Joseph Furphy

“ For my own part, I’m sick and tired of studying why some people should be in a position where they have to go out of their way to do wrong, and other people are cornered to that extent that they can’t live without doing wrong, and can’t suicide without jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. Wonder if any allowance is made for bullock drivers?—or are they supposed to be able to make enough money to retire into some decent life before they die? Well, thank God for one good camp, at all events.”
“How’s the water?” asked Cooper, meeting us at the fence. ”

“ Mile after mile we go at a good walk, till the dark boundary of the scrub country disappears northward in the glassy haze, and in front, southward, the level black-soil plains of Riverina Proper mark a straight sky-line, broken here and there by a monumental clump or pine-ridge. And away beyond the horizon, southward still, the geodesic curve carries that monotony across the zone of salt-bush, myall, and swamp box; across the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee, and on to the Victorian border—say, two hundred and fifty miles. ”

“ But as the wives of Napoleon's generals could never learn to walk on a carpet, so the aimless popinjay of adult age can never learn to take a man's place among rough-and-ready workers. Even in spite of Willoughby's personal resemblance to Dixon, there was a suggestion of latent physical force and leathery durability in the bullock driver, altogether lacking in the whaler, and equiponderated only by a certain air of refinement. How could it be otherwise? Willoughby, of course, had no horse—in fact, like Bassanio, all the wealth he had ran in his veins; he was a gentleman. ”

“ Erudition, even in the humblest sphere of life, is the sweetest solace, the unfailing refuge, of the restless mind; but if the bearer thereof be not able to do something well enough to make a living by it, his education is simply outclassed, overborne, and crushed by his own superior ignorance. ”

“ Price and Mosey had just got under way. Willoughby was trying to yoke Dixon’s leaders, while Dixon, owing to his screwmatics, could do nothing but sit on his horse, cursing with wearisome tautology, and casting glances of frantic apprehension toward the ram-paddock. His anxiety was not unreasonable, for there had just come into sight an upright speck, too small to be a horseman; and it was easy to guess who was the likeliest person to be coming on foot from that direction. There is a limit to the dignified sufficiency even of a bullock driver ”

“ Well pleased, therefore, I returned to the wagons after a few minutes absence.
“The cattle are out of sight, Steve,” said I, as I rounded up the scattering bullocks. “Not worth while to go after them now.”
“Let them go, by all means,” replied Thompson, with a ghastly simulation of cheerfulness. “We’ll gladly stand the loss of them, and make the station a present of Bum’s mare besides, if we once get out of sight of this infernal camp—Stand up, Magpie—Just let us yoke up as quickly as if our lives depended on it—which, to tell the truth, is not much of an exag——Hello! where’s Damper?” ”

“ The sound was the deep, heavy sough of a contented bullock, as he lay down with a couple of days’ rations in his capacious first stomach.
“Grass is generally a burning question with you teamsters,” observed Willoughby.
“I never make no insinuations, myself,” replied Dixon coldly.
“Good!” interjected Mosey. “If you was inclined that road, you might say the carrier’s got as much interest in the grass as a squatter. It’s the traveller as don’t give a (compound expletive) if the whole country’s as black as Ole Nick’s soot-brush.” ”

“ To be sure, there are men of social culture who gallantly and conspicuously maintain an all-round superiority in the society to which I myself hereditarily belong, namely, the Lower Orders; but their appearances are like angels’ visits—in the obvious, as well as in the conventional but remoter sense. I can count no less than three men of this stamp among my ten thousand acquaintances. When the twofold excellence of such ambidexters is not stultified by selfishness, you have in them a realised ideal upon which their Creator might pronounce the judgment that it is very good. ”

“ Human ignorance is, after all, more variable in character than in extent. Each sphere of life, each occupation, is burdened with its own special brand of this unhappy heritage. To remove one small section of inborn ignorance is a life-work for any man. ”

