Children of the Bush

“LORD DOUGLAS”

“They hold him true, who’s true to one,
However false he be—”
The Rouseabout of Rouseabouts.

The Imperial Hotel was rather an unfortunate name for an out-back town pub, for out back is the stronghold of Australian democracy; it was the out-back vote and influence that brought about “One Man One Vote,” “Payment of Members,” and most of the democratic legislation of late years, and from out back came the overwhelming vote in favour of Australian as Imperial Federation.

The name Royal Hotel is as familiar as that of the Railway Hotel, and passes unnoticed and ungrowled at, even by bush republicans. The Royal Hotel at Bourke was kept by an Irishman, one O’Donohoo, who was Union to the backbone, loudly in favour of “Australia for the Australians,” and, of course, against even the democratic New South Wales Government of the time. He went round town all one St Patrick’s morning with a bunch of green ribbon fastened to his coat-tail with a large fish-hook, and wasn’t aware of the fact till he sat down on the point of it. But that’s got nothing to do with it.

The Imperial Hotel at Bourke was unpopular from the first. It was said that the very existence of the house was the result of a swindle. It had been built with money borrowed on certain allotments in the centre of the town and on the understanding that it should be built on the mortgaged land, whereas it was erected on a free allotment. Which fact was discovered, greatly to its surprise, by the building society when it came to foreclose on the allotments some years later. While the building was being erected the Bourke people understood, in a vague way, that it was to be a convent (perhaps the building society thought so, too), and when certain ornaments in brick and cement in the shape of a bishop’s mitre were placed over the corners of the walls the question seemed decided. But when the place was finished a bar was fitted up, and up went the sign, to the disgust of the other publicans, who didn’t know a licence had been taken out—for licensing didn’t go by local option in those days. It was rumoured that the place belonged to, and the whole business was engineered by, a priest. And priests are men of the world.

The Imperial Hotel was patronized by the pastoralists, the civil servants, the bank manager and clerks—all the scrub aristocracy; it was the headquarters of the Pastoralists’ Union in Bourke; a barracks for blacklegs brought up from Sydney to take the place of Union shearers on strike; and the new Governor, on his inevitable visit to Bourke, was banqueted at the Imperial Hotel. The editor of the local “capitalistic rag” stayed there; the pastoralists’ member was elected mostly by dark ways and means devised at the Imperial Hotel, and one of its managers had stood as a dummy candidate to split the Labour vote; the management of the hotel was his reward. In short, it was there that most of the plots were hatched to circumvent Freedom, and put away or deliver into the clutches of law and order certain sons of Light and Liberty who believed in converting blacklegs into jellies by force of fists when bribes, gentle persuasion and pure Australian language failed to convert them to clean Unionism. The Imperial Hotel was called the “Squatters’ Pub,” the “Scabbery,” and other and more expressive names.

The hotel became still more unpopular after Percy Douglas had managed it for a while. He was an avowed enemy of Labour Unionists. He employed Chinese cooks, and that in the height of the anti-Chinese agitation in Australia, and he was known to have kindly feelings towards the Afghans who, with their camels, were running white carriers off the roads. If an excited Unionist called a man a “blackleg” or “scab” in the Imperial bar he was run out—sometimes with great difficulty, and occasionally as far as the lock-up.

Percy Douglas was a fine-looking man, “wid a chest on him an’ well hung—a fine fee-gure of a man,” as O’Donohoo pronounced it. He was tall and erect, he dressed well, wore small side-whiskers, had an eagle nose, and looked like an aristocrat. Like many of his type, who start sometimes as billiard-markers and suddenly become hotel managers in Australia, nothing was known of his past. Jack Mitchell reckoned, by the way he treated his employees and spoke to workmen, that he was the educated son of an English farmer—gone wrong and sent out to Australia. Someone called him “Lord Douglas,” and the nickname caught on.

He made himself well hated. He got One-eyed Bogan “three months’ hard” for taking a bottle of whisky off the Imperial bar counter because he (Bogan) was drunk and thirsty and had knocked down his cheque, and because there was no one minding the bar at the moment.

Lord Douglas dismissed the barmaid, and, as she was leaving, he had her boxes searched and gave her in charge for stealing certain articles belonging to the hotel. The chaps subscribed to defend the case, and subsequently put a few pounds together for the girl. She proved her gratitude by bringing a charge of a baby against one of the chaps—but that was only one of the little ways of the world, as Mitchell said. She joined a Chinese camp later on.

