The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

by Henry Lawson

  ‘ “Oh, don’t, mother.”

  ‘But,’ said Mrs Spicer, in conclusion, ‘I’d been down to see it myself before they was up.’

  ‘And ain’t you afraid to live alone here, after all these horrible things?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Well, no; I don’t mind. I seem to have got past carin’ for anythink now. I felt it a little when Tommy went away – the first time I felt anythink for years. But I’m over that now.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any friends in the district, Mrs Spicer?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s me married sister near Cobborah, and a married brother near Dubbo; he’s got a station. They wanted to take me an’ the children between them, or take some of the younger children. But I couldn’t bring my mind to break up the home. I want to keep the children together as much as possible. There’s enough of them gone, God knows. But it’s a comfort to know that there’s someone to see to them if anythink happens me.’

  One day – I was on my way home with the team that day – Annie Spicer came running up the creek in terrible trouble.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Wilson! something terribl’s happened at home! A trooper’ (mounted policeman – they called them ‘mounted troopers’ out there), ‘a trooper’s come and took Billy!’ Billy was the eldest son at home.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true, Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘What for? What did the policeman say?’

  ‘He – he – he said, “I – I’m very sorry, Mrs Spicer; but – I – I want William.” ’

  It turned out that William was wanted on account of a horse missed from Wall’s station and sold down-country.

  ‘An’ mother took on awful,’ sobbed Annie; ‘an’ now she’ll only sit stock-still an’ stare in front of her, and won’t take no notice of any of us. Oh! it’s awful, Mrs Wilson. The policeman said he’d tell Aunt Emma’ (Mrs Spicer’s sister at Cobborah), ‘and send her out. But I had to come to you, an’ I’ve run all the way.’

  James put the horse to the cart and drove Mary down.

  Mary told me all about it when I came home.

  ‘I found her just as Annie said; but she broke down and cried in my arms. Oh, Joe! it was awful. She didn’t cry like a woman. I heard a man at Haviland cry at his brother’s funeral, and it was just like that. She came round a bit after a while. Her sister’s with her now … Oh, Joe! you must take me away from the Bush.’

  Later on Mary said:

  ‘How the oaks are sighing to-night, Joe!’

  Next morning I rode across to Wall’s station and tackled the old man; but he was a hard man, and wouldn’t listen to me – in fact, he ordered me off his station. I was a selector and that was enough for him. But young Billy Wall rode after me.

  ‘Look here, Joe!’ he said, ‘it’s a blanky shame. All for the sake of a horse! As if that poor devil of a woman hasn’t got enough to put up with already! I wouldn’t do it for twenty horses. I’ll tackle the boss, and if he won’t listen to me, I’ll walk off the run for the last time, if I have to carry my swag.’

  Billy Wall managed it. The charge was withdrawn, and we got young Billy Spicer off up-country.

  But poor Mrs Spicer was never the same after that. She seldom came up to our place unless Mary dragged her, so to speak; and then she would talk of nothing but her last trouble, till her visits were painful to look forward to.

  ‘If it only could have been kep’ quiet – for the sake of the other children; they are all I think of now. I tried to bring ’em all up decent, but I s’pose it was my fault, somehow. It’s the disgrace that’s killin’ me – I can’t bear it.’

  I was at home one Sunday with Mary, and a jolly bush-girl named Maggie Charlsworth, who rode over sometimes from Wall’s station (I must tell you about her some other time; James was ‘shook after her’), and we got talkin’ about Mrs Spicer. Maggie was very warm about old Wall.

  ‘I expected Mrs Spicer up to-day,’ said Mary. ‘She seems better lately.’

  ‘Why!’ cried Maggie Charlsworth, ‘if that ain’t Annie coming running up along the creek. Something’s the matter!’

  We all jumped up and ran out.

  ‘What is it, Annie?’ cried Mary.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Wilson! Mother’s asleep, and we can’t wake her!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s – it’s the truth, Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘How long has she been asleep?’

