Such is Life

J >> Joseph Furphy >> Such is Life

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There was not half enough time to pull the bark ashore and sink the wire,
so I did the next best thing I could. As the log approached, I carefully rose
to my feet, and held the wire high enough to clear the root. Nearer it came;
it would pass the bark nicely within three or four feet; a few seconds more,
and the root would glide underneath the wire----

Pup had remained yelping and dancing on the bank for a few minutes
after my embarkation--the kangaroo dog having a charcoal burner's antipathy
to the bath--but at last becoming desperate, he had plunged in, and was
rapidly approaching whilst I judiciously gauged the height of the root,
and meanwhile balanced the unsteady bark under my feet. When the root was
within six inches of the wire, Pup's chin and forepaws were on the gunwale;
in three seconds more, I was clinging with one hand to the root, the other
still mechanically holding the tightening wire; Pup was making for the log;
and the splitters' bark had gone to Davy Jones's locker.
In another half-minute, the wire parted, and Pup and I were deck passengers,
ong root for the land of the Crow-eaters.

I was no more disconcerted than I am at the present moment. I would
go on to B----'s as if nothing had happened; and put up with the inconvenience
of swimming the river in the morning. In the meantime, though I was
well splashed, all the things in my pockets were dry. I particularly
congratulated myself on the good fortune of having been so close to the root
at the Royal Georgeing of my bark. My bark--well, strictly speaking,
it was the splitters' bark; but accidents will happen; and I was certain
that not a soul had seen me turn off the main road toward the river.

My clothes were of the lightest. I took them off, and tied them
in my handkerchief. I pounded a depression in the package to fit the top
of my head, and bound it there with my elastic belt, holding the latter
in my teeth. You must often have noticed that the chief difficulty
of swimming with your clothes on your head arises from the fore-and-aft
surging of the package with each stroke. But nothing could have been
more complete than my arrangements as I slid gently into the water,
and paddled for the Cabbage Garden shore.

When I had gone a few yards, my faithful companion, now left alone on the log,
raised his voice in lamentation, after the manner of his subspecies.

"Come on, Pup!" I shouted, without looking round; and the next moment
I felt as if a big kangaroo dog had catapulted himself through twenty feet
of space, and lit on my package.

After returning to the surface and coughing about a pint of water
out of my nose and ears, I looked uneasily round for my cargo. It was nowhere
to be seen. I swam back to the log, and stood on it to get a better view.
Good! there was the white, rounded top, an inch above the water,
ten yards away. As I swam toward it, a whirlpool took it under.
I dived after it, struck it smartly with the crown of my head; and eventually
returned to the log, whence I watched for its re-appearance above
the slowly-swirling water. It never re-appeared.

Following the sinuosities of the river, this must have been a mile and a half
below the splitters' crossing-place; and time had been passing, for there was
the setting sun, blazing through a gap in the timber, and its mirrored
reflection stretching half a mile of dazzling radiance along a straight reach
of the river.

Now, though the Murray is the most crooked river on earth, its general tendency
is directly from east to west. Would n't you, therefore--if you were on
a floating log, remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow; standing, like
the Apollo Sauroctones, with your hand on the adjacent stump, and,
to enhance your resemblance to that fine antique, clad in simplicity
of mien and nothing else--if you were sadly realising the loss of your best
clothes, with all the things in the pockets, including a fairly trustworthy
watch--if, in addition to this, the patient face of the spratless swagman
was rising before you till you involuntarily muttered "O Julius Caesar!
thou art mighty yet!" and the nasty part of your moral nature was
reminding you that you might have had anything up to four-pounds-odd worth
of heavenly debentures; whereas, having failed to put your mammon
of unrighteousness into celestial scrip, to await you at the end
of your pilgrimage, you were now doubly debarred from retaining it
in your pilgrim's scrip, by reason of having neither scrip nor mammon--under
such circumstances, I say, would n't you be very likely to take the sunset
on your left, and swim for the north bank, without doing an equation
in algebra to find out which way the river ought to run? That is what I did.
It never occurred to my mind that Victoria could be on the north side
of New South Wales.

After shouting myself hoarse, and whistling on my fingers till my lips
were paralysed, I brought Pup into view on the south, and supposedly Victorian,
bank, opposite where I had landed. By the time I had induced him to take
the water and rejoin me, the short twilight was gone, and night had set in,
dark, starless, hot, and full of electricity.

