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His Country – After All
by
“Well, you’re the first man I ever heard talk as you’ve been doing about his own country,” said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being sat on all the time. “‘Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never said–to–to himself’…I forget the darned thing.”
He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat for action, and the driver–for whom the bagman had shouted twice as against the stranger’s once–took the opportunity to observe that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.
The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot–that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the world would never be any better until the deadly poison, called the sentiment of patriotism, had been “educated” out of the stomachs of the people. “Patriotism!” he exclaimed scornfully. “My country! The darned fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators, the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves–the men the patriotic fools starve and fight for–their masters. Ba-a!”
The opposition collapsed.
The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.
“What trees are those?” asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive silence which followed his unpatriotic argument, and pointing to a grove ahead by the roadside. “They look as if they’ve been planted there. There ain’t been a forest here surely?”
“Oh, they’re some trees the Government imported,” said the bagman, whose knowledge on the subject was limited. “Our own bush won’t grow in this soil.”
“But it looks as if anything else would–“
Here the stranger sniffed once by accident, and then several times with interest.
It was a warm morning after rain. He fixed his eyes on those trees.
They didn’t look like Australian gums; they tapered to the tops, the branches were pretty regular, and the boughs hung in shipshape fashion. There was not the Australian heat to twist the branches and turn the leaves.
“Why!” exclaimed the stranger, still staring and sniffing hard. “Why, dang me if they ain’t (sniff) Australian gums!”
“Yes,” said the driver, flicking his horses, “they are.”
“Blanky (sniff) blanky old Australian gums!” exclaimed the ex-Australian, with strange enthusiasm.
“They’re not old,” said the driver; “they’re only young trees. But they say they don’t grow like that in Australia–‘count of the difference in the climate. I always thought–“
But the other did not appear to hear him; he kept staring hard at the trees they were passing. They had been planted in rows and cross-rows, and were coming on grandly.
There was a rabbit trapper’s camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum-leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile’s nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.
“Good day, mate!” he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper, and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.
“Good day, mate!” The answer came back like an echo–it seemed to him–from the past.
Presently he caught sight of a few trees which had evidently been planted before the others–as an experiment, perhaps–and, somehow, one of them had grown after its own erratic native fashion–gnarled and twisted and ragged, and could not be mistaken for anything else but an Australian gum.
“A thunderin’ old blue-gum!” ejaculated the traveller, regarding the tree with great interest.
He screwed his neck to get a last glimpse, and then sat silently smoking and gazing straight ahead, as if the past lay before him–and it was before him.
“Ah, well!” he said, in explanation of a long meditative silence on his part; “ah, well–them saplings–the smell of them gum-leaves set me thinking.” And he thought some more.