The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 3

I know it was by his advice, as kindly meant, I am sure, as it was shrewd, that my father said nothing to any one else in the towns.h.i.+p of his fantastic ideas regarding what we now knew to be the derelict Italian barque, _Livorno_, of Genoa. It was given out that we were going camping, between Werrina and the coast; and, no doubt my father was credited by the local wiseacres with the possession of some crafty prospecting scheme or another. Most of the folk thereabouts had been always wont to look to the bush (chiefly for timber) as a source of livelihood, but their attention was usually turned inland rather than seaward; for the bulk of the country between Werrina and the sea is poor and swampy, or sandy. The belt of timber we had seen behind our derelict's bay was not extensive.

It was Ted who bought Jerry for us for the modest price of 3, 15s.; and I make no doubt that serviceable beast would have cost my father 7 if he had had 'the haggling of it.' Pack-saddle and tent, with a number of other oddments, had come with us from across the Queensland border; first, by rail, and thence by numerous devious coach routes to Werrina. The only thing about our expedition which I think Ted really mistrusted and disliked was the fact that we set forth on foot. He told my father of horses he could buy, if not for three a penny, certainly at the rate of two for a five-pound note. (Animals no better, or very little better, are selling for 20 apiece in the same country to-day.) But my father spoke of the cost of saddlery and the like. He had been brought up in a land where horse-keeping means considerable expense, and the need for husbanding his slender resources was strongly foremost in his mind just now. But Ted had all his life long thought of horses as a natural and necessary adjunct to man's locomotion. I have seen him devote considerable time and energy to the task of catching Jerry in order to ride across a couple of hundred yards of sand to his favourite wood-cutting spot. To be poor, that is, short of money, was a natural and customary thing enough in Ted's eyes; but to go ajourneying as a footman suggested a truly pitiable kind of dest.i.tution, and did, I am convinced, throw a shadow over what otherwise had been the outset of a jaunt entirely after his own heart.

As the morning wore on, however, and we left behind us all likelihood of chance encounters with more fortunately placed and therefore critical people, bestriding pigskin, Ted's spirits rose again to their normal easy alt.i.tude, and mounted beyond that to the level of boyish jollity. Myself, I incline to think that walking along a bush track, with a long stick in his hand and a pack-horse to drive before him, was really an ideal situation for Ted, despite his preference for riding. Afoot, he could so readily step aside to start a 'goanner' up a tree, or pluck an out-of-the-way growth to show me.

There never was such a fellow for 'noticing' things, as they say of children. Print he never read, so far as I know, and perhaps this helped to make him so amazingly keen a reader of Nature. Not the littlest comma on that page ever eluded him.

'Hullo!' he would say when Werrina was miles away behind us. 'Who'd've thought o' that baldy-faced steer o' Murdoch's bein' out here?' One gazed about to locate the beast. But, no. No living thing was in sight. In pa.s.sing, quite casually, Ted's roving eye had spied a hoof mark, perhaps a day old or more, in the soft bottom of a tiny billabong; a print I could hardly make out, leave alone identify as having been made by this beast or the other, even under the guidance of Ted's pointing finger. Yet for Ted that casual glance--no stooping, no close scrutiny--supplied an accurate and complete picture: the particular beast, its gait, occupation, and way of heading, and the period at which it had pa.s.sed that way. Withal, it was true enough, as the storekeeper said, poor Ted had no 'Systum'; or none, at all events, of the kind cultivated in shops and offices.

III

However much at fault I may be in recollection of our arrival at Sydney, my memories of our first night at Livorno Bay (so my father christened the derelict's resting-place) could hardly be more vivid and distinct. That night marks for me the beginning of a definite epoch in my life.

I pa.s.sed the spot in a large inter-state steamer last year. There was no sign of any s.h.i.+p there then, so far, at all events, as I could make out with a borrowed pair of gla.s.ses; and the place looked very much the same as any other part of the Australian coast. There are thousands of such indentations around the sh.o.r.es of the island continent, with low headlands of jagged rock by way of horns, and terraces of sh.e.l.l-strewn sand dotted over with ti-tree scrub, which merges into a low-lying bush of swamp oak and suchlike growths, among which, as like as not, you shall find, as we found, a more or less extensive salt-water lagoon, over the sandy bar of which big, tossing breakers will roll in from the Pacific in stormy weather. Yes, I would say now that there is nothing very peculiar or distinctive about Livorno Bay for the observer who is familiar with other parts of Australia's coast.

