Many
Travellers Had Come Into Our Lies And Passed On With A Bright Nod Of
Farewell; But At The First
Stirring of the dawn, without one word of
farewell, this traveller had passed on and left us; left us, and
The
faithful mate of those seven strong young years and those last few days
of weariness. "Unexpected heart failure," our chief said, as the Dandy
went to fulfil his promise to the sleeping mate. He promised to waken
him at the dawn, and leaving that awakening in the Dandy's hands, as we
thought of that lonely Warloch camp our one great thankfulness was that
when the awakening came the man was not to be alone there with his dead
comrade. The bush can be cruel at times, and yet, although she may leave
us alone with our beloved dead, her very cruelty bungs with it a fierce,
consoling pain; for out-bush our dead are all our own.
Beyond those seven faithful years the mate could tell us but little of
his comrade's life. He was William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with a
mother living somewhere there. That was all he knew. "He was always a
reticent chap," he reiterated. "He never wanted any one but me about
him," and the unspoken request was understood. He was his mate, and no
one but himself must render the last services.
Dry-eyed and worn, the man moved about, doing all that should be done,
the bushmen only helping where they dared; then shouldering a pick and
shovel, he went to the tattle rise beyond the slip rails, and set doggedly
to work at a little distance from two lonely graves already there.
Doggedly he worked on; but, as he worked, gradually his burden lost its
overwhelming weight, for the greater part of it had somehow skipped on to
the Dandy's shoulders - those brave, unflinching shoulders, that carried
other men's burdens so naturally and so willingly that their burdens
always seemed the Dandy's own. The Dandy may have had that power of
finding "something decent" in every one he met, but in the Dandy all men
found the help they needed most.
Quietly and unassumingly, the Dandy put all in order and then, soon after
midday, with brilliant sunshine all about us, we stood by an open grave
in the shade of the drooping glory of a crimson flowering bauhenia. Some
scenes live undimmed in our memories for a lifetime - scenes where we have
seemed onlookers rather than actors seeing every detail with minute
exactness - and that scene with its mingling of glorious beauty, human
pathos, and soft, subdued sound, will bye, I think, in the memory of most
of us for many years to come:
"In the midst of life we are in death," the Maluka read, standing among
that drooping crimson splendour and at his feet lay the open grave,
preaching silently its great lesson of Life and Death, with, beside it,
the still quiet form of the traveller whose last weary journey had ended;
around it, bareheaded and all in white, a little band of bush-folk,
silent and reverent and awed; above it, that crimson glory, and all
around and about it, soft sun-flecked bush, murmuring sounds, flooding
sunshine, and deep azure blue distances.
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