Such Is Life Part 20

"No," I replied; "you stay and do what you can. I'll ride back, and see Mr. Spanker. How far is it to where that swag is on the fence?"

"About--well, about seven mile, as the crow flies."

"Better have it here. Now we'll catch the horses. Come on, Mary!

Take her on your back, Rory; we must hurry up now."

I have already exceeded the legitimate exactions of my diary-record; but the rest of the story is soon told. Mr. Spanker, as a Justice of Peace, took the sworn depositions of Ward, Andrews, Rory, and myself.

In the man's pockets were found half-a-dozen letters, addressed to George Murdoch, Mooltunya Station, from Malmsbury, Victoria; and all were signed by his loving wife, Eliza H. Murdoch. Two of the letters acknowledged receipt of cheques; and there was another cheque (for 12 15s., if I remember rightly) in his pocket-book, with about 3 in cash. He was buried in the station cemetery, between Val English, late station storekeeper, who had poisoned himself, and Jack Drummond, shearer, who had died--presumably of heart failure--after breaking the record of the district. Such is life.

CHAPTER III

FRI. NOV. 9. Charley's Paddock. Binney. Catastrophe.

What fatality impelled me to fix on the 9th, above all other days in the month?

Why did n't I glance over the record of each 9th, before committing myself by a promise to review and annotate the entries of that date? For, few and evil as the days of the years of my pilgrimage have undeniably been, the 9th of November, '83, is one of those which I feel least satisfaction in recalling. Moreover, I incur a certain risk in thus unbosoming myself, as will become apparent to the perfidious reader who hungrily shadows me through this compromising story. But it may be graven with a pen of iron, that, at my age, no man shirks a promise, or tells a fib, for the first time; and so, "Sad, but Strong"---the family motto of the Colonnas, that offshoot of our tribe which settled in Italy in the year One--I answer to my bail.

One reservation I must make, however. For reasons which will too soon become manifest, it is expedient to conceal the exact locality of the unhappy experience now about to be disclosed; but I think I shall be on the safe side in setting forth that it was somewhere between Echuca and Albury.

Any person who happens to have preserved the files of the ---- Express may find, on the second page of the issue of Nov. 12th, the following local intelligence:--

LUNATIC AT LARGE!

On the night of Friday last the inhabitants of ---- were thrown into a state of excitement which may better be imagened than described by the appearance of a lunatic in puris naturalibus whose mania was evidently homicidal.

During the earlier portion of the night the unfortunate man was seen from time to time by quite a number of people in places many miles apart.

Some of the pleasure-seekers returning from the picnic held by the Sunday School Teachers' Re-union (noticed elsewhere in our columns) saw him scuttling along the three-chain road at a breakneck pace, others saw him dodging behind trees or endeavouring to conceal himself in scrub. At about 9 o'clock in the evening one of the picnic party, an athlete of some repute, made a plucky and determined attempt to capture the madman, and succeeded in overpowering him. This accomplished secundem artem, an impulse of humanity prompted Mr. K---- (for as some of our readers have already guessed, the gentleman referred to was Mr. K----, of the firm of D---- and S----, Drapers,----) to divest himself of part of his own clothing for the benefit of his prisoner. The latter, when Mr. K---- attempted to force the clothing upon him, rent the air with horrible shrieks heard by many others of the party, and by exertion of the unnatural strength which insanity confers, broke from his captor and escaped. Mr. K---- humorously comments on the difficulty of holding a nude antagonist. If we were inclined to be facetious on the subject we might suggest that mens sana in corpore sano is not an infallible rule.

Late in the evening the maniac horresco referrens made a furious attack on the residence of Mr. G---- who was unfortunately absent at the time.

Mrs. G---- with the splendid courage which distinguishes the farmer's wife, kept him at bay till some wild impulse drove him to seek "fresh fields and pastures new." The black trackers (who were brought on the scene on Sat.u.r.day afternoon) have found his tracks in Mr. A----'s flower garden close to the parlour window, and also around Mr. H----'s homestead.

