The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

by Henry Lawson

  And perhaps the old mate would say slyly, but with a sad, quiet smile:

  ‘Have you got that bit of straw yet, Tom?’

  Those old mates had each three pasts behind them. The two they told each other when they became mates, and the one they had shared.

  And when the visitor had gone by the coach we noticed that the old man would smoke a lot, and think as much, and take great interest in the fire, and be a trifle irritable perhaps.

  Those old mates of our father’s are getting few and far between, and only happen along once in a way to keep the old man’s memory fresh, as it were. We met one to-day, and had a yarn with him, and afterwards we got thinking, and somehow began to wonder whether those ancient friends of ours were, or were not, better and kinder to their mates than we of the rising generation are to our fathers; and the doubt is painfully on the wrong side.

  MITCHELL: A CHARACTER SKETCH

  IT was a very mean station, and Mitchell thought he had better go himself and beard the overseer for tucker. His mates were for waiting till the overseer went out on the run, and then trying their luck with the cook; but the self-assertive and diplomatic Mitchell decided to go.

  ‘Good day,’ said Mitchell.

  ‘Good day,’ said the manager.

  ‘It’s hot,’ said Mitchell.

  ‘Yes it’s hot.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Mitchell; ‘I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you for a job?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Well, I won’t ask you,’ said Mitchell, ‘but I don’t suppose you want any fencing done?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Nor boundary-riding?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘You ain’t likely to want a man to knock round?’

  ‘Naw.’

  I thought not. Things are pretty bad just now.’

  ‘Na – yes – they are.’

  ‘Ah, well; there’s a lot to be said on the squatter’s side as well as the men’s. I suppose I can get a bit of rations?’

  ‘Ye – yes. (Shortly) – Wot d’yer want?’

  ‘Well, let’s see; we want a bit of meat and flour – I think that’s all. Got enough tea and sugar to carry us on.’

  ‘All right. Cook! have you got any meat?’

  ‘No!’

  To Mitchell: ‘Can you kill a sheep?’

  ‘Rather!’

  To the cook: ‘Give this man a cloth and knife and steel, and let him go up to the yard and kill a sheep.’ (To Mitchell): ‘You can take a fore-quarter and get a bit of flour.’

  Half-an-hour later Mitchell came back with the carcase wrapped in the cloth.

  ‘Here yer are; here’s your sheep,’ he said to the cook.

  ‘That’s all right; hand it in there. Did you take a fore-quarter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you? The boss told you to.’

  ‘I didn’t want a fore-quarter. I don’t like it. I took a hindquarter.’

  So he had.

  The cook scratched his head; he seemed to have nothing to say. He thought about trying to think, perhaps, but gave it best. It was too hot and he was out of practice.

  ‘Here, fill these up, will you,’ said Mitchell, ‘that’s the tea-bag, and that’s the sugar-bag, and that’s the flour-bag.’

  He had taken them from the front of his shirt.

  ‘Don’t be frightened to stretch ’em a little, old man, I’ve got two mates to feed.’

  The cook took the bags mechanically and filled them well before he knew what he was doing. Mitchell talked all the time.

  ‘Thank you,’ said he – ‘got a bit of baking-powder?’

  ‘Ye – yes, here you are.’

  ‘Thank you. Find it dull here, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, pretty dull. There’s a bit of cooked beef and some bread and cake there, if you want it!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mitchell, sweeping the broken victuals into an old pillow-slip which he carried on his person for such an emergency. ‘I ’spose you find it dull round here.’

  ‘Yes, pretty dull.’

  ‘No one to talk to much?’

  ‘No, not many.’

  ‘Tongue gets rusty?’

  ‘Ye-es, sometimes.’

  ‘Well, so long, and thank yer.’

  ‘So long,’ said the cook (he nearly added ‘thank yer’).

  ‘Well, good day; I’ll see you again.’

  ‘Good day.’

  Mitchell shouldered his spoil and left.

