The Swan-Song of Jane Meakin

by Beatrice Grimshaw

 

The Swan-Song of Jane Meakin

By Beatrice Grimshaw

A STORM was raging in the first-floor front of Metropole Mansions, Sydney (“a home from home; apartments with or without; replete with every comfort and excellent cuisine; night porter, hot and cold water”). Outside, the day was a true Australian day of gold and blue; a brisk wind blew from the harbor; red roofs and green gardens shone beside speedwell-colored water. The trams roared by in the wind and the sun, carying loads that seemed composed of fluttering gauze veils and muslin dresses, for it was Saturday afternoon, and all young Sydney (and how much of Sydney is young!) was on its way to the surf. Young tram conductors, with smart figures and cultivated moustaches, charioted these loads of youth seaward; young nurses, laden up to the Plimsoll mark with cargoes of white-frilled baby to be ferried over to the park, gazed enviously at the procession of pleasure. It was a world of youth—youth in possession, youth triumphant.

In the private sitting-room labelled 24, in the first floor front of Metropole Mansions, Jane Meakin, aged seventy and a year or two, stared furiously out at the universe of Jenny and Jessamy, and saw not a boater hat, not a patent shoe of the whole procession. She saw Jane Meakin only—Jane Meakin, who had been told that very day, by the upstart idiot her son had been fool enough to marry, that she was too old to pour out the tea when company was there, and that Vera, Mrs. Andrew Meakin, Jr., was tired of the confusion always arising between the two Mrs. Andrews, and intended for the future (as Andy's father had been dead for some years) to introduce her mother-in-law as Mrs. Jane Meakin.

Mrs. Andrew Meakin, Senior, had given a piece of her mind in reply; several pieces—the bugles on her indescribably jetty and beady dress were still tinkling with the recoil of her own artillery. Vera, loud and shrill and very rapid, was engaged in cataloguing the benefits Mrs. Andrew, Senior, had received at her hands, and lamenting the absence of gratitude paid in for the same—gratitude, she hurried to add, which she had not for a moment expected, and which, therefore, by its absence, “made it that much the worse.”

“Gratitude,” orated Vera, in the purest Sydney twang (the phenomenal success of Andrew in his grocery and spirit business had whirled her somewhat too rapidly from Wooloomooloo to Darlinghurst), “gratitude? Well, I daon't expect it; but I do expect, when a married laidy is generous enough to tyke in and keep 'er husband's useless old relytions, that they shall at least refryne from myking a nuisance of themselves, and stye in their plyce. And it isn't your plyce to pour out tea for my guests, and it's not your nyme that you're using—myking confusion with my parcels and letters! You're not Mrs. Andrew; your Andrew's dead and buried. You're Mrs. Jyne; and you've got to remember you was only a factory girl 'oo married a weaver, while I'm a laidy with a husbind 'oo's a successful merchant. Besides,” she looked at her malevolently, with the hatred of one generation for another—“you're old; you're finished—no good to no one; do you 'ear that?”

“I do hear that—hussy!” said Mrs. Andrew, who, being North of Ireland bred, did not drop her h's. “And I'd have you to know that I intend keeping my man's name till I go after him. And if you call me Mrs. Jane, I—I—” She paused, and groped wildly for a weapon, but none presented itself. “I won't answer,” she finished, feebly.

Vera laughed; her anger was almost spent. She was a large, fat, overblown girl, who spent her life feeding herself, lying about in a wrapper, and “doing the block” in a garden-party dress and a feathered hat. This seemed to her perfect happiness and true refinement. What could be more refined than doing no work of any kind, having champagne for dinner as much as once a week, and wearing real lancer plumes every time you put your head out of doors?... Life was a good thing to Vera Meakin, since the successful grocer had taken her from her table in a city restaurant. She was not “bothered” with children; Andy was away all day; there was only the tiresome old mother-in-law. And, after all, you could be superior and patronizing with Mrs. Jane; that was something—life without patronage lacked a certain salt.

“You can't 'inder me calling you your right nyme,” she said, almost good-naturedly, “and you can't pour out tea, and sit at the top of the tyble, if I don't let you do it. After all, it's my tyble.”

