Читать книгу The Black Police - A. J. Vogan - Страница 9

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“So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

HE firm of Messrs. Winze and Clinskeen, Mining and Stock Agents, of Pitt Street, Sydney, is known as well, if not better, in “outside” wilds as even in Sydney. The establishment is one of those remarkable outcomes of Australian push and enterprise that are to be found in these colonies and nowhere else in the world. The office before us is the focussing-point of two great fields of operations,—mining and stock-raising. In the ground-glass case in the office—dedicated, as a black letter notice on the door informs us, to Mr. Clinskeen, the station-business partner—a subtle brain is directing the business affairs of fifty large stations a thousand miles away, comprising a total area of perhaps 50,000 square miles. Any hour of the day you may drop in at the office, and you are sure to find somebody from the “Far North” closeted with the keen-eyed, courteous, military-looking old gentleman and his shorthand clerk in the little glass case aforesaid. Tall, slim, darkly-bronzed men, in well-cut clothes and be-puggeried light-felt hats, come there and drawl out their ideas about “fats,” stores, capital, artesian-bores, and the like, whiffing long cigars meanwhile, and everlastingly “nipping” from the decanter of “three star” upon the table. One of these bowed out, perhaps the “boss-drover” of a mob (herd) of fat cows, which has lately arrived from the north in Sydney, enters, with his dirty, rough, cabbage-tree hat in his hand. He has a jolly, brown-red face, and has come to get his “accounts squared up.” He is a bit “breezy” just now, for he has already begun to “knock down his cheque” (spend his money); but he sobers up under the keen “no nonsense” glance of Mr. Clinskeen in little less than no time. He is not quite happy, to tell the truth, about these same accounts. Thoughts will enter his head about that beast that disappeared mysteriously about the time he had to wait with his cattle near Swindle’s grog-shanty, at Parakelia Creek, for five days, whilst his black boys tracked some of his pack-horses that had wandered away. His mind is not quite easy either about his enormous butcher’s bill; for Mr. Clinskeen knows something about the awkward mistakes that will arise sometimes with drovers, in mixing up their own private grog account with the “rations expenses’ list.” However he has got down with only a loss of one and a half per cent. of his “O. B. Fours,” and his business being soon dispatched to his satisfaction, he goes away as contented as may be. Jew money-lenders, hydraulic engineers, stock-inspectors, patentees of “ear-marking” machines, come and go, and then more squatters. The flow of business through that little glass office is never ceasing.

On the opposite side of the clerk’s outside office is Mr. Winze’s special apartment. “His claim,” he calls it, for he it is that conducts the mining part of the affairs of the firm, and he is thoroughly professional in speech as well as action. Born a “Cousin Jack” (a Cornishman); working for his living when nine years old in the submarine levels of a great, rambling tin mine on the ragged sea-front of the Old-land; educating himself by the light of flaring tallow-dips, whilst the moisture of the mine walls fell upon his book; the noisy man-engine creaking mournfully by his side, and the sea roaring far up above his head, he has fought his way through life; and, by means of Australian gold fields and Cornish pluck, is now one of the wealthiest and most respected of Sydney’s citizens. He does not see so many visitors in his little sanctuary as his business-brother Mr. Clinskeen does, over the way; but it is through his far-sightedness and practical knowledge of mining that the firm has amassed the capital that his partner can lend to such advantage to their run-holding clients. Mr. Winze is sitting, as our curtain rises, at his paper-strewn table. He is a powerful-looking, squarely-built, elderly gentleman, with magnificent, dark-brown eyes, and well-formed head covered with thick iron-grey hair. The expression of his face shows that much of the youthful fire remains; and although over sixty years of age, he is really younger in many respects than some of the town-bred, thirty-five-year-old clerks in his own office. By the side of the mining partner is an open iron deed-box, from which he takes several pink-ribboned bundles of papers. He reads rapidly through some of them, glances at others, taking notes meanwhile; then, glancing at a clock upon the wall opposite, turns towards the corner of the room where his lady type-writer is seated, and informs her, with a kindly smile, that he will not require her presence till three o’clock. Left to himself, he stretches himself, and letting his gold pince-nez fall upon his broad chest, with a shake of his head, proceeds to fill and light his “thinking pipe,” as he calls it.

“Disengaged, sir?” at this instant says a red-headed clerk, opening the door after first knocking on the glass. “Mr. Angland, sir.”