  The cook scratched his head; he had a chat with the overseer afterwards, and they agreed that the traveller was a bit gone.

  But Mitchell’s head wasn’t gone – not much: he was a Sydney jackeroo who had been round a bit – that was all.

  ON THE EDGE OF A PLAIN

  ‘I’D been away from home for eight years,’ said Mitchell to his mate, as they dropped their swags in the mulga shade and sat down. ‘I hadn’t written a letter – kept putting it off, and a blundering fool of a fellow that got down the day before me told the old folks that he’d heard I was dead.’

  Here he took a pull at his water-bag.

  ‘When I got home they were all in mourning for me. It was night, and the girl that opened the door screamed and fainted away like a shot.’

  He lit his pipe.

  ‘Mother was upstairs howling and moaning in a chair, with all the girls boo-hooing round her for company. The old man was sitting in the back kitchen crying to himself.’

  He put his hat down on the ground, dinted in the crown, and poured some water into the hollow for his cattle-pup.

  ‘The girls came rushing down. Mother was so pumped out that she couldn’t get up. They thought at first I was a ghost, and then they all tried to get holt of me at once – nearly smothered me. Look at that pup! You want to carry a tank of water on a dry stretch when you’ve got a pup that drinks as much as two men.’

  He poured a drop more water into the top of his hat.

  ‘Well, mother screamed and nearly fainted when she saw me. Such a picnic you never saw. They kept it up all night. I thought the old cove was gone off his chump. The old woman wouldn’t let go my hand for three mortal hours. Have you got the knife?’

  He cut up some more tobacco.

  ‘All next day the house was full of neighbours, and the first to come was an old sweetheart of mine; I never thought she cared for me till then. Mother and the girls made me swear never to go away any more; and they kept watching me, and hardly let me go outside for fear I’d –’

  ‘Get drunk?’

  ‘No, – you’re smart – for fear I’d clear. At last I swore on the Bible that I’d never leave home while the old folks were alive; and then mother seemed easier in her mind.’

  He rolled the pup over and examined its feet. ‘I expect I’ll have to carry him a bit – his feet are very sore. Well, he’s done pretty well this morning, and anyway he won’t drink so much when he’s carried.’

  ‘You broke your promise about leaving home,’ said his mate.

  Mitchell stood up, stretched himself, and looked dolefully from his heavy swag to the wide, hot, shadeless cotton-bush plain ahead.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he yawned, ‘I stopped at home for a week, and then they began to growl because I couldn’t get any work to do.’

  The mate guffawed and Mitchell grinned. They shouldered the swags, with the pup on top of Mitchell’s, took up their billies and water-bags, turned their unshaven faces to the wide, hazy distance, and left the timber behind them.

  ‘SOME DAY’

  THE two travellers had yarned late in their camp, and the moon was getting low down through the mulga. Mitchell’s mate had just finished a rather ‘racy’ yarn, but it seemed to fall flat on Mitchell; he was in a sentimental mood. He smoked a while, and thought, and then said:

  ‘Ah! there was one little girl that I was properly struck on. She came to our place on a visit to my sister. I think she was the best little girl that ever lived, and about the prettiest.
She was just eighteen, and didn’t come up to my shoulder; the biggest blue eyes you ever saw, and she had hair that reached down to her knees, and so thick you couldn’t span it with your two hands – brown and glossy – and her skin was like lilies and roses. Of course, I never thought she’d look at a rough, ugly, ignorant brute like me, and I used to keep out of her way and act a little stiff towards her; I didn’t want the others to think I was gone on her, because I knew they’d laugh at me, and maybe she’d laugh at me more than all. She would come and talk to me, and sit near me at table; but I thought that that was on account of her good nature, and she pitied me because I was such a rough, awkward chap. I was gone on that girl, and no joking; and I felt quite proud to think she was a countrywoman of mine. But I wouldn’t let her know that, for I felt sure she’d only laugh.

  ‘Well, things went on till I got the offer of two or three years’ work on a station up near the border, and I had to go, for I was hard up; besides, I wanted to get away. Stopping round where she was only made me miserable.

