 beginning, Pro-M of Australia Felix, book one of the fortunes of Richard Marnie. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tabithat. Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson. Pro-M In a shaft on the gravel pits a man had been buried alive. At work in a deep wet hole he had recklessly omitted to slab the walls of a drive. Uprights and tailors yielded under the lateral pressure and the rotten earth collapsed, bringing down the roof in its train. The digger fell forward on his face, his ribs jammed across his pick, his arms pinned to his sides, nose and mouth pressed into the sticky mud as into a mask, and over his defenceless body with a roar that burst his eardrums broke stupendous masses of earth. His mates at the windlers went staggering back from the belch of violently discharged air. It tore the wind sail to strips, sent stones and gravel flying, loosened planks and props. Their shouts, drawing no response, the younger and nimbler of the two—he was a mere boy for all his amazing growth of beard—put his foot in the bucket and went down on the rope, kicking off the sides of the shaft with his free foot. A group of diggers gathering around the pit-head waited for the tug at the rope. It was quick incoming, and the lad was hauled to the surface. No hope. Both drives had fallen in. The bottom of the shaft was blocked. The crowd melted wither. Poor Bill! God rest his soul! Or with a silent shrug. Such accidents were not infrequent. Each man might thank his stars, it was not he who lay cooling down below. And so, since no more wash-dirt would be raised from this hole, the party that worked it made off for the nearest grog-shop to wet their throats to the memory of the dead and to discuss future plans. Orbert won, a lean and haggard-looking man of some five and forty, who was known to his comrades as Long Jim. On hearing his mate's report he had sunk heavily down on a log. And there he sat, a panic and a raw spirit in his hand, the tears coursing ruts down cheeks, scabby with yellow mud, his eyes glassy as marbles, with those that had still to fall. He wept not for the dead man, but for himself. This accident was the last link in a chain of ill luck that had been forging ever since he first followed the diggings. He only needed to put his hand to a thing, and luck deserted it. In all the sinkings he had been connected with he had not once caught his pick in a nugget or got the run of a gutter. The bottoms had always proved barren, drives been exhausted without his raising the colour. At the present claim he and his mates had toiled for months overcoming one difficulty after another. The slabbing, for instance, had cost them infinite trouble. It was roughly done, too, and even after the pins were in great flakes of earth would come tumbling down from between the joints, on one occasion nearly knocking silly the man who was below. Then, before they had slabbed a depth of three times nine, they'd got into water, and in this they had worked for the next sixty feet. They were barely rid of it when the two adjoining-claims were abandoned, and in came the flood again. This time they had to fly for their lives before it so rapid was its rise. Not the strongest man could stand in this ice-cold water for more than three days on end. The bark slabs stank in it, too, like the skins in a tanner's-yard, and they had been forced to quit work till it subsided. He and another man had gone to the hills to hew trees for more slabs, the rest to the grog-shop. From there, when it was feasible to make a fresh start, they had to be dragged, some blind drunk, the rest blind stupid from their booze. That had been the hardest job of any, keeping the party together. There had only been eight in all, a hand-to-mouth number for a deep wet hole. Then one had died of dysentery, contracted from working constantly in water up to his middle. Another had been nabbed in a man-hunt and clapped into the logs. And finally, but a day or two back, the three men who completed the night-shift had deserted for a new rush to the Evoca. Now his pal had gone, too. There was nothing left for him, long gym to do, but to take his dish and turn Fosika, or even to aim no higher than washing over the tailings rejected by the Fosika. At the thought his tears flowed anew, he cursed the day on which he had first set foot on Balorat. It's El for white men. El, that's what it is. Here, have another drink, matey, and forget your bloody troubles. His refilled panic and drained, he grew warmer around the heart, and sang the praises of his former life. He had been a lamplighter in the old country, and for many years had known no more arduous tasks than that of tramping around 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 arms-house. 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, there 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 full 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 afternoon when each lamp had a halo in the foggy air. Heard the pit-pat of his forefooter behind him, the bump of the ladder against the prong of the lamppost. 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 buyer-brooms. He remembered the glowing charcoal in the stoves of the chestnut and potato-sellers, the appetizing smell of the cooked fish-shops, the fragrant steam of the hot, dark coffee at the tap in his stall when he had turned shivering out of bed. He sighed for the light-singulity of the hair 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 contrarially 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 gnawed with rheumatism than if dawn after dawn he had gone out in a cutting northeaster or groped his way through the grey fog-mists sent up by the 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 past 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. This was in the days of the first great stampede to the gold fields, 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, wheel-barrows, and swagmen, where the air rang with oaths, shouts, and hammering hooves, with whip-cracking and bullock-prodding in this hurly-burly of thieves, bush-rangers, and foreigners, of drunken convicts, and deserting sailors, of slit-eyed Chinese and apt-handed last-cars, of expires and ticket-of-leave men, of Jews, Turks, and other infidels. Long Jim, himself stunned by it all, by the bother 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 off as soon as they reached the diggings. There a man must, for safety's sake, be alone when he stooped to pick up his fortune. But at first sight of the strange wild scene that met his eyes, he hastily changed his mind. And so the two of them had stuck together, and he had never had cause to regret it. For all his lily-white hands and finical speech, young Bill had worked like a nigger, standing by his mate through the latter's disasters. Had worked until the ladish hands were horny with warts and corns, and this though he was doubled up with dysentery in the hot season, and wracked by winter cramps. But the life had proved too hard for him all the same. During the previous summer he had begun to drink, steadily with the dogged persistence that was in him, and since then his work had gone downhill. His sudden death had only been a hastening on of the inevitable. Staggering home to the tent after nightfall he would have been sure sooner or later to fall into a dry shycer and break his neck, or into a wet one and be drowned. On the surface of the gravel pit his fate was already forgotten. The rude activity of a gold-digging's in full swing had closed over the incident, swallowed it up. Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawn veil of blueness which ought to have been transparent, stretched what from a short way off resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch of green offered rest to the eye. Not a tree, hardly a stunted bush had been left standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basin itself, or on the several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides. Even the most prominent of these, the black hill, which jutted out on the flat like a gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense timber, feverishly disembowelled, and was now become a bald protuberance strewn with gravel and clay. The whole scene had that strange, repellent ugliness that goes with breaking up and throwing into disorder what has been sanctified as final, and belongs in particular to the wanton disturbing of earth's gracious green-spread crust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley lying open to sun and wind had been a lovely grassland ringed by a circlet of wooded hills, beyond these by a belt of virgin forest. A limpid river and more than one creek had meandered across its face, water was to be found there even in the driest summer. She-oaks and peppermint had given shade to the flocks of the early settlers. Wattles had bloomed their brief delirious yellow passion against the grey-green foliage of the gums. Now all that was left of the original pleasant resting-place in its pristine beauty were the ancient volcanic cones of Warren Hype and Bunan Yong. These too far off to supply wood for firing and slabbing still stood green and timbered, and looked down upon the havoc that had been made of the fair pastoral lands. Seen nearer at hand the done-coloured desert resolved itself into uncountable pimpling clay and mud heaps of diverse shade and varying sizes. Some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others were taller than the tallest man. There were also hundreds of rain-soaked mud-bespattered tents, sheds and awnings, wind-sales which fell funnel-like from a kind of gallows into the shafts they ventilated, flags fluttering on high posts in front of stores. The many human figures that went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from the ground they trod. They were coated with earth, clay clad in ochre and gamboge. Their faces were daubed with clover. It matted great beards and entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where here and there a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness it was so besmeared with yellow that it might have been expected to turn green. The gore's neck veils that hung from the brims of wide-awakes or cabbage-trees were become stiff little lattices of caked clay. There was water everywhere. From the spurs and gullies round about the autumn rains had poured freely down on the flat. River and creeks had been over their banks, and such narrow ground-spaces remained between the thick-zone tents, the myriads of holes that abutted one on another, jealous of every inch of space, had become a trough of mud. Water meandered over this mud or carved its soft way in channels, it lay about in puddles thick and dark as coffee grounds, it filled abandoned shallow holes to the brim. From this scene rose a blurred hum of sound, rose and as it were remained stationary above it like a smoke-cloud which no wind comes to drive away. Gradually though the ear made out in the conglomerate of noise a host of separate noises infinitely multiplied. The sharp tick-tick of surface-picks, the dull thud of shovels, their muffled echoes from the depths below. There was also the continuous squeak and groan