“Oh, how d’ye do, Angland? Come in; right to time to a minute. Easy to see your heart’s in the work you’ve undertaken. Sit down over there, that chair’s more comfortable. This other one is an old mate of mine, let me tell you. It has a history. I made it myself from the ‘sets’ that gave way in the O’Donaghue, when what we thought was the ‘hanging-wall’ caved in, and showed us the true reef again, and a nice little fortune too on the other side of a ‘horse.’

“Can I offer——no? You’re almost an abstainer. So much the better. Well, I’ve thought out your matters carefully,—and when I say that, knowing, as you do, that your uncle was the nearest approach to a brother I ever had, and that his wishes are sacred to me, I think you’ll believe me.” Pointing to the table with a paper-knife made from a piece of silver-kaolin from Broken Hill, he continued, after a pause, “I’ve just been going through his papers again, so as to be well posted up against your coming. Now, to drive right into the subject,—and perhaps you’d better not interrupt me till I ‘clean up,’—to go right ahead, I propose that you leave for the north at once. That you go to Cairns, in company with a tough old practical miner that I’ll introduce you to,—a ‘hatter’ who knows a lot about that part of the coast range. You’re not safe here, evidently. This little arch-business the other night showed that; and, almost teetotaler as you are, you may possibly be helped, nolens volens, to a drop too much—excuse the joke—that will leave you not worth ‘panning out.’ It’s no use your travelling under an assumed name now. You’ll be watched, likely, in any case; and I intend to hedge you round in a better and different way. You shall be a public character to a small extent. You shall go under the distinguished auspices of the Royal and Imperial Ethnological and Geological Society of Australasia.

“Plain Mr. Brown, or John James, Esq., may disappear; and it’s too late to look for traces of either when missed. It’s very different, let me tell you, with an accredited explorer of the Royal and Imperial—excuse the rest. He is under the eyes of the public wherever he goes; and there is much protecting virtue in the words ‘Royal and Imperial,’—and this is especially the case here, in republican Australia. Odd, ain’t it? Now you have trusted me because poor old Sam, your uncle, told you to do so; and you mustn’t object to my old miner friend going with you. If the poor old boy has kept something good up there, in the mining way, for you, you wouldn’t be able to do things properly without an old hand to teach you the ropes and dodges. If you went by yourself you’d be shadowed and tracked down, safe ‘as a Cornishman’s set.’ How about money? Ah! that’s all right; but if you do want any, draw on me to any amount.”

Claude murmured an expression of thanks.

“Not at all,” continued Mr. Winze, rising, “and now you’ll come and take lunch with me, and afterwards we’ll interview the scientists.”

After lunch, seated in a corner of the splendidly appointed smoking-room of the “only” club in Sydney, Claude’s new friend and ally discloses to him the past history of the late explorer.

“Now, all you know about your uncle, you say, is that you thought him ‘the grandest fellow you ever met;’ that you saw little of him when he visited London in 1878, with his native boy Billy, whom you are to find; that his time was much taken up with lecturing and seeing old friends; and that the late Dr. Angland, your father, and he did not quite hit it altogether. Both seemed to respect each other, but they didn’t combine well. You’ll see the same sort of thing every day,—first-class fellows, who respect each other’s good qualities, but haven’t enough in common in thoughts or prejudices to become friendly. Will fence with each other in a friendly, but stilted conversation, but won’t amalgamate any more than sickened silver will with gold on a badly managed battery-table. Well, the main reason of the—antipathy, I suppose we must term it in this particular case—I’ll explain. Have you a match? Have used all mine. Burn more matches than tobacco, I verily believe. Your uncle and your mother were the only children of a wealthy London merchant of the old school,—a man whose word was as safe as a Bank of England note; punctilious to a fault; and who, from what Sam used to tell me, would have died of horror, I verily believe, if he had lived to see the modern way of conducting business affairs. He was one of those straight-laced, horribly exact men of the last generation; one who never traded beyond his capital, and never owed a ha’penny. Old Mr. Dyesart would have turned his only son out of his house, I believe, if he had found him borrowing sixpence on an I.O.U. or promissory note. Sam was brought up on these lines, and inherited all the best points of his father’s character. He was, however, of a speculative turn. When he became a partner in his father’s business he developed a taste for big things, and at first rather startled the steady old clerks in the tumble-down offices in Fenchurch Street. I recollect his telling me how he took up the trade in maize from America which commenced after the last Irish famine, and did splendidly. Things went on well, and the old gentleman and his aged clerks felt more confidence in Sam in regard to his speculations, the vastness of which often caused his father at first to storm at his son, and afterwards to admire him more than ever. Then bad years came, and Sam’s Australian wheat connection drew him into various ‘wild cat’ ventures in Queensland sugar plantations and gold mines, and before long the credit of the old-established firm was in danger. He did not tell his father, and hoped to tide over the bad time, and anxiously searched for an opportunity to recover himself.

