Middle Greyness

Front matter

BY A. J. DAWSON AUTHOR OF " MERE SElfTHtfENT " JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK Copyright, 1897, By John Lane. AU rights reserved. iSnfo-tsttg -Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. V Preface At the birth, and in the writing, of this book, the author called it " The Beachcomber." Then he found that some years ago a very similar title to this had appealed to and been used by another author. In putting forward the story under its present title, the writer would ask his readers to remember that when Horatio spoke half incredulously of the " strange " nature of a certain moving tale, Hamlet replied to him, saying : " And therefore, as a stranger, give it welcome." A. J. DAWSON. London, January, 18QJ. Contents

Part I

Chapter Page I. Some Satires of the Bush I II. Beachcomber or — What ? 6 III. The Man in the Gunyah 13 IV. The Man before the Gunyah .... 19 V. And the Place knew Him Not ... 25

Part II VI

Two Men and a Maiden 32 VII. A Great Friend of Mine 44 VIII. Trottie on Worldly Success .... 53 IX. Mr. Robert Darley, M. P 64 X. The Grey Hour 76 XI. Budding 84 XII. An After-dinner Story 94 XIII. Taking Action 105

Part III XIV

In a Bush Township 115 XV. The Beachcomber and His Letter . . 1 26 XVI. The Bushman in His Bush Contents

Part IV

Chapter Paoe XVII. Two Dinners and a Supper . . . 146 XVIII. From To-day My Private Secretary i 60 XIX. Rollo Croft on the Naval Estimates 174 XX. From Fleet Street to Bushey Park 187 XXI. Suggestion 199 XXII. Success 211 XXIII. Intoxication 220 XXIV. A Stumble 234 XXV. The Black Streak 245 XXVI. The Fall 256

Part V XXVII

"The Waters of Lethe are Best" 267 XXVIII. A Vagabond's Younger Son . . . 276 XXIX. Beachcomber to His Beach . . . 289 XXX. Journalist and His Friend . . . 302 XXXI. Growth of the Black Streak . . 311 XXXII. An Idea 323 XXXIII. A Picture 331 XXXIV. "Good-bye, Trottie!" .... 338 XXXV. This Cannot be All 344 XXXVI. Down, Down, Down Contents

Part VI

Chapter Page XXXVII. Before Dawn 362 XXXVIII. Awaking 373 XXXIX. When the Blue Haze Rises . . . 384 XL. A King of Lower Bohemia . . . 391 XLI. "A Pearl, A Girl" 401 XLII. Birth 409 XLIII. " Where the Heart Lies Let the Brain Lie Also" 422

Part VII

XLsV. " Our Parents of Old Entailed the Curse" 434 XLV. The World and Will Darley . . 443 XLVI. The Bush and the Beachcomber . i 1 MIDDLE GREYNESS Part I

Chapter I Some Satires Of The Bush

The moonlight away down South is very beautiful. Perhaps its nights are to many men one of the chief charms of life in the South. It is the same that lovers admire and burglars execrate here in England ; but the moon in the Southern tropics and in all parts of Australia seems so much nearer, softer, and yet more brilliant than in the North. In the nights down there, a light comes which fills the air and soaks through one's very soul, soothing one's mind with thoughts of romance, visions of fair women, dreams of love more pure and noble than that of every-day life, and a feeling of serene pity for all beneath the sky that suffer. When one is breathing the atmosphere of nights such as these, few combinations which may enter one's mind seem unlikely of attainment ; nothing imaginable appears impossible, and an ordinary splintery grey post-and-rail fence is an object of beauty and picturesqueness for the eye to rest upon.

But in the Bush, this all-pervading light is weird and very, very sad. Towards the end of a long summer — it was early in April — the moon happened to be almost at its full one night, when two men were walking their horses along the track that leads round the foot of the Warroo range from the Narrabri coach-road. To be sure this track passes a boundary-rider's humpy at the foot of the first hill which marks the end of the Warroo run ; but where it leads to after wards, it would be hard to say. The boundary-riders know it as far west as the White Ridge ; but after that it dwindles into a sheep track, then a brumby track, and then — well, one cannot say where the brumbies go. The moon was full, and its light in that place both weird and beautiful. The two men were talking about it in a disjointed way, and had been doing so for some time.