  ‘The night I left they were all down at the station to see me off – including the girl I was gone on. When the train was ready to start she was standing away by herself on the dark end of the platform, and my sister kept nudging me and winking, and fooling about, but I didn’t know what she was driving at. At last she said:

  ‘ “Go and speak to her, you noodle; go and say good-bye to Edie.”

  ‘So I went up to where she was, and, when the others turned their backs –

  ‘ “Well, good-bye, Miss Brown,” I said, holding out my hand; “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again, for Lord knows when I’ll be back. Thank you for coming to see me off.”

  ‘Just then she turned her face to the light, and I saw she was crying. She was trembling all over. Suddenly she said, “Jack! Jack!” just like that, and held up her arms like this.’

  Mitchell was speaking in a tone of voice that didn’t belong to him, and his mate looked up. Mitchell’s face was solemn, and his eyes were fixed on the fire.

  ‘I suppose you gave her a good hug then, and a kiss?’ asked the mate.

  ‘I s’pose so,’ snapped Mitchell. ‘There is some things a man doesn’t want to joke about … Well, I think we’ll shove on one of the billies, and have a drink of tea before we turn in.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Mitchell’s mate, as they drank their tea, ‘I suppose you’ll go back and marry her some day?’

  ‘Some day! That’s it; it looks like it, doesn’t it? We all say “Some day.” I used to say it ten years ago, and look at me now. I’ve been knocking round for five years, and the last two years constant on the track, and no show of getting off it unless I go for good, and what have I got for it? I look like going home and getting married, without a penny in my pocket or a rag to my back scarcely, and no show of getting them. I swore I’d never go back home without a cheque, and, what’s more, I never will; but the cheque days are past. Look at that boot! If we were down among the settled districts we’d be called tramps and beggars; and what’s the difference? I’ve been a fool, I know, but I’ve paid for it; and now there’s nothing for it but to tramp, tramp, tramp for your tucker, and keep tramping till you get old and careless and dirty, and older, and more careless and dirtier, and you get used to the dust and sand, and heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, just as a bullock does, and lose ambition and hope, and get contented with this animal life, like a dog, and till your swag seems part of yourself, and you’d be lost and uneasy and light-shouldered without it, and you don’t care a damn if you’ll ever get work again, or live like a Christian; and you go on like this till the spirit of a bullock takes the place of the heart of a man. Who cares? If we hadn’t found the track yesterday we might have lain and rotted in that lignum, and no one been any the wiser – or sorrier – who knows? Somebody might have found us in the end, but it mightn’t have been worth his while to go out of his way and report us. Damn the world, say I!’

  He smoked for a while in savage silence; then he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, felt for his tobacco with a sigh, and said:

  ‘Well, I am a bit out of sorts to-night. I’ve been thinking … I think we’d best turn in, old man; we’ve got a long, dry stretch before us to-morrow.’

  They rolled out their swags on the sand, lay down, and wrapped themselves in their blankets. Mitchell covered his face with a piece of calico, because the moonlight and wind kept him awake.

  SHOOTING THE MOON

  WE lay in camp in the fringe of the mulga, and watched the big, red, smoky, rising moon out on the edge of the misty plain, and smoked and thought together sociably. Our nose-bags were nice and heavy, and we still had about a pound of nail-rod between us.

  The moon reminded my mate, Jack Mitchell, of something – anything reminded him of something, in fact.

  ‘Did you ever notice,’ said Jack, in a lazy tone, just as if he didn’t want to tell a yarn – ‘Did you ever notice that people always shoot the moon when there’s no moon? Have you got the matches?’

  He lit up; he was always lighting up when he was reminded of something.

  ‘This reminds me – Have you got the knife? My pipe’s stuffed up.’

  He dug it out, loaded afresh, and lit up again.

  ‘I remember once, at a pub I was staying at, I had to leave without saying good-bye to the landlord. I didn’t know him very well at that time.