of windlesses, the bump of the mullock emptied from the bucket, the trundle of wheel-barrows pushed along a plank from the shaft's mouth to the nearest pool, the dump of the dart on the heap for washing. Along the banks of a creek hundreds of cradles rattled and grated the noise of the spades chopping the gravel into the puddling tubs or the long toms was like the scrunch of shingle under waves. The fierce yelping of the dogs chained to the flag-posts of stores, mongrels which yapped at friend and foe alike supplied a note of ear-splitting discord. But except for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brains directed operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of the human voice was, for the most part, lacking. The diggers were a somber, preoccupied race little given to lip-work. Even the shepherds, who in waiting to see if their neighbours struck the lead, were guiled the time with yooka and lamb-skinnet, played moodily, their mouths glued to their pipe-stems. They were tail on end to fling down the cards for pick and shovel. The great majority, ant-like in their indefatigable busyness, neither turned ahead nor looked up. Backs were bent, eyes fixed in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin dish. It was the earth that held them, the familiar homely earth whose common fate it is to be trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here it was the lodestone that drew all men's thoughts, and it took toll of their bodies in odd exhausting forms of labour which were swift to weed out the unfit. The men at the windlesses spat into their horny palms and bent to the crank. They paused only to pass the back of a hand over a sweaty ford or to drain a nose between two fingers. The barrow-drivers shoved their loads, the bones of their forearms standing out like ribs. Beside the pools the puddlers chopped with their shovels, some even stood in the tubs and worked the earth with their feet as wine-presses trample grapes. The cradlers, eternally rocking with one hand, held a long stick in the other with which to break up any clods a careless puddler might have deposited in the hopper. Behind these came the great army of fossicas, washers of surface dirt, quipped with knives and tin dishes, and content if they could wash out half a penny-weight to the dish. At their heels still others who treated the tailings they threw away. And among these last was a sprinkling of women more than one with an infant suckling at her breast. Withdrawn into a group for themselves worked a body of Chinese in loose blue blouses, fluffy blue leg bags, and huge conical straw hats. They too fossicked and re-washed using extravagant quantities of water. Thus the pale-eyed multitude worried the surface and at the risk and cost of their lives probed the depths. Now that deep sinking was in vogue, gold-digging no longer served as a play-game for the gentlemen in the amateur. The greater number of those who toiled at it were work-tried seasoned men. And yet although it had now sunk to the level of any other arduous and uncertain occupation, and the magic prizes of the early days were seldom found. Something of the old romantic glamour still clung to this most famous gold-field, dazzling the eyes and confounding the judgment. Elsewhere the horse was in use at the puddling trough and machines for crushing quartz were under discussion. But the Ballarat Digger resisted the introduction of machinery, fearing the capitalist machinery would bring in its train. He remained the dreamer, the jealous individualist. He hovered for ever on the brink of a stupendous discovery. This dream it was of vast wealth got without exertion which had decoyed the strange motley crowd in which peers and churchmen rubbed shoulders with the scum of Norfolk Island to exile in this outlandish region. And the intention of all alike had been to snatch a golden fortune from the earth and then hay-presto for the old world again. But they were reckoning without their host only too many of those who entered the country went out no more. They became prisoners to the soil. The fabulous riches of which they had heard tell amounted at best to a few thousands of pounds, what folly to depart with so little when mother earth still teemed. Those who drew blanks nursed an unquenchable hope and laboured all their days like navvies for a navvy's wage. Others again, broken in health or disheartened, could only turn to an easier handiwork. There were also men, who as soon as fortune smiled on them, dropped their tools and ran to squander the work of months in a wild abhorch, and they invariably returned, tailed down to prove their luck anew. And yet again there were those who having once seen the metal in the raw, in dust fine as that brushed from a butterfly's wing, in heavy chubby nuggets, or more exquisite still as the daffodil yellow veining of bluish-white quartz. These were gripped in the subtlest way of all. Her passion for the gold itself awoke in them an almost sensual craving to touch and possess. And the glitter of a few specks at the bottom of pan or cradle came in time to mean more to them than home, or wife, or child. Such were the fates of those who succumbed to the unholy hunger. It was like a form of revenge taken on them, for their loveless schemes of robbing and fleeing, a revenge contrived by the ancient barbaric country they had so lightly invaded. Now she held them captive without chains, ensorcelled without witchcraft, and lying stretched like some primeval monster in the sun, her breasts freely bared. She watched with malignant eye the efforts made by these puny mortals to tear their lips away. End of Pro-M. Part I. CHAPTER I. On the summit of one of the clay heaps a woman shot into silhouette against the sky, an odd figure clad in a skimpy green petticoat with a scarlet shawl held about her shoulders, wisps of frowsy red hair standing out around her head. She balanced herself on the slippery earth, spinning her arm like the vein of a windmill, and crying at the top of her voice, Joe boys, Joe, Joe, Joey! It was as if with these words she had dropped a live shell in the digger's midst. A general stampede ensued in which the cry was caught up, echoed, and re-echoed, until the whole flat rang with the name of Joe. Tools were dropped, cradles and tubs abandoned, windlassers left to kick their cranks backwards. Many of the workers took to their heels, others in a fright scuttled aimlessly hither and thither like barnyard vows in a panic. Summoned by shouts of, up with your boys, the traps are here! Numbers ascended from below to see the fun, while as many went hurriedly down to hiding in drive and chamber. Even those diggers who could pat the pocket in which their license lay ceased work and stood about with sullen faces to view the course of events. Only the group of Chinaman-washing tail-heaps remained unmoved. One of them, to whom the warning woman belonged, raised his head and called a Chinese word at her. She obeyed it instantly, banishing into thin air. The rest went impassively on with their fossicking. They were not such fools as to try to cheat the government of its righteous Jews. None but had his license safely folded in his nose-cloth and thrust inside the bosom of his blouse. Through the labyrinth of tents and mounds a gold-laced cap could be seen approaching. Then a gold-tressed jacket came into view, the white star on the forehead of a mare. Behind the commissioner, who rode down thus from the camp, came the members of his staff. These again were followed by a body of mounted troopers. They drew rain on the slope and simultaneously a line of foot-police backed by a detachment of light infantry shot out like an arm and walled in the flat to the south. On the appearance of the enemy the babble redoubled. There were groans and cat-calls. Along with the derisive joeys the rebel diggers hurled any term of abuse that came to their lips. The dolly-mops, the skunks, the bush-rangers, oh damn them, damn them, damn their bloody eyes! It's Russia, that's what it is," said an oldish man, darkly. The commissioner, a horse-faced, solemn man with brown side-whiskers, let the rain stoop on his mare's neck and sat unwinking in the tumult. His mean was copied by his staff. Only one of them, a very young boy who was new to the colony in his post, changed colour under his gaudy cap, went from white to pink and from pink to white again, while at each fresh insult he gave a perceptible start and gaze dumbfounded at his chief's insensitive back. The bloodhounds had begun to track their prey. Rounding up with the skill-born of long practice they drove the diggers before them toward the centre of the flat. Here they passed from group to group and from hole to hole, calling for the production of licences with an insolence that made its objects see red. They were nice of sent, too, and nine times in ten pounced on just those unfortunates who, through carelessness or lack of means, or on political grounds, had failed to take out the month's licence to dig for gold. Every few minutes one or another was marched off between two constables to the government camp for fine or imprisonment. Now it was that it suddenly entered Long Jim's head to cut and run. Up until now he had stood declaring himself a free-born Britain who might be drawn and quartered if he ever again paid the blasted tax. But as the police came closer a spear of fright pierced his befuddled brain and inside a breath he was often away. Had the abruptness of his start not given him a slight advantage he would have been courted once. As it was the chase would not be a long one. The clumsy, stiff-jointed man slithered here and stuck fast there dodging obstacles with an awkwardness that was painful to see. He could be heard sobbing and cursing as he ran. At this point the commissioner, half turning, signed to the troopers in his rear. Six or seven of them shook up their bridles and rode off their scabbards clinking to prevent the fugitives' escape. A howl of contempt went up from the crowd. The pink and white subbleton made what was almost a movement of the arm to intercept his superior's command. It was too much for Long Jim's last mate, the youthful blackbeard who had pluckily descended the shaft after the accident. He had been standing on a mound with a posy of others following the man-hunt. At his partner's crack-brained dash for the open his snorts of indignation found words. Go, blimey, is the old fool gone doddy? Then he drew a whistling breath. No, it's more than flesh and blood. Stun butt-boys! And though he was as little burdened with the license as the man under pursuit, he shouted, Help! Help! For God's sake! Don't let them huff me! Shot off down the slope and was off like the wind. His foxly object was attained. The attention of the hunters was diverted. Long Jim, ceasing the moment, vanished underground. The younger man ran with the lightness of a hair. He had also the hair's address in doubling and turning. His pursuers never knew did he pass from sight behind a cupboard of tents and mounds where he would bob up next. He avoided shafts and pools as if by a miracle ran along greasy planks without a slip, and where these had been removed to balk the police, he jumped the holes taking risks