a long, low, inkstained desk, by a considerate government. Looking round and catching the eye of the “Peddler” representative, Mr. Bouncim winked. Interpreting the wink to mean “You’ll get some good copy directly,” the “Peddler” representative smiled and proceeded to sharpen his pencil.
A few seconds more and the green baize curtains, draping the dais and imparting an increased atmosphere of awe and mystery, were suddenly swept aside, revealing Mr. Justice Barkum in his robes and the sheriff in his white gloves. Counsel and solicitors and sundry officials immediately rose to their feet. The tip-staff striking an attitude of sudden and alarming importance beside the untenanted witness box, lifted his voice to an astoundingly high pitch and called “Silence!” The court sergeant, standing to attention beside the door and looking over the heads of everyone else, solemnly echoed “Silence.”
Then Mr. Justice Barkum took his seat, drew his robes about him, wrapped a heavy rug round his knees and feet and bowed to the Bar. The Bar bowed back to him. Satisfied His Honour was safely anchored, the sheriff nervously took a seat beside him and looked anxiously around to see if the jurymen were about, and if the chief bailiff, whose duty it was to round them up, was in his place beneath the Bench. At the moment that officer, however, was not in his place. He was engaged in a whispered conversation with the associate, a well-set, pugilistic looking gentleman, dressed like an undertaker.
“Well,” His Honour commenced, speaking in a husky, hollow voice, “what are we waiting for?” Everyone looked at everyone else and wondered.
“Is there no one present to call the names of the jury? Where is the sheriff? I presume there is a sheriff?” And he glared at everyone in court, except that official himself, who sat trembling beside him.
Taking out a large white handkerchief Mr. Justice Barkum applied it to his nose in a way that sounded a warning of the explosion that might follow if business wasn’t speeded up. The unhappy sheriff, aware that every eye was now concentrated upon him, would have given all the prospects he had in this world and in the next for the power to faint right off and be carried away and given a stimulant. In his confusion he leaned over and helplessly endeavoured to convey a whispered instruction to the chief bailiff. But that official, having heard from the associate all that was necessary to hear, was rushing out of court muttering imprecations as he went upon the heads of the clerical staff downstairs. He was closely followed by the tipstaff and the sergeant. They followed, because their long experience of judges had taught them that in such moments it was always more comfortable and congenial to be outside the court than in. Turning to His Honour, the associate explained sotto voce that owing to an oversight the jury cards and panel had been forgotten. “But,” he went on, “the chief bailiff has gone—”
He got no further.
“My associate informs me,” Mr. Justice Barkum exploded, addressing the Bar, “that the jury cards and panel have not been delivered to the Court. I don’t know who is to blame, someone must be, but the Court is delayed and the costs of the sittings are being piled up. It’s disgraceful. Such a delay is scandalous, and someone must be held responsible. An attorney-general holds office—or should, and I suppose there is a sheriff? I don’t know!”
Once again all eyes, excepting those of the press, who had their heads lowered and were writing rapidly, and the judge himself, were turned to the wretched sheriff. That humiliated officer, after striving in vain to appear unconcerned and virtuous, clutched the desk before him for support, and trembled visibly.
“I will wait one more minute,” Mr. Justice Barkum stormed on, “if the cards and panels are not here then I shall have the person responsible brought before me.”
Sensation!
Pa leaned across the table and asked Messrs. Punch and Pilott what was wrong.
“No cards,” Messrs. Punch and Pilott whispered back, leaving Pa as wise as he was before.
The sheriff couldn’t suffer it any longer. He struggled to his feet.
“Will—will your Honour allow me to-to—“ he stammered.
“Oh, it’s all right, Mr. Sheriff, it’s all right,” and Mr. Justice Barkum turned and bestowed a benevolent smile upon him—“sit down, sheriff, sit down.” And down in his chair the sheriff flopped, like a fritter into a frying pan, feeling, nevertheless, that everything was miserably all wrong. Taking out his handkerchief he tried to hide his flushed and disconsolate features beneath a transparent pretence of having a cold in the head.
“Of course,” and smiling at the Bar, Mr. Justice Barkum broke into one of his short, broken laughs, a form of mirth which at no time could be depended upon with any degree of reliability as a sample of geniality—“the Court knows that the sheriff in person does not comprise the whole of his department,” to which charitable concession the Bar bowed its quaint acquiescence.
Mr. Justice Barkum coughed into his handkerchief, then took out his watch and compared it with the Court clock hanging in full view of him above the entrance door. Placing the watch before him on the desk, he glanced back at the official clock and scowled. There upon the sacred timepiece was perched one of the many pigeons that infested the building—an innocent spectator of the solemn proceedings.
“Well, I don’t know,” bellowed Mr. Justice Barkum, “whether another flood is anticipated and the Court room is to be turned into a Noah’s Ark, but at all events a bird is occupying a berth on the clock.”
All eyes instantly turned to the clock. A broad smile overspread every face in Court when the feathered intruder was located. One occupant of the strangers’ gallery, more intrepid than the others, reached for the offender. Startled, the bird took to wing and circled twice round the room before finding an open window through which to make its exit. The broad grin on those present relaxed into murmurs and manifestations of inward merriment. The sheriff fumbled and called “Silence,” Mr. Justice Barkum leaned forward, locked his two hands together and glared round with life sentences in his eye.
