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Australia Felix

H >> Henry Handel Richardson (1870 1946) >> Australia Felix




In the meantime, why complain? He had much to be thankful for. To take
only a small point: was this not Saturday night? To-morrow the store was
closed, and a string of congenial occupations offered: from chopping the
week's wood--a clean and wholesome task, which he gladly performed--
through the pages of an engrossing book to a botanical ramble round old
Buninyong. The thought of it cheered him. He stooped to caress his two
cats, which had come out to bear him the mute and pleasant company of
their kind.

What a night! The great round silver moon floated serenely through
space, dimming the stars as it made them, and bathing the earth in
splendour. It was so light that straight black lines of smoke could be
seen mounting from chimneys and open-air fires. The grass-trees which
supplied the fuel for these fires spread a pleasant balsamic odour, and
the live red patches contrasted oddly with the pale ardour of the moon.
Lights twinkled over all the township, but were brightest in Main
Street, the course of which they followed like a rope of fireflies, and
at the Government Camp on the steep western slope, where no doubt, as
young Purdy had impudently averred, the officials still sat over the
dinner-table. It was very quiet--no grog-shops or saloons-of-entertainment
in this neighbourhood, thank goodness!--and the hour was
still too early for drunken roisterers to come reeling home. The only
sound to be heard was that of a man's voice singing OFT IN THE STILLY
NIGHT, to the yetching accompaniment of a concertina. Mahony hummed the
tune.

But it was growing cold, as the nights were apt to do on this tableland
once summer was past. He whistled his dog, and Pompey hurried out with a
guilty air from the back of the house, where the old shaft stood that
served to hold refuse. Mahony put him on the chain, and was just about
to turn in when two figures rounded the corner of a tent and came
towards him, pushing their shadows before them on the milk-white ground.

"'D evenin', doc," said the shorter of the two, a nuggetty little man
who carried his arms curved out from his sides, gorilla-fashion.

"Oh, good evening, Mr. Ocock," said Mahony, recognising a neighbour.--
"Why, Tom, that you? Back already, my boy?"--this to a loutish,
loose-limbed lad who followed behind.--"You don't of course come from the
meeting?"

"Not me, indeed!" gave back his visitor with gall, and turned his head
to spit the juice from a plug. "I've got suthin' better to do as to
listen to a pack o' jabberin' furriners settin' one another by th'ears."

"Nor you, Tom?" Mahony asked the lad, who stood sheepishly shifting his
weight from one leg to the other.

"Nay, nor 'im eether," jumped in his father, before he could speak.
"I'll 'ave none o' my boys playin' the fool up there. And that reminds
me, doc, young Smith'll git 'imself inter the devil of a mess one o'
these days, if you don't look after 'im a bit better'n you do. I 'eard
'im spoutin' away as I come past--usin' language about the Gover'ment
fit to turn you sick."

Mahony coughed. "He's but young yet," he said drily. "After all, youth's
youth, sir, and comes but once in a lifetime. And you can't make lads
into wiseacres between sundown and sunrise."

"No, by Gawd, you can't!" affirmed his companion. "But I think youth's
just a fine name for a sort o' piggish mess What's the good, one 'ud
like to know, of gettin' old, and learnin' wisdom, and knowin' the good
from the bad, when ev'ry lousy young fathead that's born inter the world
starts out again to muddle through it for 'imself, in 'is own way. And
that things 'as got to go on like this, just the same, for ever and ever
--why, it makes me fair tired to think of it. My father didn't 'old with
youth: 'e knocked it out of us by thrashin', just like lyin' and
thievin'. And it's the best way, too.--Wot's that you say?" he flounced
round on the unoffending Tom. "Nothin'? You was only snifflin', was you?
You keep your fly-trap shut, my fine fellow, and make no mousy sounds to
me, or it'll be the worse for you, I can tell you!"

"Come, Mr. Ocock, don't be too hard on the boy."

"Not be 'ard on 'im? When I've got the nasty galoon on me 'ands again
like this?--Chucks up the good post I git 'im in Kilmore, without with
your leave or by your leave. Too lonely for 'is lordship it was. Missed
the sound o' wimmin's petticoats, 'e did." He turned fiercely on his
son. "'Ere, don't you stand starin' there! You get 'ome, and fix up for
the night. Now then, wot are you dawdlin' for, pig-'ead?"

The boy slunk away. When he had disappeared, his father again took up
the challenge of Mahony's silent disapproval. "I can't 'ardly bear the
sight of 'im, doc.--disgracin' me as 'e 'as done. 'Im a father, and not
eighteen till June! A son o' mine, who can't see a wench with 'er bodice
open, but wot 'e must be arter 'er.... No, sir, no son o' mine! I'm a
respectable man, I am!"

