AFTER TWO YEARS
I
A sky with clouds of white and grey, and patches of blue. A green sea flecked with white, and shadowed golden brown. On the horizon, the sense of a great open void, like an open valve, as if the bivalve oyster of the world, sea and sky, were open away westward, open into another infinity, and the people on land, inside the oyster of the world, could look far out to the opening.
They could see the bulk of near islands. Further off, a tiny white sail coming down fast on the fresh great sea-wind, emanating out of the north-west. She seemed to be coming from the beyond, slipping into the slightly-open, living oysters of our world.
The men on the wharf at Fremantle, watching her black hull emerge from the flecked sea, as she sailed magically nearer, knew she would be a cattle-boat coming in from the great Nor’-West. They watched her none the less.
As she hesitated, turning to the harbour, she was recognised as the old fore-and-aft schooner “Venus”; though if Venus ever smelled like that, we pity her lovers. Smell or not, she balanced nicely, and with a bit of manoeuvring ebbed her delicate way up the wharf.
There they are! There they are, Tom and Jack, though their own mothers wouldn’t know them! Looking terribly like their fellow-passengers: stubby beards, long hair, greasy dirty dungarees, and a general air of disreputable outcasts. But, no doubt, with cheques of some sort in their pockets.
Two years, nearer three years have gone by, since they set out from Wandoo. It is more than three years since Jack landed fresh from England, in this very Fremantle. And he is so changed, he doesn’t even trouble to remember.
They don’t trouble to remember anything: not yet. Back in the Never-Never, one by one the ties break, the emotional connections snap, memory gives out, and you come undone. Then, when you have come undone from the great past, you drift in an unkempt nonchalance here and there, great distances across the great hinterland country, and there is nothing but the moment, the instantaneous moment. If you are working your guts out, you are working your guts out. If you are rolling across for a drink, you are rolling across for a drink. If you are just getting into a fight with some lump of a brute, you are just getting into a fight with some lump of a brute. If you are going to sleep in some low hole, you are going to sleep in some low hole. And if you wake feeling dry and hot and hellish, why, you feel dry and hot and hellish till you leave off feeling dry and hot and hellish. There’s no more to it. The same if you’re sick. You’re just sick, and stubborn as hell, till your stubbornness gets the better of your sickness.
There are words like home, Wandoo, England, mother, father, sister, but they don’t carry very well. It’s like a radio message that’s so faint, so far off, it makes no impression on you; even if you can hear it in a shadowy way. Such a faint, unreal thing in the broadcast air.
You have moved outside the pale, the pale of civilisation, the pale of the general human consciousness. The human consciousness is a definitely limited thing, even on the face of the earth. You can move into regions outside of it. As in Australia. The broadcasting of the vast human consciousness can’t get you. You are beyond. And since the call can’t get you, the answer begins to die down inside yourself, you don’t respond any more. You don’t respond, and you don’t correspond.
There is no past: or if there is, it is so remote and ineffectual it can’t work on you at all. And there is no future. Why saddle yourself with such a spectre as the future? There is the moment. You sweat, you rest, the bugs bite you, you thirst, you drink, you think you’re going to die, you don’t care, and you know you won’t die, because a certain stubbornness inside you keeps the upper hand.
So you go on. If you’ve got no work, you either get a horse or you tramp it off somewhere else. You keep your eyes open that you don’t get lost, or stranded for water. When you’re damned, infernally and absolutely sick of everything, you go to sleep. And then if the bugs bite you, you are beyond that too.
But at the bottom of yourself, somewhere, like a tiny seed, lies the knowledge that you’re going back in a while. That all the unreal will become real again, and this real will become unreal. That all that stuff, home, mother, responsibility, family, duty, etc., it all will loom up again into actuality, and this, this heat, this parchedness, this dirt, this mutton, these dying sheep, these roving cattle that take the flies by the million, these burning tin gold-camps — all this will recede into the unreal, it will cease to be actual.
Some men decide never to go back, and they are the derelicts, the scarecrows and the warning. “Going back” was a problem in Jack’s soul. He didn’t really want to go back. All that which lay behind, society, homes, families, he felt a deep hostility towards. He didn’t want to go back. He was like an enemy, lurking outside the great camp of civilisation. And he didn’t want to go into camp again.
Yet neither did he want to be a derelict. A mere derelict he would never be, though temporary derelicts both he and Tom were. But he saw enough of the real waster, the real out-and-out derelict, to know that this he would never be.