But in my youthful eyes, seen on the evening of our arrival, after a fifteen miles' walk, and, seen, too, in the glow of a singularly angry-looking evening sky, Livorno Bay, with its derelict barque to focus one's gaze, presented a spectacle almost terrifying in its desolation. Years must have pa.s.sed since anything edible could have been found on board the _Livorno_. Yet I hardly think I should exaggerate if I said that two thousand birds rose circling from various points of vantage about the derelict as we approached her sides. That this winged and highly vocal congregation resented our intrusion was not to be doubted for a moment. Short of actually attacking us with beak and claw, the creatures could hardly have given more practical expression to their sentiments. The circ.u.mstance was trivial, of course, but I think it somewhat dashed my father's ardour, and I know it struck into my very vitals.

'Begone, you interlopers, or we will rend you! This is no place for humans. Here is only death and desolation for the likes of you. This place belongs of immemorial right to us, and to our masters, the devouring elements. Begone!'

So it seemed we were screamed at from thousands of hoa.r.s.e throats.

For my part I was well pleased when my father agreed to Ted's suggestion that we should postpone till morning our inspection of the s.h.i.+p, and, in the meantime, concentrate upon the more immediate necessity of pitching camp for the night in the shelter of the timber belt and outside the domain of the screaming sea-birds. Our tent was fortunately not one of the c.u.mbersome sort I had seen on Wimbledon Common at home, but a light Australian contrivance of cotton, enclosing a s.p.a.ce ten feet by eight, and protected by a good large fly. Thanks mainly to Ted and his axe we had the necessary stakes cut, and the tent pitched before dark. Meanwhile, the little fire Ted had lighted against a blackened tree-stump had grown into the sort of fiery furnace that was a.s.sociated in my mind with certain pa.s.sages in the Old Testament; and, suspended by a piece of fencing wire from a cross stake on two forked sticks, our billy was boiling vigorously.

In all such bush-craft as this Ted was _facile princeps_, and he asked no better employment. Jerry was turned out to graze, belled and hobbled (for safety in a strange place), and just as actual darkness closed in upon us--no moon was visible that night--we sat down at the mouth of the tent to sup upon corned beef, bread and cheese and jam; the latter in small tins with highly coloured paper wrappers.

By this time my sense of chill and depression had pretty well evaporated. The details of our domesticity were most attractive to me.

But I am not sure that my father quite regained his spirits that evening. We each had a canvas camp-stretcher of the collapsible sort.

In ten minutes Ted had made himself a hammock bed of two sacks, two saplings, and four forked stakes, which for comfort was quite equal to any camp cot I have yet seen. Sleep came quickly to me, at all events, and whenever I woke during the night, as I did some three or four times, there was booming in my ears that rude music which remained the constant accompaniment of all our lives and doings in Livorno Bay: the dull roar of Pacific breakers on the sand below us, varied by a long sibilant intaking of breath, as it seemed, caused by the back-wash of every wave's subsidence.

Very gently, to avoid disturbing my father--I can see his face on the flimsy cot pillow now, looking sadly fragile and worn--I crept out from our tent in time to see the upper edge of the sun's disc (like a golden dagger of the Moorish shape) flash out its a.s.surance across the sea, and gild with sudden bravery the trucks and spars and frayed rigging of the barque _Livorno_. Life has no other rea.s.surance to offer which is quite so emphatic as that of the new risen sun; and it is youth, rather than culture, which yields the finest appreciation of this. In its glad light I ran and laughed, half naked, where a few hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost with terror.

I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the back-wash of their surf very insistent.

The fire of his enthusiasm was once more alight in my father when I got back to our camp that morning; and one might have supposed it nourished him, if one had judged from the cursory manner in which his share of our simple breakfast was dispatched. Then, carrying with him a tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the s.h.i.+p lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered part of the _Livorno_, was encrusted in the droppings of mult.i.tudinous sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we resented their claims, in the broad light of day; even as they, on the previous evening, had resented us. Ted promised them a warm time of it, and congratulated himself on having brought his old gun.

'I'll show 'em whose s.h.i.+p it is,' he said, 'to-night.' And the boy in me rose in sympathetic response. I suppose I looked forward to the prospect of those birds being given a taste of the fear they had helped to inspire in me.

