In Bad Company, and other Stories/Lapsed Gentlefolk
LAPSED GENTLEFOLK
Ah me! who has not known and pitied them in this Australian land of ours? The workman's Paradise! yet all too well adapted for converting the gently-nurtured waif into the resigned labourer, the homeless vagrant. The gradations through which slowly, invisibly, but none the less surely, drifts to lower levels the luckless gentleman adventurer, are fraught with a melancholy interest. How sad it seems to realise that of the hundreds of well-dressed, well-educated, high-hearted youngsters, fresh from pleasant British homes, who every season land on our shores, a certain proportion will, in a few years of Colonial Experience (save the mark!), be transformed into misanthropic shepherds, ragged tramps, or reckless rouseabouts.
One always sees a few in the men's hut at shearing time, owning no higher aspirations than the ordinary station hand, living the rough life of the bush-labourer, relishing coarse tobacco and the coarser jests when the day's work is done, hardly distinguishable in dress, tone, and manner from their ruder comrades. Like them, alas! too prone to end each term's unrelieved labour by an aimless, ruinous drinking-bout.
It is not that the daily toil, the plain fare, and rude companionship would be in any sense degrading, were they used as means to an end. Did the cadet resolve to save all but the cash absolutely required for clothing and other needs, a small capital might easily be acquired, with reasonable credit in proportion, for which a profitable outlet is always to be found. And a knowledge of the rougher side of Australian life is always valuable wherever his lot might be cast.
The real social deterioration accrues when the well-born or well-educated man becomes fatally contented with his humble surroundings; when hope has faded out, when ambition is dead, when repeated trials have landed him in deeper failure; when the conviction is only too well founded that for him no higher position is attainable in this world. Nay, that even if attained, he is no longer fitted to occupy it.
Persons imperfectly acquainted with our social system may say, 'Oh, once a gentleman, always a gentleman!' and so on. From whatever rude environment, he will come forth true to his training, and assume his earlier habitudes as easily as the well-fitting garments which his altered circumstances render necessary.
It is not so, unfortunately. Granted that the exceptional individual emerges from the wreck of his youthful aspirations safe and uninjured, more numerous are they tenfold who reach the shore bleeding and disabled, never to be again but the simulacra of their former selves—hopeless of ever attaining the fair heaven-crowned heights, so near, so tempting of ascent in boyhood; heedless but of the lower pains and pleasures to which they have all unresistingly yielded their future lives.
Much of course depends on the mental fibre of the youngster. If happily constituted, he may defy the most inauspicious surroundings to alter his habits of thought or change his settled purpose in life. One boy, at the roughest station in the 'back blocks,' will save his money and do his work in a cheerfully observant spirit; he will utilise the spare time, of which he has so large a supply, in reading and improving his mind; he will find out all he can about the working of the station, with a view to future operations when he is promoted to partnership or management. To this he resolutely looks forward. He preserves the manners and the principles which he brought from home untarnished; an easy enough matter, since even in the farthest wilds, among the roughest working men in Australia, a true gentleman's mien and tone are always held in respect, which no man loses save by his own act.
Say that he has a few years of hard work and privation, he is sure to rise in life, and eventually, by dint of perseverance and attention to detail, to become the owner of or partner in a station. His character for steadiness, efficiency, and industry becomes known from one end of the district to the other. And if those with whom he is temporarily connected do not advance him, be sure that some neighbouring proprietor in need of an active lieutenant will not lose the opportunity.
The young man of less robust self-denial takes station life after a very different fashion. His fixed idea has been from the first that galloping about on horseback, smoking, shooting, and drinking are the recognised pastoral industries by which fortunes in Australia are made. He does not bother his head about the science of sheep-breeding, or the management of that capricious but profitable animal the merino. He forgets messages. He overrides the station horses. He smokes diligently, talks familiarly and plays cards with the men, from whom he learns to swear profanely and acquires no useful knowledge—on the contrary, much that is evil. On his visits to the village or post-town he learns to drink spirits, and thus lays the foundation of a dangerous habit, which, if not checked, may destroy his after-life. At the end of his two years' experience he is regarded as about on a level with the ordinary rouseabout—hardly as good, certainly no better. On making up his mind to leave for other employment, he is told that he is heartily welcome to please himself.
