Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

His lithe, graceful movements had at first led me to mark him down as a mere lad; but now the lamplight showed a maze of incipient wrinkles on the sunburnt neck, and a few silver threads in the thick, strong, coalblack hair. Moreover, owing to inadvertence or ignorance on the part of people who should have known better, he had been christened in immediate succession to a girl. It is well and widely known that this oversight, small as it looks, will free a man for life from any rude inquiry as to when he is going to burn off the scrub. Alf had no scrub to burn off, except a faint moustache, unnoticeable but for its dark colour. For the rest, he was slightly above medium height and by no means a good stamp of a man⁠—tapering the wrong way, if I might so put it without shocking the double-refined reader. And, from stiff serge jumper to German-silver spur, he (Alf, of course) was unbecomingly clean for Saturday. The somewhat wearisome minuteness of this description is owing to his being, at least in my estimation, the most interesting character within the scope of these scranny memoirs.

I looked round for the bookshelf. It was a bookcase this time; a flat packing-case, nailed to the wall, fitted with shelves, and curtained on the front. I rose and inspected the collection: fifty or sixty volumes altogether⁠—poetry, drama, popular theology, reference, and a few miscellaneous works; history meagrely represented, science and yellow-back fiction not at all.

“You don’t find many people of my name in the country?” remarked the boundary man trivially, after a pause.

“Not many,” I replied, wondering whether he referred to his nickname or to the inexpensive, but lasting, gift of his godfathers and godmothers, at the time of their annoying mistake.

“I suppose you hardly know one,” he persisted.

“Not that I can think of,” I replied. “Have you any swapping-books?”

“Yes, you’ll find Elsie Venner lying on top of the upper shelf.”

“I’ve read it years ago, but we’ll change,” I replied. “When I first got my swapping-book, it was by Hannah More; now it’s by Zola, and smutty enough at that; it has undergone about twenty intermediate metamorphoses, and it’s still going remarkably strong⁠—in both senses of the word. Therefore I can recommend it.”

“I don’t think it does a person any good to read Zola,” remarked the boundary man gravely.

“Not the slightest, Alf⁠—that is, in the works by which he is represented amongst us. But do you think it does a person any good to read Holmes? Zola has several phases; one of them, I admit, blue as heaven’s own tinct; but Holmes has only one phase, namely, pharisaism. Zola, even as we know him here in Riverina, has this advantage, that he gives you no rest for the sole of your foot⁠—or rather, for the foot of your soul; whilst Holmes serenely seduces you to his own pinchbeck standard. Zola is honest; he never calls evil, good; whilst Holmes is spurious all through. Mind you, each has a genuine literary merit of his own.

“But don’t you like Holmes’s poetry?” asked Alf.

“Well, his poems fill a little volume that the world would be sorry to lose; but why didn’t he write one verse⁠—just one⁠—for the Abolitionists to quote?”

“Because it’s not in his nature to denounce things,” objected Alf.

“Neither was it in Longfellow’s nature; yet Longfellow’s poems on Slavery are judged worthy to form a separate section of his works. But Holmes can denounce most valiantly. He denounces witch-burning and Inquisition-persecution, like the chivalrous soul that he is. He has achieved the distinction of being the only American poet of note who blandly ignores Slavery, and takes part with the aristocrat, as against the lowly. The same spirit runs through all his writings. He has a range of about three notes: a flunkeyish koo-tooing to soap-bubble eminence; a tawdry sympathy with aristocratic woe; and a drivelling contempt for angular Poor Relations, in bombazine gowns. Bombazine, by-the-way, is a cheap, carpetty-looking fabric, built of shoddy, and generally used for homemade quilts⁠—”

“No, it’s not!” broke in Alf, with a rippling laugh; “it’s a very good dress-material; silk one way, and wool the other; and it’s mostly black, or maroon, or⁠—” he stopped with a gasp. “Why don’t you sit down?” he continued, in an altered tone. “And that reminds me, my day’s work’s not done yet.”

He cleared the table, and placed upon it his half-dissected turkey, in a milk-dish. I had the conversation to myself till he finished his work and took the turkey outside to hang it on the meat-pole. This was a sapling of fifteen or twenty feet high, with a fork at the top, through which ran a piece of clothesline. I followed him to the door, discoursing on literature, whilst he attached one end of the clothesline to the turkey’s legs, hauled it up to the fork, and hitched the fall of the rope to the pole. But just as the turkey reached its place, he had dropped his head with a movement of pain; and, after securing the rope, he groped his way into the hut, holding his hand over his right eye.

“Bit of bark, or something, dropped nght into my eye,” he muttered. “It doesn’t suit me to have anything wrong with the one I have left.”

By the bright lamplight, I soon relieved him of what proved to be a small ant; then he went out to the washing-bench, and I heard the dabbling of water.

“I got a grass-seed in my eye the New Year’s Day before last,” he remarked, in a sort of sullen self-commiseration, after we had sat in silence for a minute. “I couldn’t see to catch a horse; and it took me about six hours to grope my way along the fences to Dick Templeton’s hut. I thought I’d have gone mad.”

“Ah!” said I sympathetically, “that reminds me of an incident that came under my own notice