No, in the end he would go back to civilisation. But the thought of becoming a part of the civilised outfit was deeply repugnant to him. Some other queer hard resolve had formed in his soul. Something gradually went hard in the centre of him. He couldn’t yield himself any more. The hard core remained impregnable.
They had dutifully spent their year on the sheep-run Mr. George had sent them to. But after that, it was shift for yourself. They had stuck at nothing. Only they had stuck together.
They had cashed their cheques in many a well-known wooden “hotel” of the far-away coast. Oh, those wooden hotels with their uneasy verandahs, flies, flies, flies, flies, flies, their rum or whiskey, their dirty glasses, their flimsy partitions, their foul language, their bugs and dirt and desolation. The brutal foul-mouthed desolation of them, with the horses switching their tails at the hitching posts, the riders slowly soaking, staring at the blue heat and the silent world of dust, too far gone even to speak. Gone under the heat, the drought, the Never-Neverness of it, the unspeakable hot desolation. And evening coming, with men already drunk, already ripe for brawling, obscenity, and swindling gambling.
They had gone away chequeless, mourning their chequelessness, back on their horses to the cable station. Then following the droves miles and miles through the tropical, or semitropical bush, and over the open country, camping by water for a week at a time, and going on.
Then they had chucked cattle, wasted their cheques, footed it for weary, weary miles, like the swaggies they had so despised. Clothes in rags, boots in holes, another job; away in out-back camps with horsemen prospectors, with well-contractors; shepherding again, with utter wastrels of shepherds camping along with them, chucking the job, chucking the blasted rich aristocratic squatters, with all their millions of acres and sheep and fence and blasted outfit, all so dead bent on making money as quick as possible, all the machinery of civilisation, as far as possible, starting to grind and squeak there in the beyond. They had gone off with well-sinkers, and laboured like navvies. Chucked that, taken the road, spent the night at mission stations, watched the blacks being saved, and got to the mining camps.
Poor old Tom had got into deep waters. Even now he more than thought that he was legally married to a barmaid, far away back in the sublimest town you can imagine, back there in the blasting heat which so often burns a man’s soul away even before it burns up his body. It had burned a hole in Tom’s soul, in that town away back in the blasting heat, a town consisting of a score or so of ready-made tin houses got up from the coast in pieces, and put together by anybody that liked to try. There they stood or staggered, the tin ovens that men and women lived in; houses leaning like drunken men against stark tree-trunks, others looking strange and forlorn with some of their parts missing, said parts being under the seas, or elsewhere mislaid. But the absence of one section of a wall did not spoil the house for habitation. It merely gave you a better view of the inside happenings. Many of the tin shacks were windowless, and even shutterless: square holes in the raw corrugated erection. One was entirely wallless, and this was the pub. It was just a tin roof reared on saplings against an old tree, with a sacking screen round the bar, through which sacking screen you saw the ghost of the landlady and her clients, if you approached from the back. The front view was open.
Here sat the motionless landlady, in her cooking hot shade, dispensing her indispensable grog, while her boss or husband rolled the barrels in. He had a team with which he hauled up the indispensable from the coast.
The nice-mannered Miss Snook took turn with her mama in this palace of Circe. She was extremely “nice” in her manners, for the “boss” owned the team, the pub, and the boarding-house at which you stayed so long as you could pay the outrageous prices. So Miss Snook, never familiarised into Lucy, for she wouldn’t allow it, oscillated between the closed oven of the boarding-house and the open oven of the pub.
Father — or the “boss” — had been a barber in Sydney. Now he cooked in the boarding-house, and drove the team. “Mother” had been the high-born daughter of a chemist; she had ruined all her prospects of continuing in the eastern “swim” by running away with the barber, now called “boss.” However, she took her decline in the social scale with dignity, and allowed no familiarities. Her previous station helped her to keep up her prices.
“We’re not, y’understand, Mr. Grant, a Provident concern, as some foot-sloggers seem to think us. We’re doing our best to provide for Lucy, against she wants to get married, or in case she doesn’t.”
She and Lucy did the washing and cleaning between them, but their efforts were nominal. Boss’ cooking left everything to be desired. The place was a perfect Paradise.
“We know a gentleman when we see one, Mr. Grant, and we’re not going to throw our only child away on a penniless waster.”
Jack wanted loudly to proclaim himself a penniless waster. But Tom and he had a pact, not to say anything about themselves, or where they came from. They were just “looking round.”
And in that heat, the plump, perspiring, cotton-clad Lucy thought that Tom seemed more amenable than Jack. Poor Tom seemed to fall for it, and Jack had to look on in silent disgust.