Lord Douglas employed a carpenter to do some work about the hotel, and because the carpenter left before the job was finished, Lord Douglas locked his tools in an outhouse and refused to give them up; and when the carpenter, with the spirit of an Australian workman, broke the padlock and removed his tool-chest, the landlord gave him in charge for breaking and entering. The chaps defended the case and won it, and hated Lord Douglas as much as if he were their elder brother. Mitchell was the only one to put in a word for him.

“I’ve been puzzling it out,” said Mitchell, as he sat nursing his best leg in the Union Office, “and, as far as I can see, it all amounts to this—we’re all mistaken in Lord Douglas. We don’t know the man. He’s all right. We don’t understand him. He’s really a sensitive, good-hearted man who’s been shoved a bit off the track by the world. It’s the world’s fault—he’s not to blame. You see, when he was a youngster he was the most good-natured kid in the school; he was always soft, and, consequently, he was always being imposed upon, and bullied, and knocked about. Whenever he got a penny to buy lollies he’d count ’em out carefully and divide ’em round amongst his schoolmates and brothers and sisters. He was the only one that worked at home, and consequently they all hated him. His father respected him, but didn’t love him, because he wasn’t a younger son, and wasn’t bringing his father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave. If it was in Australia, probably Lord Douglas was an elder son and had to do all the hard graft, and teach himself at night, and sleep in a bark skillion while his younger brothers benefited—they were born in the new brick house and went to boarding-schools. His mother had a contempt for him because he wasn’t a black sheep and a prodigal, and, when the old man died, the rest of the family got all the stuff and Lord Douglas was kicked out because they could do without him now. And the family hated him like poison ever afterwards (especially his mother), and spread lies about him—because they had treated him shamefully and because his mouth was shut—they knew he wouldn’t speak. Then probably he went in for Democracy and worked for Freedom, till Freedom trod on him once too often with her hob-nailed boots. Then the chances are, in the end, he was ruined by a girl or woman, and driven, against his will, to take refuge in pure individualism. He’s all right, only we don’t appreciate him. He’s only fighting against his old ideals—his old self that comes up sometimes—and that’s what makes him sweat his barmaids and servants, and hate us, and run us in; and perhaps when he cuts up extra rough it’s because his conscience kicks him when he thinks of the damned soft fool he used to be. He’s all right—take my word for it. It’s all a mask. Why, he might be one of the kindest-hearted men in Bourke underneath.”

Tom Hall rubbed his head and blinked, as if he was worried by an idea that there might be some facts in Mitchell’s theories.

“You’re allers findin’ excuses for blacklegs an’ scabs, Mitchell,” said Barcoo-Rot, who took Mitchell seriously (and who would have taken a laughing jackass seriously). “Why, you’d find a white spot on a squatter. I wouldn’t be surprised if you blacklegged yourself in the end.”

This was an unpardonable insult, from a Union point of view, and the chaps half-unconsciously made room on the floor for Barcoo-Rot to fall after Jack Mitchell hit him. But Mitchell took the insult philosophically.

“Well, Barcoo-Rot,” he said, nursing the other leg, “for the matter of that, I did find a white spot on a squatter once. He lent me a quid when I was hard up. There’s white spots on the blackest characters if you only drop prejudice and look close enough. I suppose even Jack-the-Ripper’s character was speckled. Why, I can even see spots on your character, sometimes, Barcoo-Rot. I’ve known white spots to spread on chaps’ characters until they were little short of saints. Sometimes I even fancy I can feel my own wings sprouting. And as for turning blackleg—well, I suppose I’ve got a bit of the crawler in my composition (most of us have), and a man never knows what might happen to his principles.”

“Well,” said Barcoo-Rot, “I beg yer pardon—ain’t that enough?”

“No,” said Mitchell, “you ought to wear a three-bushel bag and ashes for three months, and drink water; but since the police would send you to an asylum if you did that, I think the best thing we can do is to go out and have a drink.”

Lord Douglas married an Australian girl somewhere, somehow, and brought her to Bourke, and there were two little girls—regular little fairies. She was a gentle, kind-hearted little woman, but she didn’t seem to improve him much, save that he was very good to her.

“It’s mostly that way,” commented Mitchell. “When a boss gets married and has children he thinks he’s got a greater right to grind his fellowmen and rob their wives and children. I’d never work for a boss with a big family—it’s hard enough to keep a single boss nowadays in this country.”