that were not for a sane man. Once he fell, but in slime from head to foot, ringing wet and hatless was up again in a twinkling. His enemies were less sure-footed than he in times without number measured their length on the oily ground. Still one of them was gaining rapidly on him a giant of a fellow with long thin legs and soon the constable's foot filled a prince lift by the younger man's while these were still warm. It was a fine run. The diggers trooped after in a body, the flat rang with cheers and plaudits, even the commissioner and his retinute trotted in the same direction. Eventually the runaway must land in the arms of the mounted police. But this was not his plan. Making as though he headed for the open he suddenly dashed off at right angles and with a final spurt brought up dead against a log and canvas store which stood on rising ground. His adversary was so close behind that a collision resulted. The digger's feet slid from under him he fell on his face the other on top. In their fall they struck a huge pillar of tin dishes ingeniously built up to the height of the store itself. This toppled over with a crash and the dishes went rolling down the slope between the legs of the police. The dog-chain to the flag-staff orbit strangled himself in his rage and excitement and the owner of the store came running out. Purdy, you, what in the name of—the digger adroitly rolled his captor over and there they both sat side by side on the ground, one gripping the other's collar both too blown to speak, a cordon of puffing constables hemmed them in. The storekeeper frowned, you've no license, you young beggar. And your license, you scoundrel, demanded the leader of the troupe. The prisoner's rejoinder was a saucy—no, then, out with the cuffs, Joe. He got on his feet as bitten, but awkwardly for it appeared that in falling he had hurt his ankle. Behind the police were masked the diggers. These opened a narrow alley for the camp officials to ride through, but their attitude was hostile and there were cries of, Leave him go, you blaggards, after such a run, none of your bloody quad for him, along with other more threatening expressions. Sombra and Taciturn the commissioner waved his hand. Take him away. Well, so long, Dick, said the culprit, jauntily, and as he offered his wrists to be handcuffed he whistled an air. Here the storekeeper hurriedly interposed, no, stop, I'll give bail. And darting into the tent and out again he counted five one-pound notes into the constable's palm. The lad's collar was released and a murmur of satisfaction mounted from the crowd. At the sound the giver made as if to retire, then yielding to a second thought he stepped forward and saluted the commissioner. A young hothead, sir, he means no harm, I'll send him up in the morning to apologize. I'll be damned if you do," muttered the digger between his teeth. But the chief refused to be placated. Good day, doctor, he said shortly, and with his staff at heel trotted down the slope followed till out of earshot by a mocking fire of Joe's. Lingering in the rear the youthful sympathizer turned in his saddle and waved his cap. The raid was over for that day. The crowd dispersed, its members became orderly, hard-working men once more. The storekeeper hushed his frantic dog and called his assistant to rebuild a pillar of tins. The young digger sat down on the log that served for a bench and examined his foot. He pulled and pulled, causing himself great pain but couldn't get his boot off. At last, looking back over his shoulder, he cried impatiently. Dick, I say, Dick Marnie, give us a drink, oh boy, I'm dead beat. At this the storekeeper, a tall slenderly-built man of some seven or eight and twenty, appeared burying a jug and a panicon. Oh, bah! said the lad when he found that the jug held only water. And on his friend reminding him that he might by now have been sitting in the lock-up he laughed and winked. I knew you'd go bail. Well, of all the confounded impudence! Faith, Dick, and do you think I didn't see how your hand itched fear-pocket? The man he called Marnie flushed above his fair beard. It was true he had made an involuntary movement of the hand, checked for the rest half-way by the knowledge that the pocket was empty. He looked displeased and said nothing. Don't be afraid, I'll pay you back soon as ever. My ship comes home, went on the young scape-grace who very well knew how to play his cards. At his companions' heated disclaimer, however, he changed his tone. I say, Dick, have a look at my foot, will you? I can't get this damned boot off. The elder man bent over the injury. He ceased to show displeasure. Purdy, you young fool, when will you learn wisdom? Well, they shouldn't hunt old women, then, the swine gave back Purdy and told his tale. Oh, Lord, there go six canaries! For at his wincing and shrinking his friend had taken a pen-knife and ripped up the jack-boot. Now practised hands explored the swollen discoloured ankle. When it had been washed and bandaged, its owner stretched himself on the ground, his head in the shade of a barrel, and went to sleep. He slept till sundown through all the traffic of a busy afternoon. Somehow a hundred customers came and went. The greater number of them were earth-stained diggers who ran up for it might be a missing tool or a hide-bucket or a coil of rope. They spat jets of tobacco juice, were richly profane, paid where coin was scarce in gold dust from a match-box, and hurried back to work. But there came also old harridans, as often as not diggers themselves, whose language outdid that of the males, and dirty Irish mothers, besides a couple of the white women who inhabited the Chinese quarter. One of these was in liquor, and a great hullabaloo took place before she could be got rid of. Put out, she stood in front of the tent, her hair hanging down her back, cursing and reviling. Respectable women as well did an afternoon shopping there. In no haste to be gone they sat about on empty boxes or upturned barrels exchanging confidences, while weary children plucked at their skirts. A party of youngsters entered, the tallest of whom could just see over the counter, and called for shandy gaffes. The assistant was for chasing them off with hard words, but the storekeeper put instead a stick of barley-sugar into each dirty, outstretched hand, and the imps retired well content. On their heels came a digger and his lady-love to choose a wedding-outfit, and all the gaudy finery the store held was displayed before them. A red velvet dress flounced with satin, a pink gauze bonnet, white satin shoes, and white silk stockings met their fancy. The dewy-lipped, smutty-lashed Irish girl blushed and dimpled in consulting with the shopman upon the stays in which to lace her ample figure. The digger, whose very paws oozed gold, planked down handfuls of dust and nuggets, and brushed aside a neat paisley shore for one of yellow satin, the fellow to which he swore to having seen on the back of the Governor's lady herself. He showered brandy-snaps on the children, and bought a polka-jacket for a shabby old woman. Then, producing a bottle of champagne from a sackie-bore, he called on those presents to give him, after her most gracious little majesty, God-blesser, the holiest state of matrimony. The empty bottle smashed for luck, the couple departed arm in arm carrying their purchases in the sack, and the rest of the company trooped to the door with them to wish them joy. Within the narrow confines of the tent were red herrings trailed over mull-skin shorts, and East India pickles and Hessian boots lay on top of sugar and mess-pork, where cheeses rubbed shoulders with tallow candles, blue-and-red-sirred shirts and captain's biscuits, where onions and guernseys and sardines, fine combs, cigars and bears-grease, Windsor-soaped tinned coffee and hair-oil, revolvers, shovels, and Oxford shoes lay in one grand miscellany. Within the crowded store, as the afternoon wore on, the air grew rank and oppressive. Precisely at six o'clock the bar was let down across the door, and the storekeeper withdrew to his living-room at the back of the tent. Here he changed his coat, and meticulously washed his hands, to which clung a subtle blend of all the stronger-smelling goods that had passed through them. Then, coming around to the front, he sat down on the log and took out his pipe. He made a point, no matter how brisk trade was, of not keeping open after dark. His evenings were his own. He sat and puffed, tranquilly. It was a fine night. The first showy splendour of sunset had passed, but the upper sky was still aflush with colour. And in the centre of this frail cloud, which faded as he watched it, swam a single star. With the passing of a cooler air the sleep awakened and rubbed his eyes. Letting his injured leg lie undisturbed, he drew up the other knee and buckled his hands around it. In this position he sat and talked. He was a dark, fresh-coloured young man of middle height and broadly built. He had large white teeth of a kind to crack nuts with, and the full wide flexible mouth that inates the generous talker. What a wind-bag it is to be sure, thought his companion, as he smoked and listened in a gently ironic silence, to abuse of the Government. He knew, or thought he knew, young birdie inside out. But behind all the froth of the boy's talk there lurked it seemed a purpose. No sooner was a meal of cold chop and tea over than Purdy declared his intention of being present at a meeting of malcontent diggers, nor would he even wait to wash himself clean of mud. His friend reluctantly agreed to lend him an arm, but he couldn't refrain from taking the lad to task for getting entangled in the political embryo, when, as you know, it's just a kind of sport to you. Purdy sulked for a few paces and burst out, if only you weren't so damned attached, Dick Marnie. You're restless and want excitement, my boy, that's the root of the trouble. Well, I'm jiggered, if ever I knew a restless mortal at yourself. The two men picked their steps across the flat and up the opposite hillside, young Purdy Smith limping and leaning heavy, his lame foot thrust into an old slipper. He was, at all times, hail-fellow well-met with the world. Now, in addition, his plucky exploit of the afternoon blazed its way through the settlement, and Blarney and Bravo's reigned upon him. Polly, for you, Purdy old osse, showed him the digger's flag he did. What'll you take me about, come in for a drop of the real strip me down naked? Even a weary old strumpet propping herself up against the doorway of a dancing saloon waved a tipsy hand and cried, oh, and dissit yourself, Purdy, my boy, sure in its bussiness I'd be after if my legs would carry me. And Purdy laughed and relished the honey, and had an answer pat for everybody, especially the women. His companion, on the other hand, was greeted with a glibness that had something perfunctory in it, and no touch of familiarity. The big canvas tent on Bakery Hill where the meeting was to be held was already lighted, and at the tinkle of a bell the diggers, who till then had stood cracking and hobnobbing outside, began to push for the entrance. The bulk of them belonged to the race that is quickest to resent injustice, were Irish. After them