The trackers aver that he is accorpanied by a large kaugaroo dog.

It is a matter of congratulation that he has so far failed in effecting an entrance to any habitation. The police are scouring the neighbourhood and though the thunderstorm of Sat.u.r.day night has unfortunately placed the trackers at fault, we trust soon to chronicle a clever capture, "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Various surmises are afloat regarding the ident.i.ty of the lunatic but to our mind the suggestion of Inspector Collins, of the N.S.W. Civil Service appears most tenable: On Sat.u.r.day afternoon when the excitement was at its height this gentleman called at our office, and in course of conversation on the all-absorbing topic p.r.o.nounced his opinion that the lunatic is no other than the late escapee from Beechworth Asylum! Anent his mysterious disapearance at some time late on Friday night Mr. Collins supposes that he must have drowned himself in the river, and advances many ingenious and apparently conclusive arguments in support of both his hypotheses.

Notwithstanding the ingenuity and conclusiveness of those arguments, the chain of fatalities which has headed this story with the entry of Nov. 9th brings the reluctant secret to light: I was that homicidal maniac.

The second page of the newspaper just quoted will be also found to contain, in another column, the following local item:--

We regret to learn that on the morning of Sat.u.r.day last Mr. Q---- lost a valuable stack of hay by fire. The conflagation was detected almost immediately on its breaking out but no steps could be taken to check the progress of the "devouring element." It might be reasonably expected that Mr. Q----'s well-deserved popularity would be a sufficient safeguard against such barbarous incendiarism, but of a truth there are people now at large who ought to be in "durance vile." At the moment of our going to press we are happy to add that the police have a clue, and will soon no doubt unearth the cowardly perpetrator of this un-British outrage, and drag him forth to condign punishment.

However, the perpetrator in question, being even more cunning than cowardly, took special order that the police should not unearth him; and here he sits in his temporary sanctum, inviting them to come on with what is left of their clue--though at the same time keeping, like Sir Andrew, o' the windy side o' the law, by putting initials and dashes in place of full names, and by leaving the exact locality unspecified. Drag me forth to condign punishment! My word! Drag a barrister.

Now for my narrative. Charley V----, a boundary rider on B---- Station, N.S.W., is one of my very oldest acquaintances. Away back in the procuratorship of Latrobe, two angels, in wreaths of asphodel, had almost simultaneously deposited Charley and myself on the same station; respectively, in the hut of a stock-keeper, and in the hut of a petty overseer.

Together, as the seasons pa.s.sed, we had looked forward to the shearing, the foot-rotting, and the lambing; and together we had watched the lagoon for the bunyip. We had aimed our little reed-spears at the same mark, we had whirled our little boomerangs over the same big tree, and we had been welted an equal number of times for crossing the river on the same slippery log.

Whatever may be the development of my own inner nature, Charley, at least, walks faithfully in the moral twilight which his early training vouchsafed to him. His fidelity to B---- Station is like that which ought to distinguish somebody's wife--I forget whose, but no matter. The mere ownership of the property is a matter of perfect indifference to Charley. When the place changes hands, he is valued and sold as part of the working plant, without his concern, and almost without his knowledge; owners may come, and owners may go, but he virtually goes on for ever. His little hut, three or four miles north from the Murray, is the very headquarters of hospitality. He has some hundreds of pounds lent out (without interest or security) though his pay is only fifteen shillings a week--with ten, ten, two, and a quarter--and he is anything but a miser. Many people would like a leaf out of his book. It is my privilege to be able to furnish this, though in a sort of ambiguous way, having received the information in confidence. Here it is:

In a bend, on the north bank of the Murray, a few miles from Charley's hut, is a tract, about a hundred acres in extent, of fine gra.s.s land, completely isolated by billabongs, reed-beds, dense scrub, and steep ridges of loose sand. At the time I write of, it was impossible to ride to this island of verdure, and no white man could track a horse through the labyrinth that led to it. Once placed in that spot, no horse would ever try to get away. This is all the information I feel justified in giving.

