Such Is Life Part 8

I went for them with a clear start of a hundred yards, and would have won easy, only that I saw they were station cattle; and at the same time I caught sight of another little lot in a hollow to the left, and Bat travelling for them. I slewed round, and gave him a gallop for it, but he won by fifty yards. However, there was only five of our lot in the little mob. There was thirteen wanted still; and Bob had possession of them among the station cattle. So they got eighteen altogether, and we only got sixteen, after running the legs off our horses."

"Port Phillip," observed Cooper pointedly.

"Another time, going on for three years ago," continued Thompson, "Bob had me as cheap as dirt for the whole twenty, while Bat snapped Potter's horses the same night. That was on Wo-Winya again--shortly before M'Gregor sold the station to Stoddart, and just before the two of them were sent out to the Diamantina"----

"M'Gregor and Stoddart, of course?" I gently suggested.

"Yes, Tom; I thought I made that clear."

"So you did, Steve. I beg pardon."

"Don't mention it, Tom."

True friendship lay underneath this severity, for when Thompson got started on his reminiscences, he was apt to continue indefinitely, to the ruin of his own dignity.

"But why this solicitude and panic over being detected in trifling trespa.s.s?"

asked Willoughby. "Like most things in this country, it appears to be purely a matter of s. d. Now, I have taken the liberty of totting up, in my own mind, some of your earnings. Will Thompson permit me to take his case as an ill.u.s.tration? I find, Thompson, that the tariff of your wool is exactly sevenpence half-penny per ton per mile. You have eight tons on your wagon at the present time. This will give you five shillings for each mile you travel. You have travelled ten miles to-day"----

"Sabbath day's journey," sighed Thompson.

----"that is two pounds ten. Now,--all things considered--an occasional penalty of, say, one pound, appears to me by no means ruinous.

It is not to be mentioned in comparison with other losses which you have been unfortunate enough to sustain, yet it appears to be your chief grievance."

"Yes; that's one way of looking at it," muttered Thompson, after a pause.

The other fellows were silently and futilely wrestling with the apparent anomaly. A metaphysical question keeps slipping away from the grasp of the bullock driver's mind like a wet melon-seed.

[Yet the solution is simple. The up-country man is decidedly openhanded; he will submit to crushing losses with cheerfulness, tempered, of course, by humility in those cases where he recognises the operation of an overhanging curse; he will subscribe to any good or bad cause with a liberality excelled only by the digger; he will pay gambling debts with the easy, careless grace which makes every P. of W. so popular in English sporting circles--in a word, the smallest of his many sins is parsimony. But the penal suggestiveness of trespa.s.s-- penalty touches the sullen dignity of his nature; and the vague, but well-grounded fear of a law made and administered solely by his natural enemies makes him feel about as apprehensive as John Bunyan, though certainly more dangerous. Of course, Willoughby, born and bred a member of the governing cla.s.s, could n't easily conceive the dismay with which these outlaws regarded legal seizure for trespa.s.s-- or possibly prosecution in courts dominated by squatters.]

"I knows wun respectable man with two teams wot's seed the time he'd emp'y a double-barr'll gun on them two fellers jis' same's if they was wild dogs," remarked Price ominously. "I happen ter mind me o' wun time this man hed ter fetch hees las' wool right on ter Deniliquin, f'm Hay, f'r two-five hextry, 'count o' there bein' no river that season.

An' that man 'e war shaddered hevery day acrost Wo-Winyar, an' hees bullicks collared hevery night with Bob or Bat; an' them bullicks har'ly fit ter crawl with fair poverty. Dirty! W'y, Chows ain't in it with them varmin f'r dirtiness." Here followed a steady torrent of red vituperation, showing that Price took a strong personal interest in the respectable man with the two teams.

"To my (adj.) knowledge, they dummied land for ole M'Gregor, an' never got a cent for it," remarked Dixon. "Same time, I got nothin' to say agen 'em, for they never got a slant to snavel my lot. Brothers--ain't they?"

"No (adj.) fear," replied Mosey. "You never seen brothers hangin' together like them chaps. I know some drovers that's been prayin'

for theyre (adj.) souls every night for years, on account o' the way they used to rush travellin' stock across M'Gregor's runs.

Whenever there was dirty work to be did, them two blokes was on hand to do it.

An' I got it on good authority that they chanced three years chokey for perjury, when they was dummyin' for M'Gregor; an' all they got for it was the fright hangin' over them. A man should n't make a dog of his self without he's well paid for it. That's my (adj.) religion."

"So far as dummying is concerned." said I; "no one except their Maker and M'Gregor knows how the thing was worked. But if they had owned all the land they secured for M'Gregor, by perjury, and personation, and straightforward dummyism, they would have been little squatters themselves.

At the same time, they were true-hearted, kindly, unselfish men, according to their uncertain light; and in all probability they're gone to heaven. Such is life, boys."