“And it's my taypot,” riposted Mrs. Jane, triumph flushing in her trembling old face. She reached out across the table, and seized the plated horror that had poured out discord instead of tea, this unlucky Saturday afternoon. “And the sugar-basin's mine, best electro—and the eight tayspoons, that's real silver. Gev them over to me, wuman, as soon as ye please, and faith, I'll rid ye of meself soon enough to please even you.”

“Oh, now you're talking rot,” said Vera. “You know Andy waon't let you work. And if he did, what work could you do? Sydney daon't want old people.”

She looked insolently at herself in the glass, and smoothed a coil of hair.

“Ould!” said Mrs. Meakin, her currant-black eyes staring fiercely. “There's many a one in ould Belfast, that I do be thinkin' long of every day of me life—there's many a one oulder than me can do ten hours in the mills, and have her own wee house, and her own money. I'm not finished, I tell ye. Is it ninety ye think I am? Seventy-one, and not a day more, is me age.”

“Seventy or ninety or a hundred, it's all one; when you're old, you're old, and I'd sooner be dead myself,” averred Vera frankly. “I've 'ad my s'y; put down that teapot, and don't be silly. You ought to be thankful to have such a home as Andy gives you. He wouldn't, if I had my way. Aoh, by the w'y, he told me not to forget your week's pocket money; 'ere it is.”

She pulled a half-crown out of a peggy-bag that jingled with coin, and tossed it across the table. Mrs. Meakin took it up deliberately, as deliberately spat upon it (I fear she was a vulgar old- woman at best) and threw it into the empty grate. Then, hugging her teapot, she withdrew.

Ten minutes afterwards, Vera saw her going down the main staircase, her small wiry figure enveloped in a beaded cape, a bristling bonnet erect upon her head.

“Where are you gowing?” screamed Vera, like a peacock on a wall, “You know Andrew daon't like you to gow out and not s'y.”

Mrs. Meakin paused outside the sitting-room door, determinedly “made a face” at her daughter-in-law, and continued her way downstairs. On the last flight but one, a sudden rush of tears overpowered her. Blinking fiercely, she took refuge in the bathroom, and “had it out.”

“Augh-an-ee, augh-an-ee!” she sobbed, rocking on the edge of the enamelled tub (the “home from home” did not run to bathroom chairs). “Sure it's no crime to be ould, but ye'd have better done a crime than that; they do be havin' a place for ye, and work for ye, in prison.”

She washed her face, and went on downstairs, a solitary little figure, with the mark of the manufacturing town plainly to be read in the short-legged body and economical build. Looking at Jane Meakin, you felt sure she would not take much to keep; further, you knew that she could do a good day's work and would not unseasonably knock up. None of her forebears, bred in the roaring mill-town of Belfast, had been able to indulge in the luxury of knocking up, whether they felt like it or not. In either case, they had gone on. They had all gone on, till they died. And now Jane Meakin, at the comparatively early age of one-and-seventy, was told she couldn't pour out tea, given pocket money like a child, and assumed to be in danger from the tram-cars, every time she went out.... In consequence, something that had been saving up for a long time was suddenly expending its savings in Jane Meakin's brain.

Her eyes were dry now, and she felt cheerful. She walked across the Domain towards the city, not at all sure what she was going to do, but quite certain she was going to do it. The huge cream-colored palace of the Art Gallery glittered in the sun; the statues and the gardens glowed. The matchless panorama of the harbor lay beneath; it did not seem to have changed since the day, twenty years ago, when Jane Meakin, a mere girl of fifty, sailed in between the Heads with Andrew, the Elder, now dead.

“I'm not that ould yet,” said Mrs. Meakin, settling her bonnet.

Passing the tea-house, she looked rather wistfully at the cups and sauccers on the marble tables outside. Woman's yearning for a cup of tea, after an emotional scene, beset her, but she was moneyless.

“In the ould time at Tay Lane Mill,” thought Mrs. Meakin, “there was Andrew's earnin', and Johnny and Katey's, and mine, and every wan of us would be havin' a pinny or two always to spend, and no questions. Sure, there was no marble stairs and gran' piannas in them days, but there was——”

Under the shade of the close-cut alley of trees she stopped, and listened.