in number came the Germans, swaggering and voluble, and the inflammable French. English, Scotch and Americans formed a smaller and cooler but very dogged group. At the end of the tent a rough platform had been erected on which stood a row of cane seats. In the body of the hall the benches were formed of boards laid from one up turned keg or tub to another. The chair was taken by a local auctioneer, a cadaverous-looking man with never a twinkle in his eye, who, in a lengthy discourse and with the single monotonous gesture of beating the palm of one hand with the back of the other, strove to bring home to his audience the degradation of their present political status. The diggers chewed and spat and listened to his periods with sang foie. The shame of their state did not greatly move them. They followed, too, with composure the rehearsal of their general grievances. As they were aware, said the speaker, the Legislative Council of Victoria was made up largely of crown nominees. In the election of members the gold-seeking population had no voice whatsoever. This was a scandalous thing for the digging constituent outnumbered all the rest of the population put together, thus forming what he would call the backbone and mainstay of the colony. The labour of their hands had raised the colony to its present pitch of prosperity. And yet these same bold and hardy pioneers were held incapable of deciding jot or tittle in the public affairs of their adopted home. Still unmoved, the diggers listened to this recital of their virtues. But when one man, growing weary of the speaker's unctuous wordiness, discharged a fierce, why the hell don't you get to the bloody license tax? The audience was fire and flame in an instant. A riotous noise ensued, rough throats rang changes on the question. Order restored it was evident that the speech was over. Thrown violently out of his concept the auctioneer struck and struck at his palm in vain. Nothing would come. So making the best of a bad job he irately sat down in favour of his successor on the programme. This speaker did not fare much better. The assemblage, roused now, jolly and merciless, was not disposed to give quarter, and his obtuseness in dawdling over such high-flown notions as that population, not property, formed the basis of representative government, reaped him a harvest of booze and groans. This was not what the diggers had come out to hear, and they were as direct as children in their demand for the gist of the matter. Our regular old scheisse was a unanimous opinion expressed without scruple, while from the back of the hall came the curt request to him to shut his tater-trap. Next on the list was a German, a ruddy-faced man with mutton-chop whiskers and prominent watery eyes. He couldn't manage the letter R. In the body of a word where it was negligible he rolled it out as though it stood three deep. Did he tackle it as the initial on the other hand, his tongue seemed to cleave to his palate and to yield only an L. This quaint defect caused some merriment at the start, but it was soon eclipsed by a more striking oddity. The speaker had the habit of, as it were, creaking with his nose. After each few sentences he paused to give himself time to produce something between a creek and a snore, an abortive attempt to get at mucus that was plainly out of reach. The diggers were beside themselves with mirth. He's forgot his anky. Airboys looks Libby an anky for all sausage. But the German was not sensitive to ridicule. He had something to say, and he was there to say it. Fixing his fish-like eyes on a spot high up the tent wall he kept them pinned to it while he moused out blood and thunder in vectives. He was, it seemed, a red-hot revolutionist, a fierce denouncer of British rule. He declared the British monarchy to be an effete institution, the fetish of British freedom, to have been exploded long ago. What they needed in this grand, young country of theirs was a republic. They must rid themselves of those shackles that had been forged in the days when men were slaves. It was his sound conviction that before many weeks had passed the Union Jack would have been hauled down for ever and the glorious Southern Cross would wave in its stead over a free Australia. The day on which this happened would be a never-to-be-forgotten date in the annals of the country. For what, he would like to know, had the British flag ever done for freedom at any time in the world's history? They should read in their school-books, and there they would learn that wherever a people had risen against their tyrants the Union Jack had waved, not over them, but over the British troops sent to stamp the rising out. This was more than Marnie could stomach. Washing up from his seat he strove to assert himself above the hum of agreement that mounted from the foreign contingent and the doubtful sort of grumble by which the Britisher signifies his disapproval. Mr. Chairman, gentlemen, he called in a loud voice, I call upon those loyal subjects of Her Majesty who are present here to join with me in giving three cheers for the British flag. Hip hip hurrah! And again, hip hip hurrah! And once more, hip hip hurrah! His compatriots followed him, though flabbily, and he continued to make himself heard above the shouts of order and the bimming of the Chairman's bell. Mr. Chairman, I appeal to you, are we Britons to sit still and hear our country's flag reviled? That flag which has ensured us the very liberty we are enjoying this evening. The gentleman who has been pleased to slander it is not, I believe, a British citizen. Now I put it to him. Is there another country on the face of the earth that would allow people of all nations to flock into a gold-bearing colony on terms of perfect equality with its own subjects, to flock in, take all they can get, and then make off with it? A point of view that elicited forcible grunts of assent which held their own against hoots and hisses. Unfortunately the speaker did not stop here but went on. Gentlemen, do not, I implore you, allow yourselves to be led astray by a handful of ungrateful foreigners who have received nothing but benefits from our crown. What you need, gentlemen, is not revolution but reform, not strife and bloodshed but a liberty consistent with law and order, and this, gentlemen, you'll never get them like that dick, muttered Purdy. Not so much, gentlemening, if you please, said a sinister-looking man who might have been a Vandemonian in his day. Men's what we are, that's good enough for us." Manny was netdled. The foreigners, too, were pressing him. Am I then to believe, sir, what I frequently hear asserted that there are no gentlemen left on the diggings? Oh, Lord Dick, said Purdy, he was sitting with his elbows on his knees clutching his cheeks as though he had the toothache. Oh, stow your blather, skite! Believe what your bloody well-like retorted the Vandemonian fiercely. But don't come here and interrupt our pleasant and horderly meetings with your blam-jaw." Manny lost his temper. I not interrupt when I see you great hulks of men. Oh, Lord, groaned Purdy again, who call yourselves British subjects letting yourselves be led by the nose like the sheep you are by a pack of foreigners who are basely accepting this country's hospitality. Here, let me, said Purdy, and pushing his way along the bench he hobbled to the platform where several arms hoisted him up. There he stood, fronting the violent commotion that had ensued on his friend's last word, stood bedraggled, mud-stained, bandaged, his cabbage-tree hat in his hand, and Manny, still on his feet angrily erect, thought he understood why the boy had refused to wash himself clean or to change his dress. He had no doubt foreseen the possibility of some such dramatic appearance. Purdy waited for the hubbub to die down, as if by chance he'd rested his hand on the bell, its provoking tinkle ceased. Now he broke into one of the frank and hearty smiles that never failed to conciliate. Brother Diggers! The strongly spoken words induced an abrupt lull. The audience turned to him, still thorny and sulky it was true, but yet they turned, and one among them demanded a hearing for the youngster. Brother Diggers! We are met here tonight with a single purpose in view. Brother Diggers! We are not met here to throw mud at our dear old country's flag, nor will we have a word set against her most gracious Majesty the Queen. Not us, we're men first whose business it is to stand up for a gallant little woman and diggers with a grievance afterwards. Are you with me, boys? Very well, then. Now we didn't come here tonight to confab about getting votes or having a hand in public affairs much as we want them both, and mean to have them when the time comes. No, tonight there's only one thing that matters to us, and that's the repeal of the accursed tax. Here such a tempest of applause broke out that he was unable to proceed. Yes, I say it again," he went on when they would let him speak, the instant repeal. When that's been done, the curse take an office, then it'll be time enough to parl a vu about the colour of the flag we mean to have and about going shares in the Government. But let me make one thing clear to you, where neither trade is to the crown nor common rebels, where true blue Britons who have been goaded to rebellion by one of the vilest pieces of tyranny that ever saw the light. Spies and informers are everywhere about us. Mr. Commissioner Sleuth and his hounds may cry tally-ho every day if it is their pleasure to. To put it shortly, boys, we're living under semi-martial law. To such a state have we, free-born men, men who came up but to see the elephant, been reduced by the asinine stupidity of the Government by the impudence and navishness of its officials. Brother Diggers, when you leave the hall this evening look over at the hill on which the camp stands. What will you see? You'll see a blaze of light and hear the sounds of revelry by night. There, boys, hidden from our mortal view but visible to our mind's eye, sit Charlie Joe's minions carousing at our expense, washing down each mouthful with good fizz bought with our hard-earned gold, licensed pickings, boys, and tips from new grog shops and the blasted farce of the commissariat. We're supposed—but here Marnie gave a loud click of the tongue in the general howl of execration it passed unheard and pushing his way out of the tent let the flap-door fall too behind him. End of Part 1, Chapter 2 Part 1, Chapter 3 of Australia Felix this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson Part 1, Chapter 3 He retraced his steps by the safe conduct of a full moon which showed up the gaping black mouths of circular shafts and silvered the water that flooded abandoned oblong holes to their brim. Tents and huts stood white and forsaken in the moonlight, their owners were either gathered on Bakery Hill or had repaired to one of the gambling and dancing saloons that lined the main street. Arrived at the store, he set his frantic dog free and putting a match to his pipe began to stroll up and down. He felt annoyed with himself for having helped to swell the crowd of malcontents and still more for his foolishness in giving the rain to a momentary irritation as if it mattered to dot what