Joe Wilson and His Mates | Page 5

man knows all about it -- after a while: he sees the woman
world through the eyes of his wife; he knows what an extra moment's
pressure of the hand means, and, if he has had a hard life, and is
inclined to be cynical, the knowledge does him no good. It leads him
into awful messes sometimes, for a married man, if he's inclined that
way, has three times the chance with a woman that a single man has --

because the married man knows. He is privileged; he can guess pretty
closely what a woman means when she says something else; he knows
just how far he can go; he can go farther in five minutes towards
coming to the point with a woman than an innocent young man dares
go in three weeks. Above all, the married man is more decided with
women; he takes them and things for granted. In short he is -- well, he
is a married man. And, when he knows all this, how much better or
happier is he for it? Mark Twain says that he lost all the beauty of the
river when he saw it with a pilot's eye, -- and there you have it.
But it's all new to a young chap, provided he hasn't been a young
blackguard. It's all wonderful, new, and strange to him. He's a different
man. He finds that he never knew anything about women. He sees none
of woman's little ways and tricks in his girl. He is in heaven one day
and down near the other place the next; and that's the sort of thing that
makes life interesting. He takes his new world for granted. And, when
she says she'll be his wife ----!
Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they've got
a lot of influence on your married life afterwards -- a lot more than
you'd think. Make the best of them, for they'll never come any more,
unless we do our courting over again in another world. If we do, I'll
make the most of mine.
But, looking back, I didn't do so badly after all. I never told you about
the days I courted Mary. The more I look back the more I come to think
that I made the most of them, and if I had no more to regret in married
life than I have in my courting days, I wouldn't walk to and fro in the
room, or up and down the yard in the dark sometimes, or lie awake
some nights thinking. . . . Ah well!
I was between twenty-one and thirty then: birthdays had never been any
use to me, and I'd left off counting them. You don't take much stock in
birthdays in the Bush. I'd knocked about the country for a few years,
shearing and fencing and droving a little, and wasting my life without
getting anything for it. I drank now and then, and made a fool of myself.
I was reckoned `wild'; but I only drank because I felt less sensitive, and
the world seemed a lot saner and better and kinder when I had a few

drinks: I loved my fellow-man then and felt nearer to him. It's better to
be thought `wild' than to be considered eccentric or ratty. Now, my old
mate, Jack Barnes, drank -- as far as I could see -- first because he'd
inherited the gambling habit from his father along with his father's luck:
he'd the habit of being cheated and losing very bad, and when he lost he
drank. Till drink got a hold on him. Jack was sentimental too, but in a
different way. I was sentimental about other people -- more fool I! --
whereas Jack was sentimental about himself. Before he was married,
and when he was recovering from a spree, he'd write rhymes about
`Only a boy, drunk by the roadside', and that sort of thing; and he'd call
'em poetry, and talk about signing them and sending them to the `Town
and Country Journal'. But he generally tore them up when he got better.
The Bush is breeding a race of poets, and I don't know what the country
will come to in the end.
Well. It was after Jack and I had been out shearing at Beenaway shed in
the Big Scrubs. Jack was living in the little farming town of Solong,
and I was hanging round. Black, the squatter, wanted some fencing
done and a new stable built, or buggy and harness-house, at his place at
Haviland, a few miles out of Solong. Jack and I were good Bush
carpenters, so we took the job to keep us going till something else
turned up. `Better than doing nothing,' said Jack.