  ‘Since lars’ night.’

  ‘My God!’ cried Mary, ‘since last night?’

  ‘No, Mrs Wilson, not all the time; she woke wonst, about daylight this mornin’. She called me and said she didn’t feel well, and I’d have to manage the milkin’.’

  ‘Was that all she said?’

  ‘No. She said not to go for you; and she said to feed the pigs and calves; and she said to be sure and water them geraniums.’

  Mary wanted to go, but I wouldn’t let her. James and I saddled our horses and rode down the creek.

  Mrs Spicer looked very little different from what she did when I last saw her alive. It was some time before we could believe that she was dead. But she was ‘past carin’’ right enough.

  JOE WILSON’S COURTSHIP

  THERE are many times in this world when a healthy boy is happy. When he is put into knickerbockers, for instance, and ‘comes a man to-day’, as my little Jim used to say. When they’re cooking something at home that he likes. When the ‘sandy blight’ or measles breaks out amongst the children, or the teacher or his wife falls dangerously ill – or dies, it doesn’t matter which – ‘and there ain’t no school.’ When a boy is naked and in his natural state for a warm climate like Australia, with three or four of his schoolmates, under the shade of the creek-oaks in the bend where there’s a good clear pool with a sandy bottom. When his father buys him a gun, and he starts out after kangaroos or ’possums. When he gets a horse, saddle, and bridle, of his own. When he has his arm in splints or a stitch in his head – he’s proud then, the proudest boy in the district.

  I wasn’t a healthy-minded, average boy; I reckon I was born for a poet by mistake, and grew up to be a Bushman, and didn’t know what was the matter with me – or the world – but that’s got nothing to do with it.

  There are times when a man is happy. When he finds out that the girl loves him. When he’s just married. When he’s a lawful father for the first time, and everything’s going on all right: some men make fools of themselves then – I know I did. I’m happy to-night because I’m out of debt and can see clear ahead, and because I haven’t been easy for a long time.

  But I think that the happiest time in a man’s life is when he’s courting a girl and finds out for sure that she loves him, and hasn’t a thought for anyone else. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, and keep them clean, for they’re about the only days when there’s a chance of poetry and beauty coming into this life. Make the best of them, and you’ll never regret it the longest day you live. They’re the days that the wife will look back to, anyway, in the brightest of times as well as in the blackest, and there shouldn’t be anything in those days that might hurt her when she looks back. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they will never come again.

  A married man knows all about it – after a while: he sees the woman world through the eyes of his wife; he knows what an extra moment’s pressure of the hand means, and, if he has had a hard life, and is inclined to be cynical, the knowledge does him no good. It leads him into awful messes sometimes, for a married man, if he’s inclined that way, has three times the chance with a woman that a single man has – because the married man knows. He is privileged; he can guess pretty closely what a woman means when she says something else; he knows just how far he can go; he can go farther in five minutes towards coming to the point with a woman than an innocent young man dares go in three weeks. Above all, the married man is more decided with women; he takes them and things for granted. In short he is – well, he is a married man. And, when he knows all this, how much better o
r happier is he for it? Mark Twain says that he lost all the beauty of the river when he saw it with a pilot’s eye – and there you have it.

  But it’s all new to a young chap, provided he hasn’t been a young blackguard. It’s all wonderful, new, and strange to him. He’s a different man. He finds that he never knew anything about women. He sees none of woman’s little ways and tricks in his girl. He is in heaven one day and down near the other place the next; and that’s the sort of thing that makes life interesting. He takes his new world for granted. And, when she says she’ll be his wife –!

  Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they’ve got a lot of influence on your married life afterwards – a lot more than you’d think. Make the best of them, for they’ll never come any more, unless we do our courting over again in another world. If we do, I’ll make the most of mine.

  But, looking back, I didn’t do so badly after all. I never told you about the days I courted Mary. The more I look back the more I come to think that I made the most of them, and if I had no more to regret in married life than I have in my courting days, I wouldn’t walk to and fro in the room, or up and down the yard in the dark sometimes, or lie awake some nights thinking … Ah, well!

