At the dinner, and when dinner was
over - after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had
been carried out to the verandah again - they shadowed him wherever he
went.
They were strangely self-possessed children; but knowing little more of
the world than the black children their playmates, Cheon, in his turn,
found them vastly amusing, and instructing them in the ways of the
world - from his point of view - found them also eager pupils.
But their education came to a standstill after they had mastered the
mysteries of the Dandy's gramophone, and Cheon was no longer
entertaining.
All afternoon brass-band selections, comic songs, and variety items,
blared out with ceaseless reiteration; and as the men-folk smoked and
talked cattle, and the wee baby - a bonnie fair child - toddled about,
smiling and contented, the women-folk spoke of their life "out-back," and
listening, I knew that neither I nor the telegraph lady had even guessed
what roughness means.
For fifteen years things had been improving, and now everyone was to have
a well-earned holiday. The children were to be christened and then shown
the delights of a large town! Darwin of necessity (Palmerston, by the
way, on the map, but Darwin to Territorians). Darwin with its one train,
its telegraph offices, two or three stores, banks and public buildings,
its Residency, its Chinatown, its lovers' walk, its two or three empty,
wide, grass-grown streets bordered with deep-verandahed, iron-built
bungalow-houses, with their gardens planted in painted tins - a
development of the white-ant pest - and lastly, its great sea, where ships
wander without tracks or made ways!