trash these foreigners talked. No thinking person took their bombast seriously. The authorities, with great good sense, let it pass for what it was a noisy blowing off of steam. At heart the diggers were as sound as good pippins. A graver consideration was Purdy's growing fellowship with the rebel faction. The boy was too young and still too much of a fly-by-night to have a black mark set against his name. It would be the more absurd considering that his sincerity in espousing the digger's cause was far from proved. He was of a nature to ride tanned TV into anything that promised excitement or adventure. With it must regretfully be admitted an increasing relish for the limelight, for theatrical effect, see the cunning with which he had made capital out of a bandaged ankle and dirty dress. At this rate, and with his engaging ways, he would soon stand for a little god to the rough artless crowd. No, he must leave the diggings, and Marnie rolled various schemes in his mind. He had it. In the course of the next week or two business would make a journey to Melbourne Imperative. Well, he would dam the extra expense and take the boy along with him. Purdy was at a loose end and would no doubt rise like a fish to a fly at the chance of getting to town free of cost. After all, why be hard on him? He was not much over twenty, and at that age it was natural enough, especially in a place like this, for a lad to flit like a butterfly from every cup that took his restless fancy. Restless? It was the word Purdy had flung back at him earlier in the evening. At the time he'd rebutted the charge with a glance at fifteen months spent behind the counter of a store. But there was a modicum of truth in it, nonetheless. The life one led out here was not calculated to tone down any innate restlessness of temperament. On the contrary, it directly hindered one from becoming fixed and settled. It was on a par with the houses you lived in, these flimsy tent and draught-riddled cabins you put up with for the time being was just as much of a makeshift affair as they. Its keynote was change. Fortunes were made and lost and made again before you could say Jack Robinson, whole township shot up overnight to be deserted the moment the soil ceased to yield. The people you knew were here to-day and gone, sold up, burnt out, or dead and buried, tomorrow. And so, whether you would or not, your whole outlook became attuned to the general unrest you lived in a constant anticipation of what was coming next. Well, he could own to the weakness with more justification than most. If trade continued to prosper with him as it did at present it would be no time before he could sell out and joyfully depart for the old country. In the meantime, why complain? He had much to be thankful for. To take only a small point was this not Saturday night. Tomorrow the store was closed and a string of congenial occupations offered, from chopping the weak's wood, a clean and wholesome task which he gladly performed through the pages of an engrossing book to a botanical ramble around old Bunin Yong. The thought of it cheered him. He stooped to caress his two cats who had come to bear him the mutant-pleasant company of their kind. What a night! The great round silver moon floated serenely through space, dimming the stars as it made them and bathing the earth in splendour. It was so light that straight black lines of smoke could be seen mounting from chimneys and open-air fires. The grass-trees which supplied the fuel for these fires spread a pleasant balsamic odour and the live red patches contrasted oddly with the pale ardour of the moon. Lights twinkled over all the township but were brightest in Main Street, the course of which they followed like a rope of fireflies and at government camp on the steep western slope, where, no doubt as young Purdy had impudently averred, the officials still sat over the dinner-table. It was very quiet, no grog-shops or saloons of entertainment in this neighbourhood, thank goodness, and the hour was still too early for drunken roisterers to come reeling home. The only sound to be heard was that of a man's voice singing often the stilly night to the yetching accompaniment of a concertina. Mani hummed the tune. But it was growing cold as the nights were apt to do on this table-land once summer was passed. He whistled his dog and Pompey hurried out with the guilty air from the back of the house where the old shaft stood that served to hold refuse. Mani put him on the chain and was just about to turn in when two figures rounded the corner of a tent and came towards him, pushing their shadows before them on the milk-white ground. Dave Nindock said the shorter of the two a nuggety little man who carried his arms curved up from his side's gorilla fashion. Oh, good evening, Mr. O'Cock, said Mani, recognising a neighbour. Why, Tom, that you, back to already, my boy? This to a loutish, loose-limbed lad who followed behind. You don't, of course, come from the meeting. Not me, indeed, gave back his visitor with gall and turned his head to spit the juice from a plug. I've got something better to do as to listen to a pack of jabber and furriner setting one another by their ears. Nor you, Tom, Mani asked the lad who stood sheepishly shifting his weight from one leg to the other. Nay, nor him, either, jumped in his father before he could speak. I'll have none of my boys playing the fool up there. And that reminds me, Doc, young Smith will get his self under the devil of a mess one of these days if you don't look after him a bit better than you do. I heard him spouting away as I came past, using language about the government fit to turn you sick. Mani coughed. He's but young yet, he said, dryly. After all, youth's youths are and comes but once in a lifetime, and you can't make lads into wise acres between sundown and sunrise. No, by gorge you can't, affirmed his companion. But I think youth's just a fine name for a sort of pickish mess. What's the good one I'd like to know of getting old and learning wisdom and knowing the good from the bad when every lousy young fathead that's born into the world began to muddle through it for himself in his own way, and that things has got to go on like this just the same forever and ever. Why, it makes me fair-tired to think of it. My father didn't old with youth, he knocked it out of us by thrashing just like Lyon and Theven, and it's the best way, too. Was that you say? He flanced around on the unoffending Tom. Nothing, he was only sniffling, was ya? You keep your fly trap shut, me fine fellow, and make no mousy sounds to me, or it'll be the worst for you, I can tell ya. Come, Mr. O'Cock, don't be too hard on the boy. Not be hard on him. When I've got the nasty Galoon on me and again like this, chucks up the good post, I'll get him and kill more without a buy-your-leave or buy-your-leave. Too lonely for his lordship it was. Missed the sound of women's petticoats he did. He turned fiercely on his son. Air, don't you stand staring there, you get home and fix up for the night. Now, then, what are you dawdling for, pighead? The boy slunk away. When he disappeared, his father again took up the challenge of Marnie's silent disapproval. I can't hardly bear the sight of him, doc. Disgrace in me as he's done. Him, father, and not 18 till June. A son of mine who can't see a wench with her bodice open, but what he must be utterer. No, sir, no, son of mine, I'm a respectable man, I am. Of course, of course. Oh, but there a sore trial to me, these boys, doc. Henry's the only one, if it weren't for Henry. Johnny, he can't pass the drink, and now is this young swine stuttered a nose out of the women. There's good stuff in the lads, I'm sure of it, they're just sewing their wild oats. They'll sew no hoats with me. I'll tell you what it is, Mr. O'Cock, you need a woman about your place to make it a bit more home-like," said Marnie, calling to mind the pigsty in which O'Cock and his son's housed. Of course I do," agreed O'Cock, and Melia shall come out to her daddy soon as ever the old woman kicks the bucket. Dratter, it's her I've got to thank for all the mischief. Well, well," said Marnie, in rising, knocked out his pipe on the log. Did his old neighbour once get launched on the subject of his wife's failings, there was no stopping him. We all have our crosses. That I have, and I'm kippin' you out of your bed-dock with me blather. But, gumman, that reminds me, I came here special to see you tonight. Been gettin' a bit boon-struck, I reckon," and he clapped on his hat. Drawing a sheaf of papers from in an apocot he selected one and offered it to Marnie. Marnie led the way indoors and lighting a kerosene lamp stooped to decipher the letter. For some weeks now he had been awaiting the delivery of a load of goods, the invoice for which had long since reached him. From this communication carried by hand he learnt that the dreiman, having got bogged just beyond back as much, had to camp to the ovens, taking with him all he could cram into a spring cart and disposing of the remainder for what he could get. The agent in Melbourne refused to be held responsible for the loss and threatened a prosecutive payment for the goods were not immediately forthcoming. Marnie, who here heard the first of the affair, was highly indignant at the tone of the letter, and before he had read to the end resolved to let everything else slide and to leave for Melbourne early next morning. O'cock bucked him up in this decision and, with the aid of a great quill pen, stiffly traced the address of his eldest son, who practised as a solicitor in the capital. Go you straight to Henry Dock, Henry will see you through. Brushing aside his dreams of a Marnie made preparations for his journey. Waking his assistant he gave the man a stupid Claude Hopper, but honest and attached instructions how to manage during his absence, then sent him to the township to order horses. Himself he put on his hat and went out to look for Purdy. His search led him through all the drunken revelry of a Saturday night and it was close on twelve before having followed the trace from bowling alley to Chinese cook-shop from the Adelphi to Mother Flanigans and haunts still less reputable he finally succeeded in catching his bird. End of Part 1 Chapter 3 Part 1 Chapter 4 of Australia Felix this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson Part 1 Chapter 4 The two young men took to the road for times. It still wanted some minutes to six hours in the tower of Baths Hotel when they threw their legs over their settles and rode down the steep slope by the camp reserve. The hooves of the horses pounded the plank bridge that spanned the Yeroui and striking loose stones and smacking and sucking in the mud made a rude clatter in the Sunday quiet. Having followed for a few hundred yards the wide rut riddled thoroughfare of Main Street the riders branched off to cross rising ground. They proceeded in single pace for the highway had been honeycombed and rendered unsafe it also ascended steadily. Just before they entered the bush which was alive with the rich strong whistling of magpies Purdy halted to look back and wave his hat in farewell. Marnie also half turned in the saddle. There it lay the scattered yet congested