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Title: Previous Convictions
Author: Hanry Lawson
eBook No.: 2200431h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: 2022
Most recent update: 2022
This eBook was produced by: Colin Choat
1. Enter Previous
2. The Story of Dotty
3. Previous and S'samuel
4. A Wet Camp
5. The Green Lady
6. Ducks and Other Things
7. The Doormat
8. The Last Rose of Winter
9. Letter to the editor of the
Bulletin.
He was one of those naturally faded little men who can only be described as vague. He was so vague that you couldn't tell, after he had gone, whether he was dark or fair; and it didn't matter at all. I once wondered how he had ever come to be identified and sworn to. He might leave you the impression that he had been exactly the same as a boy.
He blew in, or rather drifted in, on an eddy of a red-dust storm from the plains, and came along the path to the gate as a piece of paper might. I had seen him pause, paper-like, against the wire fence, vaguely examining the number of my "block", painted in staring white on a black background on an uncompromising oblong of tin, fastened to the top wire. We settlers are all numbered here, just as he and I and the rest were in other days; and, of course, by what some call the Irony of Fate, and some the Long Arm of Coincidence, and others the Thing that Has to Be, the number by the side of my gate is the same as the number I wore then. But the little man didn't notice that; he had got my number in the township, he told me later. Besides, he had gone by a good many numbers in his time, and while doing it; and he had met with Many Such.
His clothes, boots and hat—in fact, all about him—had such a washed-out appearance (if you could call it an appearance) that they weren't worth describing. He carried no water-bag; but then he was travelling along the irrigation channels and the river. His swag was round and of unusual diameter, and covered with calico, well-made and harnessed, as amateurs' swags often are when they have once learned the trick—better than professionals'. But even the swag had a hint of unreality and unhealthiness about its bulk, like some city Domain dosser's—as if the owner's atmosphere of unreality had enveloped it. To me it seemed, for the moment, with its sun-bleached white calico cover, as if it were a roll of burnt white paper that might vanish with its owner in tiny flakes of tinder if I clapped my hands. But this might have been on account of a bit of absent-mindedness, and the fiendish red-dust storm along the road, and the unreality of the great plains around. He seemed to shed his swag as if it were full of feathers. It was so dumpy that it stood on end; and the two-thirds empty tucker-bag drooped down against it as a tired, worn-out little wife might sink into a seat beside her big husband after a day of toil and trouble; or as a starved, dirty-white cat might lean against a squat, good-natured bulldog, smoodging.
And so the small man was before me at the foot of the verandah steps.
"Good-day, mate!" I said; and as he didn't answer, but seemed to be looking at me (if it could be called looking) in a vacant way, with washed-out blue-white eyes that had a chinaware brightness about them, said: "What's your trouble?"
He swung half round and down, pecked at the gravel behind him with his finger and thumb, as a hen does, and as swiftly brought the closed finger and thumb to his lips, and stood to attention. Then he saluted—or rather his hat-brim jerked downward to salute his crooked forefinger that jerked up halfway to meet it. It was a gaol salute, all right. And the other was a prison sign: he had turned, in line, to pick up an imaginary morsel of tobacco supposed to be thrown over the wall by a more fortunate prisoner in the next yard, while the attention of the warder—whom I stood for—was momentarily diverted.
"I can't place you yet," I said.
There was a slight flicker of impatience—or it may have been a shade of mildly sorrowful reproach—in this daylight shadow, and in a sigh of faraway world-weariness he told me:
"Previous Convictions."
There was not in it the ghost of a note of exclamation. Even the period was blurred and faded.
"Previous Convictions," he sighed again.
Then I remembered him. He came back to me on a great wave of thought. Or I came back to him. He had told me that when I first asked him what his trouble was; and we nicknamed him "Previous Convictions"—or "Previous" for short. But "previous" was a word that could not, by any stretch of applicability, be fitted on to him. The Law couldn't do it. It couldn't even fit him with "malice aforethought". Even "subsequent" was altogether too sudden a word to apply to poor little Previous. It was the Law that was subsequent with regard to him. Brutally so, I thought; but the warders treated him kindly, even gently—or, at worst, with toleration—as we might an unsociable poodle that keeps rats and strange cats away from the place. And the governor gave him the billet of pantryman in the gaol hospital when it fell vacant.
I rose impulsively from the deck chair on the verandah, stepped down and held out my hand. It was the ghost of a shake on the part of Previous. It seemed as if my hand was no good to him, and he didn't know what to do with it. I might as well have reached for the froth of vanished beers from the centre of a dry area.
"Come on to the verandah and sit down," I said.
But Previous declined, with the ghost of a shrug. He seated himself on the top step, with one heel trailing on the gravel, one foot on the bottom step, and his right forearm resting limply on his raised knee. I sat on the edge of the verandah, somewhat similar. Previous talked to people with his shoulder mostly. That shoulder was his salient, so to speak, and a point of mild, reproachful counter-attack that sometimes hurt. Also of too-ready retreat that left you helpless, irritated, even demoralised.
"Had dinner, Previous?" I asked.
"Yes—thank yer all the same. Boiled the billy back on what they call the Hay Canal, before we struck the town."
"Who's 'we', Previous?"
"I'll tell yer about him presently."
"Where are you making for?" I asked, more to fill up a pause than anything else.
"Hay," said the visitor. "I want to get away from some of my previous convictions, if I can." Then, after an awkward gap: "I didn't mean to come in—I only meant to go parst an' have a look at what sort of place you was livin' in, an' leave something an' a message. Besides, I've got Dotty with me. There he is."
He pointed obliquely across the road, and I saw a stout man, in white pants and faded waistcoat, sitting on the bank of the channel under the transplanted blue sugar-gums, with something in the grass beside him that might have been a swag or might have been a blue dog. He was much more solid-looking than Previous, and he had a broad-brimmed, flat, dirty-coloured straw hat, which might have come out of old Darlinghurst Gaol, tilted feloniously over the bridge of his nose. It was almost tilted over his chin; so he couldn't have had any forehead to speak of, though he seemed to have plenty of back to his head. But that might have been hair.
"I couldn't bring him in," added Previous.
"Why? What's his trouble?" I asked.
"Thievin'," said Previous, resignedly. "Allers thievin'. He can't get away from it like I could. He's thievin'-mad, I think. He'll thieve anything. He thieves things that are no good to him nor anyone else. I've known him to thieve wore-out women's underclothing from the line. Yer'd think he was one of them what they call sexyil pivits—but he ain't; nothing like that. Why, back there on the hostrich farm he tried to thieve the bustle off a hostrich that was outside on ther railway line; but the hostrich jumped the railway fence and got away. Dotty got some feathers off of ther barbed wires, though. He said he wanted to send them to his wife."
"His wife!" I exclaimed.
"Yes. Tell yer erbout her dreckly. It's funny," Previous reflected, "ter see them hostriches runnin' alongside the train, like some big women I've seen, instead of goin' off at right angles if they're frightened. Hostriches is fools all right.
"Dotty wasn't always like he is now: He was a fine young fellow once, and a bit of a boxer—a nathlete, an' somethin' on the railway. He run and picked a kid off the crossin' an' got knocked out with a truck they was shuntin'; an' his wife married him for bein' a hero, an' made his life a hell, one way and another, and drove him to drink, an' gaoled him for maint'nance, an' all that, with somethin' else that happened, and maybe the old crack he got on the head with the railway truck made him what he is. He told the warders that, but they didn't believe him—they thought he was allers dotty. But I knew a woman who was there, an' she said it was all true—an' there was no nonsense about her. She wanted to marry me an' make a man of me," Previous reflected. "But that would have bin no use—she'd only have been chuckin' up me previous convictions agen me every time we quarrelled. Dotty was on tobacco when I first met him in ther gaol, an' he was good to me an' one or two others; so, afterwards, I didn't drop him, an' I found he was a good feller, only for his rat and his thievin'. I thought a trip west might do him good, so I brought him along with me."
"How did you get here, Previous?"
"Well, first I got the tickets, and we watched our chance and slipped into the train. (No, but I thought the police might want to stop us leaving the city. Previous convictions, y'know.) We trained as fur as the tickets went, an' then we tramped, an' worked when we could, an' trained an' tramped agen; an' once or twice we got a lift in the brake-van of a luggage train. We worked at baggin' an' stackin' wheat, an' other jobs. Dotty don't thieve when he's workin'; but that's only another sign he's ratty. He don't loaf, or go slow either; so the gangs thought he must be a pimp. So we couldn't stay long on any job."
I knocked out my pipe and went inside and got my tobacco tin.
"Talking of Dotty being on tobacco, Previous—where's your pipe?"
"Oh, I chucked smokin'," said Previous. "The gaol cured me of that—I've got no taste for it. But I chew a bit sometimes. The gaol makes a tobacco-chewer of many a clean-mouthed pipe-smoker. An' a criminal of a decent, honest man sometimes. An' that's about all it does. But talkin' of smokin', I was readin' a book I found back in the last-night's camp (Dotty thieved it from me, and he's got it in his swag now) erbout a feller that escaped from some gaol in England—some Moor—yes, Dartmoor. The escape was all right, but then the book got all among German spies that had nothing to do with Dartmoor, or any gaol, or this chap, either; so I chucked readin' it. Anyway, the bloke steals a bicycle an gets off clear. He comes to a sort of deserted mansion with a carriage-drive, an' he goes in—he's deadbeat an' starvin'; an' he gets in through the pantry winder. But there's a bloke livin' there, mysterious-like, with a Russian girl and a old housekeeper—they're all mixed up some way with the German spies; but I didn't filler 'em. 'Course the bloke ketches the Dartmoor cove and has a talk to him, an' gives him a blow-out of bread and milk, an' cold turkey, an' a bottle o' wine, 'n' a good cigar. (They allers does in them books.) An' ther gaol cove smokes the cigar right down to the butt! All rot—why, he'd been five years in gaol; an' even if he could have got down the tucker and the wine, the first whiff of that cigar would have made him throw up his works! Even you should er known that. All book-writers ought to be in gaol fer awhile."
Previous turned his vague eyes to where Dotty was looking first up and then down the road.
"Well, I must be getting on," he said, rising stiffly. He screwed his face and rubbed his conversation shoulder, which had been up on the defensive all the time, and now went down with a jerk of his arm.
"What's the matter, Previous?" I asked. "Touch of rheumatism? You don't seem so dapper as you used to be—been sleeping in the wet?"
"Got knocked with a tram," said Previous laconically.
"The tram hit me."
"I know that; but how did it happen? You didn't used to get drunk."
"Nor don't now. Y—yer see," he went on reluctantly and hurriedly—slurring his words as men do when telling about a good deed performed by themselves which they don't expect to be believed—"I went to git a kid orf the tramline; an' fist as I got the kid clear the front corner of another tram come and knocked me down. I never done a decent thing yet," he reflected, "but I suffered for it afterwards somehow. Still, salin' the kid was another link between me an' Dotty. He'd saved one an' I'd saved one."
A gust of recollection came to me.
"And you wouldn't give your name!" I said.
"How'd you know? You wasn't on one of the trams?" he added suspiciously.
"No, but a friend of mine was. He described you to me—manner and talk and all—but I couldn't fix you at the time. He saw you in the hospital afterwards, and you wouldn't give your name there. You said 'Smith' would do."
"So it did," said Previous.
"But why didn't you own up?" I asked. "There might have been something coming to you. It might have done you some good. You left the hospital next day. Why didn't you give your name and address?"
Again the shadowy shrug of impatience, of mild indignation or reproach.
"There was me previous convictions."
"Oh, I beg your pardon, Previous," I said hastily; "I forgot."
The night after Previous Convictions and Dotty turned up at my place at Leeton they camped on a vacant block along the irrigation channel. There was nothing missing in Leeton next morning; no one had anything to miss, except perhaps the Commission, and not even a hopeless kleptomaniac like Dotty would attempt to thieve anything from that. Nobody ever got anything out of a Royal Commission. In the afternoon Previous Convictions turned up again; or, rather, I found the faded little man waiting vaguely in the shade on the lower steps of my front verandah.