The timber there is mostly blue-gum and black-butt, and a lot of it is ring-barked. So in the moonlight, the trunks and limbs of the trees are ashen-grey and white in parts ; and long strips of dead bark hang from them, and rustle in the night air. One of the men had called his friend's attention to this three times within half an hour. Gum-trees do not spread out in a friendly way near the earth. Their trunks rise bare and uncompromis ing for a hundred feet or so, and from thence scraggy arms stretch out hooked fingers hungrily toward heaven, as though reaching after pity for their loneli- Some Satires of the Bush ness. The effect is ghostly to a degree which one feels but cannot explain. One cannot, but both the men riding along the track to Warroo Hills were persevering in their attempts.

Now, when under such circumstances, a big grey wallaby flops across the track in two hops, twelve yards in front of one's horse's head, and at the same moment a jackass, out of sight in a tree overhead, bursts into a long cackle of cynical laughter ; a man is apt to feel that the universe is sneering at his in significance. When it happened so on this particular night, one of the two riders remarked that it was the weirdest thing he had ever known. Then the other man, the bigger of the two, who rode a grey filly, and had a way of allowing his pipe to go out every few minutes, — swore. He was angry ; but the oath he swore was not a very dreadful one. What he said was equivalent to : — " Oh, hang the weirdness of it; when are we com ing to the road ? " Seeing that the tall man, and probably the other man, too, wanted to find the coach-road, it was un fortunate that they should be riding towards the War roo Hills and the interior, on a track which leads through endless Bush to nowhere in particular.

Per haps, however, as they were not aware of the fact, and no one else in the world cared very much where they went, it was not of vast importance. Just as the tall man shivered and struck a match to light his pipe after the effort of his last remark, the grey filly shied and cleared four yards in a jump side ways. Her rider would probably have sworn again, but that relief was denied him by the suddenness of a shock which caused him to almost swallow his short briar pipe. The shorter man, whose attention was naturally not so confined to the eccentricities of the grey filly as was that of his friend, had time to notice what caused the animal's sudden activity. By the side of the track, and showing pale yellow in the moonlight, he saw the smooth cut end of an iron-bark log — one half of a freshly felled tree.

That in itself would make some horses shy, but lying in the coarse grass against the end of this log, was something white which did not belong to the Bush, and which, though simple enough in itself, surprised the short man almost as much as it had startled the grey filly. " By Gad, it 's a calf-bound book, and open at the titlepage, " said he, as looking between his horse's ears in the soft moonlight he read, first in ink, the initials " H. M. D." and then, in ordinary type, the words, " L'Espadon Satirique, Par Fourquereaux." When the tall man had gathered himself together and cleared his throat, with a sound which seemed to travel all round the Warroo Hills, the two dismounted and examined the book. Its subject struck them as being ironically appropriate to the situation, though the presence of such a book in those surroundings was incongruous enough to be startling.

What pleased the wayfarers, however, was that their find suggested Some Satires of the Bush the presence of a man. Now one is generally glad to meet a man in the Bush at night ; and these two had begun to realise that their knowledge of their whereabouts was vague. Neither spoke of the fact ; but the shorter man tucked the book under one arm, whilst holding his horse's bridle on the other, and, as the two stepped out on the track between the gum-trees, he said quietly : " I guess we '11 do a prospect for the owner of this work of satire."