The _Livorno_ had a long, low p.o.o.p, no more than three feet high, and extending forward to the mainmast. She had none of the _Ariadne's_ bright-work, as the polished teak was always called on that s.h.i.+p. Her rails and deck-houses had been painted in green and white, and I made out the remains of stencilled ornamentation in the corners of panels.

No doubt my father had his preconceptions regarding the derelict of which he had thought so much in the past week. In any case he did not linger by the way, but walked direct to the cuddy or saloon, which we entered by a deeply encrusted, sun-cracked scuttle, just forward of the mizzen-mast. So here we were, at length, at the heart of our quest.

Personally, I was for the moment disappointed. My father, being wiser and knowing better what to expect, was pleased, I think. My antic.i.p.ations had doubtless taken their colour from recent experience of the trim, well-ordered smartness of the _Ariadne's_ saloon. Here, on board the derelict, nothing was left standing which could easily be carried away. The cabins opening into the little saloon had no doors, save in the case of one--the captain's room--that had been split down the centre, apparently with an axe, and its remains hung drunkenly now upon one hinge, which, at a touch from Ted's hand, parted company with its bulkhead, leaving the door to fall clattering to the deck. But, curiously enough, the good hardwood bunks were all intact, except in the case of one, which had, apparently, been wantonly smashed, perhaps by the same insensate hand that smashed the door.

The saloon table had gone, of course, and the chairs; but the bra.s.s cleats which had held them to their places in the deck were there still to show us where our predecessors here had sat and taken their meals. Here they had done their gossiping, no doubt, over the remains of savoury macaroni, with, perchance, an occasional flagon of Chianti or Barolo. There was a sort of buffet built into the forward bulkhead; and by a most surprising chance this was unhurt, save for a great star in the mirror behind it. Even its bra.s.s rail was intact. Some idle boor must have observed this solid little piece of man's handiwork, and then, I suppose, struck at the mirror with his axe--a savage and blackguardly act. But here, at all events, was our little store cupboard.

'Sideboard's all right then,' was Ted's grinning comment. 'And a man could still see to shave in the gla.s.s.'

The saloon skylight had been removed bodily, perhaps to serve some c.o.c.katoo bush farmer for a cuc.u.mber frame! And the result of this, more than any other circ.u.mstance, had been to give the saloon its desolate look; for, beneath the yawning aperture where once the skylight had stood, there was now an unsavoury mound of bird's droppings, near three feet high at its apex. This was now dust-dry; but the autumnal rains of bygone seasons had streamed upon it no doubt, with the result that all the rest of the saloon was several inches deep in the same sort of covering. There were naturally no stores in the pitch-black lazareet which one reached through a trap-door in the saloon deck; but among the lumber there we found an old bucket, a number of empty tins, packing-cases, and the like, a coal shovel with a broken handle, and two tanks in which s.h.i.+p's biscuits had been kept. How these latter commodities came to have been spared by marauding visitors it would be hard to say; for, in the bush, every one, without exception, requires tanks for the storage of rain-water.

From the saloon we made our way right forward to the forecastle, in which practically no damage had been done; for the reason, I suppose, that little was there which easily could be damaged or removed. No anchors or cables were to be seen, but the seamen's bunks remained much as I imagine they had left them; and, on the side of one, some sundowner had contrived to scrawl, apparently with a heated wire, this somewhat fatuous legend:

'Occewpide by me Captin Ned Kelli Bushranger. Chrismas day 1868. Not too bad.'

In many other parts of the s.h.i.+p we found, when we came to do our cleaning, initials, dates, and occasional names, rudely carved. But the only attempt at a written tribute to the derelict's quality as a camping-place was the pretended bushranger's 'Not too bad'; a thoroughly Australian commentary, and probably endorsed in speech at the time of writing by the exclamation: 'My word!'

Internally, the _Livorno_ had been very thoroughly gutted, even to the removal of many of her deck joists and 'tween-decks' stanchions. But in her galley, which, having remained closed, was in quite good order, we found the cooking range, though rusty, intact. It had been built into the deck-house, and, being partly of tiles, would hardly have lent itself to easy transport or use in another place. Ted had a fire burning in it that very day, and water boiling on it in tins. Hidden under much mouldering rubbish in the boatswain's locker were found two deck sc.r.a.pers, which proved most useful.