"I promised to come round again before we went on," he said. "I waited till I seen the Little Landlady go up town. I knowed she was out here housekeeping for you. I uster know her when she kept the big refreshment rooms in North Sydney. I never thieved anything off of her—except perhaps a few cigarettes—an' I'll make that up to her some day. No, not from her—she was kind to us young larrikins."
"And you promised to tell me something about your life, Previous," I said.
"And so I will. I told you I was born at a livery stables. At least that's where I come to meself. My father—well, never mind who he was. He was what they called a gentleman in them days. They used to say that it broke out in me sometimes; but that was a long time ago. Me mother was—well, she's dead."
Previous dropped the vernacular occasionally, and then you'd know he felt things. Perhaps it was his father "breaking out" in him—there are many like him in the city and Outback.
"You know what those livery stables are like," Previous went on; "you can see it in most country towns. There's a sort of a sullen, unhealthy, resentful—what-d'yer-call-it?—atmosphere about them. And the men who go out with stallions are often the same. They seem to get all the bad qualities of the horses and none of the good ones. Anyway, I went crook—but only on thievin'. Perhaps we get broodin' about what people think we are, and end up by gettin' to think that we might as well be it. But I learned to ride and I learned to swim. (The stables were close to a swimming baths.) I can do a lot of things that nobody would ever dream of me doing."
The voice went on now as though it were altogether detached from Previous. I listened, and thought of the days when I could ride.
"Why didn't you go in the Light Horse or something, in 1915, Previous? It would have straightened you up," I said.
"The Light Horse are all about six feet and weigh half a ton each," said Previous "at least all I've seen of 'em."
"But you might have gone in the artillery, or army medical, or something, as driver?"
"An' what good would that do me?"
"It would have built you up. And you might have got a medal, or even a Victoria Cross."
"No good—it would only have made my previous convictions come out worse...Besides, there was me shoulder that went crook gettin' that kid from under the tram."
I begged pardon.
"Where's Dotty?" I asked, to end an awkward pause.
"I'll show you by and by. An' about Dotty. After he got the knock on the head savin' that kid when he was a shunter in the Goulburn railway yards, he was never quite right; and, after his wife gaoled him for maintenance in Sydney, they had to put him in the Receiving House for loonies. His missus pretended to be sorry, an' she used to come and visit him there, an' bring him fruit an' stuff—be very lovin' an' kiss him when she came an' kiss him when she went away. Now, there was a little window in that rat-joint that looked out into the street opposite the old jug" (Previous meant the Darlinghurst Gaol) "and she'd tell him to look out of that window after she'd gone and she'd wave her hand to him. And when he looked out she'd be walking up and down with the other man. And she'd wave her hand to Dotty's window and kiss it, too.
"You see, she wanted to drive him into a real madhouse, and get rid of him for good. He'd rave about it, but the attendants and doctors only thought it was delusions." (A good many delusions are the real thing; but the real things have to be cured as well as the delusions.) "One day, two of the attendants—the head one and a probationer—listened to Dotty, and watched that window, and caught her at it. After that they shut that window—and shut her out of the place, too, for good and all. But they saved Dotty from the madhouse.
"They keep patients at the Receiving House for a week or two—keep 'em to find out whether it's the mad horrors they've got or only the drink horrors: to separate the impostors from the genuine loonies, so to speak. They claim to save sixty or seventy per cent in the Receiving House—that is, save 'em from the lunatic asylums, and I reckon they're about right. But they like to have some friend or relation to take charge of doubtful cases before they let them go. So I took Dotty an' looked after him as well as I could. I'd got a job in a stables on the Shore then, and had a room there with a spare bunk in it. Dotty was clean dotty then; he'd quite forgotten everything, right back to the time he was a shunter—wife, daughters and all. But he showed a great affection for me. Just like a dog—which was another proof that he was hopeless. Fancy anyone taking to me!—unless he was mad or wanted something!
"An' now I'll tell you the truth. All Dotty's mad thievin' was done for me. At least at first. Why, the first thing he done was to slip out one night and thieve a doormat and a garden chair, and bring 'em to me at the stables. What would I want with a doormat and a garden chair in a milk-cart stables? I took him out again the same night and made him show me the verandah and the lawn he thieved 'em from, an' put 'em back again. He was just as pleased to show me the places as he was pleased to do anything else for me.
"I'd noticed a new young policeman come nosin' round the stables, and tryin' to look as if he was only dodging his sergeant and waiting for six o'clock and off-duty time. But I knowed better. He was one of those newchum wasters, sent out to a rich aunt, and had got into the force by influence while other police was away at the war; an' he'd overheard some of the decent old police talkin', and wanted a case. All me old previous convictions come back on me with a rush, an' I went off me feed. And, to make matters worse, a few nights later poor old Dotty slipped out—just before daylight when I'd got to sleep at last—and thieved that blessed old rustic chair and doormat again. He put the chair alongside my bunk with the mat on it, and sat on his own bunk looking like a poor idiot son, and waited for me to wake up and be glad. He'd noticed I wasn't too cheerful the last few days. I suppose he expected me to hug him and kiss him on both cheeks—or something like that.
"I had a bad day of it, because I seen that new policeman saunterleeryin' round agen. There was an old retired senior-sergeant about, too; he had a house of his own close handy and a pension of three or four pounds a week. He'd arrested me a few times in the old days—twice for arrears of maintenance and once for thievin' to pay it—but I didn't take much notice of him. You see he was drinking himself to death and couldn't sleep, and he used to go ghosting round at all hours haunting himself and all the young police on night duty.
"He called into the office during the day to pay his milk and ice and butter bill, which was in arrears on account of his wife's alimony havin' got in arrears first—she'd divorced him as soon's he'd got his pension. He passed out through the stables, an' while he was goin' through he nodded to me. I read something at once in that nod, and the sudden thought of that young policeman give me the cold horrers; but I nodded back, an' he went out, an' neither of us said nothing.
"I couldn't sleep that night, but walked up and down in the stables, and so Dotty couldn't get out. I knew he was awake waiting for a chance to go and steal the foundation-stone of a Hoddfellows' Hall they'd laid that day—or something just as useful to me. He did thieve the new-laid foundation-stone of a hall or institute or something for me once—or, at least, the plate on it. Must have got it off with a crowbar the workmen had left out of the tool-shed. The inscription said it was laid by Lady Abeceedy, a sort of an aunt of mine; or, rather, a relation of my father's. We always knowed she was an old hen," reflected Previous, "but I never thought she could lay a stone like that."
I looked very hard at Previous: the voice was his and the face was his, but neither in voice nor in face was there the ghost of the shadow of a sign of a smile. And I've seen a Chinaman show some emotion at something that struck both of us as being humorous.
"No. He didn't thieve the coins from under the foundation-stone. Money's about the only thing that Dotty wouldn't thieve, not even for me—except perhaps a politician's reputation; he's not so mad as that—at least not yet. I don't believe he knows what money is, or what it's good for.
"Anyway," Previous went on. "Dotty dropped off that morning just before daylight. It was during the time of the daylight-saving rat that some of the fresh, young politicians had got. Some of 'em will save daylight themselves yet. So I fed the horses and made up my mind. I broke up that chair and stuck it, and the mat with it, well in under the boiler we used to hot the water for scalding the milk-cans. I put the coal and kindling-wood in front, an' when the proper time came I lit up. I never felt so criminal in all me life. I don't suppose any decent young crook committing his first offence ever did. It was just like the old time when I embezzled the five quid to save myself from going to gaol and going mad again for arrears of maintenance. The flue was damp, and the smell of the burning green paint off that garden chair came out from under the copper at first. I can smell it yet. This was worse'n thievin' or receivin'," said Previous; "it was also aiding and abetting and destroying evidence and property. I looked out, and there was the old senior-sergeant going down towards the water like a sleepwalker. 'He'll go in to it some night,' I said to myself; and I felt that way, too, just then. And I wondered if he smelled that burning paint.
"I thought to myself that if Dotty got loose again he'd bring all my previous convictions out worse than the plague we had round there just then. But he steadied down the next few days and seemed quieter and—and more 'rational,' as you'd say," added Previous apologetically. "Or less restless. I'd told them at the stables that he was my step-brother lookin' for a job. He didn't look enough like me to be a brother. He used to help groom the horses, and by and by the head stableman took him on perminent. He'd work hard and sleep at nights; but just when things were lookin' a bit brighter for me, he went off again. That time he goes up the hill to a church they were putting a new wing to and thieved a new stained-glass window, crate and all. It was that young policeman caught him with it—bringing it home to me.
"It was Sunday at midnight when Dotty was caught thievin' that angel window from the church. My previous convictions wasn't known on the North Shore much, except to the senior-sergeant and one or two; so Monday morning at ten o'clock I chanced it and went up to the police-court. The old senior-sergeant had ghosted down and gimme the nod early. There was a grand old magistrate on the Bench—he retired, too, the other day. So I told him all about poor Dotty, even to the stepbrother lie, and I could see that he believed it. I didn't tell him about the chair and mat, though.
"'But what about the stained-glass window, yer Worship?' asked the young arresting constable.
"'It's only another proof that Ditty's mad, your Worship,' I said. 'He's a harmless lunatic. What did I want with a stained-glass window? I'm camping in a stable, not in the ruins of the Reems Cathedral. I wish I was.'
"Somebody offered bail—and I had a queer fancy that the old senior-sergeant was behind it. Old felons like meself get instincts sometimes—like women. But Mr Aarons—that was the magistrate—said he couldn't allow bail; he said he was building a new private residence across the bay, as they all knew, and it was nearly finished, with a stained-glass hall door; besides, he'd sent his prize sow with her litter across there already, so he couldn't afford to take any risks. But he'd pos'pone the case till after dinner.
"I was to come back at two o'clock sharp. The court was very quiet when I was called in—by my own name, of course, and I hardly knew it again. It was the only case for the afternoon. I noticed the church contractor and the old minister sort of hovering in the background—like stained-glass windows without the stain.
"Mr Aarons asked me if I knew anyone who would asoom charge of Dotty, and take him away; and I said I knew of a daughter who was fond of him once, but I didn't know where she was. And, anyway, her husband wouldn't have him. But I said I'd take him away and do the best I could for him. Then Mr Aarons dipped his pen twice outside the inkpot and once into it, and looked down at his book and said 'Case dismissed'.
"I was still puzzled when I got Dotty round the corner, till I saw the old senior-sergeant beckon to me from the side-entrance of a pub. He took us into the bottle-department, all amongst the Sarah Gamps and Betsy Prigs, and Dotty and I had two ginger-ales and the senior-sergeant had a brandy and soda. After that he led me aside, behind the screen. 'Look here, Previous', he said, 'you go West, you'll do well now; and take Dotty with you. And I'll give you a hint about him. He was a good amateur boxer once, when he was younger—get him interested in that. I know all about it, and I told Mr Aarons and the constable-in-charge all about Dotty—never mind when' (he says)—'except the part you left out today. And we've had our eyes on you ever since you've been here. I was Dotty's boss when he was a younger shunter in the Goulburn railway yards; and the child he saved was my niece, the daughter of my favourite sister. Keep clear of the new police, and especially of the younger ones, till you get away. Some of them are fond of hunting up old records. They're all budding detectives', and he opened my coat and slipped six notes and a half into me inner pocket and buttoned me coat up again—like a warder gettin' a criminal lunatic ready to send to the Parramatta Asylum. 'I got up a little collection this morning,' he said—'thieved it or pinched it, or what you like!' And then he said: 'I say, Previous, what god was you burning incense to the other morning? I smelt it. It was just like burnt paint on an old garden chair!'
"And so I say," concluded Previous, "once a policeman always a policeman."
