My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin [ebook offline .TXT] 📗

curlews are beginning their wild moaning cry. From the rifts in the dark lone ranges, far down the river, it comes like a hunted spirit until it makes me feel⁠—

At this point I said, “Bah! I’m mad to write to Everard Grey like this. He would laugh and call me a poor little fool.” I tore the half-finished letter to shreds, and consigned it to the kitchen fire. I substituted a prim formal note, merely thanking him for the books and magazine he had sent me. To this I never received an answer. I heard through his letters to grannie that he was much occupied. Had been to Brisbane and Melbourne on important cases, so very likely had not time to be bothered with me; or, he might have been like the majority of his fellows who make a great parade of friendship while with one, then go away and forget one’s existence in an hour.

While at Caddagat there were a few duties allotted to me. One of these was to attend to the drawing-room; another was to find uncle Jay-Jay’s hat when he mislaid it⁠—often ten times per day. I assisted my grandmother to make up her accounts and write business letters, and I attended to tramps. A man was never refused a bit to eat at Caddagat. This necessitated the purchase of an extra ton of flour per year, also nearly a ton of sugar, to say nothing of tea, potatoes, beef, and all broken meats which went thus. This was not reckoning the consumption of victuals by the other class of travellers with which the house was generally full year in and year out. Had there been any charge for their board and lodging, the Bossiers would surely have made a fortune. I interviewed on an average fifty tramps a week, and seldom saw the same man twice. What a great army they were! Hopeless, homeless, aimless, shameless souls, tramping on from north to south, and east to west, never relinquishing their heart-sickening, futile quest for work⁠—some of them so long on the tramp that the ambitions of manhood had been ground out of them, and they wished for nothing more than this.

There were all shapes, sizes, ages, kinds, and conditions of men⁠—the shamefaced boy in the bud of his youth, showing by the way he begged that the humiliation of the situation had not yet worn off, and poor old creatures tottering on the brink of the grave, with nothing left in life but the enjoyment of beer and tobacco. There were strong men in their prime who really desired work when they asked for it, and skulking cowards who hoped they would not get it. There were the diseased, the educated, the ignorant, the deformed, the blind, the evil, the honest, the mad, and the sane. Some in real professional beggars’ style called down blessings on me; others were morose and glum, while some were impudent and thankless, and said to supply them with food was just what I should do, for the swagmen kept the squatters⁠—as, had the squatters not monopolized the land, the swagmen would have had plenty. A moiety of the last-mentioned⁠—dirty, besotted, ragged creatures⁠—had a glare in their eyes which made one shudder to look at them, and, while spasmodically twirling their billies or clenching their fists, talked wildly of making one to “bust up the damn banks,” or to drive all the present squatters out of the country and put the people on the land⁠—clearly showing that, because they had failed for one reason or another, it had maddened them to see others succeed.

In a wide young country of boundless resources, why is this thing? This question worried me. Our legislators are unable or unwilling to cope with it. They trouble not to be patriots and statesmen. Australia can bring forth writers, orators, financiers, singers, musicians, actors, and athletes which are second to none of any nation under the sun. Why can she not bear sons, men of soul, mind, truth, godliness, and patriotism sufficient to rise and cast off the grim shackles which widen round us day by day?

I was the only one at Caddagat who held these silly ideas. Harold Beecham, uncle Julius, grannie, and Frank Hawden did not worry about the cause of tramps. They simply termed them a lazy lot of sneaking creatures, fed them, and thought no more of the matter.

I broached the subject to uncle Jay-Jay once, simply to discover his ideas thereon.

I was sitting on a chair in the veranda sewing; he, with his head on a cushion, was comfortably stretched on a rug on the floor.

“Uncle Boss, why can’t something be done for tramps?”

“How done for ’em?”

“Couldn’t some means of employing them be arrived at?”

“Work!” he ejaculated. “That’s the very thing the crawling divils are terrified they might get.”

“Yes; but couldn’t some law be made to help them?”

“A law to make me cut up Caddagat and give ten of ’em each a piece, and go on the wallaby myself, I suppose?”

“No, uncle; but there was a poor young fellow here this morning who, I feel sure, was in earnest when he asked for work.”

“Helen!” bawled uncle Jay-Jay.

“Well, what is it?” she inquired, appearing in the doorway.

“Next time Sybylla is giving a tramp some tucker, you keep a sharp eye on her or she will be sloping one of these days. There was a young fellow here today with a scarlet moustache and green eyes, and she’s dean gone on him, and has been bullying me to give him half Caddagat.”

“What a disgusting thing to say! Uncle, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I exclaimed.

“Very well, I’ll be careful,” said aunt Helen, departing.

“What with the damned flies, and the tramps, and a pesky thing called Sybylla, a man’s life ain’t worth a penny to him,” said uncle.

We fell into silence, which was broken presently by a dirty red-bearded face appearing over the garden gate, and a man’s voice:

“Good day, boss! Give us