During the afternoon of the 9th, I was sitting on a log, in the shade of a tree, on the north bank of the river, about a mile from that secluded Eden, and four or five from Charley's hut. I had camped at dusk on the previous evening; and the equipment of my two horses, with other impedimenta, was lying about. A small damper was maturing under the handful of fire, and a quart pot of tea was slowly collecting a sc.u.m of dirt which made it nothing the worse to a man of my nurture. Pup was reposing on my possum rug, and Cleopatra and Bunyip were in Eden, per favour of the kindly scoundrel who held that property by right of discovery, and who, in spite of some reluctance on my part, had made me free of it. Along with my two horses were ten or twelve others, all strangers, and in various stages of ripening for rewards.

Owing to the broken character of the country, the N.S.W. river-road lay three or four miles north of Charley's very private property; but a short cut, impa.s.sable during the winter, and impracticable at any time to wheeled vehicles, saved about three miles in ten, and pa.s.sed within a mile of the property. It was beside this pad that I was camped.

The refined leisure of the day had been devoted chiefly to the study of my current swapping-book--Edwards on Redemption--and now, half-stifled by the laborious blasphemy of the work, I was seeking deliverance from the sin of reading it by watching the mult.i.tudes of white c.o.c.katoos through my binocular, and piously speculating as to their intended use.

Presently, sweeping the ground-line with the gla.s.s, I noticed, crossing an open place, about a mile away, the figure of a swagman approaching from the west--that is, coming up the river. I kept the gla.s.s in his direction, and whenever he disappeared I was on the watch, and caught him again as he came in sight, tramping wearily along in the roasting sun.

That swagman had a history, highly important, at all events, to himself.

He had been born; he lived; he would probably die--and if any human being wants a higher record than that, he must work for it. This man's personal value, judged by the standard which I, for one, dare not disown, was certainly as high as that of the average monarch or multi-millionaire. But was I as much interested as I would have been had one of these personages been approaching my camp in state? And if not, why not?

I immediately filled and lit a mighty German meerschaum, an ally of established efficiency in ethical emergencies such as this. Then laying the pipe, so to speak, on the scent of the swagman, I attempted a clairvoyant rear-glance along his past history, and essayed a forecast of his future destiny, in order to get at the valuation presumably placed upon him by his Maker. But the pipe, being now master of the position, gently seduced my mind to a wider consideration, merely using the swagman as a convenient spring-board for its flight into regions of the Larger Morality. This is its hobby--caught, probably, from some society of German Illuminati, where it became a kind of storage-battery, or acc.u.mulator, of such truths as ministers of the Gospel cannot afford to preach.

Ah! (moralised the pipe) the man who spends his life in actual hardship seldom causes a trumpet to be blown before him. He is generally, by heredity or by the dispensation of Providence, an ornament to the lower walks of life; therefore his plea, genuine if ungrammatical, is heard only at second-hand, in a fragmentary and garbled form. Little wonder, then, that such a plea is received with felicitous self-gratulation, or pa.s.sed with pharisaical disregard, by the silly old world that has still so many lessons to learn-- so many lessons which none but that unresisting b.u.t.t of slender-witted jokers can fitly teach, and which he, the experienced one, is usually precluded from teaching by his inability to spell any word of two syllables.

Yet he has thoughts that glow, and words that burn, albeit with such sulphurous fumes that, when uttered in a public place, they frequently render him liable to fourteen days without the option.

And even though he be not a poor rogue hereditary; even though he may once have tasted the comfort ambiguously scorned of devils; even though his descent into Avernus be, like that of Ulysses or Dante, temporary and incidental, you need n't expect him, on reaching the upper air, to be the prophet, spokesman, and champion of the Order whose bitter johnny-cake he has eaten. You must n't be surprised to find him reticent, not to say mendacious, respecting details which he may regard as humiliating.

A sort of Irish pride will probably lead him to represent that he had abundant, though unavailable, resources during the period of his perdition.

For one or the other of these reasons--orthographical inability, or Irish pride--the half is never told; therefore, as a rule, the reading public is acquainted only with sketchy and fallacious pictures of that continuous, indurating hardship which finally sends reluctant Hope after her co-tenants of the box.