And the mosquitos. Well, those who have been much in the open air,
in Godiva costume, during opaque, perspiring, November nights,
about Lake Cooper, or the Lower Goulburn, or the Murray frontage, require
no reminder; and to those who have not had such experience, no illustration
could convey any adequate notion. Hyperbolically, however: In the localities
I have mentioned, the severity of the periodical plague goads the instinct
of animals almost to the standard of reason. Not only will horses
gather round a fire to avail themselves of the smoke, but it is quite
a usual thing to see some experienced old stager sitting on his haunches
and dexterously filliping his front shoes over a little heap
of dry leaves and bark.

To return. The recollection of much worse predicaments in the past,
and the reasonable anticipation of still worse in the future,
restored that equilibrium of temper which is the aim of my life;
and I felt cheerful enough as I welcomed my dripping companion, and,
taking a leafy twig in each hand to switch myself withal, started northward
for the river road, which I purposed following eastward to where
the pad branched off, and then running the latter to my camp. Once clear
of the river timber, and with the road for a base, the darkness, I thought,
would make little difference to me.

After half an hour's gliding through heavy forest, and cleaving my way
through spongy reed-beds, and circling round black lagoons, alive
with the "plump, plump" of bullfrogs, and the interminable "r-r-r-r-r"
of yabbies, I found the river on my right, with a well-beaten cattle-track
along the bank. Here was something definite to go upon. By keeping
straight on, I must soon strike the old horse-paddock fence,
where the splitters used to keep their bark; and in an hour and a-half more,
I would be at my camp.

But the discerning reader will perceive, from hints already given,
that, by following the cattle track, with the river on my right,
I was unconsciously travelling westward on the Victorian side, instead of
eastward on the New South Wales side. If the sky had cleared for a single
instant, a glance at the familiar constellations would have set me right.

After half a mile, the cattle-track intersected a beaten road, with the black
masses of river timber still on the right, and a wire fence on the left--as I
found by running into it. Everything seemed unfamiliar and puzzling;
but I followed the road, looking out for landmarks, and zealously switching
myself as I went along.

Soon I heard in front the trampling of horses, and men's voices
in jolly conversation. I aimed for the sounds, and, after running against
a loose horse, feeding leisurely on the grass, I distinguished through the hot,
stagnant darkness the approaching forms of three men riding abreast.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said I politely, switching myself as I spoke.
"Could you give me some idea of the geography"---- I got no farther,
for a colt that one of the fellows was riding suddenly shied at me
and followed up the action by bucking his best. Upon this, the loose horse
presented himself, cavorting round in senseless emulation, while the other two
horses swerved and tried to bolt. All this took place in half a minute.

The rider of the colt was taken by surprise, but he was plucky. Though losing
not only his stirrups but his saddle with the first buck, he spent
the next couple of minutes riding all over that colt, sometimes on his ears,
and sometimes on his tail. But this sort of thing could n't last--it never
does last--so, after hanging on for about twenty seconds by one heel
the fellow dismounted like a barrow-load of sludge. During this time,
I saw nothing of the two other men, but I could hear them trying to force
their excited horses toward the spot where I was skipping round, ready
to catch the colt on the moment of his discharging cargo.

On making the attempt, I missed the bridle in the dark; and away shot
the colt in one direction, and the loose horse in another.

"I bet a note Jack's off," said a voice from the distance.

"Gosh, you'd win it if it was twenty," responded another voice
from the ground close by.

"There goes his moke!" said the first voice. "Come and jam the beggar
against the fence, or he'll be off to glory." And away clattered the two
horsemen after the wrong horse; Jack following on foot.

Noticing their mistake, I cantered hopefully after the colt, thinking
to obtain a favourable introduction to Jack by restoring the animal;
but in a few minutes I lost the sounds, and abandoned the pursuit.
Then, after supplying myself with fresh switches, I resumed
my fatal westward course.

More voices, a short distance away, and straight in front. Judging them
to come from some vehicle travelling at a slow walk along the edge
of the timber, I posted myself behind a tree, and waited as patiently
as the mosquitos permitted.

"Now you need n't scandalise one another," said a pleasant masculine voice.
"You're like the pot and the kettle. You're both as full of sin and hypocrisy
as you can stick. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other. I would n't
have believed it if I had n't seen it with my own eyes. You've disgraced
yourselves for ever. Who the dickens do you think would be fool enough
to marry either of you after the way you've behaved yourselves to-day?"