“ At the word, Cooper and Thompson snatched up their bridles and darted off, followed by Price and Willoughby. Dixon and Bum were not in the crowd, but no one had leisure just then to notice their absence.
“Len’s yer horse, like a good feller,” said Mosey hastily.
“To (sheol) with your cheek!” snapped Moriarty. “What next I wonder?” Mosey snatched up his bridle, and went off at a run. “Hello, Collins! I didn’t notice you in the hurry. Bright cards, ain’t they? Nothing short of seven years’ll satisfy them. You’ve been travelling all night?” ”

“ Victorian poverty spoke in every detail of the working plant; Victorian energy and greed in the unmerciful loads of salt and wire, for the scrub country out back. The Victorian carrier, formidable by his lack of professional etiquette and his extreme thrift, is neither admired nor caressed by the somewhat select practitioners of Riverina.
Then the three horsemen overtook Cooper, pausing a little, after the custom of the country, to gossip with him as they passed. According to another custom of the country, Thompson, Willoughby and I began to criticise them. ”

“ Without doubt, it is easier to acquire gentlemanly deportment than axe-man’s muscle; easier to criticise an opera than to identify a beast seen casually twelve months before; easier to dress becomingly than to make a bee-line, straight as the sighting of a theodolite, across strange country in foggy weather; easier to recognise the various costly vintages than to live contentedly on the smell of an oil rag. ”

“ Then start him at any civilised work—such as splicing a loop on a wool rope, or making a yoke, or wedging a loose box in a wheel—and he has the best hands in the country. At the same time, it's plain to be seen that he has been brought up in the class of society that sticks a napkin, in a bone ring, alongside your plate at dinner." Here Thompson paused, and the recurrence of some distressing memory elicited a half-suppressed sigh.
"There is nothing unreasonable in that phenomenon," remarked Willoughby—"rather the reverse. Probably the person you speak of is a gentleman. ”

“ Martin was dancing mad, for his horse was never known to break a bridle, and he didn't know who to blame for making away with him. However, I wasn't any way interested in mustering the ram-paddock, and Martin wanted his horse, so we hunted round and round, but devil a smell of horse or saddle or bridle could we find in the dark. After a while, daylight came, and I caught sight of the wool, and tumbled to the little game. ”

“ All that has been written of man's noblest friend—from the dim, uncertain time when some unknown hand, in a leisure moment, dashed off the Thirty-ninth chapter of the Book of Job, to the yesterday when Long Gordon translated into ringing verse the rhythmic clatter of the hoof-beats he loved so well—all might find fulfilment in this unvalued beast, now providentially owned by the softest of foreigners. ”

“ After supper, we lay around, resting ourselves; everyone smoking tranquilly except Willoughby. Dixon and Bum were evidently old friends; they reclined with their heads together, occasionally laughing and whispering—a piece of bad manners silently but strongly resented by the rest of the company.
“I’ll jist go an’ have a squint at the carrion,” remarked Mosey, at length, with the inevitable adjective; and, passing through the broken fence, he disappeared in the timber and old-man salt-bush. ”

“ It’s a dirty transaction to round up a man’s team in a ten-mile paddock, and stick a bob a head on them, but that’s a thing that I’m very familiar with; it’s a dirty transaction to refuse water to perishing beasts, but I’ve been refused times out of number, and will be to the end of the chapter; it’s a dirty transaction to persecute men for having no occupation but carting, yet that’s what nine-tenths of the squatters do, and this Montgomery is one of the nine. ”

“ Then taking up the whip—Dixon was a virtuoso in whips, and always carried one with six feet of handle and twelve feet of lash—he aimed at the team, collectively, a clip which, in the most literal sense, recoiled on himself. And so the officer’s son and the sojer’s son took their way together; to become, as I afterward learned, the most attached and mutually considerate friends on the track. Such is life.
Thompson and Cooper, now ready for the road, were repairing the fence as well as they could. ”

“ The up-country man is decidedly openhanded; he will submit to crushing losses with cheerfulness, tempered, of course, by humility in those cases where he recognises the operation of an overhanging curse; he will subscribe to any good or bad cause with a liberality excelled only by the digger; he will pay gambling debts with the easy, careless grace which makes every P. of W. so popular in English sporting circles—in a word, the smallest of his many sins is parsimony. But the penal suggestiveness of trespass-penalty touches the sullen dignity of his nature ”

