Such Is Life (8 page)

“Anyhow, they ain't goin' to trouble us no furder,” rejoined Mosey complacently. “Theyre toes is turned up. Lis'n!—that's the sound I like to hear!” 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.”

“Well, I s'pose that's about a fair thing for to-night,” remarked Cooper; and he pulled off his boots, preparatory to wrapping himself in his blanket. “Time to vong tong cooshey, as the Frenchman says. Mustn't oversleep in the mornin', if the place is ever so safe.”

Then I disposed my possum rug and saddle, took off my boots, spread my coat for Pup to sleep on, lit my pipe, and lay down for the night. Thompson, Mosey, and Willoughby arranged themselves here and there, according to taste. Dixon and Methuselah retired to hammocks under the rear of their respective wagons. Bum
simply lay where he was. I would do my companions what honour I can, but the stern code of the chronicler permits no quibbling with the fact that Mosey and Bum wound up the evening with a series of gestes and apothegms, such as must not tarnish these pages—Willoughby occasionally taking part, rather, I think, through courtesy than sympathy, and ably closing the service with a fescen-nine anecdote, beginning, ‘It is related that, on one occasion, the late Marquis of Waterford'—

Willoughby had selected a smooth place near my own lair. Here he spent five minutes in spreading his exceptionally dirty blanket, and another five in tidily folding his ragged coat for a pillow. Then he removed his unmatched boots, and, unlapping from his feet the inexpensive substitute for socks known as ‘prince-alberts,' he artistically spread the redolent swaths across his boots to receive the needed benefit of the night air; performing all these little offices with an unconscious elegance amusing to notice—an elegance which not another member of our party could have achieved, any more than Willoughby could have acquired the practical effectiveness of a good rough average vulgarian.

Poor shadow of departed exclusiveness!—lying there, with none so poor to do him reverence! He was a type—and, by reason of his happy temperament, an exceedingly favourable type—of the ‘gentleman,' shifting for himself under normal conditions of back-country life. Urbane address, faultless syntax, even that good part which shall not be taken away, namely, the calm consciousness of inherent superiority, are of little use here. And yet your Australian novelist finds no inconsistency in placing the bookish student, or the city dandy, many degrees above the bushman, or the digger, or the pioneer, in vocations which have been the life-work of the latter. O, the wearisome nonsense of this kind which is remorselessly thrust upon a docile public! 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! This miracle would be more reasonable than its antithesis. 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. When
you take this back elevation of the question, the inconsistency becomes apparent. 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. Moreover, there are few advantages in training which do not, according to present social arrangements, involve corresponding penalties.

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. ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,' was what betrayed the great lexicographer into defining ‘pastern' as ‘a horse's knee.' And the Doctor was right (in his admission, of course, not in his definition). Ignorance, reader, pure ignorance is what debars you from conversing fluently and intelligibly in several dialects of the Chinese language. Yet a friend of mine, named Yabby Pelham, can do so, though the same person knows as little of book-lore as William Shakespear of Stratford knew. But if you had been brought up in a Chinese camp, on a worn-out goldfield, your own special acquirements, and corresponding ignorance, might run in grooves similar to Yabby's. Let each of us keep himself behind the spikes on this question of restricted capability.

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 physicaly, 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. But this, again, would be claiming too much for heredity, at the expense of training. Remember, however, that our present subject is not the ‘gentleman' of actual life.
He
is an unknown and elusive quantity, merging insensibly into saint or scoundrel, sage or fool, man or blackleg. He runs in all shapes, and in all degrees of definiteness. Our subject is that insult to common sense, that childish slap in the face of honest manhood, the ‘gentleman' of fiction, and of Australian fiction pre-eminently.

Heaven knows I am no more inclined to decry social culture than moral principle; but I acknowledge no aristocracy except one of service and self-sacrifice, in which he that is chief shall be servant, and he that is greatest of all, servant of all. And it is surely time
to notice the three-penny braggadocio of caste which makes the languid Captain Vernon de Vere (or words to that effect) an over-match for half-a-dozen hard-muscled white savages, any one of whom would take his lordship by the ankles, and wipe the battle-field with his patrician visage; which makes the pale, elegant aristocrat punch Beelzebub out of Big Mick, the hod-man, who, in unpleasant reality, would feel the kick of a horse less than his antagonist would the wind of heaven, visiting his face too roughly; which makes the rosy-cheeked darling of the English rectory show the saddle-hardened specialists of the back country how to ride a buck-jumper; which makes a party of resourceful bushmen stand helpless in the presence of flood or fire, till marshalled by some hero of the croquet lawn; above all, which makes the isocratic and irreverent Australian fawn on the ‘gentleman,' for no imaginable reason except that the latter says ‘deuced' instead of ‘sanguinary,' and ‘by Jove' instead of ‘by sheol.' Go to; I'll no more on 't; it hath made me mad.

