Such is Life

J >> Joseph Furphy >> Such is Life

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Here Ida turned, and, with blazing, tearless eyes, fearlessly fronted her
fellow-mammal. The latter faltered, and paused. She had gone a step too far,
and had trod on the lion's tail.

"What's that you say, you wicked woman?" demanded Ida, in a calm voice,
yet breathing heavily. "Ain't I miserable enough without you lyin' away my
character? I'll make you prove your words, as sure as you're standin' there."

"You're forgetting yourself!" replied the housekeeper haughtily, though still
quailing before the girl's terrible plainness of speech and person.

"Am I, indeed? Well, we'll both go straight to Mrs. Montgomery--she's your
missus as well as mine, she is--an' we'll git her to write to a dozen people
that knows me since I wasn't as high as that windy-sill. I'll make it hot
for you, Mrs. Bodyzart, so I will."

"What impertinence!" ejaculated the lady, moistening her lips. "Leave
the apartment, this instant, Mary; and send"----

"How dare you call me out o' my name?--for two pins, I'd slap your face!"
replied Ida, her voice rising to a hysterical scream. "You know what
my proper name is, so you do! An' I won't leave the apartment to please you,
so I won't! Think God made me for the likes o' you to wipe your feet on?
Think I bin behavin' myself decent all my life, for you to put a slur on me?
If I wanted to bemean myself, could n't I cast up somethin' you would n't like
to be minded of? Ain't you ashamed o' yourself, you ole she-devil?"

"Gentlemen, I must apologise for my servant," said the housekeeper,
with quiet dignity. "She seems to have taken leave of her senses. I trust
you will overlook her rudeness. She knows no better."

"They can't help doin' me justice; an' that's all I ask from anybody,"
rejoined Ida, looking appealingly round the table. "An' look here,
Mrs. Bodyzart: I bin full up o' your nag-nag ever since I come to this house:
an' I put up with it for the sake o' other people; but now you've put a slur
on my character; an' it's me an' you for it. I ain't goin' to let this drop."

"I must withdraw, gentlemen," said the lady forbearingly. "Pray forget
the unhappy scene you have been forced to witness; and let me beg of you,
for this poor woman's sake, to leave all further pursuit of the matter
entirely in my hands. Whilst she remains in this establishment,
I must continue to shield her from the penalties to which she insists
upon exposing herself. Come, Mary; dry your eyes, and attend to your duties.
The time is coming when you will thank me for the discipline to which you are
now subjected." And Mrs. Beaudesart retired, greater in defeat than in victory.

"I never expected anybody to put a slur on me," faltered Ida apologetically,
after a minute's silence.

"Haud yir toang, lassie, fir Gode-sak," snarled the sheep-overseer,
who was the senior of our company. "Be ma saul, an A hid ony say intil't,
A'd whang the de'il oot o' ye baith wi' a stokewhup."

"By George! you better not include Mrs. Beaudesart in your goodwill,"
remarked young Mooney gravely. "You'll have Collins in your wool."

"Keep your temper, Collins," murmured Nelson. "I can imagine your feelings;
but M'Murdo didn't think of you being here when he spoke."

"The de'il haet A care fir Collins, ony mair nir A dae fir yir ain sel',
Nelson!" replied Mac defiantly. "Od! air ye no din greetin' the yet,
lassie?" he continued, turning to Ida. "No anither pegh oot o' yir heed,
ir bagode A'll tak' ye in han'."

Ida dried her eyes, and with the more alacrity forasmuch as an approaching
step crunched the gravel outside. It was Priestley, a bullock driver
who had drawn up to the store on the previous-evening; a decent sort
of vulgarian, but altogether too industrious to get any further forward
than the extreme tail-end of his profession.