"Of course, of course."

"Oh! but they're a sore trial to me, these boys, doc. 'Enry's the only
one . . . if it weren't for 'Enry--Johnny, 'e can't pass the drink, and
now 'ere's this young swine started to nose arter the wimmin."

"There's good stuff in the lads, I'm sure of it. They're just sowing
their wild oats."

"They'll sow no h'oats with me."

"I tell you what it is, Mr. Ocock, you need a woman about your place, to
make it a bit more homelike," said Mahony, calling to mind the pigstye
in which Ocock and his sons housed.

"Course I do!" agreed Ocock. "And Melia, she'll come out to 'er daddy
soon as ever th'ol' woman kicks the bucket.--Drat 'er! It's 'er I've
got to thank for all the mischief."

"Well, well!" said Mahony, and rising knocked out his pipe on the log.
Did his old neighbour once get launched on the subject of his wife's
failings, there was no stopping him. "We all have our crosses."

"That I 'ave. And I'm keepin' you outer your bed, doc., with me blather.
--By gum! and that reminds me I come 'ere special to see you to-night.
Bin gettin' a bit moonstruck, I reckon,"--and he clapped on his hat.

Drawing a sheaf of papers from an inner pocket, he selected one and
offered it to Mahony. Mahony led the way indoors, and lighting a
kerosene-lamp stooped to decipher the letter.

For some weeks now he had been awaiting the delivery of a load of goods,
the invoice for which had long since reached him. From this
communication, carried by hand, he learnt that the drayman, having got
bogged just beyond Bacchus's marsh, had decamped to the Ovens, taking
with him all he could cram into a spring-cart, and disposing of the
remainder for what he could get. The agent in Melbourne refused to be
held responsible for the loss, and threatened to prosecute, if payment
for the goods were not immediately forthcoming. Mahony, who here heard
the first of the affair, was highly indignant at the tone of the letter;
and before he had read to the end resolved to let everything else slide,
and to leave for Melbourne early next morning.

Ocock backed him up in this decision, and with the aid of a great quill
pen stiffly traced the address of his eldest son, who practised as a
solicitor in the capital.

"Go you straight to 'Enry, doc. 'Enry'll see you through."

Brushing aside his dreams of a peaceful Sabbath Mahony made preparations
for his journey. Waking his assistant, he gave the man--a stupid
clodhopper, but honest and attached--instructions how to manage during
his absence, then sent him to the township to order horses. Himself, he
put on his hat and went out to look for Purdy.

His search led him through all the drunken revelry of a Saturday night.
And it was close on twelve before, having followed the trace from
bowling-alley to Chinese cook-shop, from the "Adelphi" to Mother
Flannigan's and haunts still less reputable, he finally succeeded in
catching his bird.




Chapter IV

The two young men took to the road betimes: it still wanted some minutes
to six on the new clock in the tower of Bath's Hotel, when they threw
their legs over their saddles and rode down the steep slope by the Camp
Reserve. The hoofs of the horses pounded the plank bridge that spanned
the Yarrowee, and striking loose stones, and smacking and sucking in the
mud, made a rude clatter in the Sunday quiet.

Having followed for a few hundred yards the wide, rut-riddled
thoroughfare of Main Street, the riders branched off to cross rising
ground. They proceeded in single file and at a footpace, for the highway
had been honeycombed and rendered unsafe; it also ascended steadily.
Just before they entered the bush, which was alive with the rich, strong
whistling of magpies, Purdy halted to look back and wave his hat in
farewell. Mahony also half-turned in the saddle. There it lay--the
scattered, yet congested, unlovely wood and canvas settlement that was
Ballarat. At this distance, and from this height, it resembled nothing
so much as a collection of child's bricks, tossed out at random over the
ground, the low, square huts and cabins that composed it being all of a
shape and size. Some threads of smoke began to mount towards the immense
pale dome of the sky. The sun was catching here the panes of a window,
there the tin that encased a primitive chimney.

They rode on, leaving the warmth of the early sun-rays for the cold blue
shadows of the bush. Neither broke the silence. Mahony's day had not
come to an end with the finding of Purdy. Barely stretched on his
palliasse he had been routed out to attend to Long Jim, who had missed
his footing and pitched into a shaft. The poor old tipsy idiot hauled up
--luckily for him it was a dry, shallow hole--there was a broken
collar-bone to set. Mahony had installed him in his own bed, and had
spent the remainder of the night dozing in a chair.

