The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 7

'Look here, mate,' he said, late in the afternoon. 'I've got pretty near thirty bob left, and a real good swag. Why not come with me, an'

we'll swag it outer this into Queensland?'

I drew a quick breath. It was an attractive offer for a boy in my position. But even then there was more of prudence and foresight in me, or possibly less of reckless courage and less of the born nomad, than Ted had.

'But how could I get away?'

'You can swim,' said Ted. 'I'd be waiting for ye at the wharf. We'd be outer reach by daybreak.'

'And then, Ted, how should we live?' My superior prudence questioned him. I take it the difference in our upbringing and tradition spoke here.

'Live! why, how does any one live on the wallaby? It's never hard to get a day's work, if ye want a few bob. Up in the station country they never refuse a man rations, anyway; it's in the town the trouble is.

I've never gone short, travelling.'

'I don't think I'd like begging for meals, Ted,' I said musingly. And in a moment I was wis.h.i.+ng with all my heart I could withdraw the words. It seemed that, for the first time in all our acquaintance, I had hurt and offended this simple, good-hearted fellow.

'Beggin', is it?' he cried, very visibly ruffled. 'I'd be sorry to ask ye to, for it's what I've never done in me life, an' never would.

Would ye call a man a beggar for takin' a ration or a bitter 'baccy from a station store? Why, doesn't every traveller do the same? An', for that matter, can't a man always put in a day's work, gettin'

firewood or what not, if he's a mind to? Ye needn't fear Ted Reilly'll ever come to beggin'!'

In my eager anxiety to placate my only friend I almost accepted his offer. But not quite. Some little inherited difference held me back, perhaps. I wonder! At all events, the thing was dropped between us for the time; and, before he left, Ted promised he would tackle a bit of work a Myall Creek farmer had offered him--to clear a bush paddock of burrajong fern, which had poisoned some cattle. Thus, he would be able to come and see me again on the following Sunday. On that we parted; and, before I was half way through my milking, fear and regret oppressed me as with a physical nausea; fear that I might have lost my only friend, regret that I had not accepted his offer, and so won to freedom and the big world outside St. Peter's.

The night that followed was one of the most unhappy spent by me at St.

Peter's. My prudence appeared to me the merest poltroonery, my remark about 'begging' the most finicking absurdity, my failure to accept Ted's offer the most reckless and offensive stupidity. Evidently I was unworthy of any better lot than I had. I should live and die an 'inmate' and a drudge. I deserved nothing else. In short, I was a very despicable lad, had probably lost the only friend I should ever have, and, certainly, I was very miserable.

Monday brought some softening (helped by the fact that Sister Mary was on duty at breakfast-time, so that I escaped the addition of punishment to hunger), and, as the week wore slowly by, hope rose in my breast once more, and with it a return of what I now regard as the common-sense prescience which made me hesitate to adopt a swagman's life. I could not honestly say that I had any definite ideas as to another and more reputable sort of occupation or career. As yet, I had not. But I did vaguely feel that there would be derogation in becoming what my father would have called a 'tramp.'

My father's memory, the question of what he would have thought of it, affected my att.i.tude materially. He had accepted it as axiomatic, I thought, that his son must be a gentleman. My present lot as an 'inmate' of St. Peter's hardly seemed to fit the axiom, somehow; and Ted, whatever I might think or say about 'beggin'' or the like, was all the friend I had or seemed likely to have, and a really good fellow at that. But withal a certain stubbornly resistant quality in me a.s.serted that there would be a downward step for me, though not for Ted, or for any of my fellow orphans, in taking to the road; that the step might prove irrevocable, and that I ought not to take it. I dare say there was something of the sn.o.b in me. Anyhow, that was how I felt about it. Also, I remember deriving a certain comically stern sort of satisfaction from contemplation of the spectacle of myself, alone, unaided, declining to stoop, even though stooping should bring me freedom from the Orphanage! Yes, there was a certain egotistical satisfaction in that thought.

Ted came to see me again on the next Sunday, but our day was far less cheery than its predecessor had been. We were good friends still, but there was a subtle constraint between us, as was proved by the fact that Ted did not again mention the suggestion of my taking to the road with him. Also, Ted was for the moment a wage-earner, working during fixed and regular hours for an employer; and I knew he hated that. In such case he felt as one of the mountain-bred brumbies (wild horses) of that countryside might be supposed to feel, when caught, branded, and forced between shafts.

On the following Sunday Ted's downcast constraint was much more p.r.o.nounced, and I saw plainly that my Sabbath visitor was on the eve of a breakaway. The name of the farmer for whom he had been working was Manna.s.seh Ford, and, having such a name, the man was always spoken of in just that way.

'I pretty near bruk my back finis.h.i.+ng Manna.s.seh Ford's padd.i.c.k last night,' explained Ted moodily. 'There was three days' fair work left in it when I got there in the morning. But I meant gettin' shut of it, an' I did. Manna.s.seh Ford opened his eyes pretty wide when I called up for me money las' night, an' he looked over the padd.i.c.k. Wanted to take me on regler, he did; pounder week an' all found, he said. I thanked him kindly, him an' his pounder week! Well, he said he'd make it twenty-five s.h.i.+llin', an' I thanked him for that.'

