Such Is Life Part 23

Another indifferent-looking alternative was accepted when my guardian angel suggested a smoke while crossing the river, and I declined, on the plea of haste. A picaninny alternative, that, you say? I tell you, it proved an old-man alternative before it ran itself out. The filling and lighting of my pipe would have occupied three or four minutes, and I should have seen an impending danger in time to guard against it. But I shunted on to the wrong line, and nothing remained but to follow it out to a finish.

You shall judge for yourself whether even your own discretion and address could have carried the allotted trip to a less unhappy issue.

Hand over hand along the wire, I had wobbled the bark to the middle of the stream, when I noticed, not fifty yards away, a dead tree of twelve or fifteen tons displacement, en route for South Australia. Being about nineteen-twentieths submerged, and having no branches on the upper side, it would have pa.s.sed under the wire but for a stump of a root, as thick as your body, standing about five feet above the surface of the water, on its forward end. In remarking that the tree was ong root, I merely mean to imply such importance in that portion of its substance that it might rather be viewed as a root with a tree attached than as a tree with a root attached. This is the aspect it still retains in my mind.

There was not half enough time to pull the bark ash.o.r.e and sink the wire, so I did the next best thing I could. As the log approached, I carefully rose to my feet, and held the wire high enough to clear the root. Nearer it came; it would pa.s.s the bark nicely within three or four feet; a few seconds more, and the root would glide underneath the wire----

Pup had remained yelping and dancing on the bank for a few minutes after my embarkation--the kangaroo dog having a charcoal burner's antipathy to the bath--but at last becoming desperate, he had plunged in, and was rapidly approaching whilst I judiciously gauged the height of the root, and meanwhile balanced the unsteady bark under my feet. When the root was within six inches of the wire, Pup's chin and forepaws were on the gunwale; in three seconds more, I was clinging with one hand to the root, the other still mechanically holding the tightening wire; Pup was making for the log; and the splitters' bark had gone to Davy Jones's locker.

In another half-minute, the wire parted, and Pup and I were deck pa.s.sengers, ong root for the land of the Crow-eaters.

I was no more disconcerted than I am at the present moment. I would go on to B----'s as if nothing had happened; and put up with the inconvenience of swimming the river in the morning. In the meantime, though I was well splashed, all the things in my pockets were dry. I particularly congratulated myself on the good fortune of having been so close to the root at the Royal Georgeing of my bark. My bark--well, strictly speaking, it was the splitters' bark; but accidents will happen; and I was certain that not a soul had seen me turn off the main road toward the river.

My clothes were of the lightest. I took them off, and tied them in my handkerchief. I pounded a depression in the package to fit the top of my head, and bound it there with my elastic belt, holding the latter in my teeth. You must often have noticed that the chief difficulty of swimming with your clothes on your head arises from the fore-and-aft surging of the package with each stroke. But nothing could have been more complete than my arrangements as I slid gently into the water, and paddled for the Cabbage Garden sh.o.r.e.

When I had gone a few yards, my faithful companion, now left alone on the log, raised his voice in lamentation, after the manner of his subspecies.

"Come on, Pup!" I shouted, without looking round; and the next moment I felt as if a big kangaroo dog had catapulted himself through twenty feet of s.p.a.ce, and lit on my package.

After returning to the surface and coughing about a pint of water out of my nose and ears, I looked uneasily round for my cargo. It was nowhere to be seen. I swam back to the log, and stood on it to get a better view.

Good! there was the white, rounded top, an inch above the water, ten yards away. As I swam toward it, a whirlpool took it under.

I dived after it, struck it smartly with the crown of my head; and eventually returned to the log, whence I watched for its re-appearance above the slowly-swirling water. It never re-appeared.

Following the sinuosities of the river, this must have been a mile and a half below the splitters' crossing-place; and time had been pa.s.sing, for there was the setting sun, blazing through a gap in the timber, and its mirrored reflection stretching half a mile of dazzling radiance along a straight reach of the river.