Some carriers never learn the great lesson, that to everything there is a time
and a season--a time for work, and a time for repose--hence you find
the industrious man's inveterately leg-weary set of frames in hopeless
competition with the judiciously lazy man's string of daisies. The contrast
is sickening. Moreover, the same rule holds fairly well throughout
the whole region of industry. But the Scotch-navigator can't see it.
He is too furiously busy for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four to notice
that, even in the most literal sense, loafing has a more intimate connection
with bread-winning than working can possibly have. Such a man finds himself
born unto trouble, as the sparks fly in all directions; but he is merely aware
of undergoing a chastening process, just as the tethered calf is aware
that he always turns a flying somersault when he impetuously charges
in any direction away from his peg; and this simply because the man knows
as much about the Order of Things as the calf knows about Euclid's definition
of a radial line. The fact is, that the Order of Things--rightly understood--
is not susceptible of any coercion whatever, and must be humoured in every
possible way. In the race of life, my son, you must run cunning, reserving
your sprint for the tactical moment. Priestley ran bull-headed.
In consequence of being always at work, he could get very little work done;
and, being pursuantly in a chronic state of debt and destitution, he got only
the work that intermittently slothful men would n't take at the price.
It is scarcely necessary to add that he had a wife and about thirteen
small children, mostly girls.

"Mornin', chaps," said this plebeian, standing between the wind and
our nobility, with a hand on each door-post. "Hope you're enjoyin' yourselves.
Say, Moriarty; I'm waitin' to git that bit o' loadin' off."

"I'll be with you in two minutes," replied the young storekeeper. "I know
you always want to get away."

"Say, chaps," continued the bullock driver, advancing into the room,
and glancing confidentially round the table, "think there's any use o' me
stickin' up the boss for leaf to take the buggy-track to Nalrookar? See,
I could make the Fog-a-bolla Tank to-night; an' there's boun' to be a bit
o' blue-bush, if not crows-foot, on them sand-hills. Then I'd fetch Nalrookar
to-morrow, easy. I got two-ton-five for there; an' I'm thinkin' I'll have a
job to deliver it, if I can't git through your run. What do you think, chaps?"

"Why didn't you take this into consideration when you loaded?"
demanded young Arblaster.

"Well, beggars ain't choosers," replied the apostle of brute force
and ignorance. "Fact was, Arblaster, I bethought me what a lot o' work
I'd done for Magomery, one time or another, an' what good friends me an' him
always was; an' I says to myself, 'Well, I'll chance her--make a spoon,
or spoil a horn.' That's the way I reasoned it out. See, if I got to
turn roun', an' foller the main track back agen to the Cane-grass Swamp,
an' take the Nalrookar track from there, I won't fetch the station much short
o' fifty mile; an' there ain't a middlin' camp the whole road. Everythin'
et right into the ground. Starve a locust. 'Sides, I'm jubious about
the Convincer Sand-hill, even with half a load. Bullocks too weak."

"Well, it's hardly likely the boss would let you cross the run," replied
Arblaster. "He'd be a d----d fool if he did."

"I'm afraid there's no use asking him, Priestley," added Nelson. "He won't
make a thoroughfare of the run, at any price. For instance, when Baxter
and Donovan delivered that well-timber in the Quondong Paddock, the other day,
they were n't five mile from the main road--and a gate to go through--but he
made them come right back by the station; thirty mile of a roundabout;
and their cheques were n't forthcoming till they did it. No, Priestley;
to ask Montgomery is simply to get a refusal; and to argue with him is simply
to get insulted."

"Well, I s'pose I must worry through, some road," said the bullock driver
resignedly, as he turned and went out.

"Fifty miles instead of twenty-two," remarked Mooney. "Hard enough case."

"And yet it's necessary, in a sense," replied Nelson. "Same time,
anybody except the like of Montgomery would spring a bit in a season like this.
I couldn't crush a poor, decent, hard-working devil like that. I'd give him
a thorough good blackguarding for calculating upon crossing the run; and then,
as a matter of form, I'd send a man with him, to see him across. Well,
I suppose we must go and get our mot d' ordre, boys."