So now he was heavy-eyed, uncommunicative. As they climbed the shoulder
and came to the rich, black soil that surrounded the ancient cone of
Warrenheip, he mused on his personal relation to the place he had just
left. And not for the first time he asked himself: what am I doing here?
When he was absent from Ballarat, and could dispassionately consider the
life he led there, he was so struck by the incongruity of the thing
that, like the beldame in the nursery-tale, he could have pinched
himself to see whether he waked or slept. Had anyone told him, three
years previously, that the day was coming when he would weigh out soap
and sugar, and hand them over a counter in exchange for money, he would
have held the prophet ripe for Bedlam. Yet here he was, a full-blown
tradesman, and as greedy of gain as any tallow-chandler. Extraordinary,
aye, and distressing, too, the ease with which the human organism
adapted itself; it was just a case of the green caterpillar on the green
leaf. Well, he could console himself with the knowledge that his
apparent submission was only an affair of the surface. He had struck no
roots; and it would mean as little to his half-dozen acquaintances on
Ballarat when he silently vanished from their midst, as it would to him
if he never saw one of them again. Or the country either--and he let
his eye roam unlovingly over the wild, sad-coloured landscape, with its
skimpy, sad-coloured trees.

Meanwhile they were advancing: their nags' hoofs, beating in unison,
devoured mile after mile of the road. It was a typical colonial road; it
went up hill and down dale, turned aside for no obstacles. At one time
it ran down a gully that was almost a ravine, to mount straight up the
opposite side among boulders that reached to the belly-bands. At others,
it led through a reedy swamp, or a stony watercourse; or it became a
bog; or dived through a creek. Where the ground was flat and treeless,
it was a rutty, well-worn track between two seas of pale, scant grass.

More than once, complaining of a mouth like sawdust, Purdy alighted and
limped across the verandah of a house-of-accommodation; but they did not
actually draw rein till, towards midday, they reached a knot of
weatherboard verandahed stores, smithies and public-houses, arranged at
the four Corners of two cross-roads. Here they made a substantial
luncheon; and the odour of fried onions carried far and wide. Mahony
paid his three shillings for a bottle of ale; but Purdy washed down the
steak with cup after cup of richly sugared tea.

In the early afternoon they set off again, revived and refreshed. Purdy
caught at a bunch of aromatic leaves and burst into a song; and Mahony.
. . . Good God! With a cloudless sky overhead, a decent bit of
horseflesh between his knees, and the prospect of a three days' holiday
from storekeeping, his name would not have been what it was if he had
for long remained captious, downhearted. Insufficient sleep, and an
empty stomach--nothing on earth besides! A fig for his black thoughts!
The fact of his being obliged to spend a few years in the colony would,
in the end, profit him, by widening his experience of the world and his
fellow-men. It was possible to lead a sober, Godfearing life, no matter
in what rude corner of the globe you were pitchforked.--And in this
mood he was even willing to grant the landscape a certain charm. Since
leaving Ballan the road had dipped up and down a succession of swelling
rises, grass-grown and untimbered. From the top of these ridges the view
was a far one: you looked straight across undulating waves of country
and intervening forest-land, to where, on the horizon, a long, low
sprawling range of hills lay blue--cobalt-blue, and painted in with a
sure brush--against the porcelain-blue of the sky. What did the washed-out
tints of the foliage matter, when, wherever you turned, you could
count on getting these marvellous soft distances, on always finding a
range of blue-veiled hills, lovely and intangible as a dream?

There was not much traffic to the diggings on a Sunday. And having come
to a level bit of ground, the riders followed a joint impulse and broke
into a canter. As they began to climb again they fell naturally into one
of those familiar talks, full of allusion and reminiscence, that are
only possible between two of a sex who have lived through part of their
green days together.

It began by Purdy referring to the satisfactory fashion in which he had
disposed of his tools, his stretcher-bed, and other effects: he was not
travelling to Melbourne empty-handed.

Mahony rallied him. "You were always a good one at striking a bargain,
my boy! What about: 'Four mivvies for an alley!'--eh, Dickybird?"

This related to their earliest meeting, and was a standing joke between
them. Mahony could recall the incident as clearly as though it had
happened yesterday: how the sturdy little apple-cheeked English boy,
with the comical English accent, had suddenly bobbed up at his side on
the way home from school, and in that laughable sing-song of his,
without modulation or emphasis, had offered to "swop" him, as above.

Purdy laughed and paid him back in kind. "Yes, and the funk you were in
for fear Spiny Tatlow 'ud see us, and peach to the rest!"

"Yes. What young idiots boys are!"