"Well, I'm sure we're not asking you to marry us," piped a feminine voice.

"Keep yourselves in that mind, for goodness' sake. I'm disgusted with you.
Why, only last Sunday, I heard your two mothers flattering themselves
about the C---- girls knowing too much; and I'll swear you've both forgot
more than the C---- girls ever knew. You're as common as dish-water."

"O, you're mighty modest, your own self," retorted a second feminine voice.

"It's my place to be a bit rowdy," replied the superior sex. "It's part
of a man's education. And I don't try to look as if butter would n't melt
in my mouth. You're just the reverse; you're hypocrites. 'Woe unto you
hypocrites!' the Bible says. But it's troubling me a good deal to think
what your mothers'll feel, now that you've come out in your true colours."

"But you wouldn't be mean enough to tell?" interrupted one of the sweet voices.

"I always thought you were too honourable to do such a thing, Harry,"
remarked the other.

"Well, now you find your mistake. But this is not a question of honour;
it's a question of duty."

"O, you're mighty fine with your duty! You're a mean wretch. There!"

"I'll be a meaner wretch before another hour's over. Go on, Jerry;
let's get it past and done with."

"But, Harry--I say, Harry--don't tell. I'll never forgive you if you do."

"Duty, Mabel, duty."

"What good will it do you to tell?" pleaded the other voice.

"Duty, Annie, duty. On you go, Jerry, and let's get home. This is painful
to a cove of my temperament."

During this conversation, I had become conscious of standing on a populous
ant-bed; and, not wishing to lose the chance of an interview with Harry,
I had retreated in front of the buggy till a second tree offered
its friendly cover. Jerry's head was now within two yards of my ambush,
and, peeping round, I could make out the vague outline of the figures
in the buggy.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do," said Harry, stopping the horse:
"If each of you gives me a kiss, of her own good will, I'll promise
not to tell. Are you on? Say the word, for I'll only give you
one minute to decide."

"What do you think, Mabel?" murmured one of the voices.

"Well, I've got no---- But what do you think?"

"I think it's about the only thing we can do. We would never be let
come out again."

There was perfect silence for a minute. My tree was n't a large one,
and the near front wheel of the buggy was almost against it. Not daring
to move hand or foot, I could only wish myself a rhinoceros.

"Come on," said one of the voices, at last.

"Come on how?" asked Harry innocently. "Look here: the agreement
is that each of you is to give me a kiss, of her own good will.
I'm not going to move."

"O, you horrid wretch! Do you think we're going to demean ourselves?
You're mighty mistaken if you do."

"Go on, Jerry." And the buggy started.

"We're not frightened of you now," remarked one of the voices complacently,
whilst I threw myself on the ground, and rolled like a liberated horse.
"If you dare to say one single word, we'll just expose your shameful proposal.
You mean wretch! you make people think it's safe to send their girls
with you, to be insulted like this. O, we'll expose you!"

"Expose away. And don't forget to mention that you both agreed
to the shameful proposal. I'll tell your mothers that I made that proposal
just to try you, and you consented on condition of me keeping quiet.
You're both up a tree. 'Weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin.' Go on, Jerry, and let's have it over."

"What do you think, Annie?" asked one of the voices, whilst I made
for my third tree.

"He's the meanest wretch that ever breathed," replied the other vehemently.
"And I always thought men was so honourable!"

"Live and learn," rejoined the escort pithily.

"O, Harry!" panted one voice, "I seen a white thing darting across there!"

"Quite likely," replied Harry. "When a girl's gone cronk, like you,
she must expect to see white things darting about. But I'll give you
one more chance."

"I think we better," suggested one of the voices.

"There's nothing else for it," assented the other.

By this time, the buggy had disappeared in the darkness. I heard it stop;
then followed, with slight intervals, two unsyllabled sounds.

"Over again," said Harry calmly. "You both cheated."

The sounds were repeated.

"Over again. You'll have to alter your hand a bit--both of you--or we'll
be here all night. Slower, this time."

Once more the sounds were repeated; then the buggy started, and Harry's voice
died away in the distance to an indistinct murmur, as he reviled the girls
for this new exhibition of their shamelessness.