Occasionally the unsuccessful gentleman, emigrant or colonial, is not distinctly to blame for his fall in social position. He has adopted a bush life, trusting vaguely to be able to get on in one of the numerous ways of which he has heard tell. He tries hard at first for situations suited to his former position in life, finding, however, that no one is in pressing need of an inexperienced youth not brought up to work. Still, if strong and willing, he can earn ordinary wages as a station hand. He learns how to manage the routine work nearly as well as his comrades in the men's hut, and by degrees, not being mentally persistent, he adopts the tone and manner of the men who are his companions—not at once, and not altogether, but after a year or two—to a much greater extent than any one would think possible. In a work of fiction some kindly squatter would free the poor fellow from his rough, or let us say uneducated comrades, but in real life no one would risk the experiment. He may have been deceived before. He would argue that though the waif might be a gentleman by birth, it must have been his own fault in some way that he was in his present position—most likely drank, gambled, or had done something shady; and this would be true in nine cases out of ten. If he introduced Mr. Waif to his family, or took him into his house if a bachelor, he might, of course, behave well for a time, but one fine day, unable to withstand the temptation of an open sideboard, would be found dead drunk or madly intoxicated on his employer's return.
Gradually the unsuccessful one, after a year or two of nomadic life, tramping it from one end of a colony to another, begins to abandon the punctilious habits of his early life. His speech shows signs of degeneration. He talks of people indifferently as 'coves' or 'cards'; causerie with him is 'pitching'; he refrains with difficulty from expletives, and so on. His reading has not been kept up, though, had he cared, it might have been. He is scented unpleasantly with coarse tobacco, occasionally, alas! with the too frequent 'nip' of alcohol. If he by any chance re-enters civilised life, he shows in a dozen ways that he is no longer in touch with it. He makes things uncomfortable for his friends or companions, and is thoroughly convinced that he is out of place himself.
A youngster of this type came to a squatter's station one evening, carrying his 'swag' like any other tramp. The owner knew that he was or had been a gentleman, but apologised, as he had guests, for not asking him into the house. He was too dirty to be quite exact, and neither in raiment nor in other matters was he then fitted for the society of ladies. So he had his supper and bed in the men's hut, smoked his pipe over the fire with the man-cook, and turned in, quite contented with his accommodation.
Sometimes, if fairly industrious and steady, the ex-tramp makes his way to a managership, or even a share in a station, where he recovers a portion of his earlier form. But he is apt to be rough and careless to the end, which his English friends attribute to the necessarily deteriorating influences of colonial life.
Perhaps the saddest sight of all is the broken-down 'swell' of maturer years, carrying his 'swag' along the road, sometimes a solitary 'traveller'—a name that has its own significance in Australia—sometimes in company with other 'sundowners.' He is free of the guild now, unluckily. They neither resent his companionship, nor feel flattered by it; in no way do they alter their mode of speech or action in consequence. It is known that he has 'seen better days,' as the phrase runs. If so, it is nobody's business but his own. A certain amount of reticence characterises Australian bushmen, which is not noticeable among their British comrades. The nomadic habit, and the goldfields' experience—for nearly every able-bodied man in Australia has graduated there—may be held accountable for this trait. Travel is the true civiliser, and in many respects supplies the place of the higher education, teaching reserve, undemonstrativeness, and the patient endurance of privations and dangers which cannot be evaded.
So, though it is generally believed that Jack Somers or Bill Brown was a gentleman (nothing, alas ! will ever make or keep him one again), he is treated by the master who employs him, and the station hands or farm labourers who work with him, exactly as the others—neither better nor worse. Generally a smart, intelligent worker, whether a shearer, rouseabout, boundary rider, road hand, what not, during the often protracted periods when he is compulsorily sober. This is secured by giving him no money (the more obvious necessaries can be procured from the station store), until his term of work be completed or his contract finished. Then he gets his cheque, and short work he makes of it. For the nearest bush public-house is to him a barrier fixed and impassable, while there is a pound in his purse.