Chapter II Beachcomber Or What

? When the two men left the spot where the book had lain, the silence of the Bush was unbroken even by the rustle of dead bark ; and so it happened that they distinctly heard footsteps on the track ahead, for at least a minute before they saw the figure of a man approaching them in the moonlight. It is a curious thing, this meeting with a strange life in the midst of the death of a Bush night ; almost as strange as it is to pass in the middle of the night, close to a lighted vessel with passengers on her decks, in some such over-the-edge-of-the-world spot as the Straits of Magellan, where the silvery glaciers of Tierra del Fuego run right down into the black water. When the man was within twenty or thirty yards, he called out, " Hullo there, strangers ! " and the effect produced by his voice in the sad loneliness of that place, was as much of a shock as would be a street boy's whistle in the central aisle of some stately cathedral.

He was a tall, finely-built man, with an old-looking head and iron-grey beard, and a body which seemed Beachcomber or — What ? that of a young man. He wore knee-boots and the Crimea shirt, mole-skins, and broad felt hat of the Bush. His shirt was open at the neck, and in one hand he carried a short clay pipe. " We are a bit fogged, and should be glad of your assistance," said the taller of the travellers. " We were directed to take a short cut from where the main road crosses Warroo creek, through the Bush to where it skirts Black-butt Gully within five miles of Narrabri." The bushman, whose voice and body seemed twenty years younger than his head, smiled. " That," he said, with a sidelong glance at the book in the short man's hand, " is, of course, the only beauty of short cuts. They take a man so much farther than a mere main road.

I suppose this one 's taken you about eleven miles further into Australia than you 'd have gone by sticking to the highway." The short man laughed ; but his friend looked rather annoyed. He struck a match to light his pipe again, and said, " But how much farther is it on this track to the Narrabri road ? " " That way," said the bushman, pointing with his pipe-stem over the travellers' shoulders, " it 's about five miles. This way " — the bushman inclined his shaggy head in the direction in which the men had been riding — • " I should say roughly it was about twenty-five thousand miles as the crow flies. Is that my Fourquereaux, you 've got there ? " The short man stretched out his hand, and the bushman took the calf-bound book at which the grey filly had shied. " Thanks ! My humpy 's just across the gully there.

You 'd better come and camp for to-night. If you get off the track hereabouts, it 's doubtful whether you '11 ever use your return tickets to the old country. You have return tickets, have n't you ? Watch that filly when you get down the gully, or she '11 shy at the smoke of my fire. Steady ! Curse it, keep the brute off me ! " So they slipped and stumbled among the dead undergrowth down the side of the gully, following the bushman, who, with his volume of satires in one hand, stepped out between the trees as one who knew every inch of the way before him. On the rising ground beyond the gully, they saw a thin column of smoke rising from the fire in front of the bushman's gunyah. Over the fire hung a large billy can from a cross-bar resting on two forked sticks ; and on an iron-bark log beside the fire, the moonlight glistened over a metal wash-hand basin, a pair of hobbles, a couple of axes, a towel, and various odds and ends such as always collect outside a humpy in the Bush.

" Down, Satan, you brute ! " said the proprietor of all this, as a big black kangaroo dog sprung onto the log and barked. The bushman's residence was an ordinary humpy of stringy-bark, — four sheets at either side, with a strong ridge-pole on forked posts in the centre. But Beachcomber or — What ? it had the various little elaborations which come to a gunyah after a tenancy running into months, or per haps years, and in point of size it was decidedly superior to the average one-man hut. In a few min utes the strangers' horses were unsaddled and hobbled out, and the men themselves were reclining on a pile of rugs placed at their disposal by the tenant of the gunyah, and partaking of the damper, tinned meat, and cheese, which he set before them with a matter-of course hospitality somewhat surprising to guests fresh from old world conventionalities.

The tall man, his mouth full of damper and pre served mutton, was gazing with some interest at a little swing shelf full of books, amongst which he noticed well-thumbed volumes of Horace, Juvenal, Balzac, Rabelais, and Browning ; when the bushman, addressing him, said : " You two are the first strangers that have been this way for eighteen months, and I suppose you have n't been half that time in the colony." " Five weeks " were the words forced with some difficulty from the tall man's lips. And then he resumed his damper and mutton. He had eaten nothing since early morning. The bushman rose, and, taking a bottle of whiskey from a case that lay in one corner of the gunyah, proceeded to knock off its neck with the back of a knife. " You '11 take some whiskey," he said, as he reached for two cups.