Whilst undecided whether to follow the buggy any further, I saw a light
on the other side of the road. Making my way toward it, I crossed
a log-and-chock fence, bounding a roughly ploughed fallow paddock,
and then a two-rail fence; wondering all the while that I had never noticed
the place when passing it in daylight. At last, a quarter of a mile
from the road, a white house loomed before me, with the light
in a front window. I opened the gate of the flower garden, and was soon
crouched under the window, taking stock of the interior.

A middle-aged woman was sitting by the table, darning socks; and at
the opposite side of the lamp sat a full-grown girl, in holiday attire,
with her elbows on the table and her fingers in her hair, reading
some illustrated journal; while a little boy, squatted behind the girl's chair,
was attaching a possum's tail to her improver.

Like Enoch Arden (in my own little tin-pot way) I turned silently and sadly
from the window, for I was n't wanted in that company. I thought of going
round to the back premises in search of a men's hut; but before regaining
the gate, I trod on a porcupine cactus, and forgot everything else
for the time. Then, as I lay on the ground outside the gate,
caressing the sole of my foot, and comforting myself with the thought
that a brave man battling with the storms of fate is a sight worthy
the admiration of the gods, a white dog came tearing round from the back yard,
and rushed at me like a coming event casting its shadow before.

"Soolim, Pup!" I hissed. That was enough. Pup's colour rendered him
invisible in the dark, and his stag-hound strain made him formidable
when he was on the job. The office of a chucker-out has its duties,
as well as its rights; and in half a minute that farm dog found that one
of these duties demanded a many-sided efficiency with which Nature had omitted
to endow him. He found that, though the stereotyped tactics of worrying,
and freezing, and chawing, were good enough as opposed to similar procedure,
they became mere bookish theories when confronted with the snapping system.
Eviction becomes tedious when the intruder's teeth are always meeting
in the hind quarters of the ejecting party; and the latter can neither get
his antagonist in front of him, nor haul off to investigate damage.

Of course, I fanned the flame of discord as well as I could, hoping that
some one of my own denomination would come out to see what was the matter.
But no: the parlour door opened, Mam came out to the gate, and,
in the broad bar of light extending from the door, I saw her pick up a clod,
and aim it at the war-clouds, rolling dun. I was crouching some yards away
to one side, but the clod crumbled against my ear. Then the storm
of one-sided battle went raging round the back premises, as the farm dog
returned to tell Egypt the story. Mam retreated from the gate in haste,
and for a minute or two there was a confused clatter of voices in the house,
and some opening and shutting of doors. Then all was silent again.
Presently Pup returned, and accompanied me back to the road,
carrying something which I ascertained to be a large fowl, plucked and dressed
in readiness for cooking.

Musing on the difficulties of this Wonderland into which, according to
immemorial usage, I had been born without a rag of clothes, I waited for Pup
whilst he ate his fowl, and then again pressed forward, alert and vigilant,
as beseemed a man scudding under bare poles through an apparently populous
country, which by right ought to have been a sheeprun, with about one
selection every five miles.

I had managed to put another mile between myself and my camp, when two horsemen
met and passed me at a canter, singing one of Sankey's Melodies. I made
a modest appeal, but they didn't hear me, and so passed on, unconscious
of their lost opportunity.

Then I saw, a long way ahead, the lamps of an approaching vehicle,
and at the same time, I heard, close in front, the trampling of horses,
and voices raised in careless glee. I headed straight for the horses.
As I neared them, the laughing and chatting ceased, and I was about to open
negotiations when a woman's awe-stricken voice asked,

"Wha--what's that white thing there in front?"

Before the last syllable had left her lips, that white thing was receding
into the darkness, like a comet into space. The party stopped for a minute,
and then went on, conversing in a lower tone.

More pilgrims of the night. This time, the slow footfalls of horses,
and a low, inarticulate murmur of voices, out in front and a little
to the left, gave me fresh hope. Warned by past failures, I thought best
to forego the erect posture to which our species owes so much of its majesty.
I therefore dropped on all-fours and went like a tarantula till
I distinguished two horses walking slowly abreast, jammed together;
the riders presenting an indistinct outline of two individuals rolled into one;
and it was from this amalgamation that the low, pigeon-like murmurs proceeded.
An instinct of delicacy prompted me to pause, and let the Siamese twins
pass in peace; but, unfortunately, I happened to be straight in the way,
and just as I started to creep aside, one of the horses extended his neck,
and, with a low, protracted snore, touched me on the back with the
coarse velvet of his nose. Then followed two quick snorts of alarm;
the horses shied simultaneously outward, while down on the ground between them
came two souls with but a single thud, two hearts that squelched as one.
In spite of the compunction and sympathy I felt, modesty compelled me
to glide unobstrusively away, leaving the souls to disentangle themselves
and catch their horses the best way they could.

By this time, the buggy lamps had approached within fifty yards.
Knowing how dense the outside darkness would appear to anyone in the vehicle,
I made a circuit, and got round to the rear. It was a single-seated buggy,
with a white horse, travelling at a walk; and, in the darkness
behind the lamps, two figures were discernible. I followed a little,
to hear them introduce themselves. They did so as follows:--

"Now, Archie; I'll scream."

"My own sweetest"----

"Letmego! O,youwon'tletmego!"

Why, the district was fairly bristling with this class of people!
I had never seen anything like it, except in the Flagstaff Gardens,
when I was in Melbourne.

"My precious darling! My sweetest"----

"I'iltellmotherIwill! O!"

"My sweetest, my beautiful"----

"O! Idon'tloveyoudear! Idon'tloveyounow! Andyouwon'tletmego!"

"There, then, sweetest. Kiss me now."

"Yes, Archie, my precious love."

There was more of it, but it fell unheeded on my ears. I paused,
and thought vehemently. The white horse in the buggy, and Archie M----,
Superintendent of the E---- Sunday School, with his girl! No wonder
I had met so many people, and all going in the same direction.
They were the sediment of the pic-nic party, returning from their orgy.
Here was the lost chord. The whole truth flashed upon me. Now,
the solid earth wheeled right-about face; east became west, and west, east.
I recognised the Victorian river road, because I saw things as they were,
not as I had imagined them--though, to be sure, I still saw them
as through a glass, darkly.

My worldly-wise friend, let us draw a lesson from this. If you have never been
bushed, your immunity is by no means an evidence of your cleverness,
but rather a proof that your experience of the wilderness is small.
If you have been bushed, you will remember how, as you struck a place you knew,
error was suddenly superseded by a flash of truth; this without volition
of judgment on your part, and entirely by force of a presentation of fact
which your own personal error--however sincere and stubborn--had never
affected, and which you were no longer in a position to repudiate.
It has always been my strong impression that this is very much like
the revelation which follows death--that is, if conscious individuality
be preserved; a thing by no means certain, and, to my mind,
not manifestly desirable.

But if, after closing our eyes in death, we open them on an appreciable
hereafter--whether one imperceptible fraction of a second, or a million
centuries, may intervene--it is as certain as anything can be, that,
to most of us, the true east will prove to be our former south-west,
and the true west, our former north-east. How many so-called virtues
will vanish then; and how many objectionable fads will shine as with the glory
of God? This much is certain: that all private wealth, beyond simplest
maintenance, will seem as the spoils of the street gutter; that fashion
will be as the gilded fly which infests carrion; that "sport" will seem folly
that would disgrace an idiot; that military force, embattled on behalf
of Royalty, or Aristocracy, or Capital, will seem like---- Well, what will
it seem like? Already, looking, or rather, squinting, back along
our rugged and random track, we perceive that the bloodiest battle ever fought
by our badly-bushed forefathers on British soil--and that only one of a series
of twelve, in which fathers, sons, brothers, kinsmen, and fellow-slaves
exterminated each other--was fought to decide whether a drivelling imbecile
or a shameless lecher should bring our said forefathers under the operation
of I Samuel, viii. (Read the chapter for yourself, my friend, if you know
where you can borrow a Bible; then turn back these pages, and take
a second glance at the paragraphs you skimmed over in that unteachable spirit
which is the primary element of ignorance--namely, those reflections
on the unfettered alternative, followed by rigorous destiny.)

Much more prosaic were my cogitations as I followed the buggy, keeping
both switches at work. According to the best calculation I could make,
I had ten or twelve miles of country to re-cross, besides the river;
and, having no base on the Victorian side, it was a thousand to one
against striking my camp on such a night. Of course, I might have groped
my way to B----'s place; but if you knew Mrs. B----'s fatuous appreciation
of dilemmas like mine, you would understand that such a thing was
not to be thought of. I preferred dealing with strangers alone, and
preserving a strict incognito. However, a pair of --- I must have, if nothing
else--and that immediately. The buggy was fifteen or twenty yards ahead.

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