Children of the Bush Part 34

The surveyor started to sing again:

I have heard the mavis singing Her love-song to the morn.

I have seen the dew-drop clinging To the rose just newly born.

They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away.

That has made me thine for ever!

Bonny Mary of Argyle.

"Blarst my pipe!" exclaimed Mitch.e.l.l, suddenly. "I beg your pardon, Peter. My pipe's always getting stuffed up," and he proceeded to sh.e.l.l out and clear his pipe.

The breeze had changed and strengthened. They heard the violin playing "Annie Laurie."

"They must be having a Scotch night in that camp tonight," said Mitch.e.l.l. The voice came again:

Maxwelton Braes are bonny-- Where early fa's the dew, For 'twas there that Annie Laurie Gie me her promise true--

Mitch.e.l.l threw out his arm impatiently. "I wish they wouldn't play and sing those old songs," he said. "They make you think of d.a.m.ned old things. I beg your pardon, Peter."

Peter sat leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands fingering his cold pipe nervously. His sad eyes had grown haggard and haunted. It is in the hearts of exiles in new lands that the old songs are felt.

"Take no thought of the morrow, Mitch.e.l.l," said Peter, abstractedly. "I beg your pardon, Mitch.e.l.l. I mean----"

"That's all right, Peter," said Mitch.e.l.l. "You're right; to-morrow is the past, as far as I'm concerned."

Peter blinked down at him as if he were a new species.

"You're an odd young man, Mitch.e.l.l," he said. "You'll have to take care of that head of yours or you'll be found hanging by a saddle-strap to a leaning tree on a lonely track, or find yourself in a lunatic asylum before you're forty-five."

"Or else I'll be a great man," said Mitch.e.l.l. "But--ah, well!"

Peter turned his eyes to the fire and smiled sadly. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow, is our destined end or way," he repeated to the fire.

"But we get there just the same," said Mitch.e.l.l, "destined or not."

But to live, that each to-morrow, Finds us further than to-day!

"Why, that just fits my life, Peter," said Mitch.e.l.l. "I might have to tramp two or three hundred miles before I get a cut* or a job, and if to-morrow didn't find me nearer than to-day I'd starve or die of thirst on a dry stretch."

[ * Cut--a pen or "stand" in a shearing shed ]

"Why don't you get married and settle down, Mitch.e.l.l?" asked Peter, a little tired. "You're a teetotaller."

"If I got married I couldn't settle down," said Mitch.e.l.l. "I reckon I'd be the loneliest man in Australia." Peter gave him a swift glance. "I reckon I'd be single no matter how much married I might be. I couldn't get the girl I wanted, and--ah, well!"

Mitch.e.l.l's expression was still quaintly humorous round the lower part of his face, but there was a sad light in his eyes. The strange light as of the old dead days, and he was still young.

The cornet had started in the surveyors' camp.

"Their blooming tunes seem to fit in just as if they knew what we were talking about," remarked Mitch.e.l.l.

The cornet:

You'll break my heart, you little bird, That sings upon the flowering thorn Thou mind'st me of departed joys, Departed never to return.

"d.a.m.n it all," said Mitch.e.l.l, sitting up, "I'm getting sentimental."

Then, as if voicing something that was troubling him, "Don't you think a woman pulls a man down as often as she lifts him up, Peter?"

"Some say so," said Peter.

"Some say so, and they write it, too," said Mitch.e.l.l.

"Sometimes it seems to me as if women were fated to drag a man down ever since Adam's time. If Adam hadn't taken his wife's advice--but there, perhaps he took her advice a good many times and found it good, and, just because she happened to be wrong this time, and to get him into a hole, the sons of Adam have never let the daughters of Eve hear the last of it. That's human nature."

Jack Barnes, the young husband, who was suffering a recovery, had been very silent all the evening. "I think a man's a fool to always listen to his wife's advice," he said, with the unreasonable impatience of a man who wants to think while others are talking. "She only messes him up, and drives him to the devil as likely as not, and gets a contempt for him in the end."

Peter gave him a surprised, reproachful look, and stood up. He paced backwards and forwards on the other side of the fire, with his hands behind his back for a while; then he came and settled himself on the log again and filled his pipe.

"Yes," he said, "a man can always find excuses for himself when his conscience stings him. He puts mud on the sting. Man at large is beginning all over the world to rake up excuses for himself; he disguises them as `Psychological studies,' and thinks he is clean and clever and cultured, or he calls 'em problems--the s.e.x problem, for instance, and thinks he is brave and fearless."

Danny was in trouble again, and Peter went to him. He complained that when he lay down he saw the faces worse, and he wanted to be propped up somehow, so Peter got a pack-saddle and propped the old man's shoulders up with that.

"I remember," Peter began, when he came back to the fire, "I remember a young man who got married----"

Mitch.e.l.l hugged himself. He knew Jack Barnes. He knew that Jack had a girl-wife who was many times too good for him; that Jack had been wild, and had nearly broken her heart, and he had guessed at once that Jack had broken out again, and that Peter M'Laughlan was shepherding him home. Mitch.e.l.l had worked as mates with Jack, and liked him because of the good heart that was in him in spite of all; and, because he liked him, he was glad that Jack was going to get a kicking, so to speak, which might do him good. Mitch.e.l.l saw it coming, as he said afterwards, and filled his pipe, and settled himself comfortably to listen.

"I remember the case of a naturally selfish young man who got married"

said Peter. "He didn't know he was selfish; in fact, he thought he was too much the other way--but that doesn't matter now. His name was--well, we'll call him--we'll call him, `Gentleman Once.'"

"Do you mean Gentleman Once that we saw drinking back at Thomas's shanty?" asked Joe.

"No," said Peter, "not him. There have been more than one in the bush who went by the nickname of `Gentleman Once.' I knew one or two. It's a big clan, the clan of Gentleman Once, and scattered all over the world."

"By the way," said Mitch.e.l.l--"excuse me for interrupting, Peter--but wasn't old Danny, there, a gentleman once? I've heard chaps say he was."

"I know he was," said Peter.

"Gentleman Once! Who's talking about Gentleman Once?" said an awful voice, suddenly and quickly. "About twenty or thirty years ago I was called Gentleman Once or Gentleman Jack, I don't know which--Get out!

_Get out_, I say! It's all lies, and you're the devil. There's four devils sitting by the fire. I see them."

Two of the four devils by the fire looked round, rather startled.

Danny was sitting up, his awful bloodshot eyes glaring in the firelight, and his ruined head looking like the bloated head of a hairy poodle that had been drowned and dried. Peter went to the old man and soothed him by waving off the snakes and devils with his hands, and telling them to go.

"I've heard Danny on the Gentleman Once racket before," remarked Mitch.e.l.l.

"Seems funny, doesn't it, for a man to be proud of the fact that he was called `Gentleman Once' about twenty years ago?"

"Seems more awful than funny to me," said Joe.