Part 4

The mate laughed, and Mitchell grinned his quiet grin.

“Well, this set me thinking,” he continued. “I always knew I was a dashed ugly cove, and I began to wonder whether any girl would really have me; and I kept on it till at last I made up my mind to find out and settle the matter for good--or bad.

“There was another farmer's daughter living close by, and I met her pretty often coming home from work, and sometimes I had a yarn with her. She was plain, and no mistake: Mary was a Venus alongside of her. She had feet like a Lascar, and hands about ten sizes too large for her, and a face like that camel--only red; she walked like a camel, too. She looked like a ladder with a dress on, and she didn't know a great A from a corner cupboard.

“Well, one evening I met her at the sliprails, and presently I asked her, for a joke, if she'd marry me. Mind you, I never wanted to marry _her_; I was only curious to know whether any girl would have me.

“She turned away her face and seemed to hesitate, and I was just turning away and beginning to think I was a dashed hopeless case, when all of a sudden she fell up against me and said she'd be my wife.... And it wasn't her fault that she wasn't.”

“What did she do?”

“Do! What didn't she do? Next day she went down to our place when I was at work, and hugged and kissed mother and the girls all round, and cried, and told mother that she'd try and be a dutiful daughter to her. Good Lord! You should have seen the old woman and the girls when I came home.

“Then she let everyone know that Bridget Page was engaged to Jack Mitchell, and told her friends that she went down on her knees every night and thanked the Lord for getting the love of a good man. Didn't the fellows chyack me, though! My sisters were raving mad about it, for their chums kept asking them how they liked their new sister, and when it was going to come off, and who'd be bridesmaids and best man, and whether they weren't surprised at their brother Jack's choice; and then I'd gammon at home that it was all true.

“At last the place got too hot for me. I got sick of dodging that girl. I sent a mate of mine to tell her that it was all a joke, and that I was already married in secret; but she didn't see it, then I cleared, and got a job in Newcastle, but had to leave there when my mates sent me the office that she was coming. I wouldn't wonder but what she is humping her swag after me now. In fact, I thought you was her in disguise when I set eyes on you first.... You needn't get mad about it; I don't mean to say that you're quite as ugly as she was, because I never saw a man that was--or a woman either. Anyway, I'll never ask a woman to marry me again unless I'm ready to marry her.”

Then Mitchell's mate told a yarn.

“I knew a case once something like the one you were telling me about; the landlady of a hash-house where I was stopping in Albany told me. There was a young carpenter staying there, who'd run away from Sydney from an old maid who wanted to marry him. He'd cleared from the church door, I believe. He was scarcely more'n a boy--about nineteen--and a soft kind of a fellow, something like you, only good-looking--that is, he was passable. Well, as soon as the woman found out where he'd gone, she came after him. She turned up at the boarding-house one Saturday morning when Bobbie was at work; and the first thing she did was to rent a double room from the landlady and buy some cups and saucers to start housekeeping with. When Bobbie came home he just gave her one look and gave up the game.

“'Get your dinner, Bobbie,' she said, after she'd slobbered over him a bit, 'and then get dressed and come with me and get married!'

“She was about three times his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters in the Sydney _Bulletin_.

“Well, Bobbie went with her like a--like a lamb; never gave a kick or tried to clear.”

“Hold on,” said Mitchell, “did you ever shear lambs?”

“Never mind. Let me finish the yarn. Bobbie was married; but she wouldn't let him out of her sight all that afternoon, and he had to put up with her before them all. About bedtime he sneaked out and started along the passage to his room that he shared with two or three mates. But she'd her eye on him.

“'Bobbie, Bobbie!' she says, 'Where are you going?'

“'I'm going to bed,' said Bobbie. 'Good night!'

“'Bobbie, Bobbie,' she says, sharply. 'That isn't our room; _this_ is our room, Bobbie. Come back at once! What do you mean, Bobbie? _Do you hear me, Bobbie?_'

“So Bobbie came back, and went in with the scarecrow. Next morning she was first at the breakfast table, in a dressing-gown and curl papers. And when they were all sitting down Bobbie sneaked in, looking awfully sheepish, and sidled for his chair at the other end of the table. But she'd her eyes on him.