Thanks clearly meant refusal with Ted, and I confess he rose higher in my esteem somehow, for the fact that he could actually refuse what to me seemed like wealth. I recalled the fact that my father had paid Ted exactly half this amount, and had found him quite willing to stay with us for half that again, or even for occasional tobacco money. Perhaps there was a mercenary vein in me at the time. I think it likely. The talk of my fellow orphans was largely of wages, and materialism dominated the atmosphere in which I lived. I know this refusal of twenty-five s.h.i.+llings a week and 'all found' struck me as tolerably reckless; splendid, in a way, but somewhat foolhardy, and I hinted as much to Ted.

'Och, bother him an' his twenty-five s.h.i.+llin'!' said Ted. 'Just because I cleared his old padd.i.c.k, he thinks I'm a workin' bullick. He offered me thirty s.h.i.+llin' after, if ye come to that; an' I told him he hadn't money enough in the bank to keep me. Neither has he.'

'But, Ted,' I urged, 'why not? It's good money, and you've got to work somewhere.'

'Aye,' said Ted, his constraint lifting for a moment to admit the right vagabondish twinkle into his blue eyes. 'Somewhere! An'

sometimes. But not there, mate, an' not all the time, thank ye; not me. It's all right for Manna.s.seh Ford; but, spare me days, I'd sooner be in me grave.'

I pondered this for a time, while a voice within me kept on repeating with sickening certainty: 'He's going away; he's going away. You've lost your friend; you've lost your friend.' And then, as one thrusts a foot into cold water before taking a plunge: 'Well, then, what shall you do, Ted?' I asked him. But, for the moment, I was not to have the plunge.

'Oh, if ye come to that,' he said, weakly smiling, 'I've money in hand, an' to spare. Look at the wealth o' me.' And he drew out for my edification a little bundle of greasy one-pound notes, which, for me, certainly had a very substantial look. I knew instinctively that my friend wanted me to help him out by pursuing the inquiry; but for the time I s.h.i.+rked it, and we talked of other things. Later in the day I returned to it, as a moth to a candle, undeterred, partly impelled thereto, in fact, by the a.s.sured foreknowledge that the process would hurt.

'But what will you do, Ted, now you've given up Manna.s.seh Ford? Will you take another job round the Creek here, or----'

I paused, scanning my only friend's face, and seeing my loss of him writ plainly in his downcast eyes and half-shamed expression. (I am not sure but what there may have been more of the human boy, the child, in Ted, than in myself.)

'Oh, well, mate,' he said haltingly, and then stopped altogether. He was drawing an intricate pattern in the dust with the blade of his pen-knife, a favourite pastime with bushmen. The pause was pregnant.

At last he looked up with a toss of his head. 'Oh, come on, mate,' he said impatiently. 'Swim across to-night, an' we'll beat up Queensland way. I tell ye, travellin' 's fine. Ye've got no boss to say do this an' that. You goes y'r own way at y'r own gait. Ye'd better come.'

'So you'll go, Ted. I knew you would,' I said, musing in my rather old-fas.h.i.+oned way. It seems a smallish matter enough now; but I know that at the time I was conscious of making a momentous sacrifice, of taking a step of epoch-making significance. Somehow, the very greatness of the sacrifice made me the more determined about it. I should lose my only friend, a devastating loss; and the more clearly I realised how naked this loss would leave me, the more convinced I felt that my decision was right. There is, of course, a kind of gluttony in self-denial; one's appet.i.te for sacrifice, and particularly in youth, may be undeniably avid.

'Well, I did try to stop,' he muttered, almost sullenly for him. And then, with that toss of his head, and the glimmering of a frank smile: 'But I can't stick it. Humpin' a swag's about all I'm fit for, I reckon. You're right, too, it's no game for your father's son.' And here his kindly face lost all trace of anything but friendliness.

'Only, what beats me is what in the world else can ye do, mewed up in this--this blessed work'us. That's what has me beat.'

The crisis was pa.s.sed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced constraint. It was admitted between us that he must be off again to his wandering, and that I must stay behind. And now Ted had no thought for anything but my welfare. There was no more awkwardness between us, but only the warmth of this good fellow's real affection, and the almost agreeable melancholy and self-righteous consciousness of wise denial which possessed me. Ted fumbled under his coat with a packet of some food he had brought me: 'Spare me days, the cats might give a lad a bit o' bread to his breakfast--drat 'em!'--and, finally pressed it into my hands, with injunctions to be careful in opening it, as he had put a sc.r.a.p of writing in with it, for me to remember him by.

And so we parted, with no shadow on our friends.h.i.+p, on the track down to the punt.