“I have the power,” he burst out, “to deal with anyone who treats this Court with disrespect. It is only out of consideration for the gaol authorities, who, I am sure, could not on short notice accommodate all of you, that I refrain from exercising those powers. I hope it will be taken as a warning that I shall not permit the dignity of the Court, so long as I occupy a seat upon the Bench, to be treated with contempt.”
Solemnity and awe were immediately restored.
But Moo, who had been tickled most by the presence of the pigeon, gave vent to a parting titter. Mr. Justice Barkum observed her.
“Notwithstanding my warning,” he added, “there is a lady in Court who apparently regards it as a laughing matter, well—” breaking into another scrap of unreliable mirth—“of course, if she prefers to view it that way, well—well and good.” Messrs. Punch and Pilott became alarmed. Their interests were in jeopardy.
“Heavens, Miss Kayton,” they whispered, “don’t get the Judge angry.”
Moo sunk into bewilderment and with lowered head looked the embodiment of misery.
Mr. Bouncim, ever on the alert for an advantage, looked up quickly, and said, “We are pleased your Honour noticed the incident. There are such things as studied insults directed to this Court.”
“Dirt Bouncim, dirt!” Mr. Calliope hissed across the table, and Mr. Bouncim retorted, “You’re eminently qualified to express an opinion upon dirt, Calliope.”
Messrs. Lucky and Lippy smiled triumphantly upon Messrs Punch and Pilott.
“I hear you, Mr. Bouncim,” Mr. Justice Barkum said, after thinking hard, “but I don’t see you.” Then all in Court joined Mr. Calliope and Messrs. Punch and Pilott in a broad smile,
Here the chief bailiff, in possession of the jury cards and panel, closely attended by the tip-staff and the sergeant, returned hurriedly, and the situation was saved.
“Well, perhaps we can get on now,” said Mr. Justice Barkum, opening his notebook, and pressing it down hard and flat. “The Court’s time has all been wasted for nothing.”
Then the associate commanded the jurymen to answer their names as he called them.
Forty-six out of forty-seven answered sullenly; one, John Smith, a poultry fancier, failed to respond.
“Where is John Smith?” enquired Mr. Justice Barkum, angrily.
All those who didn’t know John Smith from a Bolshevik looked round to see where he was. The sheriff experienced another cold shiver, and once more wished for the power to faint. The chief bailiff called “John Smith,” then rushed out of Court, and when the door closed behind him and he was in the corridor with only Constable Dooley and a number of female witnesses within hearing, cursed John Smith up hill and down dale, then calling his name again returned into Court.
Constable Dooley, patrolling the corridor and feeling cold, continued calling “John Smith” for exercise. He called until a nerve-racked, grey-bearded old boozer, a witness for the Crown in Rex v. Dawkin , rose from the form on which he had been moulting for fully an hour and said he was John Smith.
“Ye arr?” blustered the astonished constable. Securing a tight grip of the man’s withered shoulder, “and pwhat the devil are you doing out here when ye’re wanted in there! Come on!” And running him to the door, held him till the chief bailiff came out to identify him.
“He’s not a juryman, he’s a witness. It’s John Smith, of Cat Street, we want,” And once more the worried bailiff went back empty handed.
“Ye’re not a juryman?” And Constable Dooley regarded the wreck with a look of contempt, that only a disappointed policeman could execute impromptu.
“No, hi’m a witness.”
“Then pwhat the devil did you mane by tellin’ me you were John Smith?”
“Because Hi am John Smith, that’s why.”
“Thin how many d— John Smiths must there be at all?” and locking his hands behind his back, Constable Dooley renewed patrol duty in the corridor.
“Very well,” said Mr. Justice Barkum, “Juror John Smith is fined three guineas,” and dipping his pen into ink recorded the fine in his notebook.
The sheriff likewise made an entry of the circumstance in his diary, and the chief bailiff noted the fact in his official return, vindictively adding in pencil, “Serve him d— well right.” Constable Dooley opened the door just wide enough to insert his head and inquired in an Irishman’s whisper from the sergeant, “Pwhat was done with John Smith?” and when told the Judge “had fined him three guineas,” regretted that he “didn’t make it tin.” Twelve humble, unimposing looking jurymen having been sworn in “to well and truly try and true deliverance make between our Sovereign Lord the King, according to the evidence,” the associate announced “Kayton and Kayton v. the ‘Peddler’ newspaper, and the fun proceeded.
“I appear for the plaintiff in consolidation, your Honour,” Mr. Calliope said.
“Oh, in consolidation,” Mr. Justice Barkum repeated, writing it down, “very well—yes.”
“And I appear for the defendants, your Honour,” said Mr. Bouncim, and having paused till the Judge scribbled it down, added, “and my clients plead justification and in the public good.”
“Justification and in the public good,” repeated Mr. Justice Barkum.