"Anyhow, they ain't goin' to trouble us no furder," rejoined Mosey complacently. "Theyre toes is turned up. Lis'n!--that's the sound I like to hear!" The sound was the deep, heavy sough of a contented bullock, as he lay down with a couple of days' rations in his capacious first stomach.

"Gra.s.s is generally a burning question with you teamsters,"

observed Willoughby.

"I never make no insinuations, myself," replied Dixon coldly.

"Good!" interjected Mosey. "If you was inclined that road, you might say the carrier's got as much interest in the gra.s.s as a squatter.

It's the traveller as don't give a (compound expletive) if the whole country's as black as Ole Nick's soot-brush."

"Well, I s'pose that's about a fair thing for to-night," remarked Cooper; and he pulled off his boots, preparatory to wrapping himself in his blanket.

"Time to vong tong cooshey, as the Frenchman says. Must n't oversleep in the mornin', if the place is ever so safe."

Then I disposed my possum rug and saddle, took off my boots, spread my coat for Pup to sleep on, lit my pipe, and lay down for the night.

Thompson, Mosey, and Willoughby arranged themselves here and there, according to taste. Dixon and Methuselah retired to hammocks under the rear of their respective wagons. b.u.m simply lay where he was.

I would do my companions what honour I can, but the stern code of the chronicler permits no quibbling with the fact that Mosey and b.u.m wound up the evening with a series of gestes and apothegms, such as must not tarnish these pages--Willoughby occasionally taking part, rather, I think, through courtesy than sympathy, and ably closing the service with a fescennine anecdote, beginning, 'It is related that, on one occasion, the late Marquis of Waterford'----

Willoughby had selected a smooth place near my own lair. Here he spent five minutes in spreading his exceptionally dirty blanket, and another five in tidily folding his ragged coat for a pillow.

Then he removed his unmatched boots, and, unlapping from his feet the inexpensive subst.i.tute for socks known as 'prince-alberts,'

he artistically spread the redolent swaths across his boots to receive the needed benefit of the night air; performing all these little offices with an unconscious elegance amusing to notice--an elegance which not another member of our party could have achieved, any more than Willoughby could have acquired the practical effectiveness of a good rough average vulgarian.

Poor shadow of departed exclusiveness!--lying there, with none so poor to do him reverence! He was a type--and, by reason of his happy temperament, an exceedingly favourable type--of the 'gentleman,' shifting for himself under normal conditions of back-country life. Urbane address, faultless syntax, even that good part which shall not be taken away, namely, the calm consciousness of inherent superiority, are of little use here.

And yet your Australian novelist finds no inconsistency in placing the bookish student, or the city dandy, many degrees above the bushman, or the digger, or the pioneer, in vocations which have been the life-work of the latter. O, the wearisome nonsense of this kind which is remorselessly thrust upon a docile public! And what an opportunity for some novelist, in his rabid pursuit of originality, to merely reverse the incongruity--picturing a semi-barbarian, la.s.soed full-grown, and launched into polished society, there to excel the fastidious idlers of drawing-room and tennis-court in their own line! This miracle would be more reasonable than its ant.i.thesis. Without doubt, it is easier to acquire gentlemanly deportment than axe-man's muscle; easier to criticise an opera than to identify a beast seen casually twelve months before; easier to dress becomingly than to make a bee-line, straight as the sighting of a theodolite, across strange country in foggy weather; easier to recognise the various costly vintages than to live contentedly on the smell of an oil rag. When you take this back elevation of the question, the inconsistency becomes apparent.

And the longa of Art, viewed in conjunction with the brevis of Life, makes it at least reasonable that when a man has faithfully served one exclusive apprenticeship, he will find it too late in the day to serve a second. Moreover, there are few advantages in training which do not, according to present social arrangements, involve corresponding penalties.

Human ignorance is, after all, more variable in character than in extent.

Each sphere of life, each occupation, is burdened with its own special brand of this unhappy heritage. To remove one small section of inborn ignorance is a life-work for any man. 'Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,'

was what betrayed the great lexicographer into defining 'pastern'

as 'a horse's knee.' And the Doctor was right (in his admission, of course, not in his definition). Ignorance, reader, pure ignorance is what debars you from conversing fluently and intelligibly in several dialects of the Chinese language. Yet a friend of mine, named Yabby Pelham, can do so, though the same person knows as little of book-lore as William Shakespear of Stratford knew.

But if you had been brought up in a Chinese camp, on a worn-out gold-field, your own special acquirements, and corresponding ignorance, might run in grooves similar to Yabby's. Let each of us keep himself behind the spikes on this question of restricted capability.

And should some blue-blooded insect indignantly retort that, though his own ancestors have borne coat-armour for seventeen generations, and though he himself was brought up so utterly and aristocratically useless as to have been unable, at twenty years of age, to polish his own boots, yet he is now, mentally and physically, a man fit for anything-- I can only reply, in the words of Portia, that I fear me my lady his mother played false with a smith. But this, again, would be claiming too much for heredity, at the expense of training. Remember, however, that our present subject is not the 'gentleman' of actual life.