After one stormy election, at the end of a long and bitter shearing strike, One-eyed Bogan, his trusty enemy, Barcoo-Rot, and one or two other enthusiastic reformers were charged with rioting, and got from one to three months’ hard. And they had only smashed three windows of the Imperial Hotel and chased the Chinese cook into the river.

“I used to have some hopes for Democracy,” commented Mitchell, “but I’ve got none now. How can you expect Liberty, Equality or Fraternity—how can you expect Freedom and Universal Brotherhood and Equal Rights in a country where Sons of Light get three months’ hard for breaking windows and bashing a Chinaman? It almost makes me long to sail away in a gallant barque.”

There were other cases in connection with the rotten-egging of Capitalistic candidates on the Imperial Hotel balcony, and it was partly on the evidence of Douglas and his friends that certain respectable Labour leaders got heavy terms of imprisonment for rioting and “sedition” and “inciting,” in connection with organized attacks on blacklegs and their escorts.

Retribution, if it was retribution, came suddenly and in a most unexpected manner to Lord Douglas.

It seems he employed a second carpenter for six months to repair and make certain additions to the hotel, and put him off under various pretences until he owed him a hundred pounds or thereabout. At last, immediately after an exciting interview with Lord Douglas, the carpenter died suddenly of heart disease. The widow, a strong-minded bushwoman, put a bailiff in the hotel on a very short notice—and against the advice of her lawyer, who thought the case hopeless—and the Lord Douglas bubble promptly burst. He had somehow come to be regarded as the proprietor of the hotel, but now the real proprietors or proprietor—he was still said to be a priest—turned Douglas out and put in a new manager. The old servants were paid after some trouble. The local storekeepers and one or two firms in Sydney, who had large accounts against the Imperial Hotel (and had trusted it, mainly because it was patronized by Capitalism and Fat), were never paid.

Lord Douglas cleared out to Sydney, leaving his wife and children, for the present, with her brother, a hay-and-corn storekeeper, who also had a large and hopeless account against the hotel; and when the brother went broke and left the district she rented a two-roomed cottage and took in dressmaking.

Dressmaking didn’t pay so well in the bush then as it did in the old diggings days when sewing-machines were scarce and the possession of one meant an independent living to any girl—when diggers paid ten shillings for a strip of “flannen” doubled over and sewn together, with holes for arms and head, and called a shirt. Mrs Douglas had a hard time, with her two little girls, who were still better and more prettily dressed than any other children in Bourke. One grocer still called on her for orders and pretended to be satisfied to wait “till Mr Douglas came back,” and when she would no longer order what he considered sufficient provisions for her and the children, and commenced buying sugar, etc., by the pound, for cash, he one day sent a box of groceries round to her. He pretended it was a mistake.

“However,” he said, “I’d be very much obliged if you could use ’em, Mrs Douglas. I’m overstocked now; haven’t got room for another tin of sardines in the shop. Don’t you worry about bills, Mrs Douglas; I can wait till Douglas comes home. I did well enough out of the Imperial Hotel when your husband had it, and a pound’s worth of groceries won’t hurt me now. I’m only too glad to get rid of some of the stock.”

She cried a little, thought of the children, and kept the groceries.

“I suppose I’ll be sold up soon meself if things don’t git brighter,” said that grocer to a friend, “so it doesn’t matter much.”

The same with Foley the butcher, who had a brogue with a sort of drawling groan in it, and was a cynic of the Mitchell school.

“You see,” he said, “she’s as proud as the devil, but when I send round a bit o’ rawst, or porrk, or the undercut o’ the blade-bawn, she thinks o’ the little gur-r-rls before she thinks o’ sendin’ it back to me. That’s where I’ve got the pull on her.”

The Giraffe borrowed a horse and tip-dray one day at the beginning of winter and cut a load of firewood in the bush, and next morning, at daylight, Mrs Douglas was nearly startled out of her life by a crash at the end of the cottage, which made her think that the chimney had fallen in, or a tree fallen on the house; and when she slipped on a wrapper and looked out, she saw a load of short-cut wood by the chimney, and caught a glimpse of the back view of the Giraffe, who stood in the dray with his legs wide apart and was disappearing into the edge of the scrub; and soon the rapid clock-clock-clock of the wheels died away in the west, as if he were making for West Australia.

