章节正文
On the Track
by Henry Lawson
Preface
Of the stories in this volume many have already appeared
in (various periodicals), while several now appear in print
for the first time.
H. L.
Sydney, March 17th, 1900.
Contents
The Songs They used to Sing
A Vision of Sandy Blight
Andy Page's Rival
The Iron-Bark Chip
"Middleton's Peter"
The Mystery of Dave Regan
Mitchell on Matrimony
Mitchell on Women
No Place for a Woman
Mitchell's Jobs
Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster
Bush Cats
Meeting Old Mates
Two Larrikins
Mr. Smellingscheck
"A Rough Shed"
Payable Gold
An Oversight of Steelman's
How Steelman told his Story
On the Track
The Songs They used to Sing
On the diggings up to twenty odd years ago -- and as far back
as I can remember -- on Lambing Flat, the Pipe Clays, Gulgong, Home Rule,
and so through the roaring list; in bark huts, tents, public-houses,
sly grog shanties, and -- well, the most glorious voice of all
belonged to a bad girl. We were only children and didn't know
why she was bad, but we weren't allowed to play near or go near
the hut she lived in, and we were trained to believe firmly
that something awful would happen to us if we stayed to answer a word,
and didn't run away as fast as our legs could carry us, if she attempted
to speak to us. We had before us the dread example of one urchin,
who got an awful hiding and went on bread and water for twenty-four hours
for allowing her to kiss him and give him lollies. She didn't look bad
-- she looked to us like a grand and beautiful lady-girl --
but we got instilled into us the idea that she was an awful bad woman,
something more terrible even than a drunken man, and one whose presence
was to be feared and fled from. There were two other girls
in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her "Auntie",
and with whom we were not allowed to play -- for they were all bad;
which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled.
We couldn't make out how everybody in one house could be bad.
We used to wonder why these bad people weren't hunted away or put in gaol
if they were so bad. And another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark,
when the bad girls happened to be singing in their house, we'd sometimes
run against men hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening.
They seemed mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded
they were listening and watching the bad women's house to see
that they didn't kill anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys
-- ourselves, for instance -- who ran out after dark;
which, as we were informed, those bad people were always on the lookout
for a chance to do.
We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable, married,
hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad door
in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper,
and listen round until the bad girl had sung the "Bonnie Hills of Scotland"
two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk
two or three days at a time. And his wife caught him
throwing the money in one night, and there was a terrible row,
and she left him; and people always said it was all a mistake.
But we couldn't see the mistake then.
But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:
Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell,
In my bonnet then I wore;
And memory knows no brighter theme
Than those happy days of yore.
Scotland! Land of chief and song!
Oh, what charms to thee belong!
And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie
-- who was married to a Saxon, and a Tartar -- went and got drunk
when the bad girl sang "The Bonnie Hills of Scotland."
His anxious eye might look in vain
For some loved form it knew!
. . . . .
And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time.
Next door to the bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family --
a family of good girls with whom we were allowed to play,
and from whom we got lollies (those hard old red-and-white "fish lollies"
that grocers sent home with parcels of groceries and receipted bills).
Now one washing day, they being as glad to get rid of us at home
as we were to get out, we went over to the good house and found no one at home
except the grown-up daughter, who used to sing for us,
and read "Robinson Crusoe" of nights, "out loud", and give us more lollies
than any of the rest -- and with whom we were passionately in love,
notwithstanding the fact that she was engaged to a "grown-up man" --
(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the way by the time we were old enough
to marry her). She was washing. She had carried the stool and tub
over against the stick fence which separated her house from the bad house;
and, to our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over
against her side of the fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders
to the fence between them, and heads bent down close to it.
The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her,
over and over again. They sang very low, we thought.
Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us.
She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool
and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in a hurry.
And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house.
The good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw
-- that she'd been talking to a bad girl -- else she would never,
never marry us.
She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing "Madeline"
that day.
I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one night
after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a frightfully bad
woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and thereafter
we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice,
lest we should go and do what the digger did.
. . . . .
I have a dreamyrecollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy
a being from another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:
Out in the cold world -- out in the street --
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!
That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened
by women sobbing (and one or two great grown-updiggers also)
that night in that circus.
"Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now", was a sacred song then,
not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar "business"
for fourth-rate clowns and corner-men. Then there was "The Prairie Flower".