In accordance with a mutual wish unexpressed but perfectly understood by ex-felons, my faded little friend Previous Convictions was vaguely waiting for me next afternoon on the lower step of my front verandah at Leeton. It was on the shady side of the house, too, and not overlooked. Previous never seemed to make or put in an appearance; he always faded into appearance, just as he faded into absence. He had his faded, solid-looking swag with him, the dumpiness or drum-like shape of which had puzzled me on his first appearance. He was "humpin' his drum" all right, in his faded, west-o'-sunset way—maybe I am too. I looked along the bank of the irrigation channel across the road and thought I caught a glimpse of Dotty's hat low down behind a tree where he might have been sitting waiting for Previous.
I had sent the Little Landlady up to the town on a message to a place where I knew she'd spend two or three hours with another Lowland Scot of similar convictions—a fact which I believed to be also ex-feloniously understood between Previous and myself.
The voice that came from Previous sounded firmer today; and, in a haunting, irritating way, sardonic—at least, at first, and if such a term could be applied to him.
"Well, how are you today, Previous?" I asked.
There was no answer.
"I said 'How are you getting on, Previous?'"
There was something like an impatient movement of Previous's humped-up, defensive shoulder.
"What do you care?" he said. There was no resentment in the tone. He might have been referring to one of my own real or imaginary troubles.
"Why, what's wrong with you today, Previous?" I asked.
"Oh, I beg yer pardin," he said, rousing himself as though wearily. "It's only a saying I got. I thought you remembered that." Then he went on: "The first time I come—that was the day before yesterday—I seen another bloke down near the fence prunin' fruit-trees; so I says to him, 'Can you tell me where I'll find Mr Henry Lawson?' I says—'I b'lieve his place is somewheres about here,' and the bloke he looks round an' says, 'Why, there's 'Arry now, across the channel, talkin' to another old woman,' he says."
"Shut up, Previous," I said, "and get on with the yarn. You haven't told me your story, yet."
"Oh, that'll all come out in the evidence," said Previous, with a faint tinge of bitterness. "It always does.
"Well, I told you how me and Dotty come to leave Sydney an' how we got this far. As soon as we were on to the Murrumbidgee Dotty improved a lot. It seemed he'd been on the old river some time in his young days, and when he smelt it he started to thieve fishing-rods and lines from over a fence in Narrandera that I'd left him sittin' against while I looked up a likely store to buy grub in; but I caught him at it, and made him put 'em back, and bought some tackle in a store where I got flour and stuff. We follered the river from near this side of Narrandera. We had some bread, an' plenty of flour an' tea an' bacon, an' I knew a little of the game, so we was all right—I learnt something of it in the cookshop an' pantry in old Darlin'-hurst Gaol, you see, and afterwards batchin' in stables, where I had a job after I'd chucked goin' crook.
"But I needn't have bothered. Dotty knew that blessed old river if he didn't know anything else. As soon as we come to the first good fishin' hole—an' a weird, wild, three witches place it was, too, with steep dark banks and old blasted trees lookin' over the top—he made a shrimp net with a little cask hoop an' a piece of scrim he'd brought along, an' started to fish. He could sling out the lines, too, an' showed me how. The fish only seemed to bite in just two spots, wherever we camped, an' that's what always puzzled me. The first thing Dotty caught was a little black mud-turtle—caught it by the tip of the tongue. Dotty took the hook out careful, an' put the baby down gently on the top of the bank with its head towards the river. Don't ever tell me a turtle is slow—that one never touched anything till it touched water; it went just like a swaller flyin' low.
"When that turtle got over its fright, a mile or two down the river, it must have told all the other turtles to drive the fish up to us, wherever we was, out of gratitude, for we never went short of fish while the season was on, an' we even got a few after it was over. I've seen Civil Service Johnnies an' tourists come out in motor cars an' sulkies on Sundays an' fish both sides of us and in between, with telescope rods and reels an' all that sort of thing, and never catch nothing. And there was me an' Dotty, with two old clothes-props and sardine-tin openers for sinkers, Pullin' out bream no end. I useter sell fish to those Johnnies when their tarts wasn't lookin'.
"An' now I'll give yer a hint. Fish the rivers with shrimps and the creeks with worms. The river fish don't know anything about worms—they're too slow; but worms come natural to creeks. Them Johnnies had burnt out their boilers diggin' worms in the sun all the mornin'. Dotty never used one. But, look here—he always put two shrimps on his hook; the first tail first an' the second head first, coverin' between 'em the whole of the hook. Something the same as what the D's used ter do when they wanted to ketch us.
"Dotty would gut the fish and rub in coarse salt to keep 'em fresh, and lay 'em on beds of wetted charcoal under the shady side of old burnt-out shells of trees where the bush fires had bin, with a wet bag over 'em to keep 'em cool. And I'd sell them to rabbit-camps or hawkers, and I'd swap them to the station cook or storekeeper for tea and sugar and bread and other tucker. One day Dotty got a rabbit's heart and caught a Murray cod that night, and took it along to the station cook in the morning before I was awake; and I'm dashed if he didn't come back with a single barrel breechloader he said he'd borrowed from the cook, an' a brace of wild duck. Gawd, my heart was thumpin' up in me throat fit to smother me. I thought Dotty had started thievin' again, just when I was havin' a bit of peace of mind.
"It was along behind old Sam McCaughey's homestead station, and I suppose you know how Old Sam hated guns goin' off an' poachin' behind the Mansion, so I couldn't believe the cook lent Dotty a gun at all. I took Dotty back with the gun to explain him as well as I could. The men's huts was in the old homestead—all panelled windows and doors—and the cook was a fat, jovial little man, like an old-fashioned sea-cook. I showed him the gun and started to explain. But he'd lent Dotty the gun all right. I couldn't understand it at all. I'd noticed one or two of the men wink at me, but I couldn't make it out until presently I seen that the cook was another Dotty.
"He lost his billet next week. 'Bad bread.' They always drop their billets in the same old ditch—bad bread. I believe a bloke that can bake can travel all over the world for nothing, an' come back with a few quid. He wanted to come along with us, but I couldn't be expected to have two Dotties on me mind at the same time. Just while we was talkin' they come wheeling Old Sam himself round for an airing. His props had gone crook on him, you know. Ever see him? No? He was a big fat man, like George Reid, and he looked something like George Reid, too; but, then, agen, he didn't. His face was just the real old squatter's that used to come to a livery stables I worked at in Sydney when I was a youngster—when they useter come down at Easter and stay at the old Royal that's a returned soldiers' club now. The sort that managed their own stations.
"'Travellers?' asked Old Sam.
"'Yes. S'Samuel.' I said.
"'Where are you making for?'
"'Hay,' I said. 'We've been campin' on the river a bit.'
"'I know yer have,' said Old Sam.
"It didn't sound very promisin'. But then he said, 'Where did you get the cod?' and that sounded better.
"'What bait did you use?' he asked when I told him; and I told him that, too. I also worked up the courage to tell him that Dotty caught the cod; and he looked sideways at Dotty just as if he'd seen him or something like him before. 'I thought so,' he said. Then, to himself like. 'I wish my legs were as good as my head.'
"But I didn't know whether I did—or, at least, not just then.
"Then I said, a bit nervous. 'I believe my father was born on one of your stations in Victoria, S'Samuel.' I'm blest if I know why I said it.
"Now what was his name?' asked Old Sam after a short think—as if he'd been tryin' to remember it himself.
"This stumped me; but I said 'Smith'.
"'Yes,' said old Sam, 'I've heard of him.'
"An' right there poor old Dotty had one of those flashes that I'd noticed once or twice since we come on the river, and I could have killed him for it. 'And I close up croaked on one of your stations in Noo South, S'Sam,' says Dotty.
"'Indeed,' said Old Sam—'what station was that?'
"'Tooraly,' said Dotty.
"'What year?' asked old Sam.
"'I don't know,' said Dotty.
"'What was the name of the manager, then?'
"'A man named James was boss-over-the-board,' said Dotty, quite prompt.
"Old Sam nodded. Presently he asked: 'And what did you nearly croak of?'
"'It wasn't your fault, S'Sam,' said Dotty. 'It was curry an' rice an' the heat wave.'
"I looked at Dotty hard," said Previous, "but his strange face was gone and there was nothing but his silly, vacant, patient, good-natured grin that is natural to him nowadays; and I felt relieved. I'll tell you why afterwards."
"'Ah, well,' said Old Sam, 'if you get another cod, bring it up and they'll put it in the ice chest. I'm expecting the Governor up.' And he signed to them to wheel him away.
"And—ah well," reflected Previous, finally disposing of that good Australian squatter, all of the Old School. "I liked Old S'Sam, though he was a Bilfast Orangeman, and I have other convictions besides me previous ones. And I wisht his legs was as good as his head. Or his heart, for that matter.
"'Yer all right now for a week or two,' said one of the station hands to me. 'The cook'll give yer all yer want. An', say, yer can hang on to that old gun for a few days (it's mine, so keep it dry)—in case yer want to have a shot at something; yer mate, for instance. But shoot a bit down the river. I'll get yer a few more cartridges.'
"I thanked that chap, but I didn't take the gun. How was Ito know if Dotty wasn't goin' to get a different sort of rat an' mistake me for a blue duck?
"The cook gave me all we wanted, an', what's more, some jam and butter an' bacon an' eggs. Yer don't get them on the outback stations. Dotty baked the ducks on the coals, like he baked the fish, and we had a real good tuck-out for supper. Then I had about the first long, sound, happy sleep I'd had on the track, an' woke up to the smell of bacon an' eggs that poor old Dotty had ready for me. He'd fried 'em on the blade of an old shovel they'd used for diggin' worms, with plenty of butter for the eggs.
"It wasn't long after daybreak, and I laid back again after another pint of tea to have a last snooze before the sun got up much and made everything hot. It's hotter in the mornings out there. Oh, but I was tired—clean knocked up, but happy about things; about being free from trouble, and all me previous convictions, and havin' Dotty cured of his thievin', whether for me or for anybody else; so happy that I dreamed about it. But the sun or something woke me, an' I set up an' missed Dotty. I heard a scuffling on the bank an' got up—an' just in time. Dotty had been back to the loosin paddicks across the old Hay Road and thieved a red cow with a new calf, and brought 'em back home to camp to me! And the cow chased me into the river, where I got horned on a snag; which was pretty near as bad as gettin' horned on a cow, with the current running like that.
"When I got out, all over black mud, the cow had gone back up over the bank to Dotty and the calf, and was out of sight; and after a bit Dotty comes back to camp with a billy of fresh, frothy milk, an' the sickenin' silly smile of a poor idiot brother. So he'd gone in for cattle liftin' now, an' I supposed it'd be robbery under arms next, for my sweet sake. And milk spoils tea that's made in billies by the campfire, an', besides, this milk was too new and yellow for anything. So it was the same old, senseless, useless business all over again.
"But how in blazes—there, I nearly swore—but, anyhow, how anyone but a natural-born loony could mess about with a more'n half-wild red cow with a new calf—and on foot with bare hands, too—without gettin' ripped up, I dunno. And she wasn't no poley nor shorthorn neither. Perhaps the two loonies recognised each other—like Dotty an' the cook. Or, perhaps, the cow felt the same sort of respect for the loony—the ''flicted of God'—as what a Dago does, while the civilised Anglo-Saxon only laughs at them—or else torments 'em."
A bark of anxious, yearning interrogation, changing quickly into a joyous yelp of recognition, from dog Charley chained up and suffering at the side of the house—also for his previous convictions—warned us that the Little Landlady was coming home across the back channel.
"See yer agen!" said the voice of Previous with no change or suggestion of hurry. "Tell you why I brought Dotty from the river 'nother time."
I went through the house to the back door to look, and when I returned the little man was already fading into absence round the big sun-whitened front gate post.