“Dear-a-dear!” she said, and listened again.

Certainly it was—it was the accent of “ould Belfast,” that most ear-razing and unmistakable of tones, sounding in a note of anger, some little way off.

Now to Mrs. Meakin, who had entered Australia too late for mental acclimatisation, there was no music on earth comparable to the saw-edged tones that have their birth in the Shankill Road. She gave her bonnet-strings a pull towards either shoulder, and jerked down her beaded mantle into place, feeling suddenly glad that it had cost Andrew four pounds fifteen last Christmas. Beaded mantles are reverenced by people who speak with the accent of Shankill, Belfast.

Round a corner she ran the voice to earth. It belonged to a woman sitting at the other side of the restaurant, out of doors. The woman had ordered tea; her bill was brought her with the tray, and there was an overcharge of a penny. Having rectified the mistake, she was giving the waitress a solid slab of her mind, together with the coppers that were rightly due. The girl, a handsome, independent-looking, typical “Sydney-sider,” answered back with some vigor, but was speedily routed. She departed with her tray, half crying. The woman followed her with a victorious glance, and, turning to Jane Meakin, informed the latter that she, the speaker, knew the whole lot of them, and they were young skelpings, every one.

Neither youth triumphant nor youth defeated was likely to earn much of Jane Meakin's sympathy that day. She looked with an approving eye at the sensible age (somewhere north of sixty) and the solid silken and bugled clothes of her new acquaintance, and replied without emotion that they were certainly skelpings. Whether young people in general, Sydney young people, or merely handsome young people who served your tea unsatisfactorily in the domain, were thus to be classified neither woman explained. But it appeared they understood one another; and the stranger made room for Jane on her bench.

“Have a wee sup out of my sosser,” she said cunningly. “They don't like it, but they needn't see. Woman, dear,” she added, as Mrs. Meakin sat down, “you're from Belfast like meself. I knew it on ye the moment I heard ye speak.”

“I am so,” agreed Mrs. Meakin, accepting the “sosser” and its contents. “And I'd rather,” she spoke with sudden bitterness, “I'd rather have the York Street Spinnin' Mills of six of a winter mornin', the whistle yelly-hootin' at ye like mad, an' me goin' into work in the clobber and the rain—I'd rather have it than this.” Not being South of Ireland, she did not sweep an indicating arm round the splendid prospect of the harbor and the town, but she fixed it with her hard, black-currant eye, and seemed to curse it as she looked.

“Aye so?” said the other woman, drinking her tea. “And for why?”

“Because there's use for an ould wan there,” answered Mrs. Andrew Meakin, Junior's mother-in-law. “But in Australy here, an ould wan's a dead wan, never a less.”

“You're no dead wan,” commented the stranger, looking over Mrs. Meakin with a curious, appraising eye. “Well I know the like of ye; and if one would offer to kill that sort, it's with nothing less than an axe one would be doing it. Have another sosser; no one's looking.”

Mrs. Meakin accepted; this sort of generosity, mingled with cunning economy, was exactly to her taste. Besides, Vera never would let her drink out of the saucer at home.

“The childer I had!” she remarked, guarding her black silk skirt from falling drops with her pocket-handkerchief. “Ten children, and seven of them I buried in the Upper Falls, and wan I left in service in Lambeg, and wan, he went to the Portugees, and I never heard tell of him anny more. And Andy, the big grosher—Andrew Meakin's, licensed premises, biggest in Wooloo-mooloo—you'll know it——”

“Sure I do; an' is that your son?” asked the other with an accent of respect.

“He is so. He's been good to me; me mate and me clo'es is of the very best; everything of the best they have, Andy and me daughter-in-law. And I've lived with them since my man died, three year ago; and never a hand's turn of work have I had to do. But wumman dear, wumman dear!——”

She set down the saucer hastily, and picked up her handkerchief.

“Quit!” said the younger woman, fixing a keen gray eye on Mrs. Meakin's quivering face. “Quit whinin'. Talk, and tell me what ails ye at them.”