But though my friend was gone, after these three Sunday visits, and I was alone again, the influence of his coming remained. I should not revert to the unhoping inertia of my previous state. Some instinct told me that. And the instinct was right. My curiosity had been too fully roused. My relations.h.i.+p to the world of people outside St.

Peter's had been definitely re-established by the kindly, rather childlike, bushman, and would not again be allowed to lapse. The mere talk of swimming to the wharf, of cutting the painter, of walking forth into the real world which was not ruled by a Sister-in-charge--all this had wrought a permanent change in me.

The 'sc.r.a.p of writin'' fumblingly inserted into the packet of cakes was no writing of Ted's, but a crumpled, greasy one-pound Bank of New South Wales note; one of his little store, useless to me at St. Peter's--yes; but, even as my eyes p.r.i.c.ked to the emotion of grat.i.tude, some inner consciousness told me my friend's gift would yet prove of very real use to me outside the Orphanage, one day. And, before Ted came, I had been unable to descry any future outside the Orphanage.

V

I do not remember the exact period that elapsed between Ted's departure and the visit of the artist, Mr. Rawlence. But it must have been early winter when Ted was at Myall Creek, because my fifteenth birthday fell at about that time; and it was spring when Mr. Rawlence came, for I know the wattle was in bloom then. Very likely it was in August or September, three or four months after Ted's departure. At all events my mind was still much occupied by thoughts of the outside world and of my future.

Some one had told me that a Sydney artist, a Mr. Rawlence, had permission to land on the island, as he wished to sketch there. But he had not been much about the house or the yards, and I had not seen him. And then, one late afternoon, when I had arrived at the milking-yards a few minutes before the others of the milking gang, I stood with two pails in my right hand, leaning over the slip-rails at the very spot upon which I had caught my first glimpse of Ted at St.

Peter's. I was thinking of that Sunday when I had recognised his broad shoulders, and recalling the thrill that recognition had brought me.

The romantic hazardousness of life had for some considerable time now made its appeal felt by me. It seemed infinitely curious and interesting to me that I and my father ever should have known Ted intimately, as one who shared our curious life on the _Livorno_; Ted who was born and bred there in Werrina; we who came there across thousands of miles of ocean from the world's far side, from Putney, from places whose names Ted had never heard. And then that I should have walked down to that milking-yard with my pails, and, so to say, stumbled upon Ted, after his long wanderings in Queensland, where at this moment he was probably wandering again, hundreds of miles away and, possibly, thinking of me, of that same milking-yard, of these identical slip-rails and splintery grey fence. A wonderful and mysterious business, this life in the great world, I thought; and with that I threw up my left hand to lift the rails down.

'Oh, hold on! Don't move! Stay as you were a minute!'

I jumped half out of my skin as these words, apparently spoken in my very ear, reached me; and, wheeling abruptly round, I saw a man wearing a very large grey felt hat, and holding pencils and a paper block in his hands, peering at me from a little wooded hummock at the end of the cowshed. The skin about his eyes was all puckered up, he held a pencil cross-wise between his white teeth, and was shaking his head from side to side as though very much put about over something.

'What a pity! It's gone now,' he said, as he strode down the slope towards me.

He clearly was disappointed about something; but yet I thought that never since the days when my father was with me had I heard any one speak more pleasantly, or seen any one smile in kindlier fas.h.i.+on.

Later, I realised that no one I had met since my father's death possessed anything resembling the sort of manner, address, intonation, or mental att.i.tude of this Mr. Rawlence. I had no theories then about social divisions, and the like; but here, I thought, was a man who would find n.o.body in the district having anything in common with himself. By the same token, I thought, had my father been alive this newcomer would have recognised a possible companion in him. And, finally, as Mr. Rawlence came to a standstill before me, this absurd reflection flitted through my mind:

'If he only knew it, there's me! But he will never know--how could he?'

The absurd vanity and audacity of the thought made me blush like a bashful schoolgirl. The ridiculous pretentiousness of the thought that in me, the 'inmate' of St. Peter's, this splendid person could find a companion, impressed me now so painfully that I felt it must be plainly visible; that the visitor must see and be scornfully amused by it. Yet, with really extraordinary cordiality, he was holding out his right hand in salutation. Here again my awkwardness made me bungle.

What he meant by his gesture I could not think. Some amusing trick, perhaps. It did not occur to me in that moment of self-abas.e.m.e.nt that he wished to shake an 'inmate's' hand.

'Won't you shake?' he asked, with that smile of his--so unlike any expression one saw on folks' faces at St. Peter's.

'I beg your pardon,' I faltered, and gave him a limp hand, reviling myself inwardly for conduct which I felt would utterly and for ever condemn me in this gentleman's eyes. 'Of course,' I told myself, 'he'll be thinking: "What can one expect from these unfortunate inmates--friendless orphans, living on charity?"' As a fact, I suppose no man's demeanour could have been less suggestive of any such uncharitable thought.

'I suspect you thought it like my cheek, yelling at you like that. The fact is, I had just begun to sketch you. See!'