The next we heard of Lord Douglas he had got two years’ hard for embezzlement in connection with some canvassing he had taken up. Mrs Douglas fell ill—a touch of brain-fever—and one of the labourers’ wives took care of the children while two others took turns in nursing. While she was recovering, Bob Brothers sent round the hat, and, after a conclave in the Union Office—as mysterious as any meeting ever called with the object of downing bloated Capitalism—it was discovered that one of the chaps—who didn’t wish his name to be mentioned—had borrowed just twenty-five pounds from Lord Douglas in the old days and now wished to return it to Mrs Douglas. So the thing was managed, and if she had any suspicions she kept them to herself. She started a little fancy goods shop and got along fairly comfortable.

Douglas, by the way, was, publicly, supposed, for her sake and because of the little girls, to be away in West Australia on the goldfields.

Time passes without much notice out back, and one hot day, when the sun hung behind the fierce sandstorms from the northwest as dully lurid as he ever showed in a London fog, Lord Douglas got out of the train that had just finished its five-hundred-miles’ run, and not seeing a new-chum porter, who started forward by force of habit to take his bag, he walked stiffly off the platform and down the main street towards his wife’s cottage.

He was very gaunt, and his eyes, to those who passed him closely, seemed to have a furtive, hunted expression. He had let his beard grow, and it had grown grey.

It was within a few days of Christmas—the same Christmas that we lost the Pretty Girl in the Salvation Army. As a rule the big shearing-sheds within a fortnight of Bourke cut out in time for the shearers to reach the town and have their Christmas dinners and sprees—and for some of them to be locked up over Christmas Day—within sound of a church-going bell. Most of the chaps gathered in the Shearers’ Union Office on New Year’s Eve and discussed Douglas amongst other things.

“I vote we kick the cow out of the town!” snarled One-eyed Bogan, viciously.

“We can’t do that,” said Bob Brothers (the Giraffe), speaking more promptly than usual. “There’s his wife and youngsters to consider, yer know.”

“He something well deserted his wife,” snarled Bogan, “an’ now he comes crawlin’ back to her to keep him.”

“Well,” said Mitchell, mildly, “but we ain’t all got as much against him as you have, Bogan.”

“He made a crimson jail-bird of me!” snapped Bogan. “Well,” said Mitchell, “that didn’t hurt you much, anyway; it rather improved your character if anything. Besides, he made a jail-bird of himself afterwards, so you ought to have a fellow-feeling—a feathered feeling, so to speak. Now you needn’t be offended, Bogan, we’re all jail-birds at heart, only we haven’t all got the pluck.”

“I’m in favour of blanky well tarrin’ an’ featherin’ him an’ kickin’ him out of the town!” shouted Bogan. “It would be a good turn to his wife, too; she’d be well rid of the——.”

“Perhaps she’s fond of him,” suggested Mitchell; “I’ve known such cases before. I saw them sitting together on the veranda last night when they thought no one was looking.”

“He deserted her,” said One-eyed Bogan, in a climbing-down tone, “and left her to starve.”

“Perhaps the police were to blame for that,” said Mitchell. “You know you deserted all your old mates once for three months, Bogan, and it wasn’t your fault.”

“He seems to be a crimson pet of yours, Jack Mitchell,” said Bogan, firing up.

“Ah, well, all I know,” said Mitchell, standing up and stretching himself wearily, “all I know is that he looked like a gentleman once, and treated us like a gentleman, and cheated us like a gentleman, and ran some of us in like a gentleman, and, as far as I can see, he’s served his time like a gentleman and come back to face us and live himself down like a man. I always had a sneaking regard for a gentleman.”

“Why, Mitchell, I’m beginning to think you are a gentleman yourself,” said Jake Boreham.

“Well,” said Mitchell, “I used to have a suspicion once that I had a drop of blue blood in me somewhere, and it worried me a lot; but I asked my old mother about it one day, and she scalded me—God bless her!—and father chased me with a stockwhip, so I gave up making inquiries.”

“You’ll join the bloomin’ Capitalists next,” sneered One-eyed Bogan.

“I wish I could, Bogan,” said Mitchell. “I’d take a trip to Paris and see for myself whether the Frenchwomen are as bad as they’re made out to be, or go to Japan. But what are we going to do about Douglas?”

“Kick the skunk out of town, or boycott him!” said one or two. “He ought to be tarred and feathered and hanged.”

“Couldn’t do worse than hang him,” commented Jake Boreham, cheerfully.