There was something purposeful in her tone that braced Jane Meakin's nerves like a dash of water. She put down her handkerchief, looked round to see that nobody was within hearing, and launched into a catalogue of her grievances. Ended, she sat up straight, and asked, with a touch of dignity——

“And may I be askin' your own name, ma'am, and are ye long tor stoppin' here?”

“Mrs. Bell is me name,” was the reply. “Bell, me man, is dead; he was Australian-born, and I'm a bit of an Australian meself now. No, Mrs. Meakin, ma'am, I'm not for stoppin' long. I come up to Sydney for to get meself spectacles for me eyes, and teeth for me mouth, and I've got them, and I'm goin' home. Bell left me no childer, but he left me a good wee property. A property—yes.

“In the country?” hazarded Mrs. Meakin.

“Aye, in the country,” answered Mrs. Bell. Her hands were spread out on her silken knees—like Mrs. Meakin, she wore the uniform of the well-off lower middle-class—and something moved the other woman to look at them. They were splayed, cracked, and knotted like the hands of a working-engineer; the nails were broken short, and the finger-ends blunted as if with an axe. Jane Meakin's own hands showed the traces of almost life-long work, but they were lady-like compared with these.

“Save us!” she gasped. “Do you be makin' roads with them hands, or what?”

“That's telling,” said Mrs. Bell, in no way offended. “It's time I was going,” she said, her eyes fixed on a watch she had pulled out from the front of her dress. It was a slab of gold as big as an apple, and it had a chain that would have held most breeds of dog. Mrs. Meakin had noticed the immense gold brooch she wore, and the thick rings on her fingers; this last evidence of splendor almost took her breath away.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Meakin,” said the owner of the watch, getting on her feet. “I would be queer an' pleased to see ye again, if ye'd come here another day. Faith, it has done me good to have a crack with ye.”

“I'll come,” said Mrs. Meakin. “They wouldn't like it. But I'll come all the more. It does me good to spite that wee cat, Vera, and as for me son, Mrs. Bell—when childer begins to get ould, an' has their own husbands and wives, and doesn't back out their mothers as they had a right to do, ye don't have the same heart to them. Ye don't so.”

“Aye, indeed,” assented the other politely. “I never had none of my own, and I'm thankful for it. Good-bye, Mrs. Meakin; I'll be here o' Monday.”

Mrs. Meakin went home (to the “home-from-home”) with a feeling of mystery and romance in her heart, such as she had not felt since Andrew Meakin, Senior, and she dodged together round the entrance of Corn Market on a Saturday night, to escape from the mother who didn't want her Andy to marry that young skelping, Jane M'Milligan.... Vera and Andy both received her coldly; she did not know which was the more offensive, that, or Andy's solicitude lest she should have got her feet wet (a little rain had sprung up on the way home). She went to bed early, and lay long awake, hugging her secret, and following headless and tailless fancies in her own brain. Never was an anxious lass with a puzzling lover more eager to know if he “meant something” than was Mrs, Meakin to know the exact meaning of Mrs. Bell.

Andy and Vera, respectively absorbed in the odds for the Cup and the confecting of a hobble skirt at the hands of a new dressmaker, did not notice much about Mrs. Meakin for the next few days, except that she was very quiet, and “did not bother.” She seemed to be up in her room very often; Vera knew she was not out, because the main staircase was in full view from the sitting-room door, and it was the chief occupation of Mrs. Andrew, Junior, to watch the comings and goings of various people thereupon.... There was a cement fire-proof stair at the back, unused because of its steepness, but Mrs. Andrew, Junior, never thought of that.

Still, a certain hilarity about her mother-in-law's demeanor did pierce its way to Vera's comprehension, after a week or so; and thenceforward she began to watch the old lady like a cat watching a mouse. It would be hard to say what she suspected; she was at all times only too glad to suspect anybody of anything, being of the literate-illiterate type that does not read, and must, therefore, find or invent all its drama in its own immediate surroundings. She had vague notions of some belated absurdity of a love-affair; she fancied the old woman was betting on the sly; she thought drink might be at the bottom of the change.... she did not, in fine, know exactly what she thought. But she said nothing to Andrew, and she watched.