Previous Convictions' little, dumpy, sawn off swag was standing on end right in the middle of the garden path opposite my front verandah steps, like the daylight ghost of a little, furred, grey-white stump; but Previous himself was nowhere to be detected. However, he faded in presently, round the big, grey front gate post and on to the lower step; and, glancing along the bank of the irrigation channel, in the direction from which he had come, I was aware of a turned-down brim of a hat and a pair of drawn-up knees just showing behind a tree.
After a while the voice of Previous was vague in the hot, heavy air.
"I left Dotty along there behind the ornamental tree," he said, "but I lost sight of his hat for a minute when I got here, so I went back to see if he was goin' in for a swim—or tryin' to thieve the canal. But he was only down in the reeds fishing for yabbies with a bit of meat on a string."
(I might mention that yabbies are little things of the crayfish kind that undermine the banks of the irrigation channels and help let the water soak on and waste, while the reeds do their best to choke the channels, and have to be cut every year. They are known out there as McCaughey's Curse.)
"I promised once to tell you why I brought Dotty from the river," Previous went on, "after old S'Sam gave us permission to camp' an' fish an' shoot there, and after he'd thieved the cow that chased me into the water—I mean Dotty did, not old S'Sam. The fish leave off biting after Easter, and it was the last of the soft nights. You know the rain that come last week? Well, it started next night and we was out in it all. We was miserable—drenched an' wet an' cold, in spite of a fire we had under the lee of the log. Dotty rigged a sort of a fly between the log and two saplings that stood near it—did it with one of his blankets and piece of clothes line he'd thieved from somewhere. Thieved 'em for me to hang meself with, I suppose, if I felt that way. But the blanket sagged and leaked worse than the sky did, so I had to take it down to keep us from bein' drowned as well as froze.
"The weather held up a bit to let in the daybreak, and Dotty built the fire and I had a sleep, crouched up against the log. When I woke Dotty was gone, and the rain coming on again, and I didn't know how long I'd been unconscious. I sploshed through it all to the station, but Dotty wasn't there, and they didn't seem like as if Old S'Sam or anything else was missin'. They wanted me to stay and have breakfast and dry meself at the big old fireplace; but I told 'em I had to go and look after my mate, and they understood that. One of the station hands looked up the best part of an old oil-coat that had belonged to him, and an old canvas raincoat that had belonged to a horse, and made me take them. When I got back to the camp Dotty wasn't there again, and just when I was going to give it up I seen him comin' across a creek from the old Hay Road. He had a real waterproof tent-fly that he'd borrowed from some civilised blacks—the last of the Hay tribe, that lived on a corrugated iron camp across the road, towards Yanco railway station. He said they'd lent it to him, and I believed him. You see, Dotty doesn't lie; he either tells the truth or smiles that vacant, idiot smile of his, and says nothing. I wondered what the blacks thought of Dotty; and to have done with that, when we returned the fly on our way here, Dotty and the old king and queen grinned at each other a treat. Perhaps he could talk some of their lingo and sing the songs of their childhood—songs he'd learnt in his first childhood.
"Well, Dotty fixed the fly and cooked breakfast between showers. He built up a roaring fire that held its own in spite of the rain that got at it, and what with the wind and the fire he got the blankets dry. Next he kept throwing hot coals and ashes under the fly, and sweeping 'em off. Then he pulled down a lot of boughs when it held up a bit, and beat the wet out of 'em against a tree, and dried 'em out against the fire; and we spread the old horse rug and oil-coat on them and made a good camp-bed. We'd kept the bread and flour and things dry in the burnt out hollow at the bottom of an old tree, an' we drank hot tea and lay on our backs on a dry bed and under dry blankets, and didn't care for nothing nor nobody—at least, I didn't; I had a book to read. And, if he didn't feel it, Dotty looked as happy as if he'd thieved Heaven.
"Dotty had got some wire fence posts from a pile up the river bank and stacked them to the side of me, away from the fire, to make it warmer and keep the wind off. And, to make us feel more happy and comfortable, the rain and the wind came on like they did the night before. But we were all right so long as the wind stayed in that quarter. A station hand rode up, between the rainstorms, in a big oilskin overcoat, with the tail of it spread out on his horses's rump, and bent down on his horse's neck and said 'Day, mates. It's a wet day.' Dotty pointed to the billy of tea on the coals and jerked his thumb up to where there was a pint pot upside-down on the log. The station hand said 'Thank yer' and got down from his horse, and Dotty reached him the sugar bag and he had some tea. The station hand's wet sheepdog came up, too, and shook himself on the other side of the fire; then he dodged round closer to us, and laughed at us in a friendly way. The station hand stood by the fire for a while; then he scratched the back of his head with his little finger, and said 'So-long' and got on his horse and rode off and his dog went after him.
"Nobody else come to see us except an old magpie. Dotty threw it a bit of meat and so startled it that it jumped away—it'd thought Dotty was asleep. It swore at Dotty; and then it snatched up the meat and flew off with it. By and by it come back and cursed Dotty some more an' woke me; so Dotty threw it another bit of meat, and it swore its thanks and flew away with that, too. I suppose it wanted that bit for its wife and kids. Anyway it come back again and had a last piece comfortably by itself on the dry ground by the fire after cursing Dotty and all his family, good and hard, for about two minutes. It said Dotty was a foundling, or something such—like any other real bushman does when he meets an old mate unexpected after some years.
"I heard that all the wild magpies were half tame round Leeton until young civil-servant Gawps came round bangin' off guns at 'em. I've seen one of them fancy fishermen la-di-dahs down there by the river shoot a bird like a curlew and break its leg. There was a strong barb wire and netted fence between 'em, so he couldn't get at what he'd shot. But the bird kept hopping round on one leg, with his face towards us all the time, screamin' out, for all the world, 'Now—see—what—yer—done!' 'Now—see—what—yer—done!' 'Now—see—what—yer—done!' till his mates come an' got him away.
"Well, to get on with it. The rain and wind come on with the night, worse 'n' the first night; but the wind still held in the right quarter for us—as if all the winds in the Southern World lived there an' was goin' up to blow all the Japs outer the North o' Queensland. But we was as snug as two rugs in a bug—what yer grinnin' at?—an' I slept well. Till something woke me. Ver know how something wakes yer—anywhere in Australia; whether in the bosom of your family, when a child gets sick in the night, or in the bush, or in quid. The rain had cleared at midnight, as it does at midday in Sydney mostly, and it was broad moonlight, and all was still. But Dotty was gone agen. I reckoned, maybe, he mighter gone with that old magpie of his, to look after his red cow an' calf, 'n' inquire how they was gettin' on, an' whether they'd found a warm gully outer the wind to sleep in. So I give it best, an' stood up an' stretched meself, an' put some more limbs on the fire, an' turned round an' took in the scenery.
"The tourists never see the Murrumbidgee as it is; they never see it even in the mountains above Burrinjuck, nor below it either—except perhaps at Gunidagai or Narrandera or Hay. Where they do see it it's like pictures of the Upper Darling at Bourke except for the river timber; and that grows tall and straight and sound mostly. But down here it's the oldest river in the world, in the oldest bush. Them knotted an' gnarled an' stunted an' twisted old Birnam-wood witch-trees have been burnt out in a hundred bush fires, an' rotted in a hundred floods; but they won't die—except where the fire has burnt 'em down, or the floods have undermined 'em an' the river drowned 'em an' poisoned 'em with slime an' mud. But you've been there, an' you know."
"Right opposite to that camp we had on the Murrumbidgee, but a bit lower down, there's a sort of island with a tree right in the middle of the river," my friend Previous Convictions told me. "It's greener than anything anywhere around. It doesn't seem to belong to Australia at all. The tree and the little island seem all one; the island must be matted roots an' moss mostly, and it's bin through an' under God knows how many floods. The whole thing looks like a lady, dressed just as yer mother used to dress in the 'seventies or the 'eighties—bonnet and bustle, full-back skirt an' all, just leanin' forward an' glidin' up the river. They call her the Green Lady, and she's always glidin' up the stream. The faster the current runs the faster the Green Lady seems to glide. While all other trees are dark, with black shadders, there she is, green in the moonlight, gliding up the river, and seeming more anxious than ever to get there, as if she had a son in trouble up somewhere at the head of it.
"I'd turned in; but just as it seemed I was droppin' off there was sounds—or, rather, one great sound. It seemed to me at first as if it was the Sydney Town Hall organ playin' an' all the kids round Darling Harbour singin'. I thought, for the moment, that my mate Dotty had thieved the Heavenly Choir, or the other one, or both, an' brought 'em to entertain me. I sat up quick, and the sound went. I crawled from under the tent-fly and knelt up and looked over the log that was protectin' us from the weather, but there was nothing there, except the everlasting old haunting of the Bush in the moonlight. So I stood up. The wind had changed to another quarter, an' it was blowin' quite warm. The moon went under some of the bluey-white clouds that was flyin' home—like kids that had frightened 'emselves tellin' ghost yarns. An' I heard a man's voice—it seemed like a mad preacher's voice. I jumped round like a party polotician that smells dissolution. The moon popped out from behind the flying kiddy clouds, an' I looked along the steep clay bank. There was Dotty, standin' halfway down near the water, on the steep clay bank, on a sort of ledge we'd dug to fish from, clear in ther moonlight."
Previous Convictions paused awhile and seemed to think of it as if in a vague way he didn't approve of it.
"It was Dotty all right," he continued, "Dotty standing there on that clay ledge above the river that was full of black snags in the moonlight. But the voice wasn't Dotty's, an' the man, to look at him, wasn't Dotty. Either he was—well, he was another man and was raving; an' the worst of it was it was sane ravin'. He was standin' up straight, facing across the river to the Green Lady, and wavin' his arms and ravin' to her. He was ravin' about his ruined life and his wrongs and woman's devilment and lies—most of the things I knew about him and a good many I didn't. He raved about his life before he was married, and his family, and his wife, and the other man. He raved about relations who spread lies, and he cursed all neighbours who listen to them, and all smug, comfortable magistrates who listen to them, and who send innocent men to gaol and starvation and disgrace, and drive them to drink and madness. And he cursed all soft, good-natured fools of husbands; though I don't know what he did that for.
"And the Green Lady didn't say anything, but kept gliding, gliding up the river as if she was in a hurry to get past; but all the other crooked old witch-trees up on the level seemed to wave their broken, blackened arms and ragged fingers an' sing an' curse an' rave too.
"I sat down on a broken limb of the log, about knocked up, an' took me head in me hands. If that was Dotty sane, I'd rather have him dotty. It was a lot worse than the nights when he pinched the garden chair and the mat and the stained-glass angel for me to furnish a stable with.
"What with worry, and want of rest and sleep, and sheer funk, there were so many sounds and voices in my head that I didn't notice, for a minute or two, that Dotty's new mad voice had stopped. As soon as I noticed it I jumped up, and couldn't see Dotty anywhere. I thought he'd gone into the river and down with it. And then there came to me a new, cold, sudden terror—swift as they say things come to a drownin' man. You know what it would look like to come away from a place like that in the bush without yer mate!
"Perhaps it was the worry an' want of rest, and the guilty knowledge of me old criminal tendencies; but it was worse than all me old previous convictions put together, with a charge of housebreakin' an' manslaughter thrown in, and detectives standin' across the street lookin' as innercent as fourteen Chinamen outside a fantan an' opium joint. An' here, of all times, them lines of 'Gilrooney', the outback poet, came ringin' in me ears:
'Twas Murderin' Mick who killed his mate between
the dawn an' day;
He cut his throat from ear to ear, and left him where he lay.
'Twas Murderin' Mick that came to wear a queer white cap at
morn,
An' ne'er before in Goulburn Gaol was cap so lightly worn.
"I had a mad thought that I saw that cap, an' wondered how it would fit me. I even felt it over me ears, with an elastic-band under 'em—an' the band seemed to hurt more than the rope did. No, I don't want to wear a queer white cap at morn, or any other time, for that matter; and I don't think I'd wear it lightly, neither, for Dotty nor no one else—no matter how much he deserves it.