Then Mr. Calliope rose to state the case for the plaintiffs. Having adjusted his gown, settled his wig firmly on his head, giving the impression that he was about to face a rising gale, forced his chair back several inches with his leg, cleared his throat, he said: “May it please your Honour. Gentlemen of the Jury (Pa and Moo immediately shifted in their seats, held their heads sideways and gazed at the great barrister with eyes beaming with the light of unshakable confidence and admiration. Mr. Justice Barkum used his handkerchief noisily, then leaned back in his chair and removed his glasses). This is an action brought by my clients against the defendants for slander and libel, and the damages are laid at ten thousand pounds.” (“Not much when you say it quickly,” interrupted Mr. Bouncim.) “I am obliged to my learned friend for reminding me at this early stage of my address that the amount we claim is not much. No, gentlemen of the jury, ten thousand pounds is not much to ask the defendants to pay for the injury inflicted upon my clients. The plaintiffs’ modesty—their benignity—their sense of humility and human sympathy—even in a time of such mental agony as I shall show—in a time of persecution, gentlemen of the jury—a time when they were victimised—when they were singled out for this venomous and unprovoked attack by the defendants in this scurrulous publication, the ‘Peddler,’—their modesty, I repeat, gentlemen of the jury, their modesty and forgiving disposition forbids them to make it an occasion for displaying mercenary or grasping instincts. If that were not the case, and no one knows that it is better than my learned friend, or better than yourselves, gentlemen of the jury—then instead of ten thousand paltry pounds my clients would be claiming damages for thrice such an amount!”
“They would get it, too,” Mr. Bouncim interrupted, with a toss of his head.
“My learned friend says ‘they would get it, too,’ gentlemen of the jury, and I ask you to make a mental note of his admission and to remember it when you are considering your verdict. But, gentlemen of the jury, it is not money my clients came here to ask for, it is not money—it is justice. They ask you, as fair minded, intelligent men, to say on the straight out, unimpeachable evidence which I shall call, that the defendants—these people who come here to this Court as men—these fiends in human form—these gutter journalists—are criminals! That every line, every word, every suggestion, every innuendo, every insinuation printed in this rag (holding up a copy of the ‘Peddler,’ and shaking it as a dog would a rat) about my client is a lie—a cruel lie!”
Mr. Calliope paused for breath. Messrs. Punch and Pilott squeezed his hand and whispered, “Excellent, excellent.” Mr. Justice Barkum threw back his head and sneezed three times in succession.
Having read the article complained of word for word, Mr. Calliope continued:
“Now, gentlemen of the jury, that is the gravamen of this action, and I ask you to put yourselves and your daughters in the position of my clients—and the picture I ask you, as intellectual, imaginative men to paint upon the canvas of your minds shall be proved real by living witnesses of the highest integrity and repute in that box (pointing with quivering finger at the empty witness box). In that box, gentlemen—imagine yourselves and your daughters, I repeat, as pioneers of the Bush, away back thirty years ago, on a lonely station in the never never lands (at mention of thirty years ago Moo suddenly lowered her eyes) fighting your way, single-handed, against bush fires, droughts, depredations of wild blacks, lawlessness of cattle duffers and horse thieves, the lack of labour, year in and year out, scarcely ever seeing human soul but yourselves, never afforded a holiday to civilised places, your overdraft mounting higher and higher year after year, and then one day, after all those (dropping his voice to a melancholy whisper) one day, gentlemen of the jury, one day after all those weary anxious years of toil, of hardship, self-denial, Job-like patience, there came a tide in your human affairs, and taking it on the turn, like the wise men you are, you sold out and made a fortune and came to the City to enjoy it (suddenly lifting his voice like a crack of thunder) what would you think? How would you feel? How would your faithful, loving young daughters feel if, on waking up one morning, you found—they found—all this printed about you and about them in a newspaper with a circulation reaching from one end of the land to the other?”
In low, injured tones, Mr. Calliope read the article all over again, then, placing a foot on his chair, tossing his gown back with theatrical effect, resting an elbow on his elevated knee, planting his chin in the palm of his hand, leaning slightly forward, eyeing the jury like a snake mesmerising its breakfast, added: “How would you feel?” And his voice thrilled like the crooning of a lost soul in the wilderness.
One of the jury suddenly reached for pen and paper and commenced scribbling a note to his wife, telling her that so far as he could see he was likely to be kept where he was for at least a year, and not to expect him home for tea. His fellow jurors all stared wonderingly at him. The sheriff, remembering that one of his duties was to order a hot lunch in good time from the hotel adjacent, for the jury, tore a sheet of foolscap in two, with a rip that sounded like the song of a circular saw. Mr. Justice Barkum turned in his chair and roared: “Will you stop that noise?”
The sheriff stopped it.
“You would feel, gentlemen of the jury,” Mr. Calliope proceeded, “just how my clients felt— just how any innocent victims must feel—you would feel so outraged that on the impulse you would thirst for the blood of your slanderers. But on calmer reflection you would realise, as they realised, gentlemen, that here in this temple of justice —here, before a learned judge of this honourable Court and before a conscientious, intelligent, high-minded jury, as you yourselves are, was the proper place—the only place, gentlemen, for you to seek justice, to vindicate your character, to appeal for heavy damages—for full damages against those who reviled your good name and held you up to public scorn and ridicule. And that is why my clients have come here to this honourable court. ‘He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who takes from me my good name—’
Mr. Calliope’s memory living failed him for the balance of the quotation, Mr. Bouncim interjected “takes the breeks of a Hieland man.”