"Out on the Prairie, in an Early Day" -- I can hear the digger's wife yet:
she was the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly
and crept into camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up
with gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good tinkettling
in the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start housekeeping on.
She had a very sweet voice.
Fair as a lily, joyous and free,
Light of the prairie home was she.
She's a "granny" now, no doubt -- or dead.
And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife,
wearing a black eye mostly, and singing "Love Amongst the Roses" at her work.
And they sang the "Blue Tail Fly", and all the first and best coon songs --
in the days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.
. . . . .
The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews' "Redclay Inn".
A fresh back-log thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully.
Company settled down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.
Flash Jack -- red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing in it,
glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack volunteers,
without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his nose:
Hoh! --
There was a wild kerlonial youth,
John Dowlin was his name!
He bountied on his parients,
Who lived in Castlemaine!
and so on to --
He took a pistol from his breast
And waved that lit--tle toy --
"Little toy" with an enthusiasticflourish and great unction
on Flash Jack's part --
"I'll fight, but I won't surrender!" said
The wild Kerlonial Boy.
Even this fails to rouse the company's enthusiasm. "Give us a song, Abe!
Give us the `Lowlands'!" Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying
on the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his head --
his favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing.
He had a strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and through,
from hair to toenails, as a child.
They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it
behind his head on the end of the stool:
The ship was built in Glasgow;
'Twas the "Golden Vanitee" --
Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone between --
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen,
as all do within hearing, when Abe sings.
"Now then, boys:
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
"Now, all together!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!"
Toe and heel and flat of foot begin to stamp the clay floor,
and horny hands to slap patched knees in accompaniment.
"Oh! save me, lads!" he cried,
"I'm drifting with the current,
And I'm drifting with the tide!
And I'm sinking in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!" --
The old bark kitchen is a-going now. Heels drumming on gin-cases
under stools; hands, knuckles, pipe-bowls, and pannikins
keeping time on the table.
And we sewed him in his hammock,
And we slipped him o'er the side,
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
Old Boozer Smith -- a dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor
in the corner with its head on a candle box, and covered by a horse rug --
old Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe
for hours past, but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor;
for, with a suddenness and unexpectedness that makes the next man jump,
by Henry Lawson
Preface
Of the stories in this volume many have already appeared
in (various periodicals), while several now appear in print
for the first time.
H. L.
Sydney, March 17th, 1900.
Contents
The Songs They used to Sing
A Vision of Sandy Blight
Andy Page's Rival
The Iron-Bark Chip
"Middleton's Peter"
The Mystery of Dave Regan
Mitchell on Matrimony
Mitchell on Women
No Place for a Woman
Mitchell's Jobs
Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster
Bush Cats
Meeting Old Mates
Two Larrikins
Mr. Smellingscheck
"A Rough Shed"
Payable Gold
An Oversight of Steelman's
How Steelman told his Story
On the Track
The Songs They used to Sing
On the diggings up to twenty odd years ago -- and as far back
as I can remember -- on Lambing Flat, the Pipe Clays, Gulgong, Home Rule,
and so through the roaring list; in bark huts, tents, public-houses,
sly grog shanties, and -- well, the most glorious voice of all
belonged to a bad girl. We were only children and didn't know
why she was bad, but we weren't allowed to play near or go near
the hut she lived in, and we were trained to believe firmly
that something awful would happen to us if we stayed to answer a word,
and didn't run away as fast as our legs could carry us, if she attempted
to speak to us. We had before us the dread example of one urchin,
who got an awful hiding and went on bread and water for twenty-four hours
for allowing her to kiss him and give him lollies. She didn't look bad
-- she looked to us like a grand and beautiful lady-girl --
but we got instilled into us the idea that she was an awful bad woman,
something more terrible even than a drunken man, and one whose presence
was to be feared and fled from. There were two other girls
in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her "Auntie",
and with whom we were not allowed to play -- for they were all bad;
which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled.
We couldn't make out how everybody in one house could be bad.
We used to wonder why these bad people weren't hunted away or put in gaol
if they were so bad. And another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark,
when the bad girls happened to be singing in their house, we'd sometimes
run against men hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening.
They seemed mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded
they were listening and watching the bad women's house to see
that they didn't kill anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys
-- ourselves, for instance -- who ran out after dark;
which, as we were informed, those bad people were always on the lookout
for a chance to do.