And don't fall back upon the musty subterfuge which, by a shifting value of the term, represents ‘gentleman' as simply signifying a man of honour, probity, education, and taste; for, by immemorial usage, by current application, and by every rule which gives definite meaning to words, the man with a shovel in his hand, a rule in his pocket, an axe on his shoulder, a leather apron on his abdomen, or any other badge of manual labour about him—his virtues else be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo—is carefully contradistinguished from the ‘gentleman.' The ‘gentleman' may be a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee, a parasite, a helpless potterer; he may be a man of spotless life, able and honest; but he must on no account be a man with broad palms, a workman amongst workmen. The ‘gentleman' is not necessarily gentle; but he is necessarily genteel. Etymology is not at fault here; gentility, and gentility alone, is the qualification of the ‘gentleman.'

No doubt it is very nice to see a ‘gentleman' who, when drunk, can lie in the gutter like a ‘gentleman'; but will someone suggest a more pitiable sight than such a person trying to compete with an iron-sinewed miner on the goldfields, or with a hardy, nine-lifed bushman in the back country? In the back country, a penniless and friendless ‘gentleman,' if sober and honest and possessed of some little ability, may aspire to the position of a station storekeeper. If destitute of these advantages—and reduced ‘gentlemen' are not by any means always sober, honest, and capable—the best thing he can do, if he gets the chance, is to settle down thankfully
into the innocent occupation so earnestly desired by Henry the Sixth of the play, and so thriftily pursued by the alleged father of any amateur elocutionist whose name is Nerval on the Grampian Hills.

Of such reduced ‘gentlemen' it is often said that their education becomes their curse. Here is another little subterfuge. This is one of those taking expressions which are repeated from parrot to magpie till they seem to acquire axiomatic force. 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. 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.

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. Move heaven and earth, then, to multiply that ideal by the number of the population. The thing is, at least, theoretically possible; for it is in no way necessary that the manual worker should be rude and illiterate; shut out from his rightful heirship of all the ages. Nor is it any more necessary that the social aristocrat—ostentatiously useless, as he generally is—should hold virtual monopoly of the elegancies of life.

But the commonplace ‘gentleman' of fiction, who, without extraneous advantage, and by mere virtue of caste-consciousness, and caste-eminence, and caste-exclusiveness, doth bestride this narrow world like a colossus—

“I am sorry to break in upon your meditations, Collins,” said Willoughby deprecatingly, turning towards me on his elbow, “but you know,
Necessitas non habet leges
. I find myself without the requisite for my normal bedtime solace; and I am unusually wakeful. Could you spare me a pipeful of tobacco?”

“Certainly! Why didn't you mention it before? I had no idea you were a smoker. I feel really vexed at your reticence.”

“Well, Mr. Thompson kindly lent me a supply this morning;but, unfortunately, I had a hole in my pocket that I was not aware of, and—Thanks. I'll just take a pipeful”—

“No, no; shove it in your pocket. I've got more in my swag. Been long in these colonies, Willoughby?”

“About a year. I spent two months in Melbourne, and nearly four in Sydney. For the last six months I have been—er—travelling in search of employment.”

“You find the colonies pretty rough?”

“I do, Collins; to speak frankly, I do. Even in your cities I observe a feverish excitement, and a demnable race for what the Scriptures aptly call ‘filthy lucre'; and the pastoral regions are—well—rough indeed. Your colonies are too young. In time to come, no doubt, the amenities of life will appear—for you have some magnificent private fortunes; but in the meantime one hears of nothing but work—business—and so forth. Cultivated leisure is a thing practically unknown. However, the country is merely passing through a necessary phase of development. In the near future, each of these shabby home-stations will be replaced by a noble mansion, with its spacious park; and these bare plains will reward the toil of an industrious and contented tenantry”—

“Like (sheol)!” sneered Mosey from his resting-place—a little crestfallen notwithstanding.

“Irrigation, my dear Mosey, will meet the difficulty which very naturally arises in your mind. A scientific system of irrigation would increase the letting value of this land more than a hundred-fold. Now, if the State would carry out such a system—by Heaven! Collins, you would soon have a class of country magnates second to none in the world. You are a native of the colonies, I presume?”

“Yes; I come from the Cabbage Garden.”

“Victoria, I know, is called the Cabbage Garden,” rejoined Willoughby. “But—pardon me—if you are a native of Victoria, you can form no conception of what England is. Among the upper middle classes—to which I belonged—the money-making proclivity is held in very low esteem, I assure you. Our solicitude is to make ourselves mutually agreeable; and the natural result is a grace and refinement which”—

“But what the (adj. sheol) good does that do the likes o' us (fellows)?” demanded Mosey impertinently—or perhaps I should say, pertinently.

—“a grace and refinement which—if you will pardon me for
saying so—you can form no conception of. Inherited wealth is the secret of it.”