Mr. Justice Barkum, struggling with an inclination to doze, suddenly looked up and laughed a rumbling, hollow laugh. The spectators followed his cheerful example.
“Silence!” yelled the tip-staff. “Silence!” echoed the sergeant.
“And now, gentlemen of the jury,” continued Mr. Calliope, “I shall put witnesses of the highest repute and integrity in that box who will tell you on oath—on oath, gentlemen, don’t forget that— that every word printed in this contemptible article is a tissue of falsehood—that there is not a scintilla of truth in it—not a scintilla of truth! And when I have done that, gentlemen of the jury, I shall, with the utmost confidence in your loyalty and intelligence and your high sense of justice, and love of duty to your country and fellowmen and yourselves, leave the fate, the future, the honour, the hope, and all that is dear in life, to my clients, in your hands—when I have done that there my duty will end, and there, gentlemen of the jury, yours will commence.”
Flushing and perspiring, Mr. Calliope sat down and Messrs. Punch and Pilott nodded their admiration of his magnificent effort.
When he had gazed momentarily round the Court room in search of the effect of his eloquence, Mr. Calliope, with tremendous confidence rose again, and said he would now put the plaintiff, Mr. John K. Kayton, in the box.
The bald-headed tip-staff, all the while waiting patiently for his turn to show his bit of authority, now struck a mighty attitude beside the box, and with a frayed, soiled volume in his hand, waited imposingly for Pa to come forward. But Pa was not in any hurry. It took him some time to realise that it was he who was really wanted, and not until Messrs. Punch and Pilott nudged him, and counsel nodded meaningly to him, and the tipstaff shouted “John K. Kayton,” and the sergeant echoed “John K. Kayton,” and the sheriff stared, and Mr. Justice Barkum scowled, did Pa slowly extricate his long legs from under the Bar table and clumsily get a move on.
Wonderful it was, how interested the audience became all at once, in Pa. Though he had been sitting at the table since the Court had opened, you would think they had only just discovered him. Even Mr. Justice Barkum put on his glasses and stared, as though trying to look into Pa and out the other side of him.
“Take the book in your right hand,” the tipstaff commanded, meeting the witness’s bewildered gaze with a countenance in comparison with which the door of a gaol was a cheerful thing.
Pa put out his hand and received the volume in much the same spirit that he might have taken a noose to put round his neck.
Then in a high-pitched, sing-song, pies-all hot sort of voice the tip-staff rattled off, as he had been used to rattling off many hundred times before, throughout a faithful service of thirty years:
“The—evidence—which—you—in—this—case— will—give—will—be—er—er—er—er—er—help you God—kiss the book—sit down.”
Pa remained standing until Mr. Justice Barkum roared “Sit down, witness,” then he dropped into a chair which took up most of the space in that miserable little box, leaving no place for his long legs. But doubling them up, he sat facing the Court with his bent knees showing over the “parapet.”
Then in a soft, polite, encouraging tone Mr. Calliope asked his name and occupation.
“John Kayton, retired squatter,” Pa answered.
“Tired squatter, or retired squatter?” His Honour, gazing over his glasses, queried.
“Yes sir,” Pa answered confidently.
Mr. Bouncim and Messrs. Lucky and Lippy sniggered.
Mr. Justice Barkum put down his pen abruptly and frowned.
“Retired or tired?” he bellowed.
A look of confusion spread over Pa’s face.
“‘Retired squatter,’ your Honour, the witness said,” Mr. Calliope put in, coming to his client’s assistance.
“Well, I didn’t hear him,” snorted Mr. Justice Barkum. “I am here to write down the witness’s evidence, Mr. Calliope. I can’t do it if he doesn’t express himself audibly and intelligibly.”
“He doesn’t seem to be able to do either,” from counsel for defendants.
“Mr. Bouncim is making himself ridiculous,” Mr. Calliope snapped.
“And Mr. Calliope is making himself offensive,” said Mr Bouncim.
“My learned friend is a bully at the Bar,” retorted Mr. Calliope.
“And you,” flung back Mr. Bouncim, “you are a blackleg at the turf.”
Laughter from the floor of the Court, and “Silence,” from the sergeant.
“If it is Counsel’s desire to make the case spin out as long as possible,” interposed the learned judge, “well and good, I suppose it’s all right. No doubt the clients on either side are people of substance.”
“If your Honour implies that I on my part am deliberately prolonging the case,” protested Mr. Bouncim, hotly, “then with all due respect, I resent the insinuation as quite uncalled for.”
Commotion!
All eyes turned to the youthful barrister, then to the Bench.
“You are a spoilt boy, Mr. Bouncim,” blustered Mr. Justice Barkum, “and if you persist”— coughing into his handkerchief— “if you persist in the attitude you are adopting I shall know how to deal with you.”
Sensation!
“But I submit, your Honour—“
“Sit down,” interrupted Mr. Justice Barkum, with a mighty roar.