unlovely wooden canvas settlement that was Ballarat. At this distance and from this height it resembled nothing so much as a collection of child's bricks tossed out at random over the ground the low square huts and cabins that composed it being all of a shape and size. Some threads of smoke began to mount toward the immense pale dome of the sky. The sun was catching here the pains of a window there the tin that encased a primitive chimney. They rode on leaving the warmth of the early sun rays for the cold blue shadows of the bush. Neither broke the silence. Marnie's day had not come to an end with the finding of Purdy. Barely stretched on his paleos he had been routed out to attend a long gym who had missed his footing and pitched into a shaft. The poor old tipsy idiot hauled up. Luckily for him it was a dry shallow hole there was a broken collarbone to set. Marnie had installed him in his own bed and had spent the remainder of the night dozing in a chair. So now he was heavy-eyed and indicative. As they climbed the shoulder and came to the rich black soil that surrounded the ancient cone of Warnheap he mused on his personal relation to the place he'd just left. And not for the first time he asked himself what am I doing here. When he was absent from Ballarat he could dispassionately consider the life he led there. He was so struck by the incongruity of the thing that like the Baldom in the nursery tale he could wake or slept. Had anyone told him three years previously that the day was coming when he would weigh out soap and sugar and hand them over a counter in exchange for money he would have held the profit ripe for Bedlam. Yet here he was, a full-blown tradesman and as greedy of gain as any tallow chandler. Extraordinary eye and distressing too the ease with which the human organism adapted itself. It was just a case of the green chandler on the green leaf. Well, he could console himself with the knowledge that his apparent submission was only an affair of the surface. He had struck no roots and it would mean as little to his half-dozen acquaintances in Ballarat when he silently vanished from their midst as it would to him if he never saw one of them again. Or the country either, and he let his eye roam unlovingly over the wild, sad-colored landscape with its skimpy, sad-colored landscape. Meanwhile they were advancing. Their nags hooves beating in unison devoured mile after mile of the road. It was a typical colonial road. It went uphill and downhill, turned aside for no obstacles. At one time it ran down a gully that was almost a ravine to mount straight up the opposite side among boulders that reached to the belly-bands. At others it led through a reedy swamp or a stony water-course or it became a bog creek. Where the ground was flat and treeless it was a rutty well-worn track between two seas of pale scant grass. More than once, complaining of a mouth-like saw-dust, Perdia lighted and limped across the veranda of a house of accommodation, but they did not actually draw rain until towards mid-day they reached a knot of weather-board verandered stores, smithies and public-houses arranged at the fore-corners of two crossroads. Here they made a substantial luncheon and the odor of fried onions carried far and wide. Manny paid his three shillings for a bottle of ale, but Perdia washed down the steak with cup after cup of richly sugared tea. In the early afternoon they set off again revived and refreshed. Perdia caught a bunch of aromatic leaves and burst into a song, and Manny — good God! — with a cloudless sky overhead a decent bit of horse-flesh between his knees and the prospect of a firm store-keeping, his name would not have been what it was if he had for long remained captures down-hearted, insufficient sleep and an empty stomach, nothing on earth besides a fig for his black thoughts. The fact of his being obliged to spend a few years in the colony would in the end profit him by widening his experience of the world and his fellow men. It was possible to lead a sober, God-fearing life no matter in what rude corner of the world he were pitchforked, and in this mood he was even willing to grant the landscape a certain charm. Since leaving Ballon the road had dipped up and down a succession of swelling rises, grass grown and untimbered. From the top of these ridges the view was a far one. You looked straight across undulating waves of country and intervening forest land to wear on the horizon a long, low, sprawling range of hills lay blue, cobalt blue, and painted in with the shore brush against the porcelain blue of the sky. What did the washed-up tints of the foliage matter when wherever you'd turned you could count on getting these marvellous soft distances on always finding a range of blue-veiled hills lovely and intangible as a dream. There was not much traffic to the diggings on a Sunday, and having come to a level bit of ground the riders followed a joint impulse and broke into a canter. As they began to climb again they fell naturally into one of the most familiar talks full of illusion and reminiscence that are only possible between two of the sex who have lived through part of their green days together. It began by Purdy referring to the satisfactory fashion in which he had disposed of his tools, his stretcher-bed and other effects. He was not travelling to Melbourne empty-handed. Marnie rallied him. You were always a good one at striking a bargain, my boy. What about four movies for an alley, eh, dicky bird? This related to their earliest meeting and was a standing joke between them. Marnie could recall the incident as clearly as though it had happened yesterday how the sturdy little apple-cheeked English boy with the comical English accent had suddenly bobbed up at his side on the way home from school and in that laughable sing-song of his without modulation or emphasis had offered to swap him as above. Purdy laughed and paid him back in kind. Yes, and the funk you were in for fear of spiny tatloid seers and peach to the rest. Yes, what young idiots boys are! In thought he added, and what snobs. For the breach of convention he was an upper-form boy at the time had not been his sole reason for wishing to shake off his junior. Behind him, Marnie, when he reached home, closed the door of one of the largest houses in the most exclusive square in Dublin, whereas Purdy lived in a small common-house in a side street. Visits there had to be paid surreptitiously. All the same these were frequent and for the best of reasons. Marnie could still see Purdy's plump red-cheeked English mother who was as jolly and happy as her boy hugging the loaf to her bosom while she cut round after round of bread and butter and jam for two cormorant throats. And the elder boy, long-limbed and lank or wrist and ankle, had invariably been the hungrier of the two. One of the big-house, often not enough food was set to satisfy the growing appetites of himself and his sisters. Dicky bird, can't you see us with our backs to the wall in that little yard of yours trying who could take the biggest bite? Or going round the outside, crust first and though you burst by the bones of Davy Jones till only a little island of jam was left. Purdy laughed heartily at these and other incidents fished up by his friend from the well but he didn't take part in the sport himself. He had not Marnie's gift for recalling detail to him past was past. He only became alive and eager when the talk turned as it soon did on his immediate prospects. This time to his astonishment Marnie had had no trouble in persuading Purdy to quit the diggings. In addition, here was the boy now declaring openly that what he needed and must have was a fixed and steadily paying job. With this decision Marnie was in warm agreement and promised all the help that lay in his power. But Purdy was not done. He hummed and hoarded and fidgeted. He took off his hat and looked inside it. He wiped his forehead and the nape of his neck. Marnie knew the symptoms. Gum-diggy bird spit it out, my boy. Yes, uh, well, the fact is, Dick, I begin to think it's time I settled down. Marnie gave a whistle. Ooh, a lady in the case. That's the chat. Just oblige yours truly by taking a squint at this, will you? He handed his friend a squarely folded sheet of thinnest blue paper with a large purple stamp on one corner and a red seal on the back. Opening it, Marnie discovered three crossed pages written in a delicately pointed minute Italian hand. He read the letter to the end deliberately and with a growing sense of relief. Composition, expression and penmanship all met with his approval. This is the writing of a person of some refinement, my son. Well, ah, yes, said Purdy. He seemed about to add a further word, then swallowed it and went on, though somehow or other Till's different to a self-on paper. But she's the best of girls, Dick. Not one of your ethereal die-away bread-and-butter-misses. There's something of Till there is and she's always on for a lark. I never met such girls for larks as her and her sister. The very last time I was there they took and hung up. Well, me and some other fellows had been stopping up a bit late the night before and kicking up a bit of a shindy. And what did those girls do? They got the barman to come into my room while I was asleep and hang a bucket of water to one of the beams over the bed. Then I'm blammed if they didn't tie a string from it to my big toe. I give a kick, down comes the bucket and wash how those girls did laugh. Mmm! said Marnie dubiously while Purdy in his turn chewed the cut of a pleasant memory. Well, I for my part should be glad to see you married and settled with a good wife always beside you. That's just the rub, said Purdy and vigorously scratched his head. Tells the first-class girl as a sweetheart and all that but when I come to think of putting my head in the noose I say, why then somehow I can't bring myself to pop the question. There's going to be no trifling with the girl's feelings, I hope, sir. Bosh! But I say, Dick, I wish you'd turn your peepers on her and tell me what you make of her. She's a-won herself, but she's got a mother. Bye, Job, Dick, if I thought Tillie had ever got like that and they're exactly the same bill, too. It would certainly be well for him to inspect Purdy's flame, and to report Marnie, especially since the anecdote told it not bear out the good impression left by the letter, went far indeed to a-face it. Still he was loath to extend his absence by spending a night at Geelong where, as it came out, the lady lived. And he replied evasively that it must depend on the speed with which he could put through his business in Melbourne. Purdy was silent for a time, then with a side-blance at his companion he volunteered, saying, Dick, I know someone who'd suit you. The deuce you do, said Marnie, and burst out laughing. Miss Tillie's sister, no doubt. No, no, not her. Gin's all right, but she's not your sort. But they've got a girl living with them, a sort of poor relation or something, and she's a horse of quite another colour. I say, old man, serious now. Have you ever thought of getting spliced? Again Marnie laughed. At his companion's words they're descended to him once more from some shadowy distance, some pure height, the