Now, though the Murray is the most crooked river on earth, its general tendency is directly from east to west. Would n't you, therefore--if you were on a floating log, remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow; standing, like the Apollo Sauroctones, with your hand on the adjacent stump, and, to enhance your resemblance to that fine antique, clad in simplicity of mien and nothing else--if you were sadly realising the loss of your best clothes, with all the things in the pockets, including a fairly trustworthy watch--if, in addition to this, the patient face of the spratless swagman was rising before you till you involuntarily muttered "O Julius Caesar!

thou art mighty yet!" and the nasty part of your moral nature was reminding you that you might have had anything up to four-pounds-odd worth of heavenly debentures; whereas, having failed to put your mammon of unrighteousness into celestial scrip, to await you at the end of your pilgrimage, you were now doubly debarred from retaining it in your pilgrim's scrip, by reason of having neither scrip nor mammon--under such circ.u.mstances, I say, would n't you be very likely to take the sunset on your left, and swim for the north bank, without doing an equation in algebra to find out which way the river ought to run? That is what I did.

It never occurred to my mind that Victoria could be on the north side of New South Wales.

After shouting myself hoa.r.s.e, and whistling on my fingers till my lips were paralysed, I brought Pup into view on the south, and supposedly Victorian, bank, opposite where I had landed. By the time I had induced him to take the water and rejoin me, the short twilight was gone, and night had set in, dark, starless, hot, and full of electricity.

And the mosquitos. Well, those who have been much in the open air, in G.o.diva costume, during opaque, perspiring, November nights, about Lake Cooper, or the Lower Goulburn, or the Murray frontage, require no reminder; and to those who have not had such experience, no ill.u.s.tration could convey any adequate notion. Hyperbolically, however: In the localities I have mentioned, the severity of the periodical plague goads the instinct of animals almost to the standard of reason. Not only will horses gather round a fire to avail themselves of the smoke, but it is quite a usual thing to see some experienced old stager sitting on his haunches and dexterously filliping his front shoes over a little heap of dry leaves and bark.

To return. The recollection of much worse predicaments in the past, and the reasonable antic.i.p.ation of still worse in the future, restored that equilibrium of temper which is the aim of my life; and I felt cheerful enough as I welcomed my dripping companion, and, taking a leafy twig in each hand to switch myself withal, started northward for the river road, which I purposed following eastward to where the pad branched off, and then running the latter to my camp. Once clear of the river timber, and with the road for a base, the darkness, I thought, would make little difference to me.

After half an hour's gliding through heavy forest, and cleaving my way through spongy reed-beds, and circling round black lagoons, alive with the "plump, plump" of bullfrogs, and the interminable "r-r-r-r-r"

of yabbies, I found the river on my right, with a well-beaten cattle-track along the bank. Here was something definite to go upon. By keeping straight on, I must soon strike the old horse-paddock fence, where the splitters used to keep their bark; and in an hour and a-half more, I would be at my camp.

But the discerning reader will perceive, from hints already given, that, by following the cattle track, with the river on my right, I was unconsciously travelling westward on the Victorian side, instead of eastward on the New South Wales side. If the sky had cleared for a single instant, a glance at the familiar constellations would have set me right.

After half a mile, the cattle-track intersected a beaten road, with the black ma.s.ses of river timber still on the right, and a wire fence on the left--as I found by running into it. Everything seemed unfamiliar and puzzling; but I followed the road, looking out for landmarks, and zealously switching myself as I went along.

Soon I heard in front the trampling of horses, and men's voices in jolly conversation. I aimed for the sounds, and, after running against a loose horse, feeding leisurely on the gra.s.s, I distinguished through the hot, stagnant darkness the approaching forms of three men riding abreast.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said I politely, switching myself as I spoke.