There was even a ghastly, gruesome wedding. Neither of the boys could bear to think of it. Even in the stupefaction of that heat, when the brain seems to melt, and the will degenerates, and nothing but the most rudimentary functions of the organism called man, continue to function, even then a sense of shame overpowered them. But Tom was in a trance, pig-headed as any of Circe’s swine. He continued in the trance for about a week after his so-called marriage. Then he woke up from the welter of perspiration, rum, and Lucy in an amazed horror, and the boys escaped.
The nightmare of this town — it was called “Honeysuckle” — was able to penetrate Tom’s most nonchalant mood, even when he was hundreds of trackless miles away. The young men covered their tracks carefully. The Snooks knew nothing but their names. But a name, alas, is a potent entity in the wilds.
They covered their tracks and disappeared again. But even so, an ancient letter from Wandoo followed them to a well-digging camp. It was from Monica to Tom, but it didn’t seem to mean much to either boy.
For almost a year Tom and Jack had never written home. There didn’t seem any reason. In his last letter Tom, suddenly having some sort of qualms, had sent his cheque to his maiden Aunts in York, because he knew, now Gran and Dad were gone, they’d be in shallow water. This off his conscience, he let Wandoo go out of his mind and spirit.
But now wandered in a letter from Aunt Lucy — dreaded name! It was a “thank you, my dear nephew,” and went on to say that though she would be the last to repeat things she hoped trouble was not hanging over Mrs. Ellis’ head.
Tom looked at Jack — —
“We’d best go back,” said Jack, reading his eyes.
“Seems like it.”
So — the time had come. The “freedom” was over. They were going back. — They caught the old ship “Venus,” going south with cattle.
To come back in body is not always to come back in mind and spirit. When Jack saw the white buildings of Fremantle he knew his soul was far from Fremantle. But nothing to be done. The old ship bumped against the wharf, and was tied up. Nothing to do but to step ashore.
They loafed off that ship with a gang of similar unkempt, unshaved, greasy, scoundrelly returners.
“Come an’ ‘ave a spot!”
“What about it, Tom?”
“Y’know I haven’t a bean above the couple o’ dollars to take me to Perth.”
“Oh, dry it up,” cried the mate. “What y’come ashore for? You’re not goin’ without a spot. It’s on me. My shout.”
“Shout it back in Perth, then.”
“Wot’ll y’ave?”
And through the swing doors they went.
“Best an’ bitter’s mine.”
II
Jack had not let himself be cleaned out entirely, as Tom had. Tom seemed to want to be absolutely stumped. But Jack with deeper sense of the world’s nnmity, and his own need to hold his own against it, had posted a couple of cheques to Lennie to hold for him. Save for this he too was cleaned out.
The same little engine of the same little train of four years ago shrieked her whistle. The North-West crowd drifted noisily out of the Hotel and down the platform, packing into the third class compartment, in such positions as happily to negotiate the spittoons.
“Let’s go forward,” said Jack. “We might as well have cushions, if we’re not smoking.”
And he drew Tom forward along the train. They were going to get into another compartment, but seeing the looks of terror on the face of the woman and little girl already there, they refrained and went further.
Aggressively they entered another smoking compartment. A couple of fat tradesmen and a clergyman glowered at them. One of the tradesmen pulled out a handkerchief, shook it, and pretended to wipe his nose. There was perfume in the air.
“Oh my aunt!” said Tom, putting his hand on his stomach. “Turns me right over.”
“What?” asked Jack.
“All this smell o’ scent.”
Jack grinned to himself. But he was back in civilisation, and he involuntarily stiffened.
“Hello! There’s Sam Ellis!” Tom leaned out of the door. “Hello, Sam! How’s things, eh?”
The young fellow addressed looked at Tom, grinned sicklily, and turned away. He didn’t know Tom from Adam.
“Let’s have another drink!” said Tom, flabbergasted, getting out of the train.
Jack followed, and they started down the platform, when the train jogged, jerked, and began to pull away. Instantly they ran for it, caught the rail of the guard’s van, and swung themselves in. The interior was empty, so they sat down on the little boxes let in at the side. Then the two eyed each other self-consciously, uncomfortably. They felt uncomfortable and aware of themselves all at once.
“Of all the ol’ sweeps!” said Tom. “Tell you what, you look like a lumper, absolutely nothing but a lumper?”
“And what do you think you look like, you distorted scavenger!”
Tom grinned uncomfortably.
They got out of the station at Perth without having paid any railway fare.