One night she crept upstairs to Mrs. Meakin's room, which was a story higher than her own, and listened at the door. The old rebel, who had been quite surprisingly independent that day, was moving briskly about inside, though it was after eleven o'clock. She was singing, too—actually singing; the only song that anyone had ever heard from her. Vera remembered that before she had put the old silly in her place, Mrs. Jane used actually to quaver it in a thin, old voice at tea-parties....

“.. Where are now the merry party
I remember long ago,
Laughing round the Christmas fire,
Brightened by its ruddy glow?
... Some have gone from us for ever,
Longer here they might not stay.
They have reached a fairer country,
Far away, far away!”

Was she drunk? Vera tried the door; it was locked.

“What do you want?” cried a voice from within. The tone was actually fierce.

“Nothing,” said Vera hastily, and crept away downstairs. She felt almost afraid.

The next night was Saturday, and Andrew and his wife went to the theater. Everyone in the house had gone to bed when they returned. Andy suggested going up to see if his mother was all right; she had gone to her room about four o'clock with a headache, and asked not to be disturbed for dinner; but Vera was tired and cross, and said the old lady was full of her tantrums, and they wouldn't encourage her; if you asked her, Vera (which no one did) she would say that Mrs. Jane was simply sulking.

On Sunday morning, Andy, enjoying his weekly “sleep in,” was rudely awakened by screams from the floor overhead. He sat up in his pajamas, scratched his head, and listened. He had a shrewd idea that he knew that brand of scream, and Vera was nowhere to be seen. Groaning, he put on his slippers, and lurched sleepily upstairs to his mother's room.

Vera, on the smooth and empty bed, was screaming, kicking and sobbing in a full-fledged hysterical fit. A dozen other boarders were gathered round the door, timidly peeping in. On the floor lay an opened envelope.

Andrew, who was no fool, came in, slammed the door sharply, and took up the water-jug.

“Now stop, Vera,” he said. “Stop at once, or I'll make you.”

Vera was dressed for Sunday morning; one need not ruin a new silk crêpe because a man is an uncomprehending brute. She stopped.

“Your mother's run away,” she said, gasping and choking effectively. “Ungrateful old thing! everyone will be laughing at us. She left a note on the pin-cushion. There it is, and I can tell you what I think about the old——”

Andy came towards her with a light in his eye that frightened her.

“I didn't mean anything,” she cried.

“You'd better not say anything, then,” said Jane Meakin's son. “You never were kind to my mother.”

“You were as bad,” said Vera defensively. “Read the letter.”

Andy read it; it was not long. It told him, in poor handwriting and worse spelling, but concisely and clearly enough, that his mother was going away, where she would be let have a life of her own. She was going with a friend, a woman who was a sensible age, and she would be in business with her, and would make money for herself, and ask favors of no one. Her boy did not want her. Nobody wanted her, except her friend. Andy might hear of her and might not; she did not suppose he would care. There were tears on the signature, but it was firm.

For days and days after that, Vera scarcely dared to speak to her husband. Andy was angry, hurt, unhappy by turns; he set detectives to work, he haunted the railway station for traces. Nothing came of the detective work but a long bill for expenses. Andy himself unearthed the smallest of clues at last, in the chemist's close by Metropole Mansions. An old lady in a black beaded mantle, it appeared, had come in there on the Saturday afternoon, and bought some medicine; she had a big parcel under one arm, and a silver teapot, imperfectly wrapped up, under the other. As Mrs. Meakin's teapot and spoons had vanished with herself, this was proof of identity.

... Had Andy asked what the old lady's purchase was, it might have saved him many a long tramp about railway stations. For Mrs. Meakin had bought a packet of Golden Specific for Sea-sickness.

After that, came nothing at all, for nearly two years. Then came something very startling indeed.

An English lawyer, practising in a place that no sane person had ever heard of—Riobamba, Ecuador, South America—wrote to inform Mr. Andrew Meakin that his brother, John James Meakin, late of that town, had recently died, and had left an annuity of two thousand pounds until her death, to his mother, Mrs. Jane Meakin, if still living. If she was dead, the money was to go—no, not to the deserving Andrew, but to the founding of a convent in Riobamba; John James having apparently been converted to “Papistry” during his stay in heathen countries. In any case, the fortune that produced the annuity was to go to the projected convent after Mrs. Meakin's death.