"Could you give me some idea of the geography"---- I got no farther, for a colt that one of the fellows was riding suddenly s.h.i.+ed at me and followed up the action by bucking his best. Upon this, the loose horse presented himself, cavorting round in senseless emulation, while the other two horses swerved and tried to bolt. All this took place in half a minute.

The rider of the colt was taken by surprise, but he was plucky. Though losing not only his stirrups but his saddle with the first buck, he spent the next couple of minutes riding all over that colt, sometimes on his ears, and sometimes on his tail. But this sort of thing could n't last--it never does last--so, after hanging on for about twenty seconds by one heel the fellow dismounted like a barrow-load of sludge. During this time, I saw nothing of the two other men, but I could hear them trying to force their excited horses toward the spot where I was skipping round, ready to catch the colt on the moment of his discharging cargo.

On making the attempt, I missed the bridle in the dark; and away shot the colt in one direction, and the loose horse in another.

"I bet a note Jack's off," said a voice from the distance.

"Gosh, you'd win it if it was twenty," responded another voice from the ground close by.

"There goes his moke!" said the first voice. "Come and jam the beggar against the fence, or he'll be off to glory." And away clattered the two hors.e.m.e.n after the wrong horse; Jack following on foot.

Noticing their mistake, I cantered hopefully after the colt, thinking to obtain a favourable introduction to Jack by restoring the animal; but in a few minutes I lost the sounds, and abandoned the pursuit.

Then, after supplying myself with fresh switches, I resumed my fatal westward course.

More voices, a short distance away, and straight in front. Judging them to come from some vehicle travelling at a slow walk along the edge of the timber, I posted myself behind a tree, and waited as patiently as the mosquitos permitted.

"Now you need n't scandalise one another," said a pleasant masculine voice.

"You're like the pot and the kettle. You're both as full of sin and hypocrisy as you can stick. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other. I would n't have believed it if I had n't seen it with my own eyes. You've disgraced yourselves for ever. Who the d.i.c.kens do you think would be fool enough to marry either of you after the way you've behaved yourselves to-day?"

"Well, I'm sure we're not asking you to marry us," piped a feminine voice.

"Keep yourselves in that mind, for goodness' sake. I'm disgusted with you.

Why, only last Sunday, I heard your two mothers flattering themselves about the C---- girls knowing too much; and I'll swear you've both forgot more than the C---- girls ever knew. You're as common as dish-water."

"O, you're mighty modest, your own self," retorted a second feminine voice.

"It's my place to be a bit rowdy," replied the superior s.e.x. "It's part of a man's education. And I don't try to look as if b.u.t.ter would n't melt in my mouth. You're just the reverse; you're hypocrites. 'Woe unto you hypocrites!' the Bible says. But it's troubling me a good deal to think what your mothers'll feel, now that you've come out in your true colours."

"But you wouldn't be mean enough to tell?" interrupted one of the sweet voices.

"I always thought you were too honourable to do such a thing, Harry,"

remarked the other.

"Well, now you find your mistake. But this is not a question of honour; it's a question of duty."

"O, you're mighty fine with your duty! You're a mean wretch. There!"

"I'll be a meaner wretch before another hour's over. Go on, Jerry; let's get it past and done with."

"But, Harry--I say, Harry--don't tell. I'll never forgive you if you do."

"Duty, Mabel, duty."

"What good will it do you to tell?" pleaded the other voice.

"Duty, Annie, duty. On you go, Jerry, and let's get home. This is painful to a cove of my temperament."

During this conversation, I had become conscious of standing on a populous ant-bed; and, not wis.h.i.+ng to lose the chance of an interview with Harry, I had retreated in front of the buggy till a second tree offered its friendly cover. Jerry's head was now within two yards of my ambush, and, peeping round, I could make out the vague outline of the figures in the buggy.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do," said Harry, stopping the horse: "If each of you gives me a kiss, of her own good will, I'll promise not to tell. Are you on? Say the word, for I'll only give you one minute to decide."

"What do you think, Mabel?" murmured one of the voices.

"Well, I've got no---- But what do you think?"