rose-tinted vision of the wife-to-be which haunts every man's youth. And in ludicrous juxtaposition he saw the women, the only women he had encountered since coming to the colony, the hard-working, care-worn wives of diggers, the harridans, sluts and prostitutes who made up the balance. He declined to be drawn. As at old Marle Flannigan, a one of her darlings, he said to his pal, Man, don't I say I found the wife for you. Purdy was not jesting and didn't join in the fresh salvo of laughter with which Marnie greeted his words. Oh, blow it, Dick! You're too fastidious, too damn particular. Say what you like. There's good in all of them, even in old Mother Flannigan herself, and especially when she's got a drop inside her. Fuddle old Marle a bit and she'll give you the very shift off her back. That's all that I'm not built like you. Why, the woman isn't born I can't get on with. All's fish that comes to my net. Oh, to be young, Dick, and to love the girls, to see their little wastes and their shoulders and the dimples in their cheeks, see them put up their hands to their bonnets and how their little feet peep out when the wind blows their petticoats against their legs, and Purdy rose in his stirrups and stretched himself in an excessive well-being. You young reprobate. Ah, you, you've got water in your veins. Nothing of the sort. Sit me among decent women and there's no company I enjoy more to clad Marnie. Fish blood, fish blood, Dick, it's my belief you were born old. Marnie was still young enough to be netled by doubts cast on his vitality. Purdy laughed in his sleeve. Allowed he said, Oh, look here, old man, I'll lay your wager. I'll bet you're not gay when you see that tulip I've been telling you about to take her in your arms and kiss her. A fiver on it. Done, cried Marnie, and I'll have it in one note, if you please. Bravo, cried Purdy, Bravo, Dick! And having gained his end and being in a good piece of road between post-and-rail fences, he sets first to his horse and canted off, singing as he went. She wheels wheelbarrow through streets wide and narrow, cockles and muscles alive, alive, oh! But the sun was growing large in the western sky. On the ground to the left, their failing shadows slanted out lengthwise. Those cast by the horse's bodies were mounted on high spindle legs. The two men ceased their trifling, and nudged by the fall of day began to ride at a more business-like pace, pushing forward through the deep basin of Bacchus Marsh, and on for miles over wide treeless plains to where the road was joined by the main highway from the north, coming down from Mount Alexander and the Bendigo. Another hour, and from a gentle eminence, the buildings of Melbourne were visible, the mastheads of the many vessels riding at anchor in Hobson's Bay. Here, too, the briny scent of the sea, carrying up over grassy flats, met their nostrils and set Marnie hungrily sniffing. The brief twilight came and went, and it was already night when they urged their weary beasts over the moony ponds a winding chain of brackish water-holes. The horses shambled along the broad hilly tracks of north Melbourne, where early picked their steps through the city itself. Dingy oil-lamps, set here and there at the corners of roads so broad that you could hardly see across them, shed but a meagre light, and the further the riders advanced the more difficult became their passage. The streets in process of laying were heaped with stones and rubbers. Finally, dismounting, they thrust their arms through their bridles and laboriously covered the last half-mile of the journey on foot. Having lodged the horses at a livery stable, they repaired to a hotel in Little Collins Street. Here, Purdy knew the proprietor and they were fortunate enough to secure a small room for the use of themselves alone. End of Part 1, Chapter 4 Part 1, Chapter 5 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson Part 1, Chapter 5 Melbourne is built on two hills and the valley that lies between. It was over a year since Marnie or Purdy had been last in the capital and next morning on stepping out of the Adam and Eve they walked up the eastern slope to look about them. From the summit of the hill their view stretched to the waters of the bay and the mountains of masts. The nearer foreground was made up of mudflats through which a sluggish coffee-coloured river wound its way to the sea. On the horizon to the north the Dandenong ranges rose storm-blue and distinct and seemed momently to be drawing nearer for a cold wind was blowing which promised rain. The friends caught their glimpses of the landscape between dense clouds of white dust which blotted everything out for minutes at a time and filled eyes, as if they were no longer. Tiring of this they turned and descended Great Collins Street a spacious thoroughfare that dipped into the hollow and rose again and was so long that on its western height pedestrians looked no bigger than ants. In the heart of the city men were everywhere at work laying gas and drain-pipes, macadamising, paving, curbing, no longer would the old wives' tale be credited of the infant drowned in the deeps of Swanson Street a range before its own eyes in the Elizabeth Street bog. Massive erections of freestone were going up alongside here a primitive canvas front at dwelling, there one formed wholly of galvanised iron. Fashionable shops two storeys high stood next tiny dilapidated weather-boards. In the roadway handsome chases, land-dows, foreign hands made room for bullock-teams, eight and ten strong, for tumbles carrying water or refuse or worse, droves of cattle, mobs of wild colts bound for auction, flocks of sheep on their way to be boiled down for tallow. Stock riders and bull-punchers rubbed shoulders with elegance in skirted coats and shepherds plaid trousers, who adroitly skipped heaps of stones and mortar or crept along the narrow etching of curb. The visitors from up-country paused to listen to a brass band that played outside a horse-oction mart to watch the shooting in a rifle gallery. The many decently attired females they met also called for notice. Not a year ago, and no reputable woman walked abroad oftener than she could help. Now, even at this hour, the streets were starred with them. Purdy opened mouth, his eyes a dance turned his head this way and that, pointed and exclaimed. But then he had slept like a log and felt in his own words as fit as a fiddle. Whereas Marnie had sat his horse the whole night through, had never ceased to balance himself in an imaginary saddle. And when, at daybreak, he had fallen into a deeper sleep, he was either reviewing outrageous females on Purdy's behalf or accepting wages to kiss them. Hence, diverting as were the sites of the city, he did not come to them with the naive receptivity of Purdy. It was, besides hard to detach his thoughts from the disagreeable affair that had brought him to Melbourne. And as soon as banks and offices began to take down he hurried off to his interview with the carrying agent. The latter's place of business was behind Great Collins Street in a lane reached by a turnpike. Found with some trouble it proved to be a rude shanty wedged in between a Chinese laundry and a Chinese eating-house. The entrance was through a yard in which stood a collection of rabbit-hutches while further back gape to dirty closet. At the sound of their steps the man they sought emerged, and Marnie could not press an exclamation of surprise. When a little over a twelve-month ago he had first had dealings with him this Bolliver had been an alert and respectable man of business. Now he was evidently on the downgrade and the cause of the deterioration was advertised in his bloodshot eyeballs and vainest cheeks. Early as was the hour he had already been indulging his breath puffed sour. Marnie prepared to state the object of his visit in no uncertain terms but his preliminaries were cut short by a volley of abuse. The man accused him point-blank of having been privy to the rascally Drehmann's fraud and of having hoped by lying low to evade his liability. Marnie lost his temper and vowed that he would have Bolliver up for defamation of character. To which the latter retorted that the first innings in a court of law would be his he had already put the matter in the hands of his attorney. This was the last straw Purdy had to intervene and get Marnie away. They left the agents shaking his fist after them and cursing the bloody day on which he'd ever been fool enough to deal with a bloody gentleman. At the corner of the street the friends paused for hasty conference. Marnie was for marching off to take the best legal advice the city had to offer but Purdy disapproved. Why put himself to so much trouble when he had old Ock Ock's recommendation to his lawyer's son in his coat What in the name of Leary come Fitz was the sense of making an enemy for life of the old man his next-door neighbor and a good customer to boot. These councils prevailed and they turned their steps towards Chancery Lane where was to be found every variety of legal practitioner from Barrister to Scrivener. Having matched the house number and described the words Mr. Henry Ock Ock conveyance her an attorney commissioner of Vaffa Davitz in the dusty windows they climbed a wooden stair festooned with cobwebs to a landing where an injunction to push an enter was rudely inked on a sheet of paper and affixed to a door. A baying they passed into a dingy little room the entire furnishing of which consisted of a couple of deal tables with a chair to each. These were occupied by a young man and a boy, neither of whom rose at their entrance. The lad was cutting notches in a stick the clerk a young fellow in the early twenties who had a mop of flaming red hair and small slit white-lashed eyes looked at the strangers but without lifting his head his eyes performed the necessary motion. Marnie desired to know if he had the pleasure of addressing Mr. Henry Ock Ock. In reply the red head gave a noiseless laugh which he immediately quenched by clapping his hand over his mouth and shutting one eye at his junior said, You can have the goodness to inform Mr. Ock Ock that I wish to see him flashback Marnie. Sing until till the rum rum d.a. now then might me child toddle. With patent reluctance the boy ceased his whittling and dawdled across the room to an inner door through which he vanished having first let his knuckles bump as if by chance against the wood of the panel. A second later he reappeared and was as engaged but Marnie surprised a lightning sign between the pair. No, sir, I declined to state my business to any one but Mr. Ock Ock himself. He declared hotly in response to the red-haired man's invitation to get it off his chest. If you choose to find out when he will be at liberty I will wait so long no longer. As the office boy had somehow failed to hit his seat on his passage to the outer door there was nothing left to do but himself to undertake the errand. He lounged up from his chair and in his case without even the semblance of a knock squeezed through a foot-wide aperture in such a fashion that the two strangers should not catch a glimpse of what was going on inside. But his voice came to them through the thin partition. Ah, just a couple of stony-broke