We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable, married,
hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad door
in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper,
and listen round until the bad girl had sung the "Bonnie Hills of Scotland"
two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk
two or three days at a time. And his wife caught him
throwing the money in one night, and there was a terrible row,
and she left him; and people always said it was all a mistake.
But we couldn't see the mistake then.
But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:
Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell,
In my bonnet then I wore;
And memory knows no brighter theme
Than those happy days of yore.
Scotland! Land of chief and song!
Oh, what charms to thee belong!
And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie
-- who was married to a Saxon, and a Tartar -- went and got drunk
when the bad girl sang "The Bonnie Hills of Scotland."
His anxious eye might look in vain
For some loved form it knew!
. . . . .
And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time.
Next door to the bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family --
a family of good girls with whom we were allowed to play,
and from whom we got lollies (those hard old red-and-white "fish lollies"
that grocers sent home with parcels of groceries and receipted bills).
Now one washing day, they being as glad to get rid of us at home
as we were to get out, we went over to the good house and found no one at home
except the grown-up daughter, who used to sing for us,
and read "Robinson Crusoe" of nights, "out loud", and give us more lollies
than any of the rest -- and with whom we were passionately in love,
notwithstanding the fact that she was engaged to a "grown-up man" --
(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the way by the time we were old enough
to marry her). She was washing. She had carried the stool and tub
over against the stick fence which separated her house from the bad house;
and, to our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over
against her side of the fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders
to the fence between them, and heads bent down close to it.
The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her,
over and over again. They sang very low, we thought.
Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us.
She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool
and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in a hurry.
And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house.
The good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw
-- that she'd been talking to a bad girl -- else she would never,
never marry us.
She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing "Madeline"
that day.
I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one night
after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a frightfully bad
woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and thereafter
we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice,
lest we should go and do what the digger did.
. . . . .
I have a dreamyrecollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy
a being from another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:
Out in the cold world -- out in the street --
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!
That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened
by women sobbing (and one or two great grown-updiggers also)
that night in that circus.
"Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now", was a sacred song then,
not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar "business"
for fourth-rate clowns and corner-men. Then there was "The Prairie Flower".
"Out on the Prairie, in an Early Day" -- I can hear the digger's wife yet:
she was the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly
and crept into camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up
with gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good tinkettling
in the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start housekeeping on.
She had a very sweet voice.
Fair as a lily, joyous and free,
Light of the prairie home was she.
She's a "granny" now, no doubt -- or dead.
And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife,
wearing a black eye mostly, and singing "Love Amongst the Roses" at her work.
And they sang the "Blue Tail Fly", and all the first and best coon songs --
in the days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.
. . . . .
The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews' "Redclay Inn".
A fresh back-log thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully.
Company settled down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.
Flash Jack -- red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing in it,
glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack volunteers,
without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his nose:
Hoh! --
There was a wild kerlonial youth,
John Dowlin was his name!
He bountied on his parients,
Who lived in Castlemaine!
and so on to --
He took a pistol from his breast
And waved that lit--tle toy --
"Little toy" with an enthusiasticflourish and great unction
on Flash Jack's part --
"I'll fight, but I won't surrender!" said
The wild Kerlonial Boy.
Even this fails to rouse the company's enthusiasm. "Give us a song, Abe!
Give us the `Lowlands'!" Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying
on the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his head --
his favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing.
He had a strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and through,
from hair to toenails, as a child.
They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it
behind his head on the end of the stool:
The ship was built in Glasgow;
'Twas the "Golden Vanitee" --
Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone between --
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen,
as all do within hearing, when Abe sings.
"Now then, boys:
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
"Now, all together!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!"
Toe and heel and flat of foot begin to stamp the clay floor,
and horny hands to slap patched knees in accompaniment.
"Oh! save me, lads!" he cried,
"I'm drifting with the current,
And I'm drifting with the tide!
And I'm sinking in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!" --
The old bark kitchen is a-going now. Heels drumming on gin-cases
under stools; hands, knuckles, pipe-bowls, and pannikins
keeping time on the table.