Ted strongly advised the adoption, as living-room, of the forecastle; and he may have been in the right of it. The place was weather-proof, its tiny skylight being intact. But sentiment, I think, attracted my father to the quarter-deck. 'The weather side of the p.o.o.p's my only promenade,' he said gaily. 'And those square stern ports, with the carving under them--it would be a sin to leave them to the birds. Oh, the saloon is clearly our place, and we must rig a shelter over the skylight by and by.'

In the end we accomplished little or nothing beyond inspection that day. Towards evening Ted laid in a stock of firewood beside our camp, while my father wrote a letter to the Werrina storekeeper, which Ted was to take in next day with a cheque. I say we accomplished nothing, because I can remember no useful work done. Yet I do vividly remember falling asleep over my supper, and feeling more physically weary than I had ever been before. We were on our feet all day, of course. We were gleaning new impressions at a great rate. The day was, I suppose, a pretty full one; and a.s.suredly one of us slept well after it.

IV

When my eyes opened next morning, dawn, though near at hand, had not yet come. His pale-robed heralds were busy, however, diffusing that sort of nacreous haze which in coastal Australia lights the way for each day's coming. Looking out over the pillow of my cot I saw Ted among the trees, girthing the pack-saddle on Jerry. In a very few moments I was beside him, and in five minutes he had started on his journey.

'I'll be in Warrina for breakfast,' he said.

I walked a few hundred yards beside him, and the last glimpse I caught of him, at a bend over which the track rose a little, showed Ted seated sideways on the horse's hindquarters, one hand resting on the pack-saddle, the other waving overhead to me. A precarious perch I thought it, but as it saved him from the final degradation of walking, I have no doubt it suited Ted well enough.

The sun was still some little way below the horizon when Ted disappeared, and I was perhaps a quarter of a mile from camp. Inland, I had very likely been bushed. Here, vague though the track was, the sea's incessant call was an unfailing guide. But it was in those few minutes, spent in walking back towards our tent, that I was given my first taste of solitude in the Australian bush; and, boy that I was, it impressed me greatly. It was a permanent addition to my narrow store of impressions, and it is with me yet.

At such times the Australian bush has qualities which distinguish it from any other parts of the world known to me. I have known other places and times far more eerie. To go no farther there are parts of the bush in which thousands of trees, being ring-barked, have died and become ghosts of trees. Seen in the light of a half moon, when the sky is broken by wind-riven cloud, these spectral inhabitants of the bush, with their tattered winding sheets of corpse-white bark, are distinctly more eerie than anything the dawn had to show me beside Livorno Bay.

Withal, the half-hour before sunrise has a peculiar quality of its own, in the bush, which I found very moving and somewhat awe-inspiring upon first acquaintance. There was a hush which one could feel and hear; a silence which exercised one's hearing more than any sound. And yet it was not a silence at all; for the sea never was still there. It was as though the bush and all that dwelt therein held its breath, waiting, waiting for a portent; and, meantime, watching me. In a few moments I found myself also waiting, conscious of each breath I drew.

It was not so much eerie as solemn. Yes, I think it was the solemnity of that bush which so impressed me, and for the time so humbled me.

A few moments later and the kindly brightness of the new-risen sun was glinting between tree-trunks, the bush began to breathe naturally, and I was off at a trot for my morning dabble in the surf.

My father and I made but a poor show as housekeepers that day. I suppose we neither of us had ever washed a plate, or even boiled a kettle. In all such matters of what may be called outdoor domesticity (as in the use of such primitive and all-round serviceable tools as the axe), the Colonial-born man has a great advantage over his Home-born kinsman, in that he acquires proficiency in these matters almost as soon and quite as naturally as he learns to walk and talk. And not otherwise can the sane easy mastery of things be acquired.

My father had some admirably sound theories about cooking. He had knowledge enough most heartily to despise the Frenchified menus which, I believe, were coming into vogue in London when we left it, and warmly to appreciate the sterling virtue of good English cookery and food. The basic aim in genuine English cookery is the conservation of the natural flavours and essences of the food cooked. And, since sound English meats and vegetables are by long odds the finest in the world, there could be no better purpose in cooking than this. Subtle methods and provocative sauces, which give their own distinctive flavour to the dishes in which they are used, are well enough for less favoured lands than England, and a much-needed boon, no doubt. They are a wasteful mistake in England, or were, at all events, so long as unadulterated English food was available.