“Oh, yes, we could,” said Mitchell, sitting down, resting his elbows on his knees, and marking his points with one forefinger on the other. “For instance, we might boil him slow in tar. We might skin him alive. We might put him in a cage and poke him with sticks, with his wife and children in another cage to look on and enjoy the fun.”

The chaps, who had been sitting quietly listening to Mitchell, and grinning, suddenly became serious and shifted their positions uneasily.

“But I can tell you what would hurt his feelings more than anything else we could do,” said Mitchell.

“Well, what is it, Jack?” said Tom Hall, rather impatiently.

“Send round the hat and take up a collection for him,” said Mitchell, “enough to let him get away with his wife and children and start life again in some less respectable town than Bourke. You needn’t grin, I’m serious about it.”

There was a thoughtful pause, and one or two scratched their heads. “His wife seems pretty sick,” Mitchell went on in a reflective tone. “I passed the place this morning and saw him scrubbing out the floor. He’s been doing a bit of house-painting for old Heegard to-day. I suppose he learnt it in jail. I saw him at work and touched my hat to him.”

“What!” cried Tom Hall, affecting to shrink from Mitchell in horror.

“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’m not sure that I didn’t take my hat off. Now I know it’s not bush religion for a man to touch his hat, except to a funeral, or a strange roof or woman sometimes; but when I meet a braver man than myself I salute him. I’ve only met two in my life.”

“And who were they, Jack?” asked Jake Boreham.

“One,” said Mitchell—“one is Douglas, and the other—well, the other was the man I used to be. But that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“But perhaps Douglas thought you were crowing over him when you took off your hat to him—sneerin’ at him, like, Mitchell,” reflected Jake Boreham.

“No, Jake,” said Mitchell, growing serious suddenly. “There are ways of doing things that another man understands.”

They all thought for a while.

“Well,” said Tom Hall, “supposing we do take up a collection for him, he’d be too damned proud to take it.”

“But that’s where we’ve got the pull on him,” said Mitchell, brightening up. “I heard Dr Morgan say that Mrs Douglas wouldn’t live if she wasn’t sent away to a cooler place, and Douglas knows it; and, besides, one of the little girls is sick. We’ve got him in a corner and he’ll have to take the stuff. Besides, two years in jail takes a lot of the pride out of a man.”

“Well, I’m damned if I’ll give a sprat to help the man who tried his best to crush the Unions!” said One-eyed Bogan.

“Damned if I will either!” said Barcoo-Rot.

“Now, look here, One-eyed Bogan,” said Mitchell, “I don’t like to harp on old things, for I know they bore you, but when you returned to public life that time no one talked of kicking you out of the town. In fact, I heard that the chaps put a few pounds together to help you get away for a while till you got over your modesty.”

No one spoke.

“I passed Douglas’s place on my way here from my camp to-night,” Mitchell went on musingly, “and I saw him walking up and down in the yard with his sick child in his arms. You remember that little girl, Bogan? I saw her run and pick up your hat and give it to you one day when you were trying to put it on with your feet. You remember, Bogan? The shock nearly sobered you.”

There was a very awkward pause. The position had become too psychological altogether and had to be ended somehow. The awkward silence had to be broken, and Bogan broke it. He turned up Bob Brothers’s hat, which was lying on the table, and “chucked” in a “quid,” qualifying the hat and the quid, and disguising his feelings with the national oath of the land.

“We’ve had enough of this gory, maudlin, sentimental tommy-rot,” he said. “Here, Barcoo, stump up or I’ll belt it out of your hide! I’ll—I’ll take yer to pieces!”

But Douglas didn’t leave the town. He sent his wife and children to Sydney until the heat wave was past, built a new room on to the cottage, and started a book and newspaper shop, and a poultry farm in the back paddock, and flourished.

They called him Mr Douglas for a while, then Douglas, then Percy Douglas, and now he is well-known as Old Daddy Douglas, and the Sydney Worker, Truth, and Bulletin, and other democratic rags are on sale at his shop. He is big with schemes for locking the Darling River, and he gets his drink at O’Donohoo’s. He is scarcely yet regarded as a straight-out democrat. He was a gentleman once, Mitchell said, and the old blood was not to be trusted. But, last elections, Douglas worked quietly for Unionism, and gave the leaders certain hints, and put them up to various electioneering dodges which enabled them to return, in the face of Monopoly, a Labour member who is as likely to go straight as long as any other Labour member.