And we sewed him in his hammock,
And we slipped him o'er the side,
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
Old Boozer Smith -- a dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor
in the corner with its head on a candle box, and covered by a horse rug --
old Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe
for hours past, but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor;
for, with a suddenness and unexpectedness that makes the next man jump,
- volume [´vɔlju:m, ´vɑljəm]
n.卷；书籍；体积；容量 (初中英语单词) - vision [´viʒən] n.视觉；想象力；幻影 (初中英语单词)
- mystery [´mistəri] n.神秘；秘密；故弄玄虚 (初中英语单词)
- glorious [´glɔ:riəs] a.光荣的；辉煌的 (初中英语单词)
- drunken [´drʌŋkən] a.喝醉的；常醉的 (初中英语单词)
- mysterious [mi´stiəriəs] a.神秘的；难以理解的 (初中英语单词)
- mostly [´məustli] ad.主要地；多半；通常 (初中英语单词)
- instance [´instəns] n.例子，实例，例证 (初中英语单词)
- anxious [´æŋkʃəs] a.担忧的；渴望的 (初中英语单词)
- grown-up [´grəun-ʌp] n.成年人 a.成熟的 (初中英语单词)
- astonishment [ə´stɔniʃmənt] n.吃惊；惊异 (初中英语单词)
- dismay [dis´mei] n.惊慌 vt.使惊慌 (初中英语单词)
- dreadful [´dredful] a.可怕的；讨厌的 (初中英语单词)
- incident [´insidənt] n.小事件；事变 (初中英语单词)
- standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- wander [´wɔndə, ´wɑ:n:dər] v.徘徊；流浪 (初中英语单词)
- haunted [´hɔ:tid] a.常出现鬼的，闹鬼的 (初中英语单词)
- sacred [´seikrid] a.神圣的；庄严的 (初中英语单词)
- prairie [´preəri] n.大草原 (初中英语单词)
- old-fashioned [´əuld´feʃənd] a.老式的；过时的 (初中英语单词)
- invitation [,invi´teiʃən] n.邀请；请帖；吸引 (初中英语单词)
- preparation [,prepə´reiʃən] n.准备；预习(时间) (初中英语单词)
- pistol [´pistl] n.手枪 vt.用手枪射击 (初中英语单词)
- flourish [´flʌriʃ] v.茂盛；挥动 n.挥舞 (初中英语单词)
- enthusiasm [in´θju:ziæzəm] n.热心；狂热；爱好 (初中英语单词)
- thrill [θril] v.震惊；激动；刺激 (初中英语单词)
- bother [´bɔðə] v.打扰 n.麻烦(事) (初中英语单词)
- bundle [´bʌndl] n.包，捆；包袱(裹) (初中英语单词)
- supposed [sə´pəuzd] a.想象的；假定的 (初中英语单词)
- chorus [´kɔ:rəs] n.合唱；齐声 v.合唱 (初中英语单词)
- hanging [´hæŋiŋ] n.绞刑 a.悬挂着的 (高中英语单词)
- respectable [ri´spektəbəl] a.可敬的；有身价的 (高中英语单词)
- bonnet [´bɔnit] n.无边女帽；童帽 (高中英语单词)
- hearing [´hiəriŋ] n.听力；听证会；审讯 (高中英语单词)
- recollection [,rekə´lekʃən] n.回忆；追想；记忆力 (高中英语单词)
- circus [´sə:kəs] n.马戏(团)；圆形广场 (高中英语单词)
- joyous [´dʒɔiəs] a.充满快乐的 (高中英语单词)
- amongst [ə´mʌŋst] prep.其中之一 =among (高中英语单词)
- granny [´græni] n.奶奶；外婆 (高中英语单词)
- enthusiastic [inθju:zi´æstik] a.热情的，热心的 (高中英语单词)
- passionately [´pæʃənitli] ad.多情地；热烈地 (英语四级单词)
- flaming [´fleimiŋ] a.熊熊燃烧的；热情的 (英语四级单词)
- vulgar [´vʌlgə] a.粗俗的；大众的 (英语四级单词)
- warning [´wɔ:niŋ] n.警告；前兆 a.预告的 (英语四级单词)
- digger [´digə] n.挖掘者(机) (英语六级单词)
- frightfully [,fraitfuli] ad.可怕地；非常 (英语六级单词)
- dreamy [´dri:mi] a.心不在焉的；朦胧的 (英语六级单词)
- housekeeping [´haus,ki:piŋ] n.家务管理，家政 (英语六级单词)
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