The first place they went to was Mr. George’s office. Jack pushed Tom through the door, and stood himself in the doorway fingering his greasy felt hat. Tom dropped his, picked it up, hit it against his knee.
Mr. George, neat in pale-grey suit and white waistcoat, glared at them briefly.
“Now then, my men, what can I do f’ ye?”
“Why — — ” began Tom, grinning sheepishly.
“Trouble about a mining right? — mate stolen half y’ gold dust? — want stake a claim on somebody else’s reserve? — Come, out with it. What d’ you want me to do for ye, man?”
“Why — — ” Tom began, more foolishly grinning than ever. Mr. George looked shrewdly at him, then at Jack. Then he sat back smiling.
“Well, if you’re not a pair!” he said. “So it was mines for the last outfit? How’d it go?”
“About as slow as it could,” said Tom.
“So you’ve not come back millionaires?” said Mr. George, a little bit disappointed.
“Come to ask for a fiver,” said Tom.
“You outcast!” said Mr. George. “You had me, completely. But look here, lads, I’ll stand y’ a fiver apiece if y’ll stop around Perth like that all morning, an’ nobody spots ye.”
“Easy!” said Tom.
“A bigger pair o’ blackguards I’ve seldom set eyes on. — But you have dinner with me at the club tonight, I’ll hear all about y’ then. Six-thirty sharp. An’ then I’ll take ye to the Government House. Y’ can wear that evening suit in the closet at my house, Jack, that you’ve left there all this time. See you six-thirty then.”
III
Dismissed, they bundled into the street.
“Outcasts on the face value of us!” said Jack.
Tom stopped to roar with laughter, and bumped into a pedestrian.
“Hold hard! Keep a hand on the reins, can’t you?” exclaimed the individual, pushing Tom off.
Tom looked at him. It was Jimmie Short, another sort of cousin.
“Stow it, Jimmie. Don’t y’ know me?”
Jimmie took him firmly by the coat lapels and pulled him into the gutter.
“‘f course I know ye,” said Jimmie in a conciliatory tone, as to a drunk. “Meet me in half an hour at the Miners’ Refuge, eh? Three steps and a lurch and there y’ are! — Come, matey” — this to Jack — ”take, hold of y’ pal’s arm. See ye later.”
Tom was weak with laughter at Jimmie’s benevolent attitude. They were not recognised at all, as they lurched across the road.
They had a drink, and strolled down the long principal street of Perth, looking in at the windows of all the shops, and in spite of the fact that they had no money, buying each a silk handkerchief and a cake of scented soap. The excitement of this over, they rolled away to the riverside, to the ferry. Then again back into the town.
At the corner of the Freemason’s Hotel they saw Aunt Matilda and Mary; Aunt Matilda huge in a tight-fitting, ruched dress of dark purple stuff, and Mary in a black-and-white striped dress with a tight bodice and tight sleeves with a little puff at the top, and a long skirt very full behind. She wore also a little black hat with a wing. And Jack, with a wickedness brought with him out of the North-West, would have liked to rip these stereotyped clothes and corsets off her, and make her walk down Hay Street in puris naturalibus. She went so trim and exact behind the huge Mrs. Watson. It would have been good to unsheathe her.
“Hello!” cried Tom. “There’s Aunt Matilda. We’ve struck it rich.”
The two young blackguards followed slowly after the two women, close behind them. Mary carried a book, and was evidently making for the little bookshop that had a lending library of newish books.
“Well, Mary, while you go in there I’ll go and see if the chemist can’t give, me something for my breathing, for its awful!” said Mrs. Watson, standing and puffing before the bookshop.
“Shall I come for you or you for me?” asked Mary.
“I’ll sit and wait for you in Mr. Pusey’s,” panted Aunt Matilda, and she sailed forward again, after having glanced suspiciously backward at the two ne’er-do-wells who were hesitating a few yards away.
Mary, with her black hair in a huge bun, her hat with a wing held on by steel pins, was gazing contemplatively into the window of the bookshop, at the newest book. The Booklovers Latest! said a cardboard announcement.
“Can you help a poor chap, Miss?” said Tom, dropping his head and edging near.
Mary started, looked frightened, glanced at the first tramp and then at the second, in agitation, began to fumble for her purse, and dropped her book, spilling the loose leaves.
Jack at once began to gather up the scattered pages of the book: an Anthony Trollope novel. Mary, with black kid-gloved fingers, was fumbling in her purse for a penny. Tom peeped into the purse.