My father taught me these truths long ago, and I am an implicit believer in them to-day. All his theories about such matters were sound; and it may be that, in a properly appointed kitchen, he could have turned out an excellent good meal--given the right mood for the task. But I will admit that in Livorno Bay, both on this our first day alone there, and ever afterwards, my father's only attempts at domestic work were of the most sketchy and least satisfactory description; his grip of our housekeeping was of the feeblest, and in a very short time the matter fell entirely into my hands when Ted was not with us. Ted was my exemplar; from him such knowledge and ability as I acquired were derived. But to his shrewd practicality I was able to add something, in the shape of theory evolved from my father's conversation; and thus presently I obtained a quite respectable grasp of bush domesticity.

This day of Ted's absence in Werrina we devoted to a more or less systematic exploration of our territory. My father was in a cheery vein, and entertained me by bestowing names upon the more salient features of our domain. The two horns of Livorno Bay, I remember, were Gog and Magog; the lagoon remained always just The Lagoon; the timber belt was Arden; our camp, Zoar; and so forth. We found an eminently satisfactory little spring, not quite so near at hand as the water-hole from which Ted had drawn our supplies till now, but yielding brighter, fresher water. And we botanised with the aid of a really charming little ma.n.u.script book, bound in kangaroo-skin, and given to my father by the widow of a Queensland squatter whom we had met on the coasting steamer. That little volume is among my few treasured possessions to-day. Some of its watercolour sketches look a little worn and pallid, after all these years, but it is a most instructive book; and from it came all my first knowledge of the various wattles, the different mahoganies, the innumerable gums, the ferns, creepers, and wild flowers of the bush.

It was almost dark when Ted returned--in a cart. We were greatly surprised to see Jerry between the shafts of this ancient vehicle, and my father found it hard to credit that any cart could be driven over the bush track by which we had travelled, with its stumps and holes and sudden dips to watercourses. However, there the cart was, its harness plentifully patched with pieces of cord and wire; and it seemed well laden, too.

'Who lent it you?' asked my father. And Ted explained how the cart had been offered to him for 3, and how, at length, he had bought it for 2, 5s. and a drink. It seemed a sin to miss such a chance, but if my father really did not want it, well, he, Ted, would pay for it out of his earnings. Of course my father accepted responsibility for the purchase, and very useful the crazy old thing proved as time went on; for, though its collapse, like that of other more important inst.i.tutions, seemed always imminent, it never did actually dissolve in our time, and only occasionally did it shed any vital portion of its fabric. Even after such minor catastrophes, it always bore up n.o.bly under the rude first (and last) aid we could give with cord, or green-hide and axed wood.

To my inexperience it seemed that Ted had brought with him a wide a.s.sortment of most of the commodities known to civilisation. The unloading of the cart was to me as the enjoyment of a monstrous bran-pie; an entertainment I had heard of, but never seen. And when I heard there was certainly one more load, and probably two, to come, I felt that we really were rich beyond the dreams of most folk. I recalled the precise manner in which Fred (the _Ariadne_ rival and fellow-pa.s.senger, whose surname I never knew) had wilted when he heard that my father and I had intended travelling steerage, and from my heart I wished he could see this cart-load of a.s.sorted goods. 'Goods' was the correct word, I thought, for such wholesale profusion; and 'cart-load'

had the right s.p.a.ciousness to indicate a measure of our abundance.

There were several large sheets of galvanised iron, appearing exactly as one in the cart, but covering a notable expanse of ground when spread out singly. These were for a roof in the place of the saloon skylight. My father had pished and tushed and pressed for a bark roof; but Ted, in his bush wisdom, had insisted on the prosaic 'tin,' as a catchment area for rain-water to be stored in the two s.h.i.+p's tanks.

There were brooms, scrubbing-brushes, kettles, pots, pans, crockery, fis.h.i.+ng-lines, ammunition for Ted's highly lethal old gun, and there were stores. I marvelled that stores so numerous and varied could have come out of Werrina. My imagination was particularly fired by the contemplation of a package said to contain a gross of boxes of matches. Reckoning on fifty to the box, I struggled for some time with a computation of the total number of our matches, giving it up finally when I had reached figures which might have thrilled a Rothschild. Our sugar was not in blue paper packages of a pound weight, but in a sack, as it might be for the sweetening of an army corps' porridge. And our tea! Like the true Australian he was, Ted had actually brought us a twenty-six pound case of tea. It was a wondrous collection, and I drew a long breath when I remembered that there was more, much more, to come. Here were nails, not in spiral twists of paper, but in solid seven-pound packages, and quite a number of them.