They regarded him respectfully. A man who could make fifteen shillings in an hour deserved respect. The Stray was roused to emulation.
‘Me.’ She adopted the busker’s vainglorious tone. ‘I’m the best bum on the track. In Tewsbury I come back wiv ten bob, two soots of cloves, a jar of jam, a dozen eggs, and two loaves of bread. An’ I didn’t get warned off by no John, neiver.’
The busker gave her a patronising nod. ‘Good for you, missus,’ he encouraged. ‘You sound as though you could make an iron pump give milk. I bet the boss here’ — he gave Snow a playful dig in the ribs — ‘thinks he’s a lucky man, eh, sport?’
Snow grunted. He was not a man to indulge in laborious explanations. He was tempted to boast that he was the best sheep-stealer on the track, but caution restrained him. Thinking of mutton made him hungry. He began to unwrap the white cerements from the limbs of the sheep.
‘Not mutton?’ Duke cried, taking an eager interest in the proceedings. Snow had not realised that, for all the busker’s talk of easy money, his face was pinched and hungry-looking. ‘Not my favourite food, mutton?’
Had the busker observed the etiquette of the track he would have pretended not to notice that there was food about, and when offered the meat, he would have been surprised, refused, hesitated, and partaken reluctantly.
Snow dubiously regarded the fire on the bit of corrugated iron, decided it would not be suitable for roasting mutton, and went out to build his own fire in the stone porch.
‘Mustn’t muck the church up too much,’ he declared.
He was back again almost immediately. ‘She’s comin!’ he announced in solemn tones.
‘Oo-er!’ The Stray rose in alarm. ‘Lemme out of here.’
‘Sit down,’ the busker said carelessly. ‘Phippsy’s harmless.’
But Snow had gone round the back of the church ostensibly to look at the horse. He thoughtfully took Bluey with him. Not that he need have worried. The approaching menace in woman’s form was fond of animals, as she later demonstrated by patting the snarling Bluey on the head and calling him: ‘Good doggie, there.’
She came mincing up to the porch, peering from her little, short-sighted eyes under the flapping lobes of hat. Then, focusing the two occupants, she stood with her head forward very much like a pointer dog.
‘Dear me, dear me!’ Her voice was so affected that it made the ‘dear’ sound like ‘dah’. ‘I trust I don’t intrude? Miss Phipps is the name. I am seeking shelter — yes, shelter.’ She had a habit of repeating words, as though the minds of her hearers might be too dense to grasp them without repetition. ‘So unfortunate this rain when one is on a walking tour.’
The busker silently indicated another upturned kerosene tin, the one Snow had brought in for himself.
‘I thank you.’ She sat down as though it had been a throne, and held out her dreadful shoes to the blaze. ‘This terrible weather, my deah.’ She ignored Duke and concentrated her attention on Dancy. ‘I suppose the poah farmers must have rain, but so inconvenient. I always say they should have it at a time when it will least disturb other people’s plans.’
‘Eh, missus.’ Flattered by the attention, the Stray spoke eagerly, ‘When we gets into Currawong I can bum you a better pair of boots than them.’
‘My deah child,’ Miss Phipps gave a little affected laugh, ‘what on earth do you mean by that dreadful word?’
The busker raised his head from his task. Rather he tossed his head so that the lank strands of hair flopped backward. ‘Come off it, Dora,’ he said bluntly. ‘Don’t try to put that guff over us.’
‘You impertinent creature!’ The little black eyes glittered.
‘Come off it,’ the busker said again calmly. ‘You can put it over a lot of ignorant mugs of bagmen that you’re some sort of society woman, but you can’t put it over me.’ He eyed her ominously. ‘I’ve got the lowdown on you, Dora.’
Miss Phipps turned her back on him. ‘I don’t suppose you have a little cold cream, deah?’ she asked. ‘The skin should always be one’s first care, and I find my hands suffah so.’
The Stray dumbly shook her head, and Miss Phipps was about to launch forth on another conversational effort when the figure of Snow loomed up in the porch.
‘Hey, Stray,’ he called. ‘C’mere.’ He was anxious not to attract the fat madwoman’s attention.