patty-landers. Marnie, who had seized the opportunity to dart an angry glance at Purdy which should say this is what one gets by coming to your second-rate pettifoggers, now let his eyes rest on his friend and critically detail the latter's appearance, the description fitted to a nicety. Purdy did in truth look down on his luck, unkempt, bearded to the eyes, there he stood clutching his shapeless old cabbage-tree in mud-stained jumper and thread-bear smalls, the very spit of the unsuccessful digger. Well, might they be suspected of not owning the necessary to pay all serene mister, the boss will take you on. The sanctum was a trifle large as in the outer room but almost equally bare. Half a dozen deed-boxers were piled up in one corner. Stalking in with his chin in the air Marnie found himself in the presence of a man of his own age who sat absorbed in the study of a document. At their entry two beady gray eyes lifted to take a brief but thorough survey and a hand of pencil in it pointed to the single empty chair. Marnie declined to translate the gesture and remained standing. Under the best of circumstances it irked him to be kept waiting. Here following on the clerk's saucy familiarity the wilful delay made his gorge rise. For a few seconds he fumed in silence then his patience exhausted he burst out, my time, sir, is as precious as your own with your permission I will take at these words and at the tone in which they were spoken the lawyer's head shot up as if he had received a blow under the chin. Again he narrowed his eyes at the couple and this time he laid the document from him and asked swavly what can I do for you? The change in his manner though slight was unmistakable. Marnie had a nice ear for such refinements and responded to the shade of difference with the promptness of one who has been on his side. His irritation fell. He was ready on the instant to be propitiated. Putting his hat aside he sat down and having introduced himself made reference to Ballarat and his acquaintance with the lawyer's father who directed me to you, sir, for advice on a vexatious affair in which I have had the misfortune to become involved. With a pray be seated Ock Ock Rose and cleared a chair in and out. I think you may take it from me that no case is so unpromising but what we shall be able to find a loophole. Marnie thanked him with a touch of reserve. I trust you will still be of that opinion when you have heard the facts and went on. Myself I do not doubt it. I am not a rich man, but serious though the monetary loss would be to me I should settle the matter out of court were I not positive and a quick, oh, quite so, of course. Like his old father he was a short, heavily built man, but there the likeness ended. He had a high domed forehead above a thin hooked nose. His skin was of an almost Jewish pallor. Fingers of straight jet-black hair grew down the walls of his cheeks and round his chin, meeting beneath it. The shaven-upper lip was long and flat with no central markings and helped to form a mouth that was fresher than a slit cut by a knife in a sheet of paper. The chin was bare to the size of a crown piece and both while he spoke and while he listened to others speaking the lawyer caressed this patch with his fingertips so that in the course of time it had arrived at a state of high polish like the shell of an egg. The air with which he heard his new client out was of a noncommittal kind and Marnie having talked his first heat there was nothing in this of the frank responsiveness with which your ordinary mortal lens is ear. The brain behind the dome was, one might be sure, adding, combining, comparing and drawing its own conclusions. Why should lawyers, he wondered, treat those who came to them like children, advancing only insofar as it suited them out of the darkness where they housed among strangely worded paragraphs and obscure formulas. But these musings were cut short. Having fondled his chin for a further moment a cock looked up and put a question. And while he could not but admire the lawyer's acumen this did not lessen Marnie's discomfort. All unguided it went straight for what he believed to be the one weak point in his armour. It related to the Dremen. Contrary to custom Marnie had on this occasion himself recommended the driver and as he admitted it his ears rang again with the worded fellow countryman, a weedler from the south country off whose tongue the familiar brogue had dripped like honey. His recommendation he explained had been made out of charity, he had not forced the agent to engage the man and it would surely be a gross injustice if he alone were to be held responsible. To his relief a cock did not seem to attach importance to the fact but went on to ask whether any written agreement had existed hmm no writing hmm so so. To read his thoughts was an impossibility but as he proceeded with his catechism it was easy to see how his interest in the case grew. He began to treat it tenderly warmed to it as an artist to his work and Marnie's spirits rose in consequence. Having selected a number of minor points that would tell in their favour a cock dilated upon the libelous dispersion that Marnie's good faith. My experience has invariably been this Mr. Marnie. People who suggest that kind of thing and accuse others of it are those who are accustomed to make use of such means themselves. In this case there may have been no goods at all the thing may prove to have been a put-up job from beginning to end but his here as start of surprise was too marked to be overlooked. Well let us take the existence of the goods for granted but might they not, being partly of a perishable nature, have gone bad or otherwise got spoiled on the road and not have been in a fit condition for you to receive at your end. This was credible. Marnie nodded his assent. He also added gratuitously that he had before now been obliged to reclaim uncasques of mouldy mess-pork, at which Ockock ceased coddling his chin to point a straight forefinger at him with a triumphant, you see. But Purdy, who, sick and tired of the discussion, had withdrawn to the window to watch the rain zigzag in runlets down the dusty panes and hiss and patter on the sill, Purdy puckered his lips to a sly and soundless whistle. The interview at an end Ockock mentioned in his frigidly urbane way that he had recently been informed there was an excellent opening for a firm of solicitors in Ballarat, could miss to Marnie as a resident confirm the report. Marnie regretted his ignorance but spoke in praise of the golden city and its assured future. This would be most welcome news to your father, sir, I can picture his satisfaction on hearing it. Carly Dick, that's no more poke, was Purdy's comment as they emerged into the rain-swept street, a crafty devil, if ever I cede one. Henry Ockock seems to me to be a singularly able man, replied Marnie dryly. To his thinking Purdy had cut a poor figure during the visit. He had said no intelligent word but has lounged lumpishly in his chair the very picture of the countrymen come up to the metropolis and, growing tired of this, had gone like a restless child to thrum his fingers on the veins. Oh, you bet, he'll slither you through. What do you insinuate there's any need for slithering as you call it? cried Marnie. Why, dig all, man, and as long as what does it matter? It matters to me, sir. The rain, a tropical deluge, was over by the time they reached the hollow. The sun shone again, hot and sticky, and people were venturing forth from their shelters to wade through beds of mud, or to cross on planks the deep, swift rivers formed by the open rains. There were several such cloud bursts in the course of the afternoon, and each time the refuse of the city was world-fast on the flood to be just as an edging to the footpaths when the water went down. Marnie spent the rest of the day in getting together a fresh load of goods, for whether he lost or won his suit the store had to be restocked without delay. That evening, towards eight o'clock, the two men turned out of the lather arcade. The night was cold, dark and wet, and there had wound comforters around their bare throats. They were on their way to the mechanics hall to hear a lecture on mesmerism. Marnie had looked forward to this all through the sorry job of choosing soaps and candles. The subject piqued his curiosity. It was the one drop of mental stimulant he could hope to extract from his visit. The theatre was out of the question. If none of the actors happened to be drunk, a fair proportion of the audience was sure to be. Part of his pleasure this evening was due to Purdy having agreed to accompany him. It was always a matter of regret to Marnie to hide the hobnob of daily life. He and his friend had so few interests in common, that Purdy should rest content with the coarse diversions of the ordinary digger. Then, from the black shadows of the arcade, a woman's form detached itself, and a hand was laid on Purdy's arm. Shout us a drink, old pal! Marnie made a quick repellent movement of the shoulder. But Purdy, some vagrum fancy quickened in him, either with a voice which was not unrefined or by the stealthiness of the approach, Purdy turned to look. Come, come, my boy, we've no time to lose. Without raising her pleasant voice the woman levelled a volley of abuse at Marnie, then muttered a word in Purdy's ear. Just half a jiff dick, said Purdy, or go ahead, I'll make up on you. For a quarter of an hour Marnie aired his heels in front of a public house, then he gave it up and went on his way. But his pleasure was damped, the inconsiderateness with which Purdy could shake him off always had a disconcerting effect on him. To face the matter squarely the friendship between them did not mean as much to Purdy as to him. The sudden impulse that had made the boy relinquish a promising clerkship to emigrate in his wake into this he had read more than it would hold. And as he picked his muddy steps Marnie agreed with himself that him, of Purdy's coming to the colony, had been to saddle him with a new responsibility. It was his lot for ever to be helping the lad out of tight places. Sometimes it made him feel unnecessarily bearish. For Purdy had the knack, common to sunny and provident natures, of taking everything that was done for him for granted. His want of delicacy in this respect was distressing. Yet in spite of it all it was much for long together. A well-meaning young fellow if ever there was one. That very day how faithfully he'd stuck to his side assisting at dull discussions and duller purchasings without once obtruding his own concerns. And here Marnie remembered their talk on the ride to town. Purdy had expressed the wish to settle down and take a wife, a poor friend that would be who did not back him up in this front benches of a half empty hall. The mesmerist, a corpse like man in black, already surveyed its thinness from the platform with an air of pain's surprise. Marnie decided that Purdy should have his chance. The heavy rains of the day and the consequent probable flooding of the ponds and the marsh would serve as an excuse for a change of route. He would go and have a look at Purdy's sweetheart would ride back to the diggings by way of Geelong. End of Part 1 Chapter 4