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

and Mooney knew there was some reason why you daren’t go back to where you were known; but they had never heard the story; so I put them on their honour, and told them the whole affair.”

“How did the story run?” I asked.

My vicar repeated it. (Which is more than I can do.)

“Well, that ought to drum me out of her esteem,” I remarked, with the feeling of a man respited on the scaffold. “And it hangs together fairly well for a fabrication. But I’m honestly sorry to have been forced to put such an office on you, Moriarty. Indeed, I wonder how you could have the nerve to tell such a yarn in a woman’s hearing.”

“Friendship, old man,” replied my factor wammly. “But it ain’t a fabrication. I found I couldn’t invent anything with the proper ring of truth about it; so, the evening before the disclosure, when Jack the Shellback was in the store getting some things to take out with him, I asked him what was the most blackguardly prank he ever got off with; and that was the yarn he told me. Of course, I altered it a bit to suit you.”

“And Mrs. Beaudesart believes it?” I queried hopefully.

“I don’t see what else she can do, considering the way the thing came off. She would have to be like one of the ancient prophets.”

“And you think it has the proper effect?”

“No effect at all,” replied the nuncio decidedly. “Her manner’s just the same when she hears you talked about promiscuously; and she doesn’t take it any way ill to overhear a quiet joke about the thing that’s supposed to be coming off some time soon. It’s a failure so far as that goes. Certain as life.”

“Well, Moriarty, if dishonour has no effect, we must try disgrace.”

“Why, they’re the same. You better go back to school, Collins.”

“They’re entirely independent of each other⁠—if you insist on bringing me back to school, to waste my time over one barren pupil. Poverty, for instance, is disgrace without dishonour; Michael-and-Georgeship is dishonour without disgrace. In cases like mine, the dishonour lies in the fact, and the disgrace in the publicity. You must set the whole station commenting on your scandal.”

“That’s just what the whole station is doing at the present time,” replied my legate unctuously. “Surprising how these things spread of themselves, when they’re once fairly started. And everybody believes the yarn; bar Mooney, and Nelson, and myself; and you can depend your life on us to keep it jigging. No, I’m wrong; Montgomery’s got the inside crook on us.”

“Montgomery?” said I inquiringly.

“Yes. I got a fright over that,” explained the diplomatist. “The other morning, I was at some correspondence here, and I heard a quick step, and when I looked up, who should I see but Montgomery, as black as thunder.

“ ‘Moriarty!’ says he, in a voice that made me jump; ‘what is this story I hear of Collins? Now, no shuffling,’ says he; ‘I’ve traced it home to you, and I want your authority. I always looked upon Collins as a decent sort of oddity,’ says he; ‘and I’m determined to sift this matter thoroughly.’ Frightened me out of a year’s growth.” Moriarty paused, and drew a long breath.

“Well?” said I, hazily; wondering whether this piteous wreckage of plot was owing to some defect in my own strategy, or to bad lieutenantry in the working out.

“So I had to make a clean breast of it,” continued the plenipotentiary, in a reluctant and apologetic tone. “No use talking. It was impossible to stand to the yarn, when Montgomery’s eye was on me⁠—let alone being taken by surprise. It was dragged from me by a sort of hypodermic influence; and all the fun seemed to have died out of it, till it sounded mean and small and unmanly. Yes; I had to tell him the fix you were in, and the commission you had given me, and everything from first to last; bar that infernal wager. Well, you know, Montgomery never laughs; but I saw his face twitching, once or twice; and before I had done, he wheeled round and stood looking out of the door, as if I wasn’t worth listening to. Then he went away, coughing fit to break his neck.”

“I may thank him for being tree’d, in the first place; and he knows it,” I remarked, with a sourness which appears pardonable even at this distance of time.

“What had he got to do with it?” asked Moriarty.

“How the tempus does fugit!” I replied. For the midday bell was ringing at the hut.

“Best sound since breakfast-time,” said Moriarty, rising. “Come on to lunch.”

As we left the store, half-a-dozen representatives of the lower classes were stringing-in from different directions toward the hut, to attend to the most ancient and eminent of human institutions⁠—the institution which predicates and affirms the brotherhood of our race as positively, and, to the philosophic mind, as touchingly, as death itself; being recognised and remembered by the aristocrat who forgets his own personal dirt-origin and dirt-destination; by the woman who forgets the date of her birth; by the friend who forgets the insulting language he used to you when he was under the influence; and by the boy who forgets his catechism. The meal-signal is the real Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame; the Greek invocation which calls fools into a circle as surely as wise men; for neither folly nor wisdom is proof against its spell.

Just then, two swagmen on foot came into the yard, and approached Moriarty and me. I fixed my belltopper, adjusted my specs, and assumed my stately pipe, whilst my soul went forth in psalms of thanksgiving. Here was the true key to the Wilcannia shower; here was the underside of my imagined precaution against ophthalmia; here was the hidden purpose of that repetitional picking and sorting of the hawker’s stock which had left Jack the Shellback his Hobson’s choice in coats; here was a Wesleyan converging of the whole vast order of the universe toward