“'Bobbie, Bobbie!' she said, 'Come and kiss me, Bobbie!'” And he had to do it in front of them all.

“But I believe she made him a good wife.”

HIS COUNTRY-AFTER ALL

The Blenheim coach was descending into the valley of the Avetere River--pronounced Aveterry--from the saddle of Taylor's Pass. Across the river to the right, the grey slopes and flats stretched away to the distant sea from a range of tussock hills. There was no native bush there; but there were several groves of imported timber standing wide apart---sentinel-like--seeming lonely and striking in their isolation.

“Grand country, New Zealand, eh?” said a stout man with a brown face, grey beard, and grey eyes, who sat between the driver and another passenger on the box.

“You don't call this grand country!” exclaimed the other passenger, who claimed to be, and looked like, a commercial traveller, and might have been a professional spieler--quite possibly both. “Why, it's about the poorest country in New Zealand! You ought to see some of the country in the North Island--Wairarapa and Napier districts, round about Pahiatua. I call this damn poor country.”

“Well, I reckon you wouldn't, if you'd ever been in Australia--back in New South Wales. The people here don't seem to know what a grand country they've got. You say this is the worst, eh? Well, this would make an Australian cockatoo's mouth water-the worst of New Zealand would.”

“I always thought Australia was all good country,” mused the driver--a flax-stick. “I always thought--”

“Good country!” exclaimed the man with the grey beard, in a tone of disgust. “Why, it's only a mongrel desert, except some bits round the coast. The worst dried-up and God-forsaken country I was ever in.”

There was a silence, thoughtful on the driver's part, and aggressive on that of the stranger.

“I always thought,” said the driver, reflectively, after the pause--“I always thought Australia was a good country,” and he placed his foot on the brake.

They let him think. The coach descended the natural terraces above the river bank, and pulled up at the pub.

“So you're a native of Australia?” said the bagman to the grey-beard, as the coach went on again.

“Well, I suppose I am. Anyway, I was born there. That's the main thing I've got against the darned country.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“Till I got away,” said the stranger. Then, after a think, he added, “I went away first when I was thirty-five--went to the islands. I swore I'd never go back to Australia again; but I did. I thought I had a kind of affection for old Sydney. I knocked about the blasted country for five or six years, and then I cleared out to 'Frisco. I swore I'd never go back again, and I never will.”

“But surely you'll take a run over and have a look at old Sydney and those places, before you go back to America, after getting so near?”

“What the blazes do I want to have a look at the blamed country for?” snapped the stranger, who had refreshed considerably. “I've got nothing to thank Australia for--except getting out of it. It's the best country to get out of that I was ever in.”

“Oh, well, I only thought you might have had some friends over there,” interposed the traveller in an injured tone.

“Friends! That's another reason. I wouldn't go back there for all the friends and relations since Adam. I had more than quite enough of it while I was there. The worst and hardest years of my life were spent in Australia. I might have starved there, and did do it half my time. I worked harder and got less in my own country in five years than I ever did in any other in fifteen”--he was getting mixed--“and I've been in a few since then. No, Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land--and that country is the United States of America. What's Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns--also for the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the towns, and like dingoes in the bush--who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet haven't any more spunk than to graft for a few Cockney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven't even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw a few dams across their watercourses, and so make some of the interior fit to live in. America's bad enough, but it was never so small as that.... Bah! The curse of Australia is sheep, and the Australian war cry is Baa!”

“Well, you're the first man I ever heard talk as you've been doing about his own country,” said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being sat on all the time. “'Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never said--to--to himself'... I forget the darned thing.”

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat for action, and the driver--for whom the bagman had shouted twice as against the stranger's once--took the opportunity to observe that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot--that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the world would never be any better until the deadly poison, called the sentiment of patriotism, had been “educated” out of the stomachs of the people. “Patriotism!” he exclaimed scornfully. “My country! The darned fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators, the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves--the men the patriotic fools starve and fight for--their masters. Ba-a!”

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.

“What trees are those?” asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive silence which followed his unpatriotic argument, and pointing to a grove ahead by the roadside. “They look as if they've been planted there. There ain't been a forest here surely?”

“Oh, they're some trees the Government imported,” said the bagman, whose knowledge on the subject was limited. “Our own bush won't grow in this soil.”