" It 's better than the cheese. I can guarantee this as bottled fresh from Lethe, — that is, I get it from the importers in Sydney, and not from the store in Warroo." The owner of the swinging library placed the bottle before the two men, the shorter of whom made a mental note of the fact that their host took his whiskey by half-cups, neat. When the eating was over, the bushman assisted his guests to rig up a couple of bunks, taking four flour-sacks and the same number of thin saplings and forked sticks sunk in the ground, as his material. Then, with the whiskey and cups on the ground between them, the three men talked and smoked, whilst the moon, shining down between the tops of the tall trees and through the triangular front of the humpy, bathed the bushman's head and the end of his bunk in its pure white sheen, leaving the rest of the hut's interior in clean-cut black shadow.

The tall man took some papers from his saddle bags, and, leaning forward into the light, read scraps of news of the old country he had left a few months before to the bushman, who talked of it as though it were part of a world in which he no longer existed. To the men fresh from England, the whole thing was strange and unreal. Perhaps the whiskey, " bottled fresh from Lethe," made their own lives seem far away, and the present phase grotesque and mystical. Perhaps the ghostly surroundings, and that indefinite ride between the bare trunks of the trees, made the reader of French satirists seem to his untravelled guests, a more mysterious dweller in the Bush than he Beachcomber or — What ? might otherwise have appeared. In talking of it afterwards, they were never very confident, but at the time, it seemed to the two men that whilst they lay stretched on flour-bag bunks, they listened to talk of all the countries and seas of which they had ever heard.

That then, they took deep breaths and heard stories told in vivid nervous language, of men and women in lands they knew not of, who lived lives that were outside and beyond the lives of those who listened, as cities are beyond villages, and continents outside parishes. Trying, six months afterwards and in another country, to convey to others the misty impression made upon the pair that night, the tall man said : " When the sky across that little gully was getting full of streaks of silver and purple, the bushman was standing before the gunyah drinking whiskey from the neck of a bottle. Afterwards, when the jackasses in the trees outside were making the Warroo Hills echo back their sneering laughter, the bushman, his great grey beard trembling, and his eyes on fire, recited the whole of Browning's ' Fra Lippo Lippi,' and talked of men and things in the country we came from, in a way that sent sleep farther from our eyes than the memory of anything real and tangible was from our minds."

Finally, the two men afterwards agreed in affirming that when daylight came, slowly effacing the dying night of the Bush, the man with the grey beard pulled his rugs over his shoulders and lay down. Then the taller traveller said : — " Won't you tell us what you are, and why you are here ? " At this, the bushman, laughing in his beard, turned on one elbow and looked at his questioner. While he looked, his face grew drawn and sad, and the laugh died out of his blood-shot eyes, as he said : — " I am — well, I suppose in the Islands, in the East, they would call me a beachcomber." Then the end of the dead laugh came back to life for one moment, and the older man, lowering his elbow again, the three fell asleep.

Chapter III The Man In The Gunyah

When the sun was well up in a sky of ripply blue, and the great fragrant clusters of wattle-blossom down the gully were quivering in the luxury of that heat which, in New South Wales, comes an hour or so before noon-day, a red spider, with a black head and deliberate movements, crawled onto the short man's nose and woke him. He opened his eyes, and the door which shuts the man sleeping from the man waking, slammed to in his head, whisking up as it closed a little panorama in which he saw mistily : a woman waving her hand at the garden-gate of a Devonshire farm-house ; a ship's deck from which passengers were straining their eyes to make out the loom of the Heads outside Sydney harbour; a moonlit track winding between dead gum-trees ; a man with a huge grey beard, whose face was a picture of hunger-mocking strength.

