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

I promised to deliver the message, whereupon the wise men of the north laughed heartily. Then the three of us raised our hats with aristocratic gravity; and the vehicle moved away toward the land of Disillusionment. As I lay down again, I heard the poor fellows burst into unintelligible song; and, after the spring-cart had jogged a quarter of a mile, one of the adventurers looked past the edge of the tilt toward me, and waved his handkerchief. Not having any similar article on me at the time, I half-rose and returned the farewell with my hat.

As big fools as ever! Between asleep and awake, I pondered on the quantity and quality of Australian-novel lore which had found utterance there. The outlawed bushrangers; the lurking blackfellows; the squatter’s lovely Diana-daughter, awaiting the well-bred greenhorn (for even she had cropped-up in conversation)⁠—how these things recalled my reading! And yet they were quite as reasonable as the discovery of the rich reef by the soft-handed, fastidious young gentleman-digger.

I had only wasted time in asseverating that barren reefs are twice as plentiful as half-tucker reefs; ten times as plentiful as wages reefs; and a hundred times as plentiful as pile reefs. Both margraves had listened with polite toleration when I compassionately added that the pile reef is always discovered by an ungrammatical person, named Old Brummy, or Sydney Bob, or Squinty-eyed Pete, or something to the same general effect; and this because few “gentlemen” can stoop low enough, and long enough, and doggedly enough, to conquer; whereas Brummy etc., doesn’t require to stoop at all⁠—and his show is little better than Buckley’s.

Also, the barons had derived keen enjoyment from my honest suggestion, that the “gentlemans” best show is to discover the discoverer, and prevail upon the latter, per medium of firewater and blarney, to affix his illegible signature to some expropriating document. And yet those visionaries were highly informed men⁠—at least, as far as schools, lecturerooms, laboratories, museums, and the whole admirable machinery of modern academic and technical training could take them. This, let me add, is the record of an actual occurrence. It will just show you how much the novelist has to answer for; following, as he does, the devices and desires of his own heart; telling the lies he ought not to have told, and leaving untold the lies that he ought to have told.

I am not forgetting the pipe. Leaving the camp at about ten in the forenoon, I noticed, lying among the tussocks where the spring-cart had stood, something which, at the first glance, I took for the sumptuous holster of an overgrown navy revolver. I need say no more. It may have been the landgraves’ pipe-case, or, on the other hand, it may not. At all events, regarding the article as treasure-trove, within the meaning of the Act, I formally took possession under 6 Hen. III, c. 17, sec. 34; holding myself prepared at any time to surrender the property to anyone clever enough to sneak it, and cunning enough to keep it; though a sense of delicacy might prevent me chasing the Kronprinzes round the country, as if they had stolen something. When the pipe had eaten its magnificent head off in tobacco, then, of course, I sold it to pay expenses, and bought it in myself. So I have it still. And if the censorious reader has detected here and there in these pages a tendency toward the Higher Criticism, or a leaning to State Socialism, or any passage that seemed to indicate a familiarity with cuneiform inscriptions, or with the history and habits of Pre-Adamite Man, he may be assured that, at the time of writing such passage, I had been smoking the mighty pipe⁠—or rather, the mighty pipe had been smoking me⁠—and the unlawful erudition had effervesced per motion of my scholastic ally.

“I can better that yet,” remarked Jack unprintably. “I’ll swap you coats. Yours ain’t a bad one, but your arms goes a foot too fur through the sleeves, an’ she’s ridiculous short in the tail. She’ll jist about fit my soul-case; an’ I got an alpacar one here, made a-purpose for some clipper built (individual) like you. I wouldn’t ’a’ speculated in her, on’y she was the last the hawker had left. She’s never bin bent.” He produced a slate-coloured alpaca coat, which, when I tried it on, extended down to my knuckles and knees, trailing clouds of glory where there was none before. “You’ll do a bit o’ killin’ at the station, in that rig-out,” continued my host, with a lewd reference to some person who shall be nameless.

“By-the-way, what’s come of Alf Jones?” I asked, as we resumed our seats.

“Gone to (sheol),” replied his successor tersely. Alf, it appeared, had left the station six or eight weeks before, bound for no one knew where. Jack’s opinion was that in so doing he had made a slippery-hitch. I spoke of Alf’s singing; and Jack told me how the fellows at the station had persuaded him to give them a couple or three songs before he left.

“Wasn’t he something wonderful?” I remarked.

“Well, no,” Jack replied, deferentially but positively; “nothing like what you’d hear in a fo’c’sl.”

In fact, according to Jack’s account, he used to be reputed a middling singer himself. And he straightway rendered a mawkishly sentimental song, and a couple of extremely unchaste ones, in a voice which made the tea-embrowned pannikins on the table rattle in sympathy.

I remembered Alf’s minstrelsy, and the contrast was painful. Jack noticed a depression creeping over me, and, with the intuition of true hospitality, exerted his conversational powers for my entertainment. His discourse ran exclusively on a topic which, sad to say, furnishes, in all grades of masculine society, the motif of nearly every joke worth telling. In this line, Jack was a discriminating anthologist, and, moreover, a judicious adapter⁠—all his gestes being related in the first-person-singular. His autobiographical record was a staggerer; but I happened to