“With all this trouble on his shoulders, he still,—he was ever the same,—he still could think, feel, and work for others. He was indeed, as you say, ‘a grand fellow.’ As one of the ‘great unpaid,’ he was exercising his official position of Justice of the Peace for some little country town near London where he lived, when a young girl was brought before him one day charged with being an immoral character and without means of support. She told a pitiful tale. She was from Australia, she said, having left all a year before to follow the fortunes of a young libertine, who, as traveller for the soft-goods firm by whom she was employed, had come in contact with and ruined her. He had been commissioned by his firm to buy for them in the chief manufacturing towns of England, and, having been already seduced by him in Sydney, the girl had no alternative—or desire either, if you ask me—but to accompany him to Europe when he told her to do so. After a brief sojourn in London he deserted her; gave her the slip. Without money, friends, or much of a character, left helpless in the great city of a strange land, and afraid to write to her parents, she fell into the ranks of the wretched ‘necessary evils of the pavement.’ Now instead of passing over this girl’s story with an incredulous smile, as most J. P.’s would have done, he communicated through his agents with the girl’s parents,—no, it was the girl’s brother, a gold miner,—and, paying her passage, packed her off back to Sydney again. The girl never reached home, but died on the voyage, of consumption, I think Sam said, contracted by the fearful life she had led in London. You’ll see why I mention this matter by-and-by. Soon after this, Sam saw what he thought was at last a chance of winning back his losses. It proved a ‘duffer.’ This, with other mining speculations, proved to be the straw to break the business back of the old firm; and, happy only in the thought that his father had been spared the shock and disgrace of the collapse by quietly dying beforehand, Sam Dyesart left for Australia,—‘To cure my wounds with the hair of the dog that bit me,’ he used to say, for he turned gold miner, and was pretty lucky all through. His sister, your lady-mother, was engaged to be married to your father, young Dr. Angland, just about the time the final crash came. Although wooing your mother as an heiress worth £20,000 or more, his affection—with honour let it be remembered of him—his affection knew no change when he found her penniless. He must have been a very good fellow. But it appears that he had all along warned Sam of the risk he was running in dabbling in mining matters, and when the crash came rather crowed over Sam I fancy. At any rate, a tremendous row ensued. Sam forbade his sister to marry the doctor. The doctor stuck to his colours, however, and the marriage took place, Sam being absent from the wedding. Then, just after you were born, I think, having wound up his affairs, Sam started for this country, promising his sister before he went that he would return her dowry to her with interest some day. A number of years afterwards, when Sam was my mate upon the West Coast diggings in New Zealand, a stranger arrived in the camp, and came to our ware (house) one night and asked if Mr. Dyesart was at hand. You didn’t hear many surnames on the camp, I can tell you, and Sam was generally known as ‘Doctor,’ from the surgical knowledge he possessed, and the fact of his being ever ready to nurse anybody who might be sick. The visitor turned out to be the brother of the girl Sam had tried to save. It appears that, upon hearing of his sister’s disgrace and death, he set to work and saved up his wages till he could go to England. There he traced out the girl’s destroyer; and finding him, left him a helpless cripple for life. The avenger was arrested, and served a term of, I forget how many, years’ imprisonment, to which he was sentenced by a judge who pointed out, in the usual cold-blooded style, ‘that the girl had her remedy against her seducer,’ and that the law did not recognize the righteousness of a brother’s anger against the destroyer of his only sister. But the object of this long yarn, which has apparently not bored you so much as it has tired me, is that the faithful brother,—I forget his name now, ‘Solemn Jim’ the boys used to call him,—Jim met with an accident a few months after he found Sam, and on his death-bed told your uncle some cock-and-bull yarn of a regular bonanza of a gold-bearing reef, situated somewhere in the Queensland desert country. It was the belief in this imagined ‘second Mount Morgan,’—the outcome of a feverish imagination and a wish to repay your uncle for his goodness to the sister, and nothing more, I verily believe,—it was this that kept Sam flying round the country like a Cooper’s Creek ‘brumbie’ (wild horse) of late years, for he did not know the exact spot to look for his gold mine in, as Jim had turned up his toes in the middle of the directions how to find the reef.”