He raised himself, and threw a morsel of damper at the back of the tall man's head. " Hi ! " he said, hurriedly assuming a wide-awake air, " are you going to lie there sleeping all day ? " Then they both sat up in their flour-sack bunks, and stared blinkingly out into the dazzling sunlight, where they saw their host dropping tea from a battered canister into the billy of boiling water which hung over the fire. The man looked fresh though rather haggard, in the brilliant sunshine. His hat was far back on its owner's shaggy head, and over his beard drops of water sparkled brightly. There was a creek in the little gully below the gunyah. The travellers did not once refer to the previous night. And, in some vague way, both had a desire to appear at their best in the eyes of the unkempt bushman, who evi dently cared not a solitary jot what his guests might think of him.

The three men had a little meal together, and talked of the surfaces of things ; the road to Narrabri and the time to be occupied in getting there. Then, after a smoke on the shady side of the gunyah, they saddled their horses in the early afternoon, and the bushman led them through the gully onto the track by the iron-bark log. There was something in his face which held at arm's length the curiosity it aroused, and the two men felt no inclination to make jocular remarks or to ask questions. " You '11 be on the Narrabri road in an hour," said their host ; " but don't leave the track whatever you do, and you can sleep in a real brick-and-mortar hotel to-night. Good-bye ! Not at all. Every man's camp is a home in the Bush, unless — you know him too well. Good-bye ! " The Man in the Gunyah And when the short man, turning in his saddle to look back from the first bend in the track, waved his hat, he saw this bushman leaning against the iron bark log and ramming tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

The two men had drifted past him as they drifted to him, and the bushman, having lighted his pipe, laughed drily to himself as he jerked a long axe from out the place where it stuck in the fallen log. While the afternoon shadows stretched farther down the side of the gully, the muscles of the man's arms swelfed, and his loose shirt rucked and creased in moist folds that grew moister with every swing of the seven pound axe. The reciter of " Fra Lippo Lippi " was breaking out iron-bark sleepers ; and when the short Australian twilight had almost finished its hasty burial of the bright day, four red, splintery sleepers lay in the rough by the side of the track, ready for the touch of the squaring adze. Then the bushman who had called himself a beachcomber, gave his axe a final whirl which sent its blade, with a " Clumph !

" that echoed all down the gully, far into the hard red wood, where it was left, quivering. He stood for a minute looking across to the Warroo Hills, through that indistinct blue haze which seems to surround the birth of night in the Bush, with a veiled mysticism well suited to the weirdness which comes later. Then, with one foot extended, he touched the kangaroo dog, who lay stretched at full length on the track. " What is scenery before dinner ? " he muttered, smoothing one of the creased sleeves of his shirt. " Satan, you pompous fraud, we will feed." The dog rose, yawning till his mouth seemed larger than his sinewy body, and the two walked slowly down the gully to the bark humpy on the other side. Arrived there, the bushman performed his evening toilette beside the big log, and, having spread some eatables on the whiskey case by his bunk, filled his billy-can and hung it over the fire.

Then he sat down on the heap of flour bags at the entrance to the gunyah, and leaning forward picked up a double sheet of newspaper which lay stained and crumpled on the ground. This was one of the papers his guests of the previous night had carried with them. The moon had hardly thrown its earliest rays through the tree-tops then, so it must have been the flickering light of his fire that enabled the bushman to read the closely printed English newspaper. Anyhow, he sat there reading, and the grey beard sank lower and lower between the knee-caps of his long boots, as the man bent over his crumpled sheet. The big log in the centre of the fire was blazing and smouldering, and the billy-can rocked to and fro in excitement, as the water in it bubbled and hissed over its sides till very little else but steam was left.