“With all due respect to your Honour—“
“Sit down, sir,” in a mightier roar from Mr. Justice Barkum.
Tremendous excitement!
“I refuse to be silenced,” shouted Mr. Bouncim, defiantly, “I have a duty to perform in this Court as well as your Honour.”
A pin could have been heard to drop.
“I said, Mr. Bouncim,” and the learned judge struggled visibly with his emotion, “that if you persist I shall deal with you.”
“Yes, I heard your Honour say as much.”
“Will you sit down, Mr. Bouncim?” Mr. Justice Barkum struck the desk violently with his fist, and dislodged the ink bottle, which emptied itself on the rich carpet.
Mr. Bouncim sat down. The sheriff rose up and with rare presence of mind, tremblingly placed his own ink bottle before his Honour.
His Honour jabbed his pen hard and angrily into it, and rolling the whites of his eyes at everyone in court, finally rested them upon the counsel for the plaintiff, and said:
“Yes, Mr. Calliope?” and the storm was over.
“Now, Mr. Kayton,” the latter proceeded, “tell the Court in your own words what your feelings were when you read this article in the ‘Peddler.’”
“Well,” Pa said, thoughtfully, “I got into a devil of a pelt about it.” (Laughter.)
“Silence,” from the tip-staff. “Silence!”
“What was that, witness?” And Mr. Justice Barkum frowned on Pa.
“I got into a devil of a pelt, your Worship.” Down went Mr. Justice Barkum’s pen again.
“You can’t introduce devils here,” he said.
“They are specially reserved for newspapers, your Honour,” and Mr. Calliope glanced insinuatingly at the defendants, then smiled triumphantly at the jury.
Sniggers and titters from the gallery, and some more “Silence” from the sergeant.
“Well, you got into a pelt,” and Mr. Justice Barkum, amending Pa’s answer to his own satisfaction, wrote it down.
“Why did you get into a pelt, Mr. Kayton?”
“Because I took it to mean,” Pa answered, “that I was a cattle stealer and got me money dishonest.”
Messrs. Punch and Pilott nodded their heads and smiled approval. It was the answer they had instructed Pa to give, and up to now had been experiencing much mental anxiety lest he, in his excitement, might fumble it.
A few more questions and Mr. Calliope sat down and Mr. Bouncim rose up. The latter, in loud, aggressive yells, calculated to fill Pa with terror and confusion, reminded him that he was on his oath.
Then he endeavoured, in ways known to the profession, to tie Pa in a knot and compel him to make a liar of himself. But Pa had been warned by Messrs. Punch and Pilott just what to expect, and being ready sat tight and stuck to his story.
Then Mr. Bouncim sat down, and Pa having finished, returned to the table.
Moo entered the box. The spectators and court officials stared at her when she kissed the book and took her seat, as though she were a much injured young lady suing someone for breach of promise, or a notorious beauty seeking divorce from a rich husband.
“Your name and occupation, Miss Kayton?” Mr. Calliope commenced, in soft, patronising tones.
“Moorabinda Kayton,” Moo said, then paused, and faltered and thought hard.
“Moorabinda Kayton,” Mr. Justice Barkum repeated. Then, lifting his pen and eyes: “how do you spell ‘Moorabinda?’”
“Spell it?” and Moo smiled and tugged at her glove. “same as anyone else, I suppose.”
Mr. Calliope and Messrs. Punch and Pilott were staggered; Mr. Bouncim delighted, and the gallery excited.
“If you don’t answer questions put to you in the right way,” said Mr. Justice Barkum, sternly, “I shall find a way of making you.”
Moo lowered her eyes and dragged harder at her glove.
“Lest the witness may not have understood,” Mr. Justice Barkum added, addressing the Bar, “I shall put the question again.”
“How do you spell that name ‘Moorabinda?’ You know what I mean by ‘spell’ I suppose?” Tremendous suspense!
“I’m never called ‘Moorabinda,’” Moo snapped. “I always get ‘Moo.’”
“Being a cattle person,” Mr. Bouncim interjected, “she bears a bovine appellation, your Honour.”
“That’s an asinine observation my friend has made,” Mr. Calliope retorted.
Giggles from the gallery and the same old “Silence” from the sergeant.
“Very well,” the learned judge concluded, “the witness doesn’t know how to spell her own name,” and lowering his eyes to his note book, spelt it his own way.
Continuing the examination, Mr. Calliope drew from Moo that the article in the “Peddler” made her ill for fully a month; that Pa never branded or sold a single hoof that was not his own; that she never made love to any sundowners at Emuwood; that she would not have flirted with one of them for hundreds of pounds, and any suggestion that she did, or that she ever thought of such a frivolous thing was a lie.
Then Mr. Calliope resumed his seat, and Mr. Bouncim rose again. Adjusting his gown and massive collar, and striking a pedantic pose with one foot planted on his chair, he commenced to cross-examine the witness.
“How old do you say you are, Miss Kayton?” he asked.
“I didn’t say how old I was at all,” and Moo curled her lip and turned red.
“Just so. When young ladies are well over the fifties they don’t care to mention their age, do they?”