So we left the breakfast-room to Ida. The four narangies, with the practical
M'Murdo, went to the veranda of the boss's house for their day's orders;
Moriarty, with a ring of keys in his hand, sauntered across to the store;
and I managed to drag myself out to a seat built against the south side
of the barracks, whence I torpidly surveyed the scene around, whilst listening
to my vitality whistling out through four million yawning pores.

In an open shed, near the store--where two tribesmen were now assisting
Priestley to unload--a travelling saddler and Salvationist, named
(without a word of a lie) Joey Possum, was at work on the horse-furniture
of the station; his tilted wagonette, blazoned with his name and title,
JOSEPH PAWSOME, SADDLER, standing close by. Watching these lewd fellows
of the baser sort at their sordid toil, my mind reverted to certain incidents
of the preceding night, and so drifted into a speculation on the peculiar kind
of difficulties which at certain times beset certain sojourners on the rind
of this third primary orb. The incidents, of course, have nothing to do
with my story.

But as the mere mention of them may have whetted the reader's curiosity,
I suppose it is only fair to satisfy him.

The night in question seemed, from an astrological point of view, to be
peculiarly favourable to the ascendancy of baleful influences. The moon hung
above the western horizon, in her most formidable phase--just past
the semicircle, with her gibbous edge malignantly feathered. Being now
in the House of Taurus, she had overborne the benignant sway of Aldebaran,
and was pressing hard on Castor and Pollux (in the House of Gemini). Also,
her horizontal attitude was so full of menace that Rigel and Betelgeux
(in Orion) seemed to wilt under her sinister supremacy. Sirius
(in Canis Major), strongest and most malevolent of the astral powers,
hung southwest of the zenith, reinforcing the evil bias of the time, and thus,
from his commanding position, overruling the guardianship of Canopus (in Argo),
south-west of the same point. Lower still, toward the south, Achernar seemed
to reserve his gracious prestige, whilst, across the invisible Pole,
the beneficent constellations of Crux and Centaurus exhibited the very
paralysis of hopelessness. Worst of all, Jupiter and Mars both held aloof,
whilst ascendant Saturn mourned in the House of Cancer.

Such was the wretched aspect of the heavens to my debilitated intelligence,
as I slunk home from the swimming-hole, toward midnight. I was somewhat
comforted to observe in Procyon a firmness which I attributed to the evident
support of Regulus (in the House of Leo); but the most reassuring element
in an extremely baleful horoscope was Spica (in the House of Virgo),
scarcely affected by the moon's interference, and now ascending confidently
from the eastern horizon.

Still, to my washed-out mind, there was something so hopeless in the lunar
and stellar outlook that, for comfort, I turned my eyes toward the
station cemetery, which was dimly in view.

There several shapeless forms, some white, and others of neutral hue,
seemed to be moving slowly and silently amongst the dwellings of the dead,
as if holding what you could scarcely call a carnival, in their own sombre way.
The time, the place, the supermundane conditions, acting together on
a half-drowned mind, gave to the whole scene a weird reality which writing
cannot convey; so, after pinching myself to make sure I was awake,
and doing a small sum in mental arithmetic to verify my sanity, I advanced
toward the perturbed spirits, got them against the sky, and identified them
as cattle, greedily stevedoring the long, dry grass.

It seemed a pity to turn the poor hungry animals out; yet I knew that
somebody would have to suffer for it if Montgomery knew of anything
trespassing here. But how had they got in, through seven wires--the upper one
barbed--with rabbit-netting along the bottom?----

"Evenin', Collins."

"Evening, Priestley. Working the oracle?"

"Inclinin' that road. Dangerous--ain't it? Good job it's on'y you.
Nobody else stirrin'?"

"Not a soul. They 're as regular as clockwork on this station.
How did you get in?"