‘There’s that dreadful man,’ Miss Phipps exclaimed, clutching ferociously at a log of wood. ‘A ghastly creature who leered at me on the road! Yes! He deliberately leered.’
Dancy Smith screamed with laughter. ‘Why, that’s Snow, missus. A decent cove ’e is. Hey, Snow, come in and meet the girl friend.’
Miss Phipps could not draw herself up any straighter because of her fat, but, seizing the kerosene tin on which she was seated, she waddled over to the far corner of the hall in a very haughty way and muttered something about ‘depraved wretches.’
‘Don’t take any notice,’ the busker advised. He tapped his forehead, and Snow nodded understandingly, if cautiously. He returned to the porch and began building his fire for the mutton.
‘Hey, play us something,’ the Stray urged the owner of the guitar, and that youth, nothing loth, elevated his face and gave vent to a long, keening howl which, he informed them in the subsequent song, was part of his habit of ‘yoo-delling as I go.’
‘The Yodelling Rouseabout, that’s me,’ he explained in answer to the Stray’s praise. ‘That’s the name I’m going to go under when I’m singing at the Tivoli. No, I’m not the sort of chap to spend me life on the roads. Experience, that’s all it is. So I can say I been out and collected all the real Australian songs the bushmen sing. That’s the ticket! Make up my own songs. Sing ’em round picture-shows, got up in a cowboy suit. Grab half the takings.’ He raised his voice as though to overrule objection. ‘Look at Tex Morton. Thousands he’s making out of records alone.’
‘Not fousands?’ The Stray was awestruck.
‘Well, money, anyway,’ the busker conceded. He thought, his forehead wrinkled. ‘I’m not too keen on the Yodelling Rouseabout. I need a good selling title.’
‘How about the Busking Bum?’ the Stray suggested.
The busker looked at her scornfully and plunged into another long-drawn yodel.
‘I’m a poor lonely stockman …’ (he sang) ‘away from my ho-ome,
And I promised my mother no more I would roo-oam.’
He paused modestly. ‘I made that up myself. Poetry, see?’
Snow, now that his fire was well alight, had drifted inside to contribute his applause. ‘There’s a bloody song I always wanted to hear, and I never knew its bloody name,’ he said pleasantly.
‘Please!’ Miss Phipps rose from her seat in the corner. ‘Stop that foul language.’
Snow looked injured. ‘What bloody foul language?’ he asked.
‘She’s not responsible,’ the busker said consolingly.
‘Oh!’ Snow was mollified. ‘Well, this (adjective) song was about an (adjectival) bagman who was getting himself a bit of meat …’
The busker nodded somewhat contemptuously. ‘Waltzing Matilda, the Australian National Anthem. The dogs bark it.’
‘You know it?’
‘Of course, I know it.’ He burst into song:
‘Down came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee.
And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker-bag …
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.’
‘That’s it. That’s it all right,’ Snow exclaimed excitedly. ‘I ain’t but heard it the once.’
‘Down came the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred,
Down came the troopers, one, two, three,
“Where’s that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker-bag?
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.” ’
Miss Phipps, at the sound of Duke’s strong, not unmelodious baritone raised in this worn ball
ad, had approached out of her corner, forgetful of her ruffled feelings. Now, as he broke into the chorus, she joined in, singing a deep contralto second that blended with the busker’s voice like organ music. The look of astonishment that spread over his face was comical, but he strummed to the last line.
‘Hey,’ he said, laying the guitar aside. ‘Can you do that to any tune? Sing harmony, I mean?’
‘Of course,’ Miss Phipps said haughtily. ‘If I hear it once.’
‘It’s a gift.’ The busker looked at her admiringly. ‘You’d be a knockout outside the pubs on a Saturday afternoon. Why!’ Illumination burst over him. ‘It’s new. ‘The Singing Girl Tramp.’ We’d coin money.’ He rubbed his dark chin enthusiastically. ‘We’d block the traffic.’
‘How dare you suggest,’ Miss Phipps said haughtily, ‘that I should sing in the street!’
‘Now, Dora,’ the busker urged, ‘you know me. Would I suggest anything to a woman with a voice like yours that didn’t do me credit? Would I …’
‘You’re an impertinent young man.’