  I was between twenty-one and thirty then: birthdays had never been any use to me, and I’d left off counting them. You don’t take much stock in birthdays in the Bush. I’d knocked about the country for a few years, shearing and fencing and droving a little, and wasting my life without getting anything for it. I drank now and then, and made a fool of myself. I was reckoned ‘wild’; but I only drank because I felt less sensitive, and the world seemed a lot saner and better and kinder when I had a few drinks: I loved my fellow-man then and felt nearer to him. It’s better to be thought ‘wild’ than to be considered eccentric or ratty. Now, my old mate, Jack Barnes, drank – as far as I could see – first because he’d inherited the gambling habit from his father along with his father’s luck; he’d the habit of being cheated and losing very bad, and when he lost he drank. Till drink got a hold on him. Jack was sentimental too, but in a different way. I was sentimental about other people – more fool I! – whereas Jack was sentimental about himself. Before he was married, and when he was recovering from a spree, he’d write rhymes about ‘Only a boy, drunk by the roadside,’ and that sort of thing; and he’d call ’em poetry, and talk about signing them and sending them to the Town and Country Journal. But he generally tore them up when he got better. The Bush is breeding a race of poets, and I don’t know what the country will come to in the end.

  Well. It was after Jack and I had been out shearing at Beenaway Shed in the big scrubs. Jack was living in the little farming town of Solong, and I was hanging round. Black, the squatter, wanted some fencing done and a new stable built, or buggy and harness-house, at his place at Haviland, a few miles out of Solong. Jack and I were good Bush carpenters, so we took the job to keep us going till something else turned up. ‘Better than doing nothing,’ said Jack.

  ‘There’s a nice little girl in service at Black’s,’ he said. ‘She’s more like an adopted daughter, in fact, than a servant. She’s a real good little girl, and good-looking into the bargain. I hear that young Black is sweet on her, but they say she won’t have anything to do with him. I know a lot of chaps that have tried for her, but they’ve never had any luck. She’s a regular little dumpling, and I like dumplings. They call her ’Possum. You ought to try a bear up in that direction, Joe.’

  I was always shy with women – except perhaps some that I should have fought shy of; but Jack wasn’t – he was afraid of no woman, good, bad, or indifferent. I haven’t time to explain why, but somehow, whenever a girl took any notice of me I took it for granted that she was only playing with me, and felt nasty about it. I made one or two mistakes, but – ah well!

  ‘My wife knows little ’Possum,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll get her to ask her out to our place, and let you know.’

  I reckoned that he wouldn’t get me there then, and made a note to be on the watch for tricks. I had a hopeless little love-story behind me, of course. I suppose most married men can look back to their lost love; few marry the first flame. Many a married man looks back and thinks it was damned lucky that he didn’t get the girl he couldn’t have. Jack had been my successful rival, only he didn’t know it – I don’t think his wife knew it either. I used to think her the prettiest and sweetest little girl in the district.

  But Jack was mighty keen on fixing me up with the little girl at Haviland. He seemed to take it for granted that I was going to fall in love with her at first sight. He took too many things for granted as far as I was concerned, and got me into awful tangles sometimes.

  ‘You let me alone, and I’ll fix you up, Joe,’ he said, as we rode up to the station. ‘I’ll make it all right with the girl. You’re rather a good-looking chap. You’ve got the sort of eyes that take with girls, only you don’t know it; you haven’t got the go. If I had your eyes along with my other attractions, I’d be in trouble on account of a woman about once a week.’

  ‘For God’s sake shut up, Jack,’ I said.

  Do you remember the first glimpse you got of your wife? Perhaps not in England, where so many couples grow up together from childhood; but it’s different in Australia, where you may hail from two thousand miles away from where your wife was born, and yet she may be a countrywoman of yours, and a countrywoman in ideas and politics too. I remember the first glimpse I got of Mary.