"But, just as I was sliding down the steep bank to the river—whether with an idea of savin' Dotty from drownin' an' me from ther gallows, or, failin' that, drownin' meself for the same reason, I don't know—but just then I seen a bunyip or something heave itself inter the mud, an' Dotty comes climbin' up the bank on three legs, with a fish in the other. He'd been down attending to the lines, and got a fish off one of 'em. Either his mad-sane fit had passed or it was all a dream.
"Dotty put the fish in an old kerosene-tin half-full of water that he kept for the purpose. He reckoned it was cruel to string 'em through the gills and mouth on a reed or string or piece of wire, and hang 'em from a branch or let 'em die slow in the dust and dirt. No—he kept 'em alive an' as happy as they could be till he was ready to clean 'em. Poor Dotty never knew how he got me in the gills sometimes.
"I turned in an' slept till the sun was up amongst the tree-trunks, bright an' white an' hot; but Dotty had rigged boughs to keep it off my face. He was cookin' breakfast when I woke; it was the smell of it that woke me. (Did yer ever smell bacon or chops cookiri' at the campfire in the mornin' when you was hungry?) Dotty had fish and ham, and last night's bread from the station cook. Mine was fried ham, and Dotty brought breakfast to me in bed in an old tin plate that he'd found and straightened and polished with ashes. He was just his same old good-natured idiotic self again. His old red cow and calf came to the edge of the bank and looked down at us—looked at Dotty in a mild, anxious, motherly sort of way, as if she thought he might have been a twin-calf that she'd forgot. Me she gave a last look of disgust and went away."
Previous Convictions thought a while. Then he said: "That last night on the river was enough for me, and I'd made up my mind to bring Dotty away from it, whether he was a stained angel or a stained devil or a moonstruck lunatic—whatever he was. We went to the station to say good-bye to the ratty cook and the good-natured station hand, and take back the old raincoats they'd lent us; but they wouldn't have 'em, and I'm glad they wouldn't, though they're a bit more load, for we'll want 'em on the Hay track this winter.
"I forgot to tell yer the men's quarters at Yanco are in the old homestead behind the mansion, an' the pint pots and bread and meat and sugar are slid out fer 'travellers' in the same old hospitable way on the big old cedar dinin'-room table, in the long old dinin'-room with its high panelled ceilin' an' wall and deep panelled doorways and winders, an' the cook standin' with his legs wide apart, an' his back to the big old-fashioned fireplace, presidin' an' beamin' like a prodigal father. He was short and stout, with a big apron, an' looked like a sea cook, an' he was ratty—like all station and shearers' cooks I'd ever seen. He gave me some poetry he'd wrote about old S'Sam and got printed, and some he'd made up about himself; and as much tucker as we'd like to carry; and so we went back to camp to roll up our swags.
"A lot of magpies come round and cursed us till Dotty threw out the rest of the meat for 'em, and they sung 'For He's a Jolly Good Feller' as we took the track.
"Before we struck the road Dotty called at a little old slab-and-iron cottage standin' by itself in a garden 'longside McCaughey's old main irrigation canal—all full of tall reeds now except for a narrow channel of clear water, and looking wonderfully fresh and green. An old Irish couple lived there, private and independent. They were old retainers, I suppose. They seemed to have seen Dotty before this trip—perhaps in one of his private peregrinations—and knew he was afflicted, for the old woman crossed herself, and the old man took off his hat. It looked as if he only took it off at other times when he went to bed, 'n' perhaps not then. And they told us of a short cut across the paddocks, an' pointed where to strike it. After we left them Dotty's old magpie caught us and come with us, and nagged at us from the top of every wire fence post for about a mile; but he took us the short cut all right, and gave us a good, hearty affectionate cursing at the end."
I had watched the Little Landlady climb the water-tower hill on her way to the township; and when I went to the front door Previous Convictions had already done his fade-in, as he did his fades-out, with his everlasting swag, whose drum-like shape and constant reappearance had puzzled me from the first. He couldn't have been afraid of Dotty "thieving" it, for Dotty had an idea that everything about the camp had already been thieved, and it would be merely silly to thieve them over again, seeing there was no place to take them to. But that was all soon to be explained.
Half-a-dozen Muscovy ducklings, at that stage when they really need three pairs of legs, came round the corner of the cottage to the front, followed by their big, old, generously-hackled mother-hen, in a great state of agitation. They made friends with Previous Convictions, who played seesaw with them and showed them flies to jump at, while the old hen did something between a "Blue Danube" waltz and a Highland fling, and fell over her feet. Presently the ducklings went round the corner to see dog Charley, and we heard their ridiculous and superfluous foster-mother in dangerous hysterics there. Charley, who wanted a sleep, "womped" at them, and they waddled away—just in time to save the old lady going clean out of her mind.
"Them ducks would have been right into Dotty's hands," reflected Previous Convictions; "he'd have got them to follow him to camp, an' carried 'em on the track somehow, an' brought 'em up an' educated 'em right to the stuffin' and bakin' stage. He'd ha' looked after 'em all right. There's his old hat showin' out from behind that tree along the channel there; we'd best not let them ducklings meander that way or you'll lose some of 'em. It would be just lovely," Previous went on, after a minute's think, "to have to take Dotty through the township with all his ducks waddlin' after him!
"But I like Muscovy ducks and Muscovy ducklings," said Previous. "Used to rear them once, about the stables and other places. An old Muscovy drake is the biggest two-legged brute and blackguard that never had his neck twisted; but I like Mrs Muscovy an' the kids. Other ducks are mischief-makers and scandalmongers. Whenever new poultry comes in you'll see common, ordinary ducks bobbin' their heads at each other, an gossipin', an' tellin' lies about the newcomer, same as humans. 'Oh, I knowed all about her before she came here. An' as for 'im'—an' that sorter thing.
"But Mrs Muscovy attends strictly to her own affairs. I had a old Muscovy duck once that had a nest under some bushes between the stable wall and the fence. When she come off her nest for tucker—bran and pollard—she'd waddle round to the back gate, an' if it happened to be shut she'd flap against the bars till she made me hear somehow. Sometimes I'd climb up an' peep through a high side window an' watch her goin' back on to her nest. She'd come round after awhile, an' up the side way, most mysterious like, squintin' to left an' right in case someone might be watchin' her unbeknownst, and pretendin' she was just goin' out to the front to see if the postman was comin'. But just when she got opposite her nest she'd turn sharp, at right angles, and, with a flick first of one foot an' then the other—that was to knock the dirt off—she'd be in under the bushes and on to her eggs that she'd left covered with down; an' no one would ever dream there was a nest there, much less a big Muscovy duck sittin' on it.
"When the little ducklings first break out of their shells they come wrigglin' home through the grass after their mother of an evening, just like a pretty little bright-yeller snake. Later on they're waddlers—like what yours is; an' so on up through the flapper an' the duck to the Sairey Gamp stage. The young drakelings mostly reach the stuffed and baked stage first, like young roosters—Dotty'll find the stuffin' all right, somewhere and somehow. But hens—well, one hen will dig up your garden, plants an' all, quicker'n you could do it yerself; an' if she gets into the kitchen, an you try to 'shoo' her out, she'll scream all round and through the place like a mad young female whirlwind, and go anywhere but out of the open window or door; and if there's anything valuable to break she'll break it. But if half-a-dozen ducks come into your place an' you tell 'em they've made a mistake, they'll apologise, cheerful-like, an' go out through the same hole they come in by, an' never do no damage at all. And like as not one'll come back during the night an' lay an' egg on the garden path for your breakfast to show there's no ill-feelin'. But you gotter get up early to beat the milkman to it.
"Still," said Previous philosophically, and as if he had perhaps done somebody an injustice, "no two two-legged pullets or hens ever act exactly alike or bring up their chickens just the same. I knowed an old hen that'd come into the kitchen an' git up on the dresser an' sit on the plate of breakfast eggs. You could lift her down an' put her outside, but she'd be there again as soon as your back was turned. She muster spent the best part of a year tryin' to hatch out the breakfast eggs. If she got a scare when a strange man or woman or cat or dog came to the kitchen-door, she'd tightrope round an' fly an' flop, an' get out somehow without shiftin' as much as a cup. So at last we left her there on a settin' of eggs, in a proper nest in a dark corner of a big old fashioned dresser; an' she brought up her chickens and took 'em home to the fowl-house, an' they all grew up. She wanted to lay on the dresser after that; but we was full up of her an' shut her up in the fowl-house. It was no good; she screeched an' screeched all night, just like a hysterical wife bein' held back from killin' her husband. (''Elp, neighbours; 'elp! 'E's ill-treatin' me agen!') An' she raked all the other hens' eggs out of the nest an' broke 'em; and in the mornin' she was dead.
"But to come back to your ducklings. Don't you ever feel sorry for a hen that's set on duck eggs? Look at the states of mind she must go through! (I know—I've got me previous convictions.) I suppose, if we'd follered 'em, we'd see your lot tryin' to make their old lady jump into the channel after 'em now; an' no doubt they bin doin' it all along—except when they wanted her for a blanket in cold weather. Ah, well, it's the way of the world!"
"We're goin' west to-night, Dotty an' me, along the Hay Canal"—it was Previous Convictions who broke the silence we'd fallen into—"so you won't see me termorrer nor yet the next day."
He paused for reply, but I knew too much to express either surprise or sorrow. Still I thought I might venture on: "Why don't you wait and start in the morning, Previous?"
"Well," he replied, "the weather's warm an' fine, and travellin' by moonlight seems to agree with Dotty—he's less restless in camp afterwards. Besides, there's some interest in wakin' up in a new camp an' seein' what the new country looks like by daylight."
"How about finding the way? Besides, there's snakes about yet, an' they might be in the new camp and not have time to get friendly with you."
"Findin' the way is easy enough," said Previous. "For a start we've got to go back six or seven miles on our old track, an' I've got the rest mapped out. And Dotty'd find the way if I missed it—all Dotty's sort can. As for snakes, you know very well we never think of snakes when we're campin', even in snake country, an' this isn't snake country—a snake couldn't get down into it unless he was a drill, with an Irish navvy drivin' him. You're on'y talkin' for the sake of talkin'."
Previous's reproof was called for; but I wanted to draw him out about snakes. It wasn't hard to do.
"Anyway, talkin' o' snakes," Previous proceeded, "an Australian snake is mostly a gentleman, an' we haven't any time for him, an' he hasn't any time for such as us." (I winced.) "You keep out of his track an' he'll keep out of yours. He takes his tucker clean an' alive, with painless dentistry, for he fascinates it first. But goannas now, they're just what they look like. There was a wreck off Gabi, and the Allans of Mallacoota Inlet heard of some bodies of sailors washed ashore on a beach a bit further down. It was terrible rough country, no roads, on'y cattle tracks: si old Dad Allan and his brother an' the eldest son took the bullock-sledge with two young workin' bullocks they called 'the bunyips' and scrambled through. An' when they got over the beach where the searfarin' bodies was, the sin sings out from the top of the point, 'Some of them's alive, Dad! Some of them's alive! I can see them movin'!' But when they climbed down to the beach they found that the big brutes of goannas had got at the bodies, an'—an' that's what made them bodies seem to move. The Allans shot every goanna they saw after that; and that's how I feel about 'em.