And further, of this, my son, be admonished (continued the pipe): The more bitter the hardship, the more unmixed and cordial is the ignominy lavished by the elect upon the sufferer--always provided the latter is one of the non-elect, and more particularly if he is a swagman.

Yet this futureless person is the man who pioneers all industries; who discovers and unearths the precious ores; whose heavy footprints mark the waterless mulga, the wind-swept plains, and the scorching sand; who leaves intaglio impressions of his mortal coil on the wet ground, at every camp from the Murray to the Gulf; and whose only satisfaction in the cold which curls him up like cinnamon bark--making him nearly break his back in the effort to hold his shoulders together--is the certainty that in six months he will sc.r.a.pe away the hot surface sand, in order to sleep comfortably on the more temperate stratum beneath; he is the man who, with some incoherent protest and becoming invective, metaphorically makes a Raleigh-cloak of himself, to afford free and pleasant pa.s.sage for the n.o.blest work of G.o.d, namely, the Business Man.

The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss.

The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm. Like Rosalind's typical traveller, this worm has rich eyes and poor hands--the former often ophthalmic, the latter always brown and wrinkled, and generally dirty.

Life is too short to admit of repeated blunders in the numeration of beans, and this being his one weak point, the dram of ale does its work. And so, neither as pharisee nor publican, but rather as the pharisee's shocking example, and the publican's working bee, he toils and swears his hour upon the stage, and then modestly departs to where the thrifty cease from troubling, and the thriftless be at rest. Little recks he then for lack of storied urn or animated bust, little that for him no minstrel raptures swell; for his animated busts are things of the past, and there never was anything of the swell about him.

Heaven help him! that nameless flotsam of humanity! (mused the pipe).

Few and feeble are his friends on earth; and the One who, like him, was wearied with his journey, and, like him, had not where to lay his head, is gone, according to His own parable, into a far country. The swagman we have always with us--And comfortable ecclesiasticism marks a full stop there, blasphemously evading the completion of a sentence charged with the grave truth, that the Light of the world, the G.o.d-in-Man, the only G.o.d we can ever know, is by His own authority represented for all time by the poorest of the poor. Yet whosoever fails to recognise in the marred visage of any social derelict the image of Him who was despised and rejected of men--whosoever resents not the spectacle of that image weighted down by fraternal neglect and oppression till a human heart pulses with no higher aspiration than that which prompts a persecuted animal to preserve its life for further persecution--such a person, I say, can have no place among the Architect's workmen, being already employed on the ageless Babel-contract.

This special study of hardship (resumed the pipe, after a pause) leads naturally to the generic study of poverty; for, as the greater includes the less, poverty includes hardship, along with disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, social outlawry, proud man's contumely, and so forth; entirely without reference to the moral worth of the person most concerned. In a word, poverty is, in the eyes of the orthodox Christian, a h.e.l.l in the hand, better worth avoiding than two h.e.l.ls in the book, which latter may be only figurative after all.

But the great inst.i.tution of poverty (ruminated the pipe) is too often referred to in this large, loose way. There are two kinds--or rather, the condition exhibits two opposite extremes of moral quality.

There is a voluntary poverty, which is certainly the least base situation you can occupy whilst you crawl between heaven and earth, and which is not so rare as your sordid disposition might lead you to imagine.

There is also a compulsory poverty, shading down from discontented to contented. And, paradoxical as it may appear, the contented sub-variety is the opposing pole to voluntary poverty. The discontented sub-variety is the perpetual troubler of the world, by reason of its aiming only at changing the incidence of hardship, and succeeding fairly well in its object. Touching the contented sub-variety--well, possibly the Hindoo language might do justice to its vileness; the English falls entirely short.