"Took the hinges off o' the gate with my monkey-wrench. I'll leave that
all straight. Course, they'll see the tracks by-'n'-by, an' know who
to blame; but I'll be clear by that time; an' I must guard agen comin'
in contract with Runnymede till the st-nk blows off o' this transaction.
Natural enough, Magomery'll buck; but the ration-paddick's as bare
as a stockyard; an' I can't ast the bullocks to die o' starvation.

"Certainly not, Priestley. Mind, it's only four hours till daylight.
Good night."

"Good night, ole man."

My way led me past a small, isolated stable, used exclusively for
the boss's buggy-horses. Nearing this building, I heard a suppressed
commotion inside, followed by soothing gibberish, in a very low voice.
This was bad. Priestley's bullocks were within easy view; and Jerry,
the groom, was a notorious master's man. I must have a friendly yarn with him.

"What's up with you this hour of the night, Jerry?" I asked, looking through
the latticed upper-wall. "Uneasy conscience, I bet." Whilst speaking the last
words, I distinguished Montgomery's pair of greys, tied, one in each
back corner of the stable, whilst Pawsome's horses--a white and a piebald--
were occupying the two stalls, and voraciously tearing down mouthfuls
of good Victorian hay from the rack above the manger. Pawsome, silently
caressing one of the greys, moved to the lattice on hearing my voice.
"Sleight-of-hand work?" I suggested, in a whisper.

"Sort of attempt," replied the wizard, in the same key. "You gev me a start.
All the lights was out two hours ago, an' I med sure everybody was safe."

"So they are. I've only been down for a swim. Good-night, Possum."

"I say, Collins--don't split!"

"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?"

"Second Kings," whispered the poor necromancer, in eager fellowship,
and displaying a knowledge of the Bible rare amongst his sect. "God bless you,
Collins! may we meet in a better world!"

"It won't be difficult to do that," I replied dejectedly, as I withdrew
to enjoy my unearned slumber.

Now the night, replete with such sphere-music, was past, and the cares
that infest the day had returned to everyone on the station, except myself
and two or three equally clean, useless, and aristocratic loafers in
the boss's house. Toby, the half-caste, was cantering away toward Clarke's,
for the weekly mail. Priestley, at his wagon, was bullocking even more
desperately than usual, with a view to getting out of sight of the station
as soon as possible. Pawsome, repairing a side-saddle, on his extemporised
bench, was softly crooning a familiar hymn, the sentiment of which seemed
appropriate to himself, whilst the language breathed the very aroma
of his social atmosphere:--

Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to gain the prize,
And sail'd through (adj.) seas?

In the veranda of the house, Mr. Folkestone, a young English gentleman
of not less than two hundred-weight, lolled on a hammock, smoking a chibouque,
and reading a magazine; while straight between us two aristocratic loafers,
Vandemonian Jack, aged about a century, was mechanically sawing firewood
in the hot, sickly sunshine. This is one of the jobs that it takes a man
of four or five score years to perform ungrudgingly; and, to any illuminated
mind, the secret of these old fellows' greatness is very plain. Bathing,
though an ancient heresy, has been of strictly local prevalence, and,
for the best of reasons, of transient continuance. Our relapse belongs to
the present generation. Though our better-class grandsires understood
no science unconnected with the gloves, a marvellous instinct taught them
the unwholesomeness of sluicing away that panoply of dirt which is
Nature's own defence against the microbe of imbecility, and which, indeed,
was the only armour worn by the formidable Berserkers, from whom some of them
claimed descent. We have done it however (at least, we say so),
whilst our social inferiors have held on to the old-time religion (at least,
we say so, here again); wherefore----

"I say, Mr. Collins," faltered Ida, breaking in on my reflections,
"I picked up this little buckle aside o' your b-d; it's come off o' the back
o' your tr----rs. I'll sew it on for you any time, for I notice you're
bothered with them slippin' down. O, Mr. Collins!"--and the poor unlovely face
was suddenly distorted with anguish and wet with tears--"ain't Mrs. Bodyzart
wicked to put a slur on me like that? There ain't one word o' truth in it;
I'd say the same if I was to die to-night; an' you may believe me or believe
me not, but I'm tellin' the truth. Far be it, indeed!"