"But—to take the taste outer yer mouth—I was down on one of them beaches once, when me previous convictions had scarcely begun, showing a civil service Pommy round for th' 'commodation-house where I was handyman—and keepin' from bein' round meself. It was snake country all right—real black-with-red-brown-belly snake country. We was doin' a crawl off the beach, round a tussock hump, to see if there was any black duck in a fresh-water lagoon there, when we caught sight of a six-foot black snake about a dozen yards away, just gatherin' himself up for business. The Pommy he ups with his double-barrel breechloader—he was a good shot. But I says, 'Hold hard, Mister! He's in his own country an' on his own track an' we ain't. Just wait a bit an' see what he'll do.' And the Pommy—he was a good sort—he drops his gun; an' I'm blessed if that old snake didn't uncoil and stretch himself—I think he yawned—an' went, takin' it easy, over the opposite sandhill to his missus an' kids, or whatever business he had in hand. I could ha' sworn he waved his tail 'S'long!' while he was goin' over the top. 'If we'd ha' shot him,' I says to the Pommy, 'his old woman would have got us sure, either in camp ter-night or on the track.' An' the Pommy he says, 'Pom-me-word!'—and that's how I think the Pommies got their name.
"An' a carpet-snake is a gentleman, too, though he ain't poisonous, except when he's laid up in a rotten holler log all winter and not looked after his teeth. There was two ole maiden sisters in a house I was once gard'ner an' milkmaid an' pony-master to in North Sydney. They was ratty on animals—wouldn't drown a kitten an' they'd spoil the best dog that was ever pupped. There was a family named Ward that had a pet old Queensland carpet-snake named Jim James, about thirty foot long, that lived in a palin' an' wire-nettin' snake house they'd built for him. They fed him on sparrers mostly, but were hard put to it to find him grub. Well, th' old maidens' brother Jim come home to get ready to go to ther war and sent 'em away on a fortnight's holiday to give him a chance to fix up things. They had an' old cat that they must take; but she had half-a-dozen weaned, nearly half grown kittens that they couldn't take and wouldn't trust the brother to look after, so he spoke to the Wards next door and they said they'd look after the kittens. So the sisters packs up, an' hands the kittens, very carefully, one by one, over the fence an' went away happy. You see, they knowed nothin' about snakes an' their ideas of tucker.
"Well, the brother took the spare bed in a back room with me that night—we'd got chummy—and after we'd done smokin' an' pitchin', an' 'ad dropped off dead tired, ole Jim James broke out of his cage and come over the fence in the moonlight, an' in through an open window over Brother Jim's bunk. He'd come to thank him for the kittens, I suppose; but when he seen he was asleep he went under the bunk an' coiled himself up an' wenter sleep himself.
"About eight or nine o'clock in the morning there comes a rap-rap-tap at the front door. Jim gets up and goes out to see an' pay off the milk, but it was one of the Ward boys from next door, with his cap in his hand.
"'Please, Mister,' he says, 'have yer seen anything of our carpet? 'E's broke loose.'
"Jim remembered he'd felt, or dreamed he'd felt, something in in over him in the night, so he brings the boy in to see, and they finds Jim James under the bunk. I didn't like to interfere, so they took Jim James out the front door an' home yard by yard. And I heard our Jim say to the other Jim: 'Why, damn you, Jim James, if it had been larst night week you'd have give me a of a scare!' he says."
Previous got up and went to his swag and turned it on its side and had unbuckled the straps when we heard a joyous whoop from dog Charley at the side of the house.
"Go an' keep her back for a minute!" said Previous. "Send her after the ducks."
I went to the back and intercepted the Little Landlady; and, having drawn her attention to the alleged fact that the ducklings had taken the old hen into the back channel at the far corner of the paddock, I returned to Previous, who had his swag strapped again and up.
"I've altered me mind," he said. "You've kept me too late with your everlastin' interruptin'. I'll take Dotty back to the old house we was campin' in at Five Bough Swamp, an' make an early start for Hay in the mornin'."
I had hinted the night before to the Little Landlady that I'd heard that the woman across the back channel wanted to buy a setting of eggs; so she (the L.L.) fed the dogs, cats and fowls, and got me my breakfast in record time, and then charged the plank over the back channel and the wire-fence with the eggs in a peggy-bag, and when I went to the front Previous Convictions was haunting the lower verandah step like a half forgotten ghost of my boyhood days, which keeps coming near and fading back, to come ever nearer again as I grow older. And presently I heard a voice that seemed to come and go from that past.
"We're starting now," said Previous (and I started, too, for it sounded as if it referred to the funeral), "me and Dotty. There he is, behind a tree, as usual." Previous pointed along the road that ran at right angles to ours from in front of my cottage, away to nothing and Hay, as if it were the destination of the funeral; and I saw, showing from behind a tree, the hat and knees which, by the way, were all that I had ever seen of Dotty.
"Do you, well, to be blunt, do you want any money, Previous?" I asked.
"No," said Previous in his faded drawl and in nowise offended. "And, besides, you'll be wanting all you've got, by the look of things," (I could see no "look of things") "by the time you travel by moonlight, like me and Dotty are going to do tonight—and like most of your neighbours do, if all I hear is true. I save my money, and Dotty don't know what it's good for, so I have to save his when he earns it. I believe he's uneasy about me thinking so much of it and bothering about carrying the stuff on the track with me. I believe he thinks I'm going ratty over it, and, in fact, he hinted to that effect once as well as he could. I have to take care that Dotty don't thieve it from me and throw it in the river or somewhere some night when I ain't lookin'. But, if Dotty doesn't know what money is good for, I do—it's good for almost everything except what they say it's good for.
"Now, I don't smoke, and that saves a lot," and Previous glanced along the verandah-floor, where were scattered half-smoked pipefuls of the most expensive tobacco to be got in Leeton. "And I don't drink"—here Previous blinked meaningly at a half-filled demijohn of beer from Narrandera under the front-room table, and badly hidden by the tablecloth. "So I save not only the cost of the beer, but what the drinking of it costs—and there is a big difference between the two. Look there."
Previous stood up on the step, and I looked. Dotty had stood up and moved into the centre of the road. He had always sat hunched up, crouched low, and I now saw that he was a big man. He held his hands, thumbs joined and palms forward, high and a little back above his head. Then he brought them down without appearing to bend his knees, till his finger tips touched his toes. Then he did some sort of a double shuffle, and so on, the same over again. Next he swung first one arm and then the other in circles and so on, all over again. Then he did a trot round, with his fists on his chest, but never far from the tree.
"What on earth is he doing?" I asked.
"Can't you see?" said Previous with a touch of selfishness. "He's training for a fight. Sometimes he does it for an hour every morning for days together. When he gets at it in or near townships we pass through, I tell the local gawks he gathers round him that he's training for a big fight in a new and natural way with a rough life on a long straight track; and some of 'em want to feel Dotty and take him in and shout for him, and the big 'uns with beer inside, who fancy they can use their hands, try to get the money put up and have a go with him. Yes, I could make money on Dotty. I told you about the ex-senior-sergeant in North Sydney telling me that Dotty was a first-class amateur boxer, and now I'm always afraid of him getting one of those flashes of sanity—you know what I mean" (here Previous cocked a most felonious eye up at me) "and taking on one of those big gawks. God help the man that ruined Dotty's life—and a big brute of a blond he was—if Dotty ever meets him and remembers with the shock of the sight of him, and goes in for the fight he's been training for off and on these six or seven years. But then," he reflected, the reflection of a ruined man himself, "when you meet those sort of men afterwards they're generally so wrecked and done for that they're a shock for you instead of you being a shock for them, and you feel more inclined to pity the abject lice than to kill 'em. I meself—but never mind that.
"Never mind Dotty; he'll have a rest presently, and, anyway, he wouldn't surprise your neighbours if they did see him. They've been too much stupefied by the results of Royal Commissions and them sort of things to be surprised at anything—and waitin'—waitin'—waitin'. God, how we waited then—you and me!"
And presently the voice of Previous Convictions went on as of old. You couldn't call it a drawl—I don't know what to call it. I haven't got a note of music in me—nor the other thing.
"Do you know what I was talking about just now?" asked Previous, half-persuasively, half-dreamily; and I didn't see the trap.
"Yes, Previous," I said, "perfectly," still a little dazed.
Previous faded into an upright position.
"I didn't know you was a liar before, 'Arry," he said, "because I don't know what I was talking about myself." And perhaps he didn't. Hypnotism or—what? He had dropped back naturally into the vernacular; but this was the first time he had been so familiar. He was on the second step, and now he stepped down and went to his swag. He touched it over onto its side with his lower leg, unbuckled and cast off the harness and gave the swag a practised touch with his foot that sent it unrolling to its full length; and there it lay, a bush or outback camp-bed ready made but for the gum-leaves or mulga branches under it. From under the little pile of best clothes, spare shirt and so on; and in the heart of the swag, the neatly-sewn little canvas "pocket" containing letters and portraits, the relics of his ruined life (why do men carry these things about with them?), and the whole forming a pillow at night for the world-tired head. From under his pillow Previous dexterously slipped a beautifully clean and neatly-made little rope-yarn doormat, something less than two feet long by eighteen inches wide, and fully two inches thick in all. And this accounted for the dumpiness of his swag.
"I made that coming out," said Previous. ("You remember when we were 'on mats' in Darlinghurst Gaol? It saved us from goin' silly.) I used the top wire of fences and saplings for frames and finished off on the floors and tables I rigged up in old houses we camped in. I had a sail-needle and plenty of twine, and so I made the sail-needle blood-hot in the charcoal and beat it out straight and narrower for a mat-needle. Dotty borrowed all the rope I wanted and unravelled it, and did most of the plaiting. He borrowed a pair of shears to trim off. He'd been 'on mats' himself; you remember I told you. The best piece of rope he borrowed was nearly new, from a shallow well at a pub—at least, I seen the yardman fishing for it in the bottom of the well with a piece of clothesline, and bent fencing-wire while we was passing, comin' away."
In the centre of the mat were the letters I.B. (the Little Landlady's initials) in some dark-red or brown colour. "I'll tell you about that some other time—no, I'll tell you now," said Previous. "We don't know anything about some other time. There was an old Horse that belonged to a selection back on the back track that got his leg smashed by the limb of a burnt out tree falling on it while he was spread out dreaming of the Cups he didn't win; and he had to be killed. I shot him, in fact, with an old carbine the selector had, for no one else had the heart to do it—the old moke had been in the family so long. So, while they were hiding behind the house and shed so as not to see the last kicks of old Geddup, I got a funny fancy. You know how Mrs Byrnes was always ratty on animals—bringing mangy mongrels and cats in from the street to soap and sulphur and feed them? (You used to get mad about it.) And how she'd interfere about a jibbing rogue-horse being touched up, and make the innocent driver jumpin' mad, too? Well, I dipped a bundle of sail-twine in this horse's blood, and that's how I got the colour of those letters on that mat. They won't wear out till the mat wears out."
He lifted the mat and came right up the steps on to the verandah for the first time. He laid the mat down in front of the door, reverently, it seemed; and it seemed to me that he bowed the shade of an old fashioned bow.
"Now," he said, "that will pay Mrs Byrnes for some of the cigarettes I thieved from her when she had the refreshment rooms, an' help pay her for her kindness to us half grown hooligans afterwards." (Previous had hypnotised himself into the fancy that he had been a mixture of the Artful Dodger and Fagin in his young days, whereas the Tom Pinch characters were more in poor little Previous Convictions's line. Indeed, according to the Little Landlady, she had experienced help and kindness, and some real protection from real larrikins of the old "Push" Previous had belonged to.)
He stepped down to the gravel walk, rolled up his swag and harnessed it to the last bucklehole; slung it up and the tucker bag, and made a start. I walked with him to the gate. He gave me a hand as he might offer his defensive shoulder, but I felt, for the first time, a grip that sent a thrill through me, and a feeling that it was a hand that could strike out strongly to save the drowning, lift a bar bully off his feet and lay him quiet on his back on the floor of the bar where he deserved to be—a hand that could guide a man-killer horse through storm and rough country on a life or death ride—or a ride for the sake of the Family Name—as I, the writer, did, ah, many years ago!
