Australia Felix | Page 5

and for many years had known no more arduous task than that
of tramping round certain streets three times daily, ladder on shoulder,
bitch at heel, to attend the little flames that helped to dispel the London
dark. And he might have jogged on at this up to three score years and
ten, had he never lent an ear to the tales that were being told of a
wonderful country, where, for the mere act of stooping, and with your
naked hand, you could pick up a fortune from the ground. Might the
rogues who had spread these lies be damned to all eternity! Then, he
had swallowed them only too willingly; and, leaving the old woman
wringing her hands, had taken every farthing of his savings and set sail
for Australia. That was close on three years ago. For all he knew, his
wife might be dead and buried by this time; or sitting in the almshouse.
She could not write, and only in the early days had an occasional
newspaper reached him, on which, alongside the Queen's head, she had
put the mark they had agreed on, to show that she was still alive. He
would probably never see her again, but would end his days where he
was. Well, they wouldn't be many; this was not a place that made old
bones. And, as he sat, worked on by grief and liquor, he was seized by
a desperate homesickness for the old country. Why had he ever been
fool enough to leave it? He shut his eyes, and all the well-known sights
and sounds of the familiar streets came back to him. He saw himself on
his rounds of a winter's afternoon, when each lamp had a halo in the
foggy air; heard the pit-pat of his four-footer behind him, the bump of
the ladder against the prong of the lamp-post. His friend the
policeman's glazed stovepipe shone out at the corner; from the distance
came the tinkle of the muffin-man's bell, the cries of the buy-a-brooms.
He remembered the glowing charcoal in the stoves of the chestnut and

potato sellers; the appetising smell of the cooked-fish shops; the
fragrant steam of the hot, dark coffee at the twopenny stall, when he
had turned shivering out of bed; he sighed for the lights and jollity of
the "Hare and Hounds" on a Saturday night. He would never see
anything of the kind again. No; here, under bare blue skies, out of
which the sun frizzled you alive; here, where it couldn't rain without at
once being a flood; where the very winds blew contrarily, hot from the
north and bitter-chill from the south; where, no matter how great the
heat by day, the night would as likely as not be nipping cold: here he
was doomed to end his life, and to end it, for all the yellow sunshine,
more hopelessly knotted and gnarled with rheumatism than if, dawn
after dawn, he had gone out in a cutting north-easter, or groped his way
through the grey fog-mists sent up by grey Thames.
Thus he sat and brooded, all the hatred of the unwilling exile for the
land that gives him house-room burning in his breast.
Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a
glove fits the hand, careless of the pass to which he had brought his
mate; who this really was, Long Jim knew no more than the rest.
Young Bill had never spoken out. They had chummed together on the
seventy-odd-mile tramp from Melbourne; had boiled a common billy
and slept side by side in rain-soaked blankets, under the scanty hair of a
she-oak. That was in the days of the first great stampede to the
goldfields, when the embryo seaports were as empty as though they
were plague-ridden, and every man who had the use of his legs was on
the wide bush-track, bound for the north. It was better to be two than
one in this medley of bullock-teams, lorries, carts and pack-horses, of
dog-teams, wheelbarrows and swagmen, where the air rang with oaths,
shouts and hammering hoofs, with whip-cracking and bullock-prodding;
in this hurly-burly of thieves, bushrangers and foreigners, of drunken
convicts and deserting sailors, of slit-eyed Chinese and apt-handed
Lascars, of expirees and ticket-of-leave men, of Jews, Turks and other
infidels. Long Jim, himself stunned by it all: by the pother of landing
and of finding a roof to cover him; by the ruinous price of bare
necessaries; by the length of this unheard-of walk that lay before his
town-bred feet: Long Jim had gladly accepted the young man's

company on the road. Originally, for no more than this; at heart he
distrusted Young Bill, because of his fine-gentleman airs, and intended
shaking the lad