Compulsory-contented poverty is utterly, irredeemably despicable, and, by necessity, ignorantly blasphemous--not because its style of glorifying G.o.d is to place His conceded image exactly at the plough-horse level, but because it teaches its babies, from the cradle upward, that a capricious Mumbo-Jumbo has made pollard-bread for them, and something with a French name for its white-headed boy; moleskins, tied below the knee, for them, and a belltopper for the favourite of the family; the three R's for them, and the cla.s.sics, ancient and modern, for the vessel chosen to honour; illicit snakejuice for them, and golden top for the other fellow.

The adherents of this cult vote Conservative, work scab, and are rightly termed the "deserving poor," inasmuch as they richly deserve every degree of poverty, every ounce of indignity, and every inch of condescension they stagger under. But their children don't deserve these things. And just mark the slimy little word-shuffle which, in order to keep the "deserving poor" up to their work, p.r.o.nounces upon them the blessings obviously adherent only to that unquestionable guarantee of unselfish purpose, namely, voluntary poverty. A subtle confusion of issues; but the person who homilises on the blessings of compulsory poverty should be left talking to the undefileable atmosphere.

Yet do I cling (continued the pipe) to Plato's beautiful thought, that no soul misses truth willingly. In bare justice to brave, misguided Humanity; in daily touch with beings in so many respects little lower than the imagined angels; in dispa.s.sionate survey of history's lurid record of distorted loyalty staining our old, sad earth with life-blood of opposing loyalty, while each side fights for an idea; in view of the zeal which fires the martyr-spirit to endure all that equal zeal can inflict; in contemplation of the ever-raging enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the Ormuzd and the Ahriman in man; in view even of that dismal experiment indifferently termed "making the best of both worlds," and "serving G.o.d and Mammon "--in view of all these things, I cannot think it is anything worse than a locally-seated and curable ignorance which makes men eager to subvert a human equality, self-evident as human variety, and impregnable as any mathematical axiom.

And this special brand of ignorance is even more rampant amongst those educated a.s.ses who can read Kikero in the original than amongst uneducated a.s.ses who know not the law, and are cursed.

Remember (pursued the pipe, with a touch of severity) that Science apprehends no decimal of a second adequate to note, on the limitless circle of Time, the briefness of a centenarian's life; and yet the giddiest pitch of human effrontery dares not carry beyond the incident of death any vestige of a social code now accepted as good enough to initiate a development which, according to your own showing, goes on through changing cycles till some transcendent purpose is fulfilled. The "love of equality"--that meanest and falsest of equivocations--sickens and dies, and the inflated lie of a social privilege based on extraneous conditions collapses, under the strict arrest of the fell sergeant, Death. If we seek absolute truth-- which can never be out of place--surely we shall find it beyond the gates which falsehood cannot pa.s.s. And here we find it conceded by all; for as material things fade away, human vision clears, and truth becomes a unit.

Osiris' balances weighed impartially the souls of Coptic lord and slave, before the pyramids rose on Egypt's plains; austere Minos meted even justice to citizen and helot, while the sculptured ideals of Attica slept in Pentelican quarries; Brahmin and Sudra, according to deeds done in the body-- strictly according to deeds done in some body--awake beyond the grave to share aeons of sorrowful transmigration, and final repose; Nirvana awaits the Buddhist high and low alike; Islamism sternly sends all mankind across the sharp-edged Bridge, which the righteous only cross in safety, while wicked caliph and wicked slave together reel into the abyss below. The apotheosis of pagan heroes rested on personal merit alone. No eschatology but that of High Calvinism antic.i.p.ates, in the unseen world, anything resembling the injustice of a civilisation which, of set purpose, excludes from the only redemption flesh and blood can inherit, that sad rear-guard whose besetting sin is poverty. Yet John Knox's wildest travesty of eternal justice never rivalled in flagrancy the moving principle of a civilisation which exists merely to build on extrinsic bases an impracticable barrier between cla.s.s and cla.s.s: on one side, the redemption of life, education, refinement, leisure, comfort; on the other side, want, toil, anxiety, and an open path to the Gehenna of ignorance, baseness, and brutality. Holy Willie's G.o.d, at least, heaps no beat.i.tude on successful greed; and your Christian civilisation does so. Dare you deny it?