“Do you know what the directions were, Mr. Winze?” asks Claude.

“Nothing about it, save that the reef was firmly believed in by your uncle, and he expected of late to find it on the Great Coast Range, in Northern Queensland. Now I’ve told you all I know. My pump of recollection ‘sucks,’ as the engineers say. No more to be had of personal reminiscences. But I’ve still one thing to add,—had almost forgotten it, although to my mind most important of the lot. I’ve reason to believe that, contrary to his usual custom, your uncle has either invested in some large speculation up north or has loaned a considerable amount to some one. I say contrary to his usual custom, for he did not inform me of it. It strikes me that this is the secret of his calling you to his grave. Now, as I am appointed sole executor under his will, which will have to be proved upon your return, it is part of my duties to find out what has become of the missing money. The singular silence upon this point maintained by him is odd; but I think that your friend of the Royal, who took you to see the rink so obligingly, but who carelessly dropped you on the way, could point out the answer to what we want to get at.”

The two men rise to go, and soon they are crossing Hunter Street, on their way to the rooms, or rather room, of the Royal and Imperial E. and G. S. of A. Claude, so far from feeling inclined to murmur “Ich bin langeweilig”—as an illustrious person did on a similar occasion—at the loquacity of the old gentleman at his side, has been intensely interested in all he has heard. The evident affection also the narrator had for the memory of the best points in the character of his “old chum Sam” reflected Mr. Winze’s own goodness in its expression; and the young man respects him accordingly, and is ready to follow his directions. Our friends arrive at the Society’s room, and on the way the mining agent has sketched its history for Claude’s benefit.

This august body, like many of the institutions of New South Wales, is unique in its way; it belongs to a class of scientific associations whose parallel is to be found nowhere outside the Australian colonies. To understand the Society’s present position, one must be aware that the most prominent trait of the practical, pushing, nervous brains that are rolling Australia’s “old chariot along” is the instinctive readiness with which any object likely to facilitate the upward march of the individual is seized and made use of, to be thrown aside when it has served the purpose of the climber.

“Advance Australia,” yells Mr. Corn-stalk (N. S. Wales), John Chinaman Crow-eater, Esq. (South Australia), or hot-headed Master Banaana-boy (Queensland); but really they mean “Advance Australian,” which Australian is the particular ego of each individual shouter of the national motto.

Let a thing be untried or unknown, then America or Europe must test it. It will hardly have a chance in Australia of a fair trial. But once an idea has proved itself a good one, an invention has been found labour-saving, an actor has crowded the houses of New York or London, and the hero-worshippers of Sydney and Melbourne become frantically enthusiastic over the new matter, man, or thought brought to their notice. It was through this latter kind of forcing growth that the humbly-useful, plain Geological Society (no Royal and Imperial then) of Sydney—which was originally composed of real lovers of science—suddenly burst into the green-leafed glory of public recognition, with a real live Governor of the Colony as patron.

Science is a tender plant in many respects, and requires plenty of room in which to expand and throw out its ever-increasing tendrils. You cannot assist it by tying its budding branches to the regal fence with ribbons and parchment charters. Indeed, the healthful circulation of the life-giving chlorophyll is dependent on freedom. Second only in harmfulness to the dank shadows of the Church is the hot blaze of Imperial glories on the tender shootlets. Science is impatient of both.