“ It is such men’s ignorance—their technical ignorance—that is their curse. Education of any kind never was, and never can be, a curse to its possessor; it is a curse only to the person whose interest lies in exploiting its possessor. ”

“ Thompson’s unpretentious stockwhip was in my hand at the time; and, judging it unlikely that Cleopatra had been broken in to the use of that disquieting implement, I was just turning Bunyip round, when Willoughby stepped forward——
“Permit me to redeem my unfortunate mistake by assisting you!” he exclaimed. “I have ridden to hounds in England. May I take this horse? Thanks. Pray remember that I shall be under your orders, Collins.”
“Take care might he buck-lep,” I remarked casually, as the whaler gathered Cleopatra’s reins, and threw himself into the deep seat of the new saddle. ”

“ Now, the man who is a gentleman by birth and culture—by which I mean a man of good family, who has not only gone through the curriculum of a university, but has graduated, so to speak, in society—such a one has every advantage in any conceivable situation. ”

“ If you want a problem to work out, just consider that God constructed cattle for living on grass, and the grass for them to live on, and that, last night, and to-night, and to-morrow night, and mostly every night, we’ve a choice between two dirty transactions—one is, to let the bullocks starve, and the other is to steal grass for them. ”

“ And should some blue-blooded insect indignantly retort that, though his own ancestors have borne coat-armour for seventeen generations, and though he himself was brought up so utterly and aristocratically useless as to have been unable, at twenty years of age, to polish his own boots, yet he is now, mentally and physically, a man fit for anything—I can only reply, in the words of Portia, that I fear me my lady his mother played false with a smith. ”

“ And what an opportunity for some novelist, in his rabid pursuit of originality, to merely reverse the incongruity—picturing a semi-barbarian, lassoed full-grown, and launched into polished society, there to excel the fastidious idlers of drawing-room and tennis-court in their own line! ”

“ Collins,” replied the whaler. “Nature produces such men expressly for rank and file; and I should imagine that their existence furnishes sufficient rejoinder to the levelling theory.”
"Quite possible the chap's as good as either of you," remarked Thompson, seizing the opportunity for reproof. "Do you know anything against him?"
"Well, to quote Madame de Staël," replied Willoughby; "he abuses a man's privilege of being ugly."
"Moreover, he has left undone a thing that he ought to have done," I rejoined. "He ought to be taking a spell of carrying that mare. ”

“ Of course, we were out in the morning at grey daylight, but it was a bit foggy, and instead of finding the bullocks, we found Bob and Bat cantering round, looking for them. Cunningham and I separated, and so did the other two; and the four of us spent the liveliest half-hour you could wish for; chasing, and crossing, and meeting one another in all directions, and not a word spoken, and not a hoof to be seen. At last the fog lifted a bit, and Cunningham spotted cattle in a timbered swamp, but Bat was between him and them ”

“ And the longa of Art, viewed in conjunction with the brevis of Life, makes it at least reasonable that when a man has faithfully served one exclusive apprenticeship, he will find it too late in the day to serve a second. ”

“ Now, Montgomery doesn't bark about a night's grass out of the ram-paddock at this time of year, in case of emergency; but he doesn't believe in people driving expressly for it; and besides, he badly wants to catch Price and Thompson, and make an example of them. Well, it happened that he had thought out early jobs for all the rest of the fellows, so what does he do—Sunday and all—but he rouses out Martin and me, and tells us to go to the ram-paddock, and quietly round up all the bullocks, and bring them to the station. ”

“ It was blazing hot weather; and the other fellow he never seen tucker nor water all the trip, for he wouldn’t leave the track. Laugh? Lord! I thought I’d ’a’ busted when the bloke at the well told me. I noticed the other feller was a bit narked when he seen me on the horse to-day. He’s got red o’ Pilot.”
“Look here, Mosey,” said Thompson slowly: “I’d rather—so help me God—I’d rather cut my own throat than do a trick like that. Aren’t you frightened of bringing a curse on yourself?” ”