Previous picked up Dotty, who mounted a swag that seemed ridiculously small considering his bulk and thieving propensities, and they went on the long road to the Hay Canal, across which the red dust storms were still prevalent, Previous's swag seeming more like a swag now that it was lightened of its little load of reparation and gratitude; and Previous's shoulders bearing, I hope, a lighter load of previous convictions.
The last big dust storm closed behind them like side drawn curtains on a stage, opened again (as for applause), closed and opened, and closed yet a third time, a heavy, dull-red curtain that opened to reveal them no more that year.
I climbed on to my verandah and dropped into a canvas deck-chair, dead tired and comfortably and happily mined for the fifteenth or twentieth time; and the Little Landlady brought out a cup of tea and some bread and butter and put them on a neat little deal table that I'd finished and stained that morning and wanted to admire at intervals till dark, in my hours of leisure and insolvency—which were mainly because of demijohns of beer from Narrandera (a pretty but sinful township outside the prohibition area), and, in winter, bottles of good prohibition whisky bought from our favourite sly-grogress—and also good fishing on the Murrumbidgee, behind old Sam McCaughey's mansion—all shared with my old mate, Jim Grahame. The sly-grogress might bright her wholesome face and generous figure into my disrespectful yarns later on. There was a day and a night of trouble when sly grog wasn't needed, but the big heart and practical, motherly commonsense (also the wide knowledge of police methods and ways of circumventing them) of the woman who sold it was wanted very sorely indeed. And whatever gods happened to be around sent her along in due course.
And so I sat and smoked. The weather was still cool, and the retreating first red dust storm of summer might have been likened to a distant hill of reddened snow, touched by a rising or setting sun. From round by the chimney at the end of the house I heard the thudding of dog Charley's hind elbow while he was in earnest quest of the first flea of summer. Along one end of my front verandah was a vine of "winter roses"—a small red rose of the baby kind. The last one was close to the end verandah post, and she seemed to be peeping out fearfully at the signs of the coming summer that was to kill her and fade her away like Previous Convictions. At the quick thought of the name—and it sounded sharp and loud—a something (you have all felt it at times) from the hair of my head to the balls of my toes, with a wrenching jerk in it, told me that something, and a change, was coming. And coming now.
The little man turned briskly in through the front gate, and the big man followed him. Previous Convictions was a changed man. He had the manner of a small building contractor (say in the repairing line) who had come, a little late, to start his men on a new job; but only to get them off his mind to make room for more important business. His whole manner indicated that he had opened an account in the Bank of Determination. He came right up the steps and on to the verandah, and left Dotty standing at the lower step. Previous shook hands quickly, as though it was a most unnecessary performance and rather silly, but had to be done with.
"Mister Lawrence," he said, "this is Mr Dotterell—or 'Dotty'—I told you all about; an' now yer introduced. You ain't seen him before, except his hat. Now I'm going in to see Mrs Byrnes—you two can get acquainted." He went to the door, and I heard the Little Landlady's squeal of pleasure: "Oh! Mr—Mr Smith! Come in!" So Smith was Previous's real name, and the hesitation was because she had last known him as a boy, or young man, and was used to addressing him by his Christian name. The pleasure was because no one ever visited us except Jim, and, as the lady of the Sub-Inspector for Sanitary Pans had not yet sent in her card, we expected no one else.
Dotty (or Mr Dotterell) came up on to the verandah and shook hands comfortably. I indicated a home-made stool by my side, and he christened it with his weight. It didn't give a sigh, and I felt abstractedly satisfied with my handiwork. It was my turn to be vague and feel shadowy. Dotty was, as I hinted, a big man. He had taken off his famous (in these stories) hat; but, as he came up the garden path I had noticed the hat was turned up in front, instead of behind, something after the Napoleon fashion; so I had a good view of his face at all angles. It might have been that of Napoleon in a kindly, humorous mood—if Napoleon had one. Dotty didn't have a low nothing-to-speak-of forehead, as I had fancied at first from glimpses of the tilt of his hat from behind trees. It was high and wide and naturally bald well back, and his hair was light or fair. He had light blue eyes with the expression of a contented, easygoing fat boy and a touch of the quizzical or whimsical about them. And Dotty had dimples in his cheeks! On the whole, he had that lovable expression of a bushman admiring his mate making a giddy angora of himself in a friend's house or on a pub verandah. To sum up, his whole manner and bulk, as I noted later, sitting down or rising up or looming in or out of a door, suggested nothing but tolerant good nature towards the works of man—or whatever gods there be.
"Well, Mr Lawrence," said Dotty, "I've heard a lot about you from Preve, and"—with his tolerant smile—"I suppose he's told you all about me." The voices of Previous and the Little Landlady went on in the front room.
The Little Landlady: "And to think...after all these years...your father...and did I forget to thank you for the doormat!" (She had already thanked him a couple of times); but how did she know who made it! I often wonder how much she really does know.
The voices faded back into the kitchen—I suppose the move was engineered by Previous for some reason. And Dotty (I must stick to the old name) went on:
"A year or two ago I got a knock from a truck in the shunting yards at Goulburn, and when I came out of the hospital I'd—well, I'd lost my memory. Then Preve got hold of me and brought me out here on the Hay line, thinking it might do me some good. I got another shake up at Hay, stopping a runaway horse in a sulky (so Preve says), and when I came out of hospital there my memory was all right again." Here a momentary shade half shifted the smile that wouldn't come off. "The only things that bother me are the dates in the newspapers; but the doctors say that that will wear off—and, now, I seem to have seen you before—like sometimes I seem to have seen other things before. But, bother it! The doctors said I mustn't bother over those silly things or I'll lose my memory again." And Dotty started to talk about the soil and fruit trees on my block.
Dog Charley, being loosened against orders, came round, and, sqatting down in front of Dotty, laid his chin firmly and decidedly on his knee, and looked up at him with his brown eyes till a big hand came round on to his head. But Charley, in spite of his "big, faithful brown eyes", was a fraud, a humbug and a felon. He was a fowl-killer and a horse-chaser. He'd run the milkboy and my own personal friends off the block; if they had "fresh" or "skittish" horses, he'd heel 'em for them. And he'd welcome the debt collector, and tell him not to go; that I wasn't out, that I was somewhere round at the back and would be pleased to see him; and he'd lead him round. After a while Charley went for his run, and to see what mischief he could get up to. And I went on studying Dotty.
Dotty spoke very well; but that goes for nothing in the Bush or Outback. I've known sons to speak with no trace of the vernacular, who had had no education except in a bush school, where the young teacher often said "Don't do that no more", and whose father and mother said "seen" for see, and never sounded the "g" in words that end in "ing". Call it "throw-back", or perhaps working associations with an educated mate or mates who hadn't fallen into the vernacular yet. Dotty's favourite expressions were: "Now that you come to look at it", and "As the saying is"—or "goes"—and "He's all right".
While Dotty was on soil and fruit trees I was thinking back (or stationary). At last I had a brain wave. He had only regained his memory up to the date of the accident in the shunting yards, six or seven years since, and thought that that was only a year or two back. That accounted for his reference to the "dates in the newspapers" which "bothered him", and made me fear that he was "not right" yet; and his reference to seeming to remember and "see things". Otherwise I'd never have dreamed of thinking that he was not cheerfully and permanently sane.
Just then the Little Landlady and Previous came round the corner to the front; he'd been out pretending to take an interest in her infernal hens. Dotty was introduced and loomed above her in a protecting way; like as if she was a chicken, or a flower, he might tread on.
"Dotterell!" said Previous, with emphasis on the name. "Go with Mrs Byrnes, and she'll show you round", and they went round to the back.
Previous sat down on the stool and leaned towards me and spoke quickly and even excitedly—for him.
"Yes. Dotty's all right; but he only remembers back to where he got the bump in the shunting yards an' went dotty. He don't know he's a married man with a grown-up married daughter—and maybe he's a grandfather—and I don't want him to remember. I'd rather have him the old Dotty. The doctor in Hay thought his talk about dates was a new thing that came of his new shake up; 'n' would pass off like any other new thing. I didn't tell 'em any different. It might have put someone on the track of who I was—or both of us, for that matter—and me old previous convictions and Dotty's madness. It wouldn't have done us any good. Doctors can't be expected to know everything. They seldom know what's behind—one of them told me that that's the worst of it in some cases they're trying to save. They don't know what's behind. The day we got into Hay there was a horse bolted with a sulky. There was a woman with two children in it. The woman threw the children out as they came along. The horse come straight for our camp on the river bank and then swerved amongst the saplings, and then 'Dotty' got it. It was all over in no time. In the first flash I had a mad, silly idea that Dotty was going to thieve the horse and sulky and woman and all. She'd have been the frozen limit all right. If he'd started thievin' women and bringin' 'em to camp, I'd have had to leave him. Ther woman jumped clear and run back to the kids; but Dotty got mixed up with the horse and sulky and a sapling, and, I think, an end of a shaft that had got broken swung round and gave him a clip on the head; and that's what laid him out. The horse went away and got the other shaft on one side of another sapling and himself on the other, and then he gave it up and stood there looking surprised. By the time I'd got Dotty on his back, with a swag under his head, and got some water from the river and a towel from my swag, the woman had come back with her husband and kids, and a lot of others. The kids hadn't been hurt a scratch—but them sort of things are always happening in the bush. The woman was a big, bony woman—a regular bushwoman, and her husband a little, mild man. She went for him first because there hadn't been room for him in the sulky, what with the kids and groceries and things. She wanted to know who he thought was going to pay for the broken shaft. He'd been going to have a lift home with a neighbour, and he looked as if he was sorry he hadn't gone sooner. Then this woman nagged the kids a bit and gave one of 'em a clip—for getting his pants torn, I s'pose. Then she turned her attention to Dotty—and she looked as if she'd half-a-mind to give him a clout, too, to bring him to his senses. When she saw that he wasn't in a hurry to come to, she made 'em put him into a cart that was there and told her husband to get up and hold his head—in case Dotty might bolt too, perhaps; and then she put the children up and went ahead, and after she'd straightened up her hair and hat a bit, she caught hold of the front of end of a big, bony horse that was in the cart and led him off to the hospital or doctor's or somewhere. Someone said that that horse had been asleep for years. I s'pose she knowed where she was goin'. I heard her say that all men were 'sich —— fools' (she said the full word).
"She must have made up her mind to stay in town for the night with her sister or someone—those sort of bushwomen all have sisters, but they're mostly smaller and milder and more good lookin'—for she sent her husband round to the hospital once or twice to find out how Dotty was. And, in the coil of the evening, after Dotty had come to whatever senses he had, she came round herself, with some fruit of some sort and three or four big new handkerchieves from the store and a big blue workman's shirt with a collar on—like the likes of us used to wear in gaol, or the reception house. Those are the sort of things you need in hospital. She was a hard, practical woman, this one was. She asked Dotty if there was anything more he wanted in a tone of voice like she might say, 'Anything more while the shop's open?' but, of course she didn't mean it that way at all. She stood up and hovered over Dotty a bit, and then she sat down again as if she was too tired to go yet. She had a long, gaunt, bony face, something after the style of the old cart horse she'd led, and tired, patient, red-brown eyes like his too. Dotty might have reminded her of a brother, or someone belonging to her who had died long ago, for I saw three or four big rusty-looking tears roll down her long cheeks and heard 'em drop on the floor. But she might only have been thinking of some milkers she'd lost last drought—you know what that's like?—or she could have sent Dotty fresh milk on horseback every morning."
I nodded.
"I turned to the window and looked out for a while," Previous Convictions went on, "and when I turned back again she was blundering out of the hospital, half blind like—as if she'd just left a dead child there. But she said to one of the nurses, sharp like, 'Which is the way out of this?' I wondered how many years it was since she'd cried last."
I was back in a sorrowful past, and it seemed as if a Shade stood by and over me. The shade of a tall woman. Previous had drawn the picture of one of our mothers. His silence roused me.
"And what next, Previous?" I asked.