About 1884 great public interest was awakened by an attempt of the “man of blood and iron” to annex the whole island of New Guinea. Germany’s Chancellor for once in his life made a mistake. He had calculated upon the surprise, supine, peace-at-any-price restfulness of the English Colonial Secretary, but he was frustrated by the prompt pluck of the Premier of the Queensland Ministry, Sir Thomas McIlwraith. Some of the business-men subscribers of the Society—who had joined to oblige their scientific friends, wives, or sons—saw in the excitement caused by the New Guinea question the tide in their affairs that, taken at the flood, was to lead them on to promotion in their business and social worlds. They got elected on the executive of the Association; worked upon the feelings of the newspaper proprietors till copious “notices” of the Society appeared in “our columns;” got anybody and everybody who knew, or pretended to know, anything of New Guinea to read papers before the members; and, after judiciously waiting till the public were well advertised of the existence of the Society, suddenly proclaimed that an expedition would be despatched to the Dark Island, and proceeded to obtain contributions towards the same. Dinners and conferences follow, with the Governor himself yawning at the end of the committee-room table; and then, as a finishing touch of the picture, came the gilding of “Her Majesty’s gracious permission” to add the prefix Royal and Imperial to the little Society’s scientific cognomen. The energetic councillors soon received the rewards of their energy; their plan to robe themselves in the reflected glories of the English scientific societies, by building a dazzling looking-glass association on the lowly foundation of an already established body of thinkers, met with perfect success. Plain Mr. Orkshineer became John Orkshineer, Esq., F.R.G.S., and Hon. Treasurer Royal and Imperial Ethnological and Geological Society of Australasia, and found himself rubbing shoulders, at conversaziones and soirées, with a far better crowd in which to enlarge his clientage than he could have dared to show himself in heretofore; and Mr. Lionel E. Gentlydon, the gay and handsome—but, alas! briefless—barrister, met sixteen solicitors’ daughters at one scientific garden-party, where he spread his peacock’s tale of new-born glories as Hon. Sec. of the R.I.E.G.S.A. He has never since regretted his far-sighted policy in climbing up by the scientific ladder, which he had helped to ruin on his way up. The original and true naturalist members of the Society are, as is generally the case, quiet men who dislike all this tinsel and glitter, and they retire more and more into the shade. The New Guinea expedition goes; the brave explorers employed find their provisions composed of damaged and unsaleable articles got rid of by advertising firms, whose names appear before the public as Donators to the Expedition Fund. Even the steam-launch, which must be their home for many months, has long been condemned as useless by her owners, and is obtained for the Society, at an enormous sum per month, through the kindness of one of the shipping-agent members of the Council.

The expedition returns, scientifically successful in spite of all the disadvantages of jobbery and bad management, and the round of dinners, speech-making, and festivities is begun again. Meanwhile the unhappy explorers—several of whom are quite incapacitated by sickness and the hardships they have undergone—wait in vain for their wages for months; when it is discovered that the Society is financially ruined. The business-men have sucked what they wanted out of the Association, and now the older members come forward, and are trying to rejuvenate the dried husk when Claude is first introduced to their notice by Mr. Winze. We have perhaps trespassed too long already upon the subject of the Society, or we would indulge in a sketch of the Executive Council, as the members thereof sit round the little table in the shady room with the map-covered walls. Suffice it, however, to say that the genial old mining agent, having long been a member of the Society, briefly introduces Claude. He points out that he is a scientifically-inclined young man, who is about to visit on business some property of his in Central-Northern Queensland, and that Mr. Angland is willing to collect information and data upon such subjects as the Council may suggest, without cost to the Society, in return for being accredited as its representative. The President welcomes and thanks Claude, and half an hour afterwards he says good-bye to Mr. Winze, having successfully accomplished the first item in the programme laid out for him by his new friend.

Claude feels light-hearted, and is intensely interested in the work before him; and he proceeds to make a few purchases of such scientific instruments as he may require in his new rôle of explorer,—a couple of aneroids, maximum and minimum thermometers, and the like. Then he sends word from a messenger-boy office for his little friend of the arches to be ready to start with him next day,—for Angland has taken his little guide of the arches under his wing entirely. Don’s parents have readily agreed to part with him to Claude, upon receiving a few greasy, crumpled pieces of paper issued by a local bank; and so altered has the child become, in the last few days, that the old expression, “his own mother wouldn’t know him,” would have actually been the case had that bedraggled, whisky-sodden lady taken the trouble to go and look at him. The general “cleaning and refitting” the youngster has undergone by Claude’s orders have so changed him that even our hero can hardly believe that his little henchman is the same child that piloted him out of the railway yard. By the advice of Mr. Inspector Chime, Don has been placed under “police supervision,” namely, at the home of a suburban constable; and here, in a week, by the motherly care of Mrs. Peeler, he has developed into a bright, good-looking little fellow, with an intense desire to become a policeman, and a large capacity for food. His pup has improved with its master, and now shows—the matted coat being treated with carbolic soap—all the points of a well-bred brown retriever. For Claude has wisely arranged that the development of the child’s good qualities should suffer no arrest, even for an instant, by being separated from the only object he has as yet learned to show unselfish kindness to.