“Lend us the half-a-quid, Mary,” he said.
She looked at his face, and a slow smile of amusement dawned in her eyes.
“I should never have known you!” she said.
Then as Jack rose, shoving the leaves together in the book, she looked into his blue eyes with her brown, queer shining eyes.
She held out her hand to him without saying a word, only looked into his eyes with a look of shining meaning. Which made him grin sardonically inside himself. He shook hands with her silently.
“You look something like you did after you’d been fighting with Easu Ellis,” she said. “When are you going to Wandoo?
“Tomorrow, I should think,” said Tom. “Everybody O.K. down there?”
“Oh I think so!” said Mary nervously.
“What do you men want?” came a loud, panting voice. Aunt Matilda sailing up, purple in the face.
“Lend us half-a-quid, Mary,” murmured Tom, and hastily she handed it over. Jack had already commenced to beat a retreat. Tom sloped away as the large lady loomed near.
“Beggars!” she panted. “Are they begging? — How much — how much did you give him? The disgraceful — — !”
“He made me give him half-a-sovereign, Aunt.”
Mrs. Watson had to stagger into the shop for a chair.
The boys had a drink, and set off to the warehouse to look up Jack’s box, in which were his white shirts and other forgotten garments.
Back in town, Jack felt a slow, sinister sense of oppression coming over him, a sort of fear, as if he were not really free, as if something bad were going to happen to him.
“How am I going to get dressed to dine with Old George tonight?” grumbled the still-careless Tom, who was again becoming tipsy. “Wherever am I goin’ to get a suit to sport?”
“Oh, some of yer relations ‘ll fix you up.”
Jack had an undefinable, uncomfortable feeling that he might suddenly come upon Monica, and she might see him in this state. He wouldn’t like the way she’d look at him. No, he wouldn’t be looked at like that, not for a hundred ponies.
They turned their backs on the beautiful River, with its Mount Eliza headland and wide sweeps and curves twinkling in the sun, and they walked up William Street looking for an adventure.
A man whom they knew from the north, in filthy denims, came out of a boot-shop and hailed them.
“Come an’ stop one on me, maties.”
“Righto! But where’s Lukey? He stood us one this morning. Seen him?”
“Yes, I seen him. — But ‘arf a mo’!”
Scottie turned into the pawnbroker’s, under the three balls, and the boys followed.
“If y’ sees what y’ didn’t oughta see, keep y’ mouth shut.”
“As a dead crab,” assented Jack.
“Now then, Uncle! What’ll y’ advance on that pair o’ bran new boots I’ve just bought?”
“Two bob.”
“Glory be. An’ I just give twenty for ‘em. Ne’ mind, gimme th’ ticket.”
This transaction concluded, Jack wondered what he could pawn. He pulled out a front tooth, beautifully set in a gold plate. It had been a parting finish to his colonial outfit, the original tooth having been lost in a football scrum.
“Father Abraham,” he said, holding up the tooth, “I’m a gentleman whether I look it or not. So is my friend this gentleman. He needs a dress suit for tonight, though you wouldn’t believe it. He needs a first-class well-fitting dress suit for this evening.”
“I have first-class latest fashion gents’ clothes upstairs. But a suit like that is worth five pound to me.”
“Let me try the jacket on.”
Abraham was doubtful. But at length Tom was hustled shamefacedly into a rather large tail-coat. It looked awful, but Jack said it would do. The man wouldn’t take a cent less than two quid deposit: and ten bob for the loan of the suit. The boys said they would call later.
“What’ll you give me on this tooth?” asked Jack. “There’s not a more expensive tooth in Western Australia.”
“I’ll lend y’ five bob on that, pecos y’ amuth me.”
“And we’ll come in later for the dress suit. All right, Aaron. Hang on to that tooth, it’s irreplaceable. Treat it like a jewel. Give me the five bob and the ticket.”
In the Miners’ Refuge Jack flung himself down on a bench beside an individual who looked tidy but smelt strongly of rum, and asked:
“Say, mate, where can y’ get a wash an’ a brush-up for two? — local?”
The fellow got up and lurched surlily to the counter, refusing to answer.
Jack sat on, while Tom drank beer, and a heavy depression crept over his spirit. He had been hobnobbing with riff-raff so long, it had almost become second nature. But now a sense of disgust and impending disaster came over him. He would soon have to make an angry effort, and get out. He was becoming angry with Tom, for sitting there so sloppily soaking beer, when he knew his head was weak.