In thought he added: "And what snobs!" For the breach of convention--he
was an upper-form boy at the time--had not been his sole reason for
wishing to shake off his junior. Behind him, Mahony, when he reached
home, closed the door of one of the largest houses in the most exclusive
square in Dublin. Whereas Purdy lived in a small, common house in a side
street. Visits there had to be paid surreptitiously.

All the same these were frequent--and for the best of reasons. Mahony
could still see Purdy's plump, red-cheeked English mother, who was as
jolly and happy as her boy, hugging the loaf to her bosom while she cut
round after round of bread and butter and jam, for two cormorant
throats. And the elder boy, long-limbed and lank, all wrist and ankle,
had invariably been the hungrier of the two; for, on the glossy damask
of the big house, often not enough food was set to satisfy the growing
appetites of himself and his sisters.--"Dickybird, can't you see us,
with our backs to the wall, in that little yard of yours, trying who
could take the biggest bite?--or going round the outside: 'Crust first,
and though you burst, By the bones of Davy Jones!' till only a little
island of jam was left?"

Purdy laughed heartily at these and other incidents fished up by his
friend from the well of the years; but he did not take part in the sport
himself. He had not Mahony's gift for recalling detail: to him past was
past. He only became alive and eager when the talk turned, as it soon
did, on his immediate prospects.

This time, to his astonishment, Mahony had had no trouble in persuading
Purdy to quit the diggings. In addition, here was the boy now declaring
openly that what he needed, and must have, was a fixed and steadily
paying job. With this decision Mahony was in warm agreement, and
promised all the help that lay in his power.

But Purdy was not done; he hummed and hawed and fidgeted; he took off
his hat and looked inside it; he wiped his forehead and the nape of his
neck.

Mahony knew the symptoms. "Come, Dickybird. Spit it out, my boy!"

"Yes . . . er. . . . Well, the fact is, Dick, I begin to think it's time
I settled down."

Mahony gave a whistle. "Whew! A lady in the case?"

"That's the chat. Just oblige yours truly by takin' a squint at this,
will you?"

He handed his friend a squarely-folded sheet of thinnest blue paper,
with a large purple stamp in one corner, and a red seal on the back.
Opening it Mahony discovered three crossed pages, written in a
delicately pointed, minute, Italian hand.

He read the letter to the end, deliberately, and with a growing sense of
relief: composition, expression and penmanship, all met with his
approval. "This is the writing of a person of some refinement, my son."

"Well, er . . . yes," said Purdy. He seemed about to add a further word,
then swallowed it, and went on: "Though, somehow or other, Till's
different to herself, on paper. But she's the best of girls, Dick. Not
one o' your ethereal, die-away, bread-and-butter misses. There's
something OF Till there is, and she's always on for a lark. I never met
such girls for larks as her and 'er sister. The very last time I was
there, they took and hung up . . . me and some other fellers had been
stoppin' up a bit late the night before, and kickin' up a bit of a
shindy, and what did those girls do? They got the barman to come into my
room while I was asleep, and hang a bucket o' water to one of the beams
over the bed. Then I'm blamed if they didn't tie a string from it to my
big toe! I gives a kick, down comes the bucket and half drowns me.--
Gosh, how those girls did laugh!"

"H'm!" said Mahony dubiously; while Purdy in his turn chewed the cud of
a pleasant memory.--"Well, I for my part should be glad to see you
married and settled, with a good wife always beside you."

"That's just the rub," said Purdy, and vigorously scratched his head.

"Till's a first-class girl as a sweetheart and all that; but when I come
to think of puttin' my head in the noose, from now till doomsday--why
then, somehow, I can't bring myself to pop the question."

"There's going to be no trifling with the girl's feelings, I hope, sir?"

"Bosh! But I say, Dick, I wish you'd turn your peepers on 'er and tell
me what you make of 'er. She's AI 'erself, but she's got a mother. . . .
By Job, Dick, if I thought Tilly 'ud ever get like that . . . and
they're exactly the same build, too."

It would certainly be well for him to inspect Purdy's flame, thought
Mahony. Especially since the anecdote told did not bear out the good
impression left by the letter--went far, indeed, to efface it. Still,
he was loath to extend his absence by spending a night at Geelong,
where, a, it came out, the lady lived; and he replied evasively that it
must depend on the speed with which he could put through his business in
Melbourne.

Purdy was silent for a time. Then, with a side-glance at his companion,
he volunteered: "I say, Dick, I know some one who'd suit you."

"The deuce you do!" said Mahony, and burst out laughing. "Miss Tilly's
sister, no doubt?"

"No, no--not her. Jinn's all right, but she's not your sort. But
they've got a girl living with 'em--a sort o' poor relation, or
something--and she's a horse of quite another colour.--I say, old man,
serious now, have you never thought o' gettin' spliced?"