“But it looks as if anything else would--”

Here the stranger sniffed once by accident, and then several times with interest.

It was a warm morning after rain. He fixed his eyes on those trees.

They didn't look like Australian gums; they tapered to the tops, the branches were pretty regular, and the boughs hung in shipshape fashion. There was not the Australian heat to twist the branches and turn the leaves.

“Why!” exclaimed the stranger, still staring and sniffing hard. “Why, dang me if they ain't (sniff) Australian gums!”

“Yes,” said the driver, flicking his horses, “they are.”

“Blanky (sniff) blanky old Australian gums!” exclaimed the ex-Australian, with strange enthusiasm.

“They're not old,” said the driver; “they're only young trees. But they say they don't grow like that in Australia--'count of the difference in the climate. I always thought--”

But the other did not appear to hear him; he kept staring hard at the trees they were passing. They had been planted in rows and cross-rows, and were coming on grandly.

There was a rabbit trapper's camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum-leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile's nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.

“Good day, mate!” he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper, and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.

“Good day, mate!” The answer came back like an echo--it seemed to him--from the past.

Presently he caught sight of a few trees which had evidently been planted before the others--as an experiment, perhaps--and, somehow, one of them had grown after its own erratic native fashion--gnarled and twisted and ragged, and could not be mistaken for anything else but an Australian gum.

“A thunderin' old blue-gum!” ejaculated the traveller, regarding the tree with great interest.

He screwed his neck to get a last glimpse, and then sat silently smoking and gazing straight ahead, as if the past lay before him--and it _was_ before him.

“Ah, well!” he said, in explanation of a long meditative silence on his part; “ah, well--them saplings--the smell of them gum-leaves set me thinking.” And he thought some more.

“Well, for my part,” said a tourist in the coach, presently, in a condescending tone, “I can't see much in Australia. The bally colonies are--”

“Oh, that be damned!” snarled the Australian-born--they had finished the second flask of whisky. “What do you Britishers know about Australia? She's as good as England, anyway.”

“Well, I suppose you'll go straight back to the States as soon as you've done your business in Christchurch,” said the bagman, when near their journey's end they had become confidential.

“Well, I dunno. I reckon I'll just take a run over to Australia first. There's an old mate of mine in business in Sydney, and I'd like to have a yarn with him.”

A DAY ON A SELECTION

The scene is a small New South Wales western selection, the holder whereof is native-English. His wife is native-Irish. Time, Sunday, about 8 a.m. A used-up looking woman comes from the slab-and-bark house, turns her face towards the hillside, and shrieks:

“T-o-o-m_may_!”

No response, and presently she draws a long breath and screams again:

“_Tom_m-a-a-y!”

A faint echo comes from far up the siding where Tommy's presence is vaguely indicated by half a dozen cows moving slowly--very slowly--down towards the cow-yard.

The woman retires. Ten minutes later she comes out again and screams:

“_Tom_my!

“Y-e-e-a-a-s-s!” very passionately and shrilly.

“Ain't you goin' to bring those cows down to-day?”

“Y-e-e-a-a-s-s-s!--carn't yer see I'm comin'?”

A boy is seen to run wildly along the siding and hurl a missile at a feeding cow; the cow runs forward a short distance through the trees, and then stops to graze again while the boy stirs up another milker.

An hour goes by.

The rising Australian generation is represented by a thin, lanky youth of about fifteen. He is milking. The cow-yard is next the house, and is mostly ankle-deep in slush. The boy drives a dusty, discouraged-looking cow into the bail, and pins her head there; then he gets tackle on to her right hind leg, hauls it back, and makes it fast to the fence. There are eleven cows, but not one of them can be milked out of the bail--chiefly because their teats are sore. The selector does not know what makes the teats sore, but he has an unquestioning faith in a certain ointment, recommended to him by a man who knows less about cows than he does himself, which he causes to be applied at irregular intervals--leaving the mode of application to the discretion of his son. Meanwhile the teats remain sore.

Having made the cow fast, the youngster cautiously takes hold of the least sore teat, yanks it suddenly, and dodges the cow's hock. When he gets enough milk to dip his dirty hands in, he moistens the teats, and things go on more smoothly. Now and then he relieves the monotony of his occupation by squirting at the eye of a calf which is dozing in the adjacent pen. Other times he milks into his mouth. Every time the cow kicks, a burr or a grass-seed or a bit of something else falls into the milk, and the boy drowns these things with a well-directed stream--on the principle that what's out of sight is out of mind.