  ‘My room was upstairs at the back, with the window opening onto the backyard. I always carried a bit of clothes-line in my swag or portmanteau those times. I travelled along with a portmanteau those times. I carried the rope in case of accident, or in case of fire, to lower my things out of the window – or hang myself, maybe, if things got too bad. No, now I come to think of it, I carried a revolver for that, and it was the only thing I never pawned.’

  ‘To hang yourself with?’

  ‘Yes – you’re very smart,’ snapped Mitchell; ‘never mind –. This reminds me that I got a chap at a pub to pawn my last suit, while I stopped inside and waited for an old mate to send me a pound; but I kept the shooter, and if he hadn’t sent it I’d have been the late John Mitchell long ago.’

  ‘And sometimes you lower’d out when there wasn’t a fire.’

  ‘Yes, that will pass; you’re improving in the funny business. But about the yarn. There was two beds in my room at the pub, where I had to go away without shouting for the boss, and, as it happened, there was a strange chap sleeping in the other bed that night, and, just as I raised the window and was going to lower my bag out, he woke up.

  ‘ “Now, look here,” I said, shaking my fist at him, like that, “if you say a word, I’ll stoush yer!”

  ‘ “Well,” he said, “well, you needn’t be in such a sweat to jump down a man’s throat. I’ve got my swag under the bed, and I was just going to ask you for the loan of the rope when you’re done with it.”

  ‘Well, we chummed. His name was Tom – Tom – something, I forget the other name, but it doesn’t matter. Have you got the matches?’

  He wasted three matches, and continued –

  ‘There was a lot of old galvanised iron lying about under the window, and I was frightened the swag would make a noise; anyway, I’d have to drop the rope, and that was sure to make a noise. So we agreed for one of us to go down and land the swag. If we were seen going down without the swags it didn’t matter, for we could say we wanted to go out in the yard for something.’

  ‘If you had the swag you might pretend you were walking in your sleep,’ I suggested, for the want of something funnier to say.

  ‘Bosh,’ said Jack, ‘and get woke up with a black eye. Bushies don’t generally carry their swags out of pubs in their sleep, or walk neither; it’s only city swells who do that. Where’s the blessed matches?

  ‘Well, Tom agreed to go, and presently I saw a shadow under the window, and lowered away.

  ‘ “All right?” I asked in a whisper.

  ‘ “All right!” whispered the shadow.


  ‘I lowered the other swag.

  ‘ “All right?”

  ‘ “All right!” said the shadow, and just then the moon came out.

  ‘ “All right!” says the shadow.

  ‘But it wasn’t all right. It was the landlord himself!

  ‘It seems he got up and went out to the back in the night, and just happened to be coming in when my mate Tom was sneaking out of the back door. He saw Tom, and Tom saw him, and smoked through a hole in the palings into the scrub. The boss looked up at the window, and dropped to it. I went down, funky enough, I can tell you, and faced him. He said:

  ‘ “Look here, mate, why didn’t you come straight to me, and tell me how you was fixed, instead of sneaking round the trouble in that fashion? There’s no occasion for it.”

  ‘I felt mean at once, but I said: “Well, you see, we didn’t know you, boss.”

  ‘ “So it seems. Well, I didn’t think of that. Anyway, call up your mate and come and have a drink; we’ll talk it over afterwards.” So I called Tom. “Come on,” I shouted. “It’s all right.”

  ‘And the boss kept us a couple of days, and then gave us as much tucker as we could carry, and a drop of stuff and a few bob to go on the track again with.’

  ‘Well, he was white, any road.’

  ‘Yes. I knew him well after that, and only heard one man say a word against him.’

  ‘And did you stoush him?’

  ‘No; I was going to, but Tom wouldn’t let me. He said he was frightened I might make a mess of it, and he did it himself.’

  ‘Did what? Make a mess of it?’

  ‘He made a mess of the other man that slandered that publican. I’d be funny if I was you. Where’s the matches?’