Part 9 (1/2)

Then he drew in his breath, shut his teeth hard, shouldered his swag, stepped into the doorway, and faced round again.

The dog limped out of the corner and looked up anxiously.

”That there dog,” said Macquarie to the hospital staff in general, ”is a better dog than I'm a man--or you too, it seems--and a better Christian.

He's been a better mate to me than I ever was to any man--or any man to me. He's watched over me; kep' me from getting robbed many a time; fought for me; saved my life and took drunken kicks and curses for thanks--and forgave me. He's been a true, straight, honest, and faithful mate to me--and I ain't going to desert him now. I ain't going to kick him out in the road with a broken leg. I--Oh, my G.o.d! my back!”

He groaned and lurched forward, but they caught him, slipped off the swag, and laid him on a bed.

Half an hour later the shearer was comfortably fixed up.

”Where's my dog!” he asked, when he came to himself.

”Oh, the dog's all right,” said the nurse, rather impatiently. ”Don't bother. The doctor's setting his leg out in the yard.”

GOING BLIND

I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place in the city, with good beds upstairs let at one s.h.i.+lling per night--”Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen s.h.i.+llings per week.”

I was a respectable single man then. I boarded and resided there. I boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining-room or restaurant downstairs. They called it dining-rooms, but it was only one room, and them wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pa.s.s up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man--he was a living skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the ”roast beef one,” and ”roast lamb one,” ”corn beef and cabbage one,” ”veal and stuffing one,”

and the ”veal and pickled pork,” one--or two, or three, as the case might be--and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings--we handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well as we could.

The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was adjacent, and it contained the bathroom and other conveniences, behind screens of whitewashed boards.

I resided upstairs in a room where there were five beds and one wash-stand; one candle-stick, with a very short bit of soft yellow candle in it; the back of a hair-brush, with about a dozen bristles in it; and half a comb--the big-tooth end--with nine and a half teeth at irregular distances apart.

He was a typical bushman, not one of those tall, straight, wiry, brown men of the West, but from the old Selection Districts, where many drovers came from, and of the old bush school; one of those slight active little fellows whom we used to see in cabbage-tree hats, Crimean s.h.i.+rts, strapped trousers, and elastic-side boots--”larstins,” they called them. They could dance well; sing indifferently, and mostly through their noses, the old bush songs; play the concertina horribly; and ride like--like--well, they _could_ ride.

He seemed as if he had forgotten to grow old and die out with this old colonial school to which he belonged. They _had_ careless and forgetful ways about them. His name was Jack Gunther, he said, and he'd come to Sydney to try to get something done to his eyes. He had a portmanteau, a carpet bag, some things in a three-bushel bag, and a tin bog. I sat beside him on his bed, and struck up an acquaintance, and he told me all about it. First he asked me would I mind s.h.i.+fting round to the other side, as he was rather deaf in that ear. He'd been kicked by a horse, he said, and had been a little dull o' hearing on that side ever since.

He was as good as blind. ”I can see the people near me,” he said, ”but I can't make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur.” He looked up: ”That ceiling is a kind of white, ain't it? And this,”

tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, ”is a sort of green, ain't it?” The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of the wall-paper had originally been blue and red, but it was mostly green enough now--a damp, rotten green; but I was ready to swear that the ceiling was snow and that the walls were as green as gra.s.s if it would have made him feel more comfortable. His sight began to get bad about six years before, he said; he didn't take much notice of it at first, and then he saw a quack, who made his eyes worse. He had already the manner of the blind--the touch of every finger, and even the gentleness in his speech. He had a boy down with him--a ”sorter cousin of his,” and the boy saw him round. ”I'll have to be sending that youngster back,”

he said, ”I think I'll send him home next week. He'll be picking up and learning too much down here.”

I happened to know the district he came from, and we would sit by the hour and talk about the country, and chaps by the name of this and chaps by the name of that--drovers mostly, whom we had met or had heard of.

He asked me if I'd ever heard of a chap by the name of Joe Scott--a big sandy-complexioned chap, who might be droving; he was his brother, or, at least, his half-brother, but he hadn't heard of him for years; he'd last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone overland to Western Australia with Tyson's cattle to the new country.

We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and shearing--all about the bush--and it all came back to me as we talked.

”I can see it all now,” he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn't see the dirty blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the greasy wash-stand; he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the gra.s.sy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of she-oak here and there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringy-bark and the apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains--and all. I could see it, too--plainer than ever I did.

He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about timber. He didn't believe in having fencing-posts with big b.u.t.ts; he reckoned it was a mistake. ”You see,” he said, ”the top of the b.u.t.t catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I'd back posts without any b.u.t.t at all to last as long or longer than posts with 'em--that's if the fence is well put up and well rammed.” He had supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and--well, you can get more posts without b.u.t.ts out of a tree than posts with them. He also objected to charring the b.u.t.ts. He said it only made more work--and wasted time--the b.u.t.ts lasted longer without being charred.

I asked him if he'd ever got stringy-bark palings or s.h.i.+ngles out of mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and said he had. He had also got them out of various other kinds of trees.

We talked about soil and gra.s.s, and gold-digging, and many other things which came back to one like a revelation as we yarned.

He had been to the hospital several times. ”The doctors don't say they can cure me,” he said, ”they say they might, be able to improve my sight and hearing, but it would take a long time--anyway, the treatment would improve my general health. They know what's the matter with my eyes,”