He is an unknown and elusive quant.i.ty, merging insensibly into saint or scoundrel, sage or fool, man or blackleg. He runs in all shapes, and in all degrees of definiteness. Our subject is that insult to common sense, that childish slap in the face of honest manhood, the 'gentleman' of fiction, and of Australian fiction pre-eminently.

Heaven knows I am no more inclined to decry social culture than moral principle; but I acknowledge no aristocracy except one of service and self-sacrifice, in which he that is chief shall be servant, and he that is greatest of all, servant of all. And it is surely time to notice the threepenny braggadocio of caste which makes the languid Captain Vemon de Vere (or words to that effect) an overmatch for half-a-dozen hard-muscled white savages, any one of whom would take his lordship by the ankles, and wipe the battlefield with his patrician visage; which makes the pale, elegant aristocrat punch Beelzebub out of Big Mick, the hod-man, who, in unpleasant reality, would feel the kick of a horse less than his antagonist would the wind of heaven, visiting his face too roughly; which makes the rosy-cheeked darling of the English rectory show the saddle-hardened specialists of the back country how to ride a buckjumper; which makes a party of resourceful bushmen stand helpless in the presence of flood or fire, till marshalled by some hero of the croquet lawn; above all, which makes the isocratic and irreverent Australian fawn on the 'gentleman,'

for no imaginable reason except that the latter says 'deuced'

instead of 'sanguinary,' and 'by Jove' instead of 'by sheol.'

Go to; I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

And don't fall back upon the musty subterfuge which, by a shifting value of the term, represents 'gentleman' as simply signifying a man of honour, probity, education, and taste; for, by immemorial usage, by current application, and by every rule which gives definite meaning to words, the man with a shovel in his hand, a rule in his pocket, an axe on his shoulder, a leather ap.r.o.n on his abdomen, or any other badge of manual labour about him--his virtues else be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo--is carefully contradistinguished from the 'gentleman.' The 'gentleman' may be a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee, a parasite, a helpless potterer; he may be a man of spotless life, able and honest; but he must on no account be a man with broad palms, a workman amongst workmen. The 'gentleman' is not necessarily gentle; but he is necessarily genteel. Etymology is not at fault here; gentility, and gentility alone, is the qualification of the 'gentleman.'

No doubt it is very nice to see a 'gentleman' who, when drunk, can lie in the gutter like a 'gentleman'; but will someone suggest a more pitiable sight than such a person trying to compete with an iron-sinewed miner on the goldfields, or with a hardy, nine-lifed bushman in the back country? In the back country, a penniless and friendless 'gentleman,' if sober and honest and possessed of some little ability, may aspire to the position of a station storekeeper.

If dest.i.tute of these advantages--and reduced 'gentlemen' are not by any means always sober, honest, and capable--the best thing he can do, if he gets the chance, is to settle down thankfully into the innocent occupation so earnestly desired by Henry the Sixth of the play, and so thriftily pursued by the alleged father of any amateur elocutionist whose name is Norval on the Grampian Hills.

Of such reduced 'gentlemen' it is often said that their education becomes their curse. Here is another little subterfuge.

This is one of those taking expressions which are repeated from parrot to magpie till they seem to acquire axiomatic force. It is such men's ignorance--their technical ignorance--that is their curse.

Education of any kind never was, and never can be, a curse to its possessor; it is a curse only to the person whose interest lies in exploiting its possessor. Erudition, even in the humblest sphere of life, is the sweetest solace, the unfailing refuge, of the restless mind; but if the bearer thereof be not able to do something well enough to make a living by it, his education is simply outcla.s.sed, overborne, and crushed by his own superior ignorance.

To be sure, there are men of social culture who gallantly and conspicuously maintain an all-round superiority in the society to which I myself hereditarily belong, namely, the Lower Orders; but their appearances are like angels' visits--in the obvious, as well as in the conventional but remoter sense. I can count no less than three men of this stamp among my ten thousand acquaintances. When the twofold excellence of such ambidexters is not stultified by selfishness, you have in them a realised ideal upon which their Creator might p.r.o.nounce the judgment that it is very good. Move heaven and earth, then, to multiply that ideal by the number of the population. The thing is, at least, theoretically possible; for it is in no way necessary that the manual worker should be rude and illiterate; shut out from his rightful heirship of all the ages. Nor is it any more necessary that the social aristocrat-- ostentatiously useless, as he generally is--should hold virtual monopoly of the elegancies of life.

But the commonplace 'gentleman' of fiction, who, without extraneous advantage, and by mere virtue of caste-consciousness, and caste-eminence, and caste-exclusiveness, doth bestride this narrow world like a colossus----

"I am sorry to break in upon your meditations, Collins,"

said Willoughby deprecatingly, turning towards me on his elbow, "but you know, Necessitas non habet leges. I find myself without the requisite for my normal bedtime solace; and I am unusually wakeful.

Could you spare me a pipeful of tobacco?"

"Certainly! Why did n't you mention it before? I had no idea you were a smoker. I feel really vexed at your reticence."