The busker dropped his cajoling manner. ‘Now, look here,’ he said. ‘I can use you in my act, see? Why, when we get to Logan, and Paul Seeby hears the two of us, he’ll snatch at us with both hands.’
Miss Phipps’ languor was that of a film star being offered a contract for garbage removal.
‘Arr,’ the busker said disgustedly, ‘you’ve got tickets all over yourself.’
Miss Phipps, never slow to resent any personal slight, gave him in return her opinion of his chances of joining even a tent-show, while its owner was in his right mind. She spoke scathingly of ‘young boys’ who slept under bridges and talked as though they amounted to something. She traced the busker’s lack of taste and social decorum to an inborn baseness. Just as she was warming to her subject, Snow tactfully attempted to change the conversation.
‘Play that there bloody song again,’ he suggested.
Miss Phipps turned her discourse to Snow, his language and habits, but it was a very different matter abusing Snow. Knowing himself innocent of offence, he merely let out a roar of rage.
‘Shuddup!’ he bellowed. ‘I ain’t hit a lady yet, but you ain’t a lady.’
Whereupon Miss Phipps retreated to the church porch, looked out at the rain, which was drumming on the tin roof with a thunderous deliberation, decided it was too wet to shake the mud of the church off her feet, and so stood, ignoring her fellow-refugees and by the tilt of her snub nose indicating that the air of the church was tainted.
Snow, for his part, was half afraid to go and tend the mutton which he had left in his camp-oven on the porch. He noticed with some bitterness that, while Miss Phipps had withdrawn herself from the low circle he disgraced, she was warming her toes at his fire and was sniffing, not without ardour, the smell of his mutton. When he did come out to see how the roast was cooking, Miss Phipps did not remove herself, but overlooked his work with a proprietorial air.
‘I see you are a good cook,’ she observed in much the same tone she had said ‘Good doggie’ to Bluey.
‘Yeah,’ Snow grunted. He did not venture any more words. There was, it seemed, something about his voice she didn’t like. Well, there was no accounting for tastes, but she needn’t treat a man as though he was dirt.
‘Is that your meat?’ Miss Phipps asked even more affably.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why, you dear man!’
Snow was a little surprised at this change of front. He turned inside, afraid that it might be the forerunner of a new attack.
But Miss Phipps only began to practise dance-steps on the porch. ‘It keeps the figure in good trim,’ she observed to the Stray, who had trotted out open-mouthed to watch. ‘One should never neglect one’s figure. Nor the eyebrows. I don’t suppose you have an eyebrow-plucker, dear? No, I thought not. So unfortunate that I left mine at that disgusting farm where they said I wouldn’t suit after just two days. And such coarse people. If I hadn’t spent my money staying at the hotel I would have taken the train to Sydney. But there is nothing — nothing — like exercise in the open air.’ She looked down complacently at her bulk. ‘I’ve slightly put on flesh. I used to be in the ballet, you know.’
‘Go wan.’ Dancy was impressed.
‘That was years ago, of course. But the people with whom one had to associate! Not elevating at all.’
She waddled over, lifted the lid of the camp-oven uninvited, and finding it hot, dropped it with a cry in the ashes. Snow came out, replaced the lid and went quietly inside again.
‘An unpleasant type,’ Miss Phipps said disdainfully.
But the Stray was beginning to have a shrewd idea that Miss Phipps was not as mad as appearance might indicate. ‘He ain’t unpleasant,’ she said stoutly. ‘He’s a good bloke to be wiv. What’s more, that’s his meat.’ And she also went inside.
‘True, true,’ Miss Phipps murmured. ‘One must suffer politely the manners of one’s host.’
No one had indicated that Snow was in any way intending to be her host; nevertheless, when the mutton was done, she had graciously and by imperceptible gradations circled closer and closer to the roast. She accepted her portion without actually throwing it in its owner’s face, while she contrived at the same time to indicate that she was cutting him dead. She had two helpings to everyone else’s one, and was standing ready with her empty plate — the plate also belonged to Snow — for the last morsel and the last bone.
‘Thank you, deah,’ she cooed to Dancy, when that outraged damsel asked sarcastically if ‘Phippsy’ would like any more. It was impossible to snub Miss Phipps at mealtimes.
‘Well’ — the busker flopped his hair back from his brow and looked round the circle cynically — ‘quite a happy family, huh? Long may we cling together like the ivy.’
Had he but been told that he was speaking prophecy, he would have fled in a panic.
3
I
The frequency of nervous breakdowns among police sergeants in the Middle West can be traced largely to their responsibility for distributing unemployed relief in its various forms of relief work, dole or track rations. The police dislike administering the unemployment relief because it means so much work. They stand between the devillings of the ‘dole-chasers’ on the one hand and the deep sea of the Chief Secretary’s files and enquiries on the other. The unemployed dislike the police administering relief because they are police.
Any sergeant will tell you that ‘the locals’ — that is, the unemployed residing in the town — are bad enough. But the ‘travellers’ — meaning the men with track-cards who wander the country in search of work, getting their food-orders from declared ‘dole stations’ in towns fifty or sixty miles apart — the travellers are worse. It is the duty of the police, or so they interpret it, to keep the travellers ‘on the move,’ never to let them settle in a town or stay too long in one place, to drive them on, to keep them circulating as a labour force, thousands strong, drifting hungrily about the country.
There are only two kinds of sergeants in the mid-west: the ‘soft’ variety, who will listen to a man’s tale of woe and let him stay in a town more than a fortnight, and the ‘tough’ variety, whose chief joy is to ‘hunt’ bagmen, swagmen, sundowners, hoboes, or whatever their local appellation may be. It is the dream of every such sergeant to get his town a reputation for ‘toughness,’ so that travellers will go a hundred miles out of their way rather than apply for rations at his station.
No one welcomes the bagman. The local unemployed watch jealously lest he get a job, the police lest he show signs of lingering, the charitable lest he impose on their charity, and the shopkeeper lest he steal. In these circumstances it is little to be wondered at that the bagman has also become ‘tough.’
Among the sixty travellers with whom the sergeant of Currawong was to deal that dull, cold Thursday morning were: Miss Phipps, who had not bothered to take out a track-card because she had not ‘heard of such a thing,’ although she wa
s registered for dole in Sydney and was there to prove it; the Stray, who had no card of her own but was part of her vanished husband’s card, furious that he should be drawing dole for her as well as himself; and Snow, drawing dole for himself and wife. Snow had kept his old track-card from the time his wife was travelling with him. Just how he had done it was a mystery, since his wife was drawing dole for herself and children a hundred miles away; but there he was on ‘B’ scale, and regretting that he was not wangling extra rations for a couple of children while he was about it.
There is probably no more depressing spectacle than a police-station on a dull winter morning, and the police-station of Currawong was a cheap, yellow brick structure of such peculiar hideousness that it gave the beholder the feeling that his eye had stubbed its toe. On this particular dole-day the temper of the sergeant matched the building. He had the expression of one who has spent a night in the cells by mistake and is brooding over it. He had just received a nasty departmental note expressing surprise at the immense sums needed by the town of Currawong for food relief and laying the blame for this extravagant expenditure at the sergeant’s door. He was, the letter hinted, spending money with a spade.
‘Jim,’ the sergeant said to his constable, ‘I’m going to have a clean-up.’ He shook his head despondently. ‘Where all these bagmen come from beats me. The locals are bad enough, but bagmen seem to pop up out of hollow logs. You think you’ve got them all cleaned out of your town, and a fresh bunch sprouts after the rain.’ He settled himself officially at his desk. ‘We’ll get the locals over first, Jim, then the single bagmen, then the married ones.’
The men began to shuffle forward to receive the orders for the rations which they would collect in the afternoon when the lists were sent down to the stores. The routine questions about how much each applicant had earned in the last fourteen days were snapped out with an unusual energy and, from the enquiry as to what quantities of bread or meat the bagmen required, you would have thought the sergeant proposed to live on the rations himself. After each brief interview he marked the applicant’s name on the list to be sent to the baker, butcher and storekeeper, and handed the man’s track-card to the constable, who filled in the name of the police-station and the issuing officer. As he did so, he intoned the warning:
The Battlers Page 3