"Hush! Stop crying, Ida! Don't look round--Mrs. Beaudesart's watching you
from the window, over there. You poor thing! you should n't trouble yourself
over what anybody says. Did you feed Pup this morning?"

"I give him a whole milk-dish full o' scraps; but if people tells the truth,
there's nobody in the world can say black is the white o' my eye; an' you may
believe me or believe me not"----

"You'll need to give Pup a drink, Ida."

"He 's got a dish o' good rain-water aside him; but if people would
on'y consider"----

"True--very true. Now go away, dear, and don't come fooling about me,
or you'll give her liberty to talk."

The girl limped back to the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made
a feeble effort to shake the dew-drops from my mane, and, so to speak,
look myself in the face. I must give this life over, I thought; and I will
give it over; an I do not, I am a villain. After all, there are not
two sides to this question; there is only one; and you may trust an overclean
man to be an authority on the evil effects of bathing, upon mind, body,
and estate; just as the grogbibber is our highest authority on headaches,
fantods, and bankruptcy.

The Spartans (so ran my reflections) were as much addicted to dirt
as the Sybarites to cleanliness; and just compare the two communities.
The conquering races of later ages--Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards,
&c.--were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other.
It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire
the sick man of Europe. Latifundia perdidere Italian (Large estates
ruined Italy). Yes. Blame it on the large estates. Would a large estate
ruin you? Bathing did the business for Italy, as it does the business
for all its victims. If Rome had left to the soft Capuan his baths
and his perfumes, she would have pulled-through. But think of the polished
Roman debating the question of survival with the superlatively dirty barbarian
of the North! Polished is good, for, in the ruins of the fatal Roman baths,
the innumerable strigulae, used by the bathers to polish their skins,
bear sad testimony to the suicidal cleanliness of that doomed race.
And just compare your strigula-polished Roman, morally and physically,
with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid--the former
flickering briefly in a puerile, semi-vital way, and going out with
a sulphurous smell; the latter, on a ration of six dates per week,
attaining an interminable longevity, and possessing the power of striking
scoffers dead, or blind, or paralytic, at pleasure.

And, talking of hermits--do you think Peter of Picardy could have launched
the muscular Christianity of Western Europe against the less muscular,
because cleaner, Islamism of Western Asia, but for his well-advertised vow,
never to change his clothes, nor wash himself, till his contract should be
completed? Prouder in his rags than the Emperor in his purple! and justly too,
for he achieved the very apotheosis of dirt--animate, no doubt, as well as
inanimate. Or take the first Teutonic Emperor of Rome--conqueror, arbitrator,
legislator, and what not. In those middle ages, you know, it was the custom
to name monarchs from some peculiarity of person or habitude--and I put it
to any reasonable soul; Was this mere Yarman Brince likely to have become
the central figure of the 10th century, but for such rigid abstinence
from external application of water as is implied in the significant name
of Otto the Great?

Indeed, the most sweepingly appropriate bestowal of the title, 'Great,'
is made when we refer to the adherents of the dirt-cult, collectively,
as the Great Unwashed. Again, Dr. Johnson's biographies lovingly preserve
the personal habits of most of the loftiest and sweetest poets that ever trod
English soil; and think what a large percentage of those Muse-invokers,
according to their historian, carried a fair quantity of that soil perennially
on their hides. And speaking of the Diogenes of Fleet Street himself,
we know, on good authority, that his antipathy to the Order of the Bath
caused him to appeal to more senses than one. He was another Otto the Great.
The original Diogenes, by the way, revelled in dirt, as well as in wisdom.
And the mighty scholar, Porson, as you may remember, never needed to wash,
because he never perspired.