"Oh, I thought you was dead!" said Previous softly. "Well, when Dotty came out of hospital he got a convenient job about the irrigation works on the Hay Canal for being a hero, and I got a job about the principal pub and stables for being a teetotaller—and looking like an idiot. Idiots always get them sort of jobs in country towns; but they're mostly good natured in a way, and sometimes they say wise things—like Sam Weller. You see, I know Dickens, an' a few other things besides. Well, Dotty got pretty popular with the men. He was a good workman 'n' mate, and he was a fair ventriloquist, and could tell a yarn; besides, he showed them tricks in scrappin' an' wrestlin' that they'd forgotten all about—or never heard of. We had a room at the end of the stables where I could keep an eye on him in case he showed signs of tryin' to remember things that I didn't want him to remember.
"Well, one mornin' I was scrubbin' out the passage when a big, seedy-looking, fair-haired, blue-eyed pub-loafer from nowhere stumbled over my bucket and started on to me. I looked up and seen I could manage him easy enough, so I didn't take much notice of his mag. He was one of those big, seedy loafers with a lot of useless fat in folds that never looks healthy, no matter what the? do with themselves, and their clothes always look greenery yellowy. One of those sort that never can look tidy when they're down, and their skins can never look clean; whereas a decent little man can always manage to look clean and tidy, no matter how shabby and hard up he is. They look and sound unhealthy, and I suppose they're rotten inside and in their minds. He was flabby and soft as mud, and his legs looked too small and wobbly for his big ugly body. He seemed to have no stern to speak of. He had the ugliest scar I'd ever seen down the middle of his left cheek as if some woman had hit him with the blunt blade of a tomahawk and shifted the outer half of that cheek further west and down on to his jaw. She'd made an untidy job of it, like an amateur butcher; so the doctors couldn't sew it up properly. He was still blundering over me and trying the bully (I knew him for a coward from the first) while I was mopping up the water when Dotty himself appeared at the back door. He'd come across from the channel behind to get a cup of tea in the kitchen. He was all right there. Dotty stood awhile leaning against the doorpost and looked on and listened. Then the old, good-humoured smile slipped from his face, and there was another face there. He came into the passage and touched the big, fat pub-loafer on the shoulder, and when he turned round Dotty jerked his thumb towards the bar. The loafer nodded, quick for him, and started to blunder in at once. He thought Dotty wanted him to have a drink. I looked in to see what would happen. There was a good few chaps in the bar. The loafer-bully didn't wait for Dotty—in case he might change his mind, I suppose. He lumbered right across the floor and breasted the bar—or, rather, bellied it. Dotty walked after him and put a hand on his shoulder and swung him round, so the? were face to face. I saw the big loafer go limp all of a sudden, like a poleaxed bullock. Then his face seemed to turn greeny white. Dotty put the other hand on the other shoulder and looked at him, reflective like. Then Dotty took that hand away and touched a pimple on the loafer's nose and looked at his finger afterwards. He took that bar-bummer's chin between his thumb and forefinger and looked at his teeth. It was easy, because the bounder's jaw had fallen already as far as it could fall. Dotty told him, friendly like, that his teeth needed attendin' to. Then he swung him round and had a good look at the back of his neck. Then he seemed to lose patience with him:—
"'You oughter wash behind your ears,' says Dotty. 'They look as if they haven't been attended to since Christmas,' Dotty sez. An' Dotty walked him to the door and gave him a boost with his knee and a shove with his hands at the same time that sent him stumbling right over the verandah edge and the gutter to the water-trough, where he fetched up, with his spindle legs at their widest apart, like a puppet's, or wooden doll's; and his hands wide apart, too, holding on to the edge of the trough and staring down—as if he was seeing things in the water. They were dirty things, I reckon now. Then he moved along to the hose-rail and threw up—he was very sick. When I looked again his ridiculous little bandy legs was takin' him off in the direction of the railway station at a great rate. You'd never have thought they could have done it.
"Maggie, the fair, what they call 'blonde' barmaid, from Sydney, called Dotty over to the bar. 'Come here, Mr Dotterell!' she said. 'I want yer.' (It was a name I'd made for him, like he christened me 'Mylott'—an' it is my lot too.) And when she found he wouldn't have even a lemonade, she reached her arms out and pulled his head down and kissed him—and they all clapped hands, and those that was sittin' down they stamped on the floor. Then Maggie went red as fire, and Dotty run against the passage door jamb and went out with a face redder'n Maggie's. But Dotty went to our room and got his towel, and went to the tank stand where there was tin dishes and soap, and washed his hands and face before he went back to work. He dusted his knee, too. But I've got nothing against Maggie.
"And now comes the funny part of it. I saw the fat crook on the railway station next day, standing just inside the doorway of the station master's office and looking left and right, as if the police was after him. As soon as the train backed up, he lumbered to a second class carriage, pulled the door open, and stumbled in. The last I seen of him was his damaged pig's cheek showing round the window frame as the train went. He'd got a ticket somehow—perhaps the boys made a collection to get rid of him—or the police got him a ticket. (But I found out yesterday he went no further than here.) And, later on, I got his real name from some of them, and remembered his description, and it all dawned on me. He was the man that Dotty's wife had carried on with, and that ruined Dotty's life! And Dotty didn't recognise him—thank the Lord his new memory skipped that part. But he'd recognised Dotty when Dotty swung him round first time in the bar, and that accounted for his fright. I think there is a God."
Charley, the dog, came round and sat down in front of Previous and planted his chin firmly on his knee and regarded him gravely—as if he was wondering if Previous was telling the truth about Dotty or only lying for his sake.
"I missed Dotty after tea, and when I went to our stable room I found him sitting on the bunk with his head in his hands. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was 'trying to remember a face'. It turned me cold. All my previous convictions and all Dotty's temporary insanity peered in at me from the moonlight through every crack in the slabs of the stable. I went out and through into the bar; all the fellows standing and sitting about outside in the moonlight might have been plainclothes police from Sydney, come by today's train, it seemed to me. I took Dotty a pint of beer and made him drink it and get into his bunk. He was tired and in splendid health, and not used to beer, so it sent him to sleep, and he was all right in the morning.
"But I saw that Dotty was due for a change. He got a good letter from his boss to the manager here and I got a first class recommendation from my boss at the pub (he didn't mention the pub—he said I'd been connected with some private irrigation experiment of his), and a letter from Maggie to her brother in Sydney, who was a policeman, in case I ever got into trouble. I wondered how much she knew. You never know how much a woman knows. And Maggie got all wet with tears; I heard 'em fallin' like kangaroo shot behind the bar. I reckon they were as genuine as the big, bony bushwoman's—and a lot cleaner and clearer than bucketsful that our wives and widows and daughters weep. And one of the chaps got wild—or pretended to—because she cried into his beer. She only emptied it out and filled it again, cluckin' and gaspin' and sobbin' and snappin' at the chaps about nothin' we could see. No, I've got nothing against Maggie.
"And one of the chaps got a pretty fair clout from his mate for starting to take up a collection for Dotty's widders and orphans—wherever they was. His mate said it served him right for acting the goat. We got quite a send-off at the station, and bags of fruit and tobacco and cigarettes enough to last us three months. Poor Maggie wasn't there. I suppose she couldn't get herself dried up in time; but she sent a message and a shirt she'd washed and forgot to give to Dotty. They cheered us off. I suppose you know the big breath of relief you draw at getting away from somewhere with nothing to worry about and all your things aboard? Somehow that shirt completed my content.
"We got here the day before yesterday, but I waited before I came round. We ran into luck straight away. I got put on at the Government stables over there, where they wanted a man. I'll be a horse-master yet. An' Dotty got a job cutting out reeds and weeds and Bathurst burrs on the channels. I'd made up my mind in Hay never to be homeless again, and so I bought a good tent and fly, and we've got a comfortable camp over there amongst the pines in the vacant ground. I heard we've got to pay seven-and-six a week rent, but I don't know what that's for, unless it's for the trees and fresh air; the grounds not fit for anything, unless it's to stand on. But the screw is good enough, and the channels bring us all the firewood we want—plenty of bits of board and boxes. I suppose the school-kids throw them in. Boys must throw something into water if they have to walk two miles to it. Some good timber, too, that I'll make into bunks and a camp-table and shelves with later on. Plenty of good straw from the stables...I wonder where Mrs Byrnes and Dotty are? Oh! here they come."
The Little Landlady and "Mr Dotterell" came round by the end of the cottage and on to the verandah, and I could tell by scraps of their conversation what had kept them so long. Dotty: "Well, Mrs Byrnes, there's one thing about those white Leghorns, they—"
The Little Landlady (the 'th repetition, I suppose): "Oh Mr Dotterell, did I tell you I got that setting of eggs sent all the way from my sister-in-law at Windsor—and every egg—"
She asked Dotty to come into the kitchen and sit down while she made tea, and, ignoring a polite protest from Previous, she went through. After a while Previous remarked to me that the fowl talk was still going on in the kitchen.
Next Dotty came out with tea and sandwiches on a tray and put it on the table and went back for the other chair and a box; and we all had tea comfortably and happily together on the verandah. When she took the tea-things in I got out my pipe, and so did Dotty, somewhat to my surprise. I'd fancied he'd always been a non-smoker.
"Yes," he said, "I started smoking again in hospital. I'd left it off in the shunting yard. The doctors encouraged it."
Daylight was dying. Dotty had slipped down into his old place on the verandah steps, perhaps because it was cooler there on account of the draught under the house, and he seemed to have partly faded back into his old vagueness. He had his head down and his defensive shoulder up; and, when he let that down he was unsubstantially smoking a short clay pipe. Both pipe and smoker seemed dimly of the past. Perhaps he smoked to please Dotty, or to keep him company—lest he'd remember. A smoker, when he leaves his pipe, must be troubled deeply indeed.
Once I half-noticed Dotty get up and move along to the end of the verandah post, and stand there, a little Shade looking at the rose. When we had seen them off and turned back I noticed that the little rose, which should have been peeping redly at the afterglow from behind the verandah post, was gone; and it gave me sudden uneasiness and sharp apprehension—on Dotty's account.
I mentioned the matter delicately to Previous afterwards.
"No, Dotty didn't thieve it," he said with conviction. "I asked him, too, to test him like, and his face went nearly like it went that time in the Hay pub. I half thought, for a minute, he might clout me. He wanted to know if I thought he was a sneak-thief—let 'lone a last flower from the best little woman he ever came across. So I thieved the rose."
"You! Previous!" I said.
"Yes." Then he explained: "The rose would have died, anyhow—and—and I wanted something to remind me of her when I was at work, an' keep me memory from other things. I kept it in a tin of water in a cool corner of the stables; in case Dotty might see it and take it back to her with a romantic 'rat'. And, when it went off colour, I dried it, and I've got it in a japanned tin match-box now...I think I must be going dotty meself."
I slept on the verandah, covered up warm; and, that first night, when it got chilly, I saw a softwood fire start up, over there amongst the trees, an' shine out, with a blue tint to clear it, like a star of Hope and Peace.
END OF "PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS"
Henry Laswon wrote a letter to the editor of the Bulletin which appeared in the magazine on 9 June 1921:
Dear Bulletin
It takes something to drag a letter or even jolt a telegram of explanation out of me; but, on commencing to read that last yarn of mine, "Previous and S'Samuel", I got a jolt myself; and I must explain it, if only for the sake of some old fruit growing mates of mine. I made Previous Convictions see a bloke pruning my fruit trees somewhere before Easter, according to the chronological order of the stories. Actually that incident occurred late in winter, when Previous and Dotty had come back from their trip to Hay; and it was only that confirmed casualness of mine which turned that incident into this story. The explanation may not seem necessary, but there are "critics" like the one who spent a lot of his valueless time finding out that there was no moon in those parts on the night Sir John Moore was buried. And such nuisances succeed in giving pain to a writer's friends and creating disturbances in their families.—Henry Lawson
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