Moo shot a fierce glance at Mr. Bouncim, but remained silent. The Court smiled. The solemn tipstaff caught the eye of the chief bailiff and winked.
A half-blind man in the gallery was about to smile, but the sergeant called “Silence!”
“You are considerably over fifty, are you not?” And Mr. Bouncim returned to the attack.
No reply.
“Well, can you tell the Court when you were born?” loudly from Mr. Bouncim.
“No, I can’t,” louder from Moo. “I don’t remember being born.
The spectators beamed with joy, and Mr. Justice Barkum smiled and coughed into his lace handkerchief.
“Is it so long ago as all that?” And taking his foot from the chair, Mr. Bouncim faced the witness with his hands locked behind his back.
“Find out!” and leaning over the box, Moo grimaced defiantly at him.
Laughter in the gallery and a terrible “Silence ’’ from the sergeant.
“Well, what is your age?”
No answer.
“You must answer Counsel’s questions,” sternly from Mr. Justice Barkum.
“Well, if he wants to know so badly,” Moo snapped, “I’m only just fifty.”
Fresh beams of joy on the faces of the spectators.
“Only just fifty,” Mr. Justice Barkum repeated appreciatively, as he scrawled it down.
“Rather a tender age, your Honour,” Mr. Bouncim suggested cheerfully.
A loud burst of mirth in the gallery, and “Silence! Silence!” accompanied by threatening looks, from the sergeant.
“When on your father’s station, Miss Kayton, you were on the wrong side of forty, were you not?” continued Mr. Bouncim.
“Well, what if I was,” and Moo’s eyes flashed fire.
“When a girl is on the wrong side of forty, her chances of marrying are greatly diminished, isn’t that so?”
“They might be if everyone was like you,” and Moo scowled at the learned Counsel.
“Never mind about me, I’m not on the matrimonial market.”
Sniggers from the court officials, all of whom regarded Mr. Bouncim as a marvel.
“And just as well,” Moo told him, “it wouldn’t take many like you to glut it.”
Great mirth.
“You were fishing for it, Mr. Bouncim,” Mr. Justice Barkum chuckled hoarsely, “and you got it.”
“I recognise the witness is a good match, your Honour,” and amidst smiles and gestures of admiration from court officials, Mr. Bouncim placcd his foot on the chair again, and resting his elbow on his knee, continued—
“Now, tell us, Miss Kayton, when those sundowners used to strike your father’s station, didn’t you think it would be better to be loved even by them than never to be loved at all?”
“Oh, don’t talk nonsense,” and Moo cast indifferent glances at the ceiling.
“Love affairs are mostly nonsense, and I ask you again when these old sundowners—”
“Perhaps you’ve had experience of love affairs, but I haven’t.”
“Oh!” And Mr. Bouncim glanced round at the grinning spectators.
Moo sighed.
“Then you swear on oath,” yelled the learned counsel, shaking his brief at her as though it were a red rag he was waving at a bull—“on your oath now, that you never ran after any of these sundowners?”
“What need would I have to run after old cripples who could hardly walk?” And Moo smiled.
“Don’t smile at me,” shouted Mr. Bouncim, shrugging his shoulders theatrically, “I’m not one of them.”
“No, but you’re something like them.”
Loud guffaws in the gallery, and “Silence” from the sergeant.
“That will do,” Mr. Bouncim said, and Moo stepped down and returned to her place at the table, where Messrs. Punch and Pilott shook her warmly by the hand.
Then Mr. Bouncim addressed the jury, and when he sat down, Mr. Justice Barkum summed up.
“That is the position of affairs, gentlemen,” the learned judge concluded, “and if you believe the evidence put before you, and I see no earthly reason to doubt it, you will find for the plaintiffs. On the other hand, if you disbelieve the evidence, well, then, you will return a verdict for the defendants. That is the position of affairs, gentlemen, and you will now retire to consider your verdict.”
But the jury didn’t retire—they found for the plaintiffs right where they sat, with one farthing damages, and Pa and Moo didn’t know whether to look pleased or disappointed about it.
Somehow, Pa didn’t benefit much by experience. Before he knew where he was he had invested a lot more of his money in a newspaper venture. A wonderful venture it was, too, so the promoters reckoned! It was to be the beacon light of social and industrial life, and the mouthpiece of a party that would sweep the polls at the coming general election. Then the rag’s columns were to be stuffed with government advertisements, and the directors, of whom Pa was one, were all to be made members of the Upper House. Yes, it was to be a wonderful paper. But, of course, it wasn’t. That was all that was wrong with it. It was an inglorious failure. It couldn’t be anything else. Those who believed most in it said it was just the sort of paper the people had been looking for for twenty years and more, gave all their patronage and support to the same old established prints in which they said they never believed. And so once again Pa fell in.
Before another year passed, a syndicate, composed of influential people, sold Pa, for another big lump of his money, a small interest in an oil well that didn’t contain any oil; and before he could quite realize what had happened he was wrecked financially. So were we!