Yet in spite of this cloud of witness, and in the face of our own experience,
we will entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have--
soaking ourselves in water, as if we were possums, and our virility
a eucalyptus flavour that we sought to dissipate. Look at myself--now a king;
now thus! Thunder-and-turf! have I fallen so low? And yet I was once
like our Otto and Co.!

Before touching the forbidden thing, I felt as if I wanted to pursue
an inspiring, if purposeless, journey up uncomfortable Alpine heights,
with my Excelsior-banner in my hand, and a tear in my solitary bright blue eye;
now, the maiden's invitation seems to be the only part of the enterprise
that has any pith in it. Then, I gloried in the fiendish adage of,
'Two hours' sleep for a man, three for a woman, and four for a fool';
now, my livelist ambition is to gaze my fill on yon calm deep, then,
like an infant, sink asleep on this form, and so remain till dinner-time--
lunch-time, I should say; belonging, as I do, to the better classes.
Then, I was like Hotspur on his crop-eared roan; now, I merely wish the desert
were my dwelling-place, with one fair Spirit for my minister. To confess
the truth, I note a certain weak glimmer of self-righteousness investing
the thought that I would be content with one fair Spirit. Got to, go to!
By virtue, thou enforcest laughter.

"I wish I was as happy as you," murmured Ida, who had again silently
approached. "Here's two newspapers; they done with them in the house.
O, Mr. Collins!"--and the girl's tears broke forth afresh, whilst ungovernable
sobs shook her from head to foot--"I can't git it off o' my mind
what Mrs. Bodyzart said."

"Ida! Ida!" I remonstrated; "you're making your nose red." The information
acted like a charm; her crying was over, though she still persisted
in chewing her grievance.

"I can prove there ain't one word o' truth in it," she continued
pertinaciously.

"What's your idea of proof, Ida?"

"I can prove it on the Bible," she replied eagerly.

"That settles the matter beyond controversy--considering that you rightly
belong to the Middle Ages."

"Indeed I don't!" she replied, with a flash of resentment. "I was twenty-seven
last birthday; an' I don't care who knows it--on the third of July,
it was--an' I would n't care tuppence if her ladyship snoke roun' tellin'
people I was forty. But to put a slur on me like that! I leave it to
your own self, Mr. Collins--was it right?"

"Right? I repeated wearily. "In heaven's name, girl, what does it signify
to you whether it was right or otherwise? That's Mrs. Beaudesart's
own business, not yours. Why, if she charged me with stooping to folly,
I would merely say, 'Sorry to undeceive you, ma'am; but I've been
too much given to letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
like the poor bandicoot i' the adage.' But I certainly shouldn't concern myself
with a question lying entirely between herself and Saint Peter."

"Ah! but you're different," replied the girl sadly.

"Simply because I'm a philosopher, Ida. I've held communion with
the Unfathomable, and watched the exfoliation of the Inscrutable; and,
you know, these things are altogether beyond the orbit of the girl-mind.
Now clear off, like a good fellow, and let me read the papers."

But I was too far gone to take any interest in either of the loathsome
contemporanes; too much afflicted even to drift down to the swimming-hole
again, much as I desired to do so. I also longed for the opinion of my mighty
pipe on the dirt-question; but that faithful ally was packed among my things,
forty feet away, and it might as well have been forty miles. So I just lay
on the seat, clean, frail, and inert, as a recumbent statue, moulded
in blanc-mange; whilst the ancient t'other-sider oscillated his frame--saw,
and the pious Pawsome lightened his toil with selections from Sankey,
and the perspiring Priestley hurried up his bullocks from the ration-paddock,
and Sling Muck, the gardener, used his hoe among the callots and cabbagee,
with the automatic stroke of a man brought up to one holiday per annum,
and no Sunday. Meanwhile, the unreturning sands of Life dribbled through
the unheeded isthmus of the Present Moment; and the fixed cone of the Past
expanded; and the dimple deepened in the diminished and hurrying Future.

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