For three days after the arrival of this maddening letter, Vera cried more or less steadily from dawn till dinner. What would not that two thousand annuity have meant to Andy and herself, had only the despised Mrs. Jane still been with them! Things were not prospering with Andy. The grocery had suffered from coöperative store competition, undreamed-of when Andy made his big venture; money was short, and likely to be shorter. The Meakins no longer lived sumptuously in Metropole Mansions; they had an upper back room in a not too high-class boarding-house, and Vera wore no more lancer plumes.... Two thousand a year! Why, old Mrs. Meakin might easily have lived ten years—twenty thousand! and most of it would certainly have gone to her affectionate son and daughter-in-law who had been so nobly generous to her in their prosperity. Why on earth had cranky John James, whom no one ever thought anything of, quarrelled so with all his family, especially with Andy, who certainly used to knock him about long ago, but only did it for his good, and because he needed to be kept in order. And why hadn't Andy had the sense to find out he was doing well, and make it up with him before it came to this? Thus Vera, in the intervals between tearful spells.

Andy did not waste time in tears, but set to work, systematically and determinedly, to find out his mother's whereabouts. He did not believe she was dead; she was only seventy-three, and as tough as pin-wire. She must be somewhere in Australia; and that somewhere should be changed to Sydney as soon as possible.

Soon every Australian newspaper contained the touching message that the affectionate son sent forth to his prodigal mother; soon every breakfast-table in the Commonwealth commented on the persistent appeal, and wondered what the hint of “astonishing news from Johnny” could mean.... It was many months before the advertisements ceased. But they vanished from the press at last.

About the same time, one Andrew Meakin took a ticket by the Burns Philip boat Meandra from Sydney up to Papua. He had not previously realized that such a place as Papua actually existed, though if he had searched the memories of long-dead school-days, he might have found an indefinite statement or two about “Papua, or New Guinea, the largest island in the world; produces birds of paradise, cocoanuts, and gold; is largely unexplored.”... In Andrew Meakin's philosophy, things you learned in school had nothing to do with things you encountered afterwards in the world.

It was a long voyage, ten days or so, and there were not many passengers. Andrew talked to the steward a good deal. He found that the man remembered a certain “Mrs. Smith” traveling up to Papua with a certain Mrs. Bell two years before. They were two old ladies, “that was, to say, not ladies exactly, but two elderly persons who was well-dressed,” and seemed to have money, at least, one of them had. They had got out at the last port, Samarai, and he remembered well seeing them start off next day in a cutter manned by “wild savages of Papuana, without a stitch of decent clothes, and hair all full of feathers,” for an unknown destination among the islands outlying New Guinea. He had been off the line ever since, and had only just come on again; couldn't say just what had become of them. “They were two old sports, all right,” he added. “They was as cheerful as two-year-olds, all the way up, and when they got their glass of porter in the evening—not that they was drunk, sir, only they'd have their nightcap together in their cabin—they would be singing away, one with the other.”

“What did they sing?” asked Andrew.

“It always seemed to be the same song, sir; one of them couldn't sing but a little bit, and the other only seemed to know the one thing—“Where Are Now the Merry Party?”

Andrew Meakin went back to his cabin knowing he had found what he sought. The newspaper paragraph that had led him thus far was short and indefinite. It spoke only of two old women leading some strange life on a far-away island off the coast of New Guinea, but, in view of the stake involved, he had thought it well to follow up the slight clue afforded. Now his mind felt at rest. He would have that two thousand a year—and his mother; yes, of course, he would be very glad to have his mother back again—within a few weeks longer at the most.

•••

“Have you got a stick of dynamite?” asked Bob Caddell, blocking up the sun-white oblong that gave light and entrance to the residence of Harry Kyle.

Harry was seated on his only chair—a levelled tree-stump, carefully left inside when the camp was made. He had left four smaller stumps also. With a bit of plank hacked from the high-buttressed root of a certain tree, they formed quite a satisfactory table. There was a bunk, also a box. He offered Caddell a seat on the latter,

“Dynamite—yes,” he said. “Is it Sunday, then?”

“What did you think it was?”

