Such Is Life - Joseph Furphy (philippa perry book txt) 📗

constantly endeavoured, by reminiscence and inference, to post him up in the usages of his adopted country; and he regaled me with the folklore of the hillside where his ancestors had passively resisted extinction since the time of Japhet. Purposeless fairy tales and profitless ghost stories for the most part, with another class of legend, equally fatuous; but ah! how legitimately born of that auroral fancy which ceases not to play above the grave of homely ambition, penury⁠—crushed and dead! Legends wherein the unvarying motif was a dazzling cash advance made by Satan in prepayment for the soul of some rustic deadbeat; delivery being due in seven years from date. And a clever repudiation of covenant, with consequent non-forfeiture of ensuing clip, always came as a climax; so that the defaulter lived happy ever after, while the outwitted speculator retired to his own penal establishment in shame and confusion of tail.

At last a queer thing happened. I received a letter, containing a bank draft for £2, from a friend to whom I had lent the money three years before, on the diggings. In case there might have been some mistake about the remittance, that draft was cashed before the postmaster had missed me from the window, and I was on the way home before the bank manager thought I was clear of his porch. On the same evening, I placed one of the notes in Rory’s hand, adjuring him not to let the storekeeper know anything about it, but to depart from me while he was safe.

He shrank from the note as from a lizard, while his lip quivered, and he tried to swallow his emotion down. Then ensued mutual expostulation, which he terminated by producing a knitted purse, which might have belonged to his grandfather⁠—or to Brian Boru’s grandfather, for that matter⁠—and disclosing a hidden treasure of seven shillings, two sixpences, and ten coppers. I nearly hit him in the mere fury of pity. Ultimately, however, my superior force of character told its tale, and we added the note to his reserve fund.

I got him started next morning. I gave him my Shakespeare as a keepsake, with a billy and pannikin, and a few days’ rations. I made up his swag scientifically while he lay heartbroken on his bunk; then I walked with him to the Echuca road. So he sorrowed his way northward, in renewed search of his brother Larry; and, as I watched his diminishing figure, I prayed that he might be enticed into the most shocking company in Echuca, and be made fightably drunk, and fall in for a remembersome hammering, and get robbed of everything, and be given in charge for making a disturbance, and wind up the adventure with a month in Her Majesty’s jail. It seemed to me that no milder dispensation of Providence would satisfy his moral requirements. Drastic, but such is life.

I had a letter from him a month afterward, but as the postmark was hopelessly illegible, and as he had omitted to head the communication with any address, and as he referred to the place where he was working as “the station,” mentioning no names except those of his fellow-workmen, I had to withhold the response for which his forlorn soul craved.

“Takes a lot of different sorts of people to make a world,” observed Williamson, referring to the hero of my reminiscences.

“Original remark,” commented Ward. “And it seems to me that people’s as much alike as sheep; and Dan’s just one of the flock. I always speak of a man as I find him.”

“Another original remark,” said Broome. “But there’s greater fools than Dan⁠—if you only knew where to drop across them.”

“Original remark, number three,” put in Andrews, who was five years older than any of the boys. “You’re all chaps of great experience.”

“Speaking of Dan, as you call him,” said I; “by the foot we recognise the Hercules; and if he knows as much about all other historical subjects as he does about Cawnpore and the American Presidents, he must have ripened into an extraordinary man. But then, an extraordinary man should have learned the difference between mallee and yarran in five years of solid scrub⁠—observation.”

“Well, you are gauging him by a standard that’s foreign to his class of mind,” replied Andrews. “If he had been as strange to that gilgie as you were, and had got the same directions he gave you, he would have found it first shot. When a certain class of bushman says ‘mallee’, he means any sort of scrub except lignum; and when he says ‘mulga’, he means any tree except pine or currajong. Same mental slovenliness in women. A woman will tell a yarn that no man can make head or tail of, but it’s as clear as day to any other woman. And if you tell a woman a yarn, as it ought to be told, she’ll think she understands it, and you’ll think so too, if she says nothing. But if she chances any remark about it, you’ll see that the correctness of style has carried it over her head.”

“Speaking of style reminds me that Dan’s a bit of an author,” remarked Williamson. “One day I was in his place, and he casually showed me a page of some treatise he’s on of evenings. And, my word, the style was grand. Knocks Ouida into a cocked hat.”

“Well, I am glad to hear that,” I observed. “Useful sort of man on the station, too, I should imagine?”

“Average, or better,” replied Andrews. “Nothing brilliant, but careful and trustworthy. Revolves in his orbit without a what-you-may-call-’im.”

“Perturbation,” I suggested. “How far is his hut from here?”

“Twelve mile. Let’s see⁠—six or eight mile northwest of where you dropped the first lot of wire that time.”

“Can’t I take him on the way to Mulppa?”

“Yes; but don’t trust him for directions beyond his own place. We’ll give you the geography. Better put up at his place tonight, and you’ll reach Mulppa in good time tomorrow evening. And look