Pa’s bankers, who hitherto never missed an opportunity of shaking him warmly by the hand, now started writing cold, formal notes to remind him that his account was overdrawn, and asking him to pay up. Wonderful how cold the institution became when it found Pa had lost his money. John reckoned it couldn’t have been Pa at all that the manager had been friendly with—it must have been his quids!
“It’s all right, Margaret”—Pa told Mamma, when she became inquisitive—“There’s nothing much the matter; lost a few pounds in a speculation, that’s all.”
But when he raised money on the Emuwood leasehold, and the rumour got about that he was “stiff as a crutch, and right on the rocks,” Mrs. Bates, the washerwoman, came an hour earlier one morning and sympathised with Mamma, and offered to take a shilling a day less for her labour if it would help us over our difficulties.
“My God!” Mamma gasped, and fainted flop on the wash-house floor.
Next day, Pa himself broke up.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” he groaned, “it’s haunting me!” And between fits of vain, useless blubbering and vows of violent vengeance on “the dogs who swindled him,” took us all into his miserable confidence.
We got the shock of our lives. The girls were staggered, and in their consternation sat biting their lips and staring blankly at each other like a meeting of lost souls out where the dead men lie.
“Surely you haven’t lost every blooming bean?” John stammered.
“There’s nothing but the roof over our heads!” Pa groaned. Then sinking to a chair, covered his face with his big hands and gazed in silence at the carpet.
“Well, you’re all right!” And William shook his head reproachfully at him.
“I was mad, mad!” and the big form of Pa swayed helplessly from side to side.
“Ah well, it’s done now and can’t be helped!” Mamma, who had recovered from her dose of the day before, sighed—“We must make the best of it, that’s all.”
“Well, my best is a fight with Wilson for the championship!” And rising suddenly, John put on his hat and hurried to the City.
Disregarding John, the rest of us sat on, pondering, brooding, and concealing our thoughts in a flood of sorrow and disappointment.
* * * * * *
Scarcely had we realized our ruin when we found ourselves looked down on and shunned by those who had partaken most of our hospitality, shared in our prosperity, and encouraged us in our extravagance. In less than a month we were relegated to the social scrap heap; where we became the butt for the derision and senseless jests of snobs and hypocrites, and objects of pity of the sane, sober section of the community. Not one of our “friends” now had any time for us. You’d think we had contracted smallpox, or were just let out of gaol. Even the tin-pot tradespeople would stand on the back steps holding out their hands for payment before delivering their baskets of shoddy goods!
Great jumping kangaroos!—Talk about Christians!—We reckoned it was time to have another flood and to build another Ark—an improvement on the one Noah captained—one with a big hole in the bottom of it!
“The rubbishing lot!” the girls foamed—“while we had plenty of money they couldn’t be kept away with sticks. Now they think we’re nothing but dirt!”
But when the servants and the gardener and Johnson, the chauffeur, were paid off, and the car and sundry other items auctioned, and we decided to take our meals in the kitchen, law! Didn’t the tongues of the best people wag! Our misfortune was the joy of their hearts—the delight of their lives.
“They’re all right!” William said, disgustedly, “all right if y’ like!”
“Let ’em rip,” John grinned confidently, “if I get well backed and knock Wilson out, it’ll be our turn again, then.”
But none save John himself saw the slightest hope of retrieving our broken fortune per medium of the prize ring. Even William shook his head and smiled impotently upon John. While as for Pa, a gold mine or a coal mine or an oil well, or a newspaper, might just as well have been mentioned as a prize-fight!
A few months passed.
Moo and Bella and Mabel and Pearle used to spend a lot of their time in the wash-house sitting amongst baskets of dirty clothes, gloomily discussing the situation.
“It’s a devil of a come down!” Moo said one day, “but I’m not going out to work in this rotten place.”
“What could we do if we went out?” despondently from Mabel.
“Yes, what could we do?” the others echoed.
“We could do as well in a bank or behind a counter as some of those university cats with their B.A.’s and their M.A.’s” Moo answered savagely— “but before I’d go into a rotten old bank I’d sooner go out and live amongst the prickly pear!”
“Have a good mind to give lessons on the piano!” And Mabel started thrumming the bottom of an iron tub for practice.
“Well, I’m half sorry that I didn’t have old Carrington when he gave me the chance.” And Pearle pulled a long, doleful face.
In a flash the gloom was lifted from the faces of her sisters.
“What?” they chorused, “did he propose?”
“But he was over eighty!” And Pearle’s countenance lengthened more.
“What if he was?” Moo asked solemnly, while the others screamed joyously.
“Hang me if I wouldn’t have had him!” And Moo hit herself on the knee and stared in surprise at Pearle.
“Why would you, Moo?” seriously from Pearle.
“Well, one thing, you would have had no worries to face now!”
“No worries to face?” Mabel squealed, “wouldn’t she have to face that weezie, wrinkled old thing?”
“She would have to spoon-feed him,” Bella yelled, “and dress him every morning and—”
“And undress him every night,” Mabel joined in, with a shriek.
“Shut up!” And Pearle rose to her feet, “I’m sorry I told you about him now.”
“Don’t take any notice of those two,” Moo snapped, and rising and facing Pearle, continued: “But he wouldn’t have lived for ever, you silly!”