  It was a two-storey brick house with wide balconies and verandas all round, and a double row of pines down to the front gate. Parallel at the back was an old slab-and-shingle place, one room deep, and about eight rooms long, with a row of skillions at the back: the place was used for kitchen, laundry and servants’ rooms, &c. This was the old homestead before the new house was built. There was a wide, old-fashioned, brick-floored veranda in front, with an open end; there was ivy climbing up the veranda-post on one side and a baby-rose on the other, and a grape-vine near the chimney. We rode up to the end of the veranda, and Jack called to see if there was anyone at home, and Mary came trotting out; so it was in the frame of vines that I first saw her.

  More than once since then I’ve had a fancy to wonder whether the rose-bush killed the grape-vine or the ivy smothered ’em both in the end. I used to have a vague idea of riding that way some day to see. You do get strange fancies at odd times.

  Jack asked her if the boss was in. He did all the talking. I saw a little girl, rather plump, with a complexion like a New England or Blue Mountain girl, or a girl from Tasmania, or from Gippsland in Victoria. Red and white girls were very scarce in the Solong district. She had the biggest and brightest eyes I’d seen round there, dark hazel eyes, as I found out afterwards, and bright as a ’possum’s. No wonder they called her ’Possum. I forgot at once that Mrs Jack Barnes was the prettiest girl in the district. I felt a sort of comfortable satisfaction in the fact that I was on horseback; most Bushmen look better on horseback. It was a black filly, a fresh young thing, and she seemed as shy of girls as I was myself. I noticed Mary glanced in my direction once or twice to see if she knew me; but, when she looked, the filly took all my attention. Mary trotted in to tell old Black he was wanted, and after Jack had seen him, and arranged to start work next day, we started back to Solong.

  I expected Jack to ask me what I thought of Mary – but he didn’t. He squinted at me sideways once or twice, and didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he started talking of other things. I began to feel wild at him. He seemed so damnably satisfied with the way things were going. He seemed to reckon that I was a gone case now; but, as he didn’t say so, I had no way of getting at him. I felt sure he’d go home and tell his wife that Joe Wilson was properly gone on little ’Possum at Haviland. That was all Jack’s way.

  Next morning we started to work. We were to build the buggy-house at the back near the end of the old house, but first we had to take down a rotten old place that might have been the original h
ut in the Bush before the old house was built. There was a window in it, opposite the laundry window in the old place, and the first thing I did was to take out the sash. I’d noticed Jack yarning with ’Possum before he started work. While I was at work at the window he called me round to the other end of the hut to help him lift a grindstone out of the way; and when we’d done it, he took the tip of my ear between his fingers and thumb and stretched it and whispered into it:

  ‘Don’t hurry with that window, Joe; the strips are hardwood and hard to get off – you’ll have to take the sash out very carefully so as not to break the glass.’ Then he stretched my ear a little more and put his mouth closer:

  ‘Make a looking-glass of that window, Joe,’ he said.

  I was used to Jack, and when I went back to the window I started to puzzle out what he meant, and presently I saw it by chance.

  That window reflected the laundry window: the room was dark inside, and there was a good clear reflection; and presently I saw Mary come to the laundry window and stand with her hands behind her back, thoughtfully watching me. The laundry window had an old-fashioned hinged sash, and I like that sort of window – there’s more romance about it, I think. There was a thick dark-green ivy all round the window, and Mary looked prettier than a picture. I squared up my shoulders and put my heels together, and put as much style as I could into the work. I couldn’t have turned round to save my life.

  Presently Jack came round, and Mary disappeared.

  ‘Well?’ he whispered.

  ‘You’re a fool, Jack,’ I said. ‘She’s only interested in the old house being pulled down.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on the business round the corner, and she ain’t interested when I’m round this end.’

  ‘You seem mighty interested in the business,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘This sort of thing just suits a man of my rank in times of peace.’

  ‘What made you think of the window?’ I asked.