“About Wednesday,” said Kyle in a shadowy voice. He was a shadowy thing altogether; an oldish, grayish man in earth-colored clothes, his shoulders bent by stooping along vine-tangled tracks, his face bleached to bone-color by the eternal gloom of the forests of Ani-Ani Island. He looked at Caddell with the curious, far-off gaze of the man who lives much alone.

“So you're back,” he added, rising to take the dynamite off a rude shelf. There was hardly light to see one's way about in the sepia-colored little house, built windowless, of sticks and sago-leaf. Caddell, plumper, redder, louder than the shadowy owner of the place, gazed round him uttering cheerful ejaculations, more or less impious.

“It's like old times,” he said, emphasizing his remark with a comet tail of happy profanity, “to be off dynamiting fish for Sunday dinner, in good old Ani-Ani. Near four years now, Harry; I didn't expect to find anyone alive. We do die off so (adjectivally) quick, on the New Guinea fields. But I couldn't stick West Australia, somehow. New Guinea's got me. Who's here now?”

“I'm here,” said the indefinite Harry. “And Micky, and Red Bill, and the Alligator. And Stan. And Dutch Johnny. And Ned Borden. And two or three you didn't know. Jerry is dead, so's Bell.”

“Poor old Bell! He was a white man, all right,” commented Caddell, working on the stick of dynamite. “How did he wink out?”

“That way,” said the other, without moving a muscle of his face. “That way that you're doing. Putting a fuse and a cap on to a stick of dynamite, and smoking while he done it.”

“I forgot,” said Bob, easily, removing his pipe. “What became of Bell's widow, our only lady?”

“Oh, the old girl was a real sport,” declared Kyle with some approach to animation. “You know she was a genuine battler, as tough as an old goanna. She took on Bell's claim herself, and ran it with her own boys. But then the old girl got lonely, and when she took a trip down to Sydney with a good shammy of gold with her, I'm blest if she didn't bring another old girl back with her—widow like herself, old and tough like herself, and the two of them bogged in and worked the claim as mates.”

“They did!” said Bob, with interest. “How did they get on?”

“First-rate; the claim was a good one, and they did fine. They had the best camp you ever saw on Ani-Ani, with glass windows that they got up from Thursday Island, and tables and chairs, and white muslin curtains. Once in a way they'd take their cutter, and have a trip down to Thursday; seemed that was good enough for them; they didn't fancy going right south. If you seen the pair of them, in a sort of bedgown rig, with trousers on, working with their boys down in the creek, you'd thought you'd got the jumps; they was no beauties. And they kept themselves to themselves, and didn't have anything much to do with the diggers; said they'd had their share of men and everything to do with them. But if one of the men was sick, why, they was like your mother to you. And when you was right again, back to their camp again, and the dogs barking blue murder at anyone who came near.”

“Did they make much?”

“If they did, they didn't save it. They lived well, and what they fancied, that they had, and what they wanted to do, they did. Not drinkers, they weren't, but they would have their little nip together of an evening, like two diggers, and the oldest, an Irishwoman she was, she'd have her pipe and smoke it. They was old sports all right, the two of them.”

“I suppose they aren't here now, from what you say.... Give me three inches of fuse.”

“I'll give you no three inches; do you think I want to knock off work and take you down to Samarai with your face blown off? Here's six. No, they aren't here; they're dead.”

“Both?”

“Both. Mrs. Bell, she took ill and died all in an hour, heart, or something like it. The natives cut and left her, when she died, of course, and the other was bad with fever, and couldn't get up, and I reckon she winked out because there was no one to attend to her.”

The hut was very quiet for a moment; there was no sound but the plunging of the creek through the emerald gloom of the valley, and the sharp “kok-kok” of a bird of paradise. Caddell was busy with his fuse, and Kyle seemed to be falling asleep.

“Well, so long,” said the visitor at last, rising. “I must be getting on. Why didn't any of you go in to look after the old lady?”

“Thought she was all right; heard her singing to herself—we reckoned after she must have been delirious. Singing to herself half that night—we heard her as we went by to the store—something about a 'merry party'.”

“Thanks for the dynamite; I'll send you a fish or two,” said the miner, stepping out into the forest.