“Wouldn’t he?” Bella screamed, “with a young wife like Pearle he would never have had a notion of dying.”
“She’s only seventeen!” And Mabel threw herself into Bella’s lap and threatened to go into hysterics at the expense of Pearle.
The mirth was interrupted by the unexpected appearance of John.
“I’m off!” he shouted, excitedly.
The girls stared.
“Off to America to try me luck. All exes. paid and a big cut out of the prize money.”
But his sisters remained silent. Somehow they would rather John had made up his mind to join William and go West again to see what could be done there towards making another start.
“I’ve won seven fights in succession,” John went on, “and there’s no one in Australia will give me a match now.”
Then he went into the house and revealed his program to Pa, and showed him a copy of the Referee containing a picture of himself, and a flattering account of his boxing career. Pa shoved the paper away, and blustered:
“D— your fighting!”
* * * * * *
Three months later.
John, along with his backer and trainer, steamed for America, and on the same day another letter came from Auntie Montague, addressed to Mamma.
“Yes, read it out,” the girls said in answer to Mamma, “and let us hear the worst.”
“‘Dear Alice”—Mamma read— “I made up my mind never to write a word to any of you again as long as I lived; but hearing that the lot of yous has come down in the world all at once— though you never wrote and told us about it yourselves,—I ain’t going to have it said about any of my family that we look down on yous on that account. Thank God we haven’t any dirty pride in our family. Yous were all far too big for your boots, an’ that’s the plain truth, though I’m sorry to be the first one to have to say it. But yous can’t deny it, Alice, not one of yous, and now for it yous have all been visited with rightyus punishment. In the Good Book all of us were told to fergive our enemies and them who hate us. And seeing yous haven’t now got a penny to bless yerselves with we fergive yous with all our hearts an souls for what you did—but can’t ever ferget it! But leaving all that alone for the present—we was thinkin’ last night that your girls would be going out to earn their living at washing or something since none of them only Jessie was able to get husbands, and be all accounts he ain’t much, and as we have been doin’ pretty well lately though not flash and stuck up about it, we could be able to give one of them a position as servant if the wages would suit— 7/6 a week it would be and her keep. But she would have no chaps comin’ to see her. Mary Ella thinks Moo would be the best to come as there wouldn’t likely be any men running after her, so if—”
“It would be to wring her d— neck, and Mary Ella’s too, if I did go!” and, white with passion, Moo left the kitchen.
“Don’t read any more of it, Mamma, don’t,” Bella pleaded.
“Burn it!” Mabel cried.
“She’s a nasty old hypocrite!” Pearle reckoned.
“She’s a Jazabel!” Pa roared, “a d— Jazabel!” And taking the letter from Mamma tore it into fragments and stamped on them with his big feet.
* * * * * *
Meantime, the newspapers kept us posted in John’s movements; and one evening a cable came from him, advising Pa to back him against Wilson, the coloured champion, for all he could afford. It didn’t say how he was to get the money to back him with.
Pa thrust the cable from him and said nothing. But William, just returned from the West with disheartening reports of the condition of the country, and little hopes of our making another start there, told the girls that he would put ten thousand pounds on John if he had it, and started them thinking hard. “John’s all right,” he assured them—“my oath, he’s all right.”
They gathered in the wash-house and thought seriously about it nearly the whole of one day. Then they decided to pool what jewellery they had and give it all to William to melt at the pawnbrokers, and back John with.
“You’re all right,” William grinned, and packing the valuables in a handbag, went off to execute the commission.
Then for weeks the girls couldn’t settle themselves to do a hand’s turn. They did nothing but mope about, thinking and cracking their fingers.
Pa, one day, unknown to us all, took the deeds of Darabolpal to the bank and raised all the money he could on them. Then he went to the leading bookmaker, and putting his fate, and our fate, to the touch, recklessly decided to “win or lose it all!”
The intervening days were filled with misery and anxiety for Pa. Every night he lay awake tossing and thinking, till John’s approaching fight became filmed on his mind and round after round reeled off before him, and John always floored and counted out!
At last the fatal morning broke—the morning when the cabled account of the contest would be published broadcast. Early and all as Pa rose, the girls were out before him and secured the newspapers.
“Kayton wins in five rounds,” they shrieked, when their eyes rested on the startling headlines and rushed into the house.
William, appearing in his pyjamas, became excited.
“He’s all right,” he cried, slapping himself on the thigh, “cripes, he’s all right!”
“Pa! Mamma!” Moo squealed, “John won!”
Pa staggered to a couch for support.
“And we won a thousand,” Bella shouted.
“And I won—twenty-five—thousand!” Pa choked.
“What!” incredibly from all of us.
“Twenty-five thousand,” Pa repeated, “raised the money on the house.”
The girls hugged each other in the wildest joy.
“Cripes, you’re all right, you are,” and William clapped Pa proudly on the shoulder.
“Now we’ll be able to talk to our ‘beautiful’ friends,” and Bella and Mabel and Pearle started a dance of triumph.
“No more of them sort of friends for me;” Pa said, “from this out we Kaytons go alone.”
* * * * * *
Six months later we all returned to the West, and made old Emuwood our home again.