They began to eat sandwiches, hungrily standing at the bar. Another slipshod waster, eyeing the denim man as if he were a fish, sidled over to him and muttered.
“Sorry,” said Scottie with a mournful expression, pulling out the pawn-ticket, “I’ve just had to pawn me boots. Can’t be done.”
Jack grinned. The waster then came sloping over to him. “Y’ axed me mate a civil question just now, lad, an’ I’d ‘ave answered it for ‘im, but I just spotted a racin’ pal o’ mine an’ was onter him ter get a tip he’d promised — a dead cert f’ Belmont tomorrer. Y’ might ha’ seen him lettin’ me inter th’ know,” he breathed. “Hev’ a drink, lad!”
“Thanks!” said Jack. “This is my mate. — I’ll take the shout, an’ one back, an’ then we must be off. Going up country tomorrer morning.”
This seemed to push the man’s mind on quicker.
“Just from up North, aren’t ye? Easy place to knock up a cheque. How’d y’ like to double a fiver?”
“O.K.,” said Tom.
“Well here’s a dead cert. Take it from me, and don’t let it past yer. I got it from a racin’ pal wot’s in the know. Not straight for the punters, maybe — but straight as a die f’r me ‘n my pals. Double y’ money? Not ‘arf! Multiply it by ten. ‘S a dead cert.”
“Name?”
“Not so quick. Not in ‘ere. Come outside, ‘n I’ll whisper it to y’.”
Jack paid for the drinks, and winking warningly to Tom, followed the man outside.
“The name o’ the ‘oss,” the fellow said — ”But tell yer wot, I’ll put ye on the divvy with a book I know — or y’ c’n come wi’ me. He keeps a paper-shop in Hay Street.”
“We don’t know the name of the horse yet.”
“Comin’ from up North you don’t know the name o’ none of ‘em, do yer? He’s a rank outsider. Y’ oughter get twenties on ‘im.”
“We’ve only got a quid atween us,” said Tom.
“Well, that means a safe forty — after th’ race.”
“Bob on!” said Tom. “Where’s the bookshop?”
“How can we go in an’ back a hoss without knowin’ his name?” said Jack.
“Oh I’ll tip it y’ in ‘ere.”
They entered a small paper-shop, and the man said to the fellow behind the counter:
“These two gents ‘s pals o’ mine. — How much did y’ say y’d lay, mates?”
“Out with the name o’ th’ hoss first,” said Tom confidentially.
“This shop’s changed hands lately,” said the fat fellow behind the counter. “I don’t make books. Got no licence.”
Didn’t that look straight? But the boys were no greenhorns. They walked out of the shop again.
In the road the stranger said:
“The name o’ th’ ‘oss is Double Bee. If y’ll give me th’ money I’ll run upstairs ‘ere t’ old Josh — everyone knows him for a sound book.”
“The name o’ th’ hoss,” said Jack, “is Boots-two-Bob. An’ a more cramblin’ set o’ lies I never heard. Get outter this, or I’ll knock y’ head off.”
The fellow went off with a yellow look.
“Gosh!” said Tom. “We’re back home right enough, what?”
“Bon soir, as Frenchy used to say?”
Rolling a little drearily along, they saw Jimmie Short standing on the pavement watching them.
“Hello, mates!” he said. “Still going strong?”
“Fireproof!” said Tom.
“Remember barging into me this morning? And my best girl was just coming round the corner with her Ma! Had to mind my company, eh, boys. But come an’ have a drink now. — I seem to have seen you before to-day, haven’t I? Where was it?”
“Don’t try and think,” said Tom. “Y’ might do us out of a pony.”
“Righto! old golddust! Step over on to the Bar-parlour mat.”
“I’m stepping,” said Tom. “‘N I’m not drunk.”
“No, he’s not,” said Jack.
“You bet he’s not,” said Jimmie. He was eyeing them curiously as if his memory pricked him.
“My name,” said Tom, “is Ned Kelly. And if yours isn’t Jimmie Miller, what is it?”
“Why, it’s Short. — Well, I give it up. I can’t seem to lay my finger on you, Kelly.”
Tom roared with laughter.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Ten past twelve.”
“We’ve won a pony off Old George!” said the delighted Tom. “I’m Tom Ellis and he’s Jack Grant. Now do you know us, Jimmie?”
Jack was glad to get washed and barbered and dressed. After all, he was sick of wasters and roughs. They were stupider than respectable people, and much more offensive physically and morally. To hell with them all. He wouldn’t care if some tyrant would up and extirpate the breed.
Anyhow he stepped clean out of their company.