After all, Australia is perhaps the best country for the fallen swell. A reasonable share of honest work is always open to him, which, from the custom of the country, is not held to be degrading, as it would be in Europe. He could not work in the field in Britain, tend sheep, drive a team, break stones. All these things he can do in Australia with but temporary loss of prestige or social rank. He would find it next to impossible to gain a living in the old country in any form of day labour. Were he even to succeed in doing so, he would be gazed and wondered at by the whole country-side. A man of good family requested me to officially certify his identity for the security of his people at home, who were remitting money to his credit. Roughly dressed was he—had evidently been 'on the wallaby' recently. After telling me his name and birth, he must have thought I looked doubtful, for he said, 'I am the man I say; I'm not the Claimant.' That great personage was then supplying England and Australia with food for conversation. A book lay near me with a Latin quotation on the frontispiece. This I slightly indicated; he at once took the hint and translated it correctly.
'What have you been doing lately?' I inquired. His hands, roughened and gnarled, with no make-believe manual labour, assured me that he had been pretty continuously at work of some sort.
'Well, station work mostly,' he returned answer. 'My last job was cooking for a survey camp.'
'Was it for this that you graduated at Trinity College, Dublin?' was my unspoken thought. That he drank hard between times, poor fellow, was apparent to my experienced eye. He received his money duly, which was, of course, 'blued' like all previous remittances. I exchanged letters with the friends who had written after him. I advised, if they were really anxious for his return, that he should be placed on board ship, but no money given to him till safe on blue water. What historiettes of lapsed gentlefolk in the colonies might be written! The Honourable Blank Blank, long past even the middle passage of station work, who loafs about country towns, taking work as ostler, or even 'boots' at the hotels, ready to drink with any rough, and feebly subsisting upon the reflection of former greatness, until he becomes too useless for even such a position, is locked up for repeated drunkenness, and finally dies in a gutter.
The 'cranky' long-bearded shepherd vegetates on a back-block station, amid desert regions now becoming traditionary, where wire fences are all unknown, or by dingoes rendered ineffectual.
A row of books adorns his solitary hut, a weekly paper, perhaps his sponge and ivory-backed brushes, curious-appearing souvenirs of old days. He talks pleasantly enough to the rare-appearing stranger, who is also a gentleman. The British tourist, if a new arrival, rides off with pity in his heart, possibly with some idea of aiding the hermit to return to his friends in England. If a colonist, he knows better; knows that the old man has his half-yearly or annual 'break-out'; that he can no more inhabit the same dwelling as ardent spirits without utter debasement than fly; that such will be his life, without change or amendment, until he ends it in a Benevolent Asylum, or, more probably, is found dead in his hut. Then from his papers it will be discovered that 'Old Jack' or 'Jindabyne Joe' was, once upon a time, Lieutenant Harry Willoughby Howard of the —th Fusiliers, one of the smartest subalterns in that distinguished and tolerably fast regiment. What brought him here? How fared he so ill in Australia, where blue blood always counts for something, the Radical press notwithstanding? Heigho! These and other questions may be answered some day, or they may never be. The nearest magistrate holds an inquiry, sitting on a bench outside of the lonely hut on the sandhill. The overseer counts out his flock to a fresh hand, and the ex-Fusilier, younger brother of one of the magnates of Blankshire, is carted into the head station and decently buried, with the collie dog as chief mourner, his grief being real and unaffected, and his lamentations for the next few days touchingly audible.
Having a favourite horse to put in harness in the early gold-field days, I betook me to an establishment in Melbourne where a brake was kept. Of course I mounted the box to watch and perhaps assist in the interesting performance. When the brakesman got up—a good-looking middle-aged man with grey whiskers if he was not a gentleman, and an ex-swell at that, I had never seen one. From his cravat to his well-polished boots—a neat foot, too—from his hat to his accurate dogskin gloves, he was 'good form.' He might have walked straight out of one of Whyte Melville's novels.
His 'hands,' in stable language, were perfection, and as he and the brake-horse between them, with practised adroitness, conducted the drag and my Zohrab, a slashing grey son of Donald Caird, out of the yard and up Lonsdale Street, I felt a measureless pity for the dear old man, who, doubtless failing to score at Bendigo or Sandhurst, had come down to this for a livelihood. Charmed with his conversation and manners, I am afraid I prolonged the lesson unduly, for when we returned my aristocratic friend was urgently required to school other young ones at a guinea per lesson. The proprietor, a vulgar person, expressed his disapproval in language unfit for publication. I remonstrated hotly, but the dependent emigré said no word. I departed sadly, and never saw him more. Melbourne was full of such derelicts in 'the fifties.'