Still the man sat poring over the stained newspaper, and gazing fixedly at a column down the centre of which ran a long irregular whiskey stain. This column was headed " University Jottings ; " and when The Man in the Gunyah the bottom had fallen out of the dry billy-can, and the light of the fire had dwindled down to nothing, the bushman still sat by the side of his untasted dinner, staring at or through the column on which drops of the Englishman's whiskey had fallen. The paragraph at the first line of which the man's beard had begun to droop, and the last line of which had ended his reading, opened thus : — " Speaking of the 'Varsity cricket match naturally causes reference to the captain of the Oxford team. Mr. Robert Manton Darley is, we understand, already spoken of in his college as one of the strongest classic men of his year, and certainly his performance at the Oval on Saturday showed him to be one of the most brilliant cricketers the senior University has produced for many seasons."

At last, Satan, who had watched the destruction of the billy-can with cynical indifference, awoke to the painful reality of his still dinnerless situation, and, walking to the front of the gunyah, howled dismallv. " Go to the devil ! " said the man, raising his head sharplv. Then as an afterthought he added, " Here, poor beggar, feed ! " And he threw the chunk of damper he had cut for himself to the dog, who wolfed it with that machine-like precision and silent rapidity which distinguishes the kangaroo dog when hungry, and causes the animal's face to wear a look of quiet watchful expectancy which savs plainly, " Now that that unconsidered trifle has been dispatched, I wait your permission to proceed to more serious business." But the bushman paid no further attention to his dog; and when the stained newspaper fell from between his knees to the ground, the man's beard moved nervously as he muttered, " So Mr. Robert Manton Darley is a success — already."

Then he rose slowly and, walking out into the moonlight, sur veyed, with a strange expression of half amused irony on his face, the remains of his billy-can. " That I should drink whiskey only to-night, is not of itself a deplorable fact, but it is distinctly sad to reflect that I shall have no tea to-morrow morning." The man muttered this softly, as he stood gazing at the smouldering middle log of his fire ; and then, kicking the useless billy far away towards the little gully, he filled his pipe, and sat down on the end of the log outside his gunyah.

Chapter IV The Man Before The Gunyah

" Mr. Robert Manton Darley," the coming man of his year at Oxford, was the eldest son of the self styled beachcomber ; and the beachcomber's indifference in the matter of his domestic arrangements for that night, was caused by reflection on the probable career of this son and one other, and on the circumstances connected with the occasion on which he had last seen these two children of his. This led to thoughts of his own early life ; and the man sitting on the log recalled the experiences of a young officer in a crack regiment, living in another world where there was no Bush. He remembered a beautiful young wife's shame, when her gallant, brilliant husband was forced to leave his regiment. Then his recollections were misty, covering as they did a feverish life of mad extremes, — a diplomatic appointment as attache in a British embassy on the Continent ; splendid resolutions and secret excesses ; and, finally, a horrid smear of shame which was blotted out and covered over by powerful influences.

Then, in the hushing process, thought the man on the log, a pure woman's heart broke; and he remembered standing by his wife's grave in a quiet old cemetery in Hampshire. Those two boys. Yes, it must be kept from them. He would tone down to middle greyness the mad hungers of his passionate nature; he would lead a clean life for their sakes, that the world might feel the power of his own strong mind as reproduced in sober steadiness in his sons. The man sitting on the log smiled bitterly, and tapped his pipe on the side of his boot. He remembered the awful, helpless feeling which had come over him, as he gradually realised that a broken man, broken in name and pocket, and to some extent in mind, could not bring his sons out in those grooves of the world where fame and success are mostly found.

Then, how on a day in that old life, when the very helplessness of the middle grey course had driven him to one of his lurid extremes, James Anthony Cumming, his millionaire cousin, had visited him. This cousin, the representative of huge inherited success and of the respectability of wealth, had, in all his intolerance of extremes and lurid lights, taunted the broken man with the hopeless permanence of the black streak which had broken him. But, the beachcomber had thought, this vain man of mediocrities, whose soul was colourless, he repre sented wealth, unlimited power, the world's approval, and success. He could make lives, and held in his weak hands all that which the disgraced diplomat longed to give his sons, that they might carry on and live the life of his power. The Man before the Gunyah " Disappear utterly.