Sometimes the boy sticks his head into the cow's side, hangs on by a teat, and dozes, while the bucket, mechanically gripped between his knees, sinks lower and lower till it rests on the ground. Likely as not he'll doze on until his mother's shrill voice startles him with an inquiry as to whether he intends to get that milking done to-day; other times he is roused by the plunging of the cow, or knocked over by a calf which has broken through a defective panel in the pen. In the latter case the youth gets tackle on to the calf, detaches its head from the teat with the heel of his boot, and makes it fast somewhere. Sometimes the cow breaks or loosens the leg-rope and gets her leg into the bucket and then the youth clings desperately to the pail and hopes she'll get her hoof out again without spilling the milk. Sometimes she does, more often she doesn't--it depends on the strength of the boy and the pail and on the strategy of the former. Anyway, the boy will lam the cow down with a jagged yard shovel, let her out, and bail up another.

When he considers that he has finished milking he lets the cows out with their calves and carries the milk down to the dairy, where he has a heated argument with his mother, who--judging from the quantity of milk--has reason to believe that he has slummed some of the milkers. This he indignantly denies, telling her she knows very well the cows are going dry.

The dairy is built of rotten box bark--though there is plenty of good stringy-bark within easy distance--and the structure looks as if it wants to lie down and is only prevented by three crooked props on the leaning side; more props will soon be needed in the rear for the dairy shows signs of going in that direction. The milk is set in dishes made of kerosene-tins, cut in halves, which are placed on bark shelves fitted round against the walls. The shelves are not level and the dishes are brought to a comparatively horizontal position by means of chips and bits of bark, inserted under the lower side. The milk is covered by soiled sheets of old newspapers supported on sticks laid across the dishes. This protection is necessary, because the box bark in the roof has crumbled away and left fringed holes--also because the fowls roost up there. Sometimes the paper sags, and the cream may have to be scraped off an article on dairy farming.

The selector's wife removes the newspapers, and reveals a thick, yellow layer of rich cream, plentifully peppered with dust that has drifted in somehow. She runs a forefinger round the edges of the cream to detach it from the tin, wipes her finger in her mouth, and skims. If the milk and cream are very thick she rolls the cream over like a pancake with her fingers, and lifts it out in sections. The thick milk is poured into a slop-bucket, for the pigs and calves, the dishes are “cleaned”--by the aid of a dipper full of warm water and a rag--and the wife proceeds to set the morning's milk. Tom holds up the doubtful-looking rag that serves as a strainer while his mother pours in the milk. Sometimes the boy's hands get tired and he lets some of the milk run over, and gets into trouble; but it doesn't matter much, for the straining-cloth has several sizable holes in the middle.

The door of the dairy faces the dusty road and is off its hinges and has to be propped up. The prop is missing this morning, and Tommy is accused of having been seen chasing old Poley with it at an earlier hour. He never seed the damn prop, never chased no cow with it, and wants to know what's the use of always accusing him. He further complains that he's always blamed for everything. The pole is not forthcoming, and so an old dray is backed against the door to keep it in position. There is more trouble about a cow that is lost, and hasn't been milked for two days. The boy takes the cows up to the paddock sliprails and lets the top rail down: the lower rail fits rather tightly and some exertion is required to free it, so he makes the animals jump that one. Then he “poddies”--hand-feeds--the calves which have been weaned too early. He carries the skim-milk to the yard in a bucket made out of an oil-drum--sometimes a kerosene-tin--seizes a calf by the nape of the neck with his left hand, inserts the dirty forefinger of his right into its mouth, and shoves its head down into the milk. The calf sucks, thinking it has a teat, and pretty soon it butts violently--as calves do to remind their mothers to let down the milk--and the boy's wrist gets barked against the jagged edge of the bucket. He welts that calf in the jaw, kicks it in the stomach, tries to smother it with its nose in the milk, and finally dismisses it with the assistance of the calf rope and a shovel, and gets another. His hand feels sticky and the cleaned finger makes it look as if he wore a filthy, greasy glove with the forefinger torn off.