Again Mahony laughed. At his companion's words there descended to him,
once more, from some shadowy distance, some pure height, the rose-tinted
vision of the wife-to-be which haunts every man's youth. And, in
ludicrous juxtaposition, he saw the women, the only women he had
encountered since coming to the colony: the hardworking, careworn wives
of diggers; the harridans, sluts and prostitutes who made up the
balance.

He declined to be drawn. "Is it old Moll Flannigan or one of her
darlints you'd be wishing me luck to, ye spalpeen?"

"Man, don't I say I've FOUND the wife for you?" Purdy was not jesting,
and did not join in the fresh salvo of laughter with which Mahony
greeted his words. "Oh, blow it, Dick, you're too fastidious--too
damned particular! Say what you like, there's good in all of 'em--even
in old Mother Flannigan 'erself--and 'specially when she's got a drop
inside 'er. Fuddle old Moll a bit, and she'd give you the very shift off
her back.--Don't I thank the Lord, that's all, I'm not built like you!
Why, the woman isn't born I can't get on with. All's fish that comes to
my net.--Oh, to be young, Dick, and to love the girls! To see their
little waists, and their shoulders, and the dimples in their cheeks! See
'em put up their hands to their bonnets, and how their little feet peep
out when the wind blows their petticoats against their legs!" and Purdy
rose in his stirrups and stretched himself, in an excess of wellbeing.

"You young reprobate!"

"Bah!--you! You've got water in your veins."

"Nothing of the sort! Set me among decent women and there's no company I
enjoy more," declared Mahony.

"Fish-blood, fish-blood!--Dick, it's my belief you were born old."

Mahony was still young enough to be nettled by doubts cast on his
vitality. Purdy laughed in his sleeve. Aloud he said: "Well, look here,
old man, I'll lay you a wager. I bet you you're not game, when you see
that tulip I've been tellin' you about, to take her in your arms and
kiss her. A fiver on it!"

"Done!" cried Mahony. "And I'll have it in one note, if you please!"

"Bravo!" cried Purdy. "Bravo, Dick!" And having gained his end, and
being on a good piece of road between post-and-rail fences, he set spurs
to his horse and cantered off, singing as he went:

SHE WHEELS A WHEELBARROW,
THROUGH STREETS WIDE AND NARROW,
CRYING COCKLES, AND MUSSELS,
ALIVE, ALIVE-OH!

But the sun was growing large in the western sky; on the ground to the
left, their failing shadows slanted out lengthwise; those cast by the
horses' bodies were mounted on high spindle-legs. The two men ceased
their trifling, and nudged by the fall of day began to ride at a more
business-like pace, pushing forward through the deep basin of Bacchus's
marsh, and on for miles over wide, treeless plains, to where the road
was joined by the main highway from the north, coming down from Mount
Alexander and the Bendigo. Another hour, and from a gentle eminence the
buildings of Melbourne were visible, the mastheads of the many vessels
riding at anchor in Hobson's Bay. Here, too, the briny scent of the sea,
carrying up over grassy flats, met their nostrils, and set Mahony
hungrily sniffing. The brief twilight came and went, and it was already
night when they urged their weary beasts over the Moonee ponds, a
winding chain of brackish waterholes. The horses shambled along the
broad, hilly tracks of North Melbourne; warily picked their steps
through the city itself. Dingy oil-lamps, set here and there at the
corners of roads so broad that you could hardly see across them, shed
but a meagre light, and the further the riders advanced, the more
difficult became their passage: the streets, in process of laying, were
heaped with stones and intersected by trenches. Finally, dismounting,
they thrust their arms through their bridles, and laboriously covered
the last half-mile of the journey on foot. Having lodged the horses at a
livery-stable, they repaired to a hotel in Little Collins Street. Here
Purdy knew the proprietor, and they were fortunate enough to secure a
small room for the use of themselves alone.




Chapter V

Melbourne is built on two hills and the valley that lies between.

It was over a year since Mahony or Purdy had been last in the capital,
and next morning, on stepping out of the "Adam and Eve," they walked up
the eastern slope to look about them. From the summit of the hill their
view stretched to the waters of the Bay, and its forest of masts. The
nearer foreground was made up of mud flats, through which a sluggish,
coffee-coloured river wound its way to the sea. On the horizon to the
north, the Dandenong Ranges rose storm-blue and distinct, and seemed
momently to be drawing nearer; for a cold wind was blowing, which
promised rain. The friends caught their glimpses of the landscape
between dense clouds of white dust, which blotted everything out for
minutes at a time, and filled eyes, nose, ears with a gritty powder.

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