I
I have often noticed that the really serious disasters of life do not announce themselves with a fanfare of trumpets. They creep up behind you in carpet slippers. In my own case the disaster crept up in the form of a telegram, delivered to my desk at the Bunbury Court House on a warm afternoon in February 1911, while I was engaged in the delicate task of entering a fine of ten shillings against a man named Higgs for being drunk in charge of a bullock.
It read:
COME AT ONCE PIER HOTEL COFFS HARBOUR NEW SOUTH WALES MATTER OF UTMOST DELICACY REQUIRE LEGAL BRAIN WILL PAY FARE EVENTUALLY UNCLE WILLIAM.
Now, I want to be fair to my Uncle William. There are those in the family — my Aunt Frances, for one, who has eleven children and consequently very little patience — who will tell you that he is a menace to navigation and should be kept in a locked room with the key thrown into Sydney Harbour. My own father, who rode with the Kimberley police for three years and is not easily rattled, has been known to change colour at the mere mention of his name. But I have always rather liked the old boy. There is something about a man who has kept hotels on four continents, lost a fortune on three of them, and come out of each experience looking exactly as pleased with himself as when he went in, that commands a sort of reluctant respect. It is the respect one feels for a cork. You may push a cork under the water as often as you like. It will bob up again, and it will look at you as if the whole thing had been your idea.
The word that worried me in the telegram was eventually. The word that worried me even more was legal. I was twenty-two years old and a Clerk of Courts, which is to say that I knew precisely enough law to recognise trouble when it was put in front of me, and not nearly enough to get anybody out of it. I said as much to the Resident Magistrate, a kindly old buffer who had never been east of Kalgoorlie, and he looked at the telegram for a long time through his half-glasses and said, “Coffs Harbour. Isn’t that where they have the jetty?”
I said I believed it was.
“Then you had better go,” he said. “A man with a jetty and a legal difficulty is a man in want of a friend.” He granted me three weeks’ leave on the spot. I have since wondered whether he had met my uncle at some point in the past, and was simply making sure of keeping the width of a continent between them.
II
It is a long way from Bunbury to Coffs Harbour. You go by steamer to Adelaide and by train to Sydney and by another steamer up the coast, and at every stage of the journey somebody asks you what you are going for, and you find yourself unable to give a satisfactory answer. By the time I came down the gangway on to the great timber jetty I had composed, in my head, eleven different versions of what my uncle might have done, and the worst of them involved a stolen racehorse, a Chinese junk and the Crown jewels of Portugal.
He was waiting at the end of the jetty. You could not have missed him. He was fifty-two years old and stood six feet in his socks, with a great sweeping moustache like a pair of buffalo horns and a white suit that must have been made for him in Yokohama, or possibly Cape Town; he had kept hotels in both, along with San Francisco, Gosford, Elizabeth Street, Clarence Street, George Street and a place in the Transvaal whose name he could never remember. He wore a Panama hat at an angle that suggested he had won it at cards from a South American general, which, knowing my uncle, he very possibly had.
“Jack, my boy!” he cried, seizing my hand and pumping it as though he expected to strike water. “Splendid. Capital. The very man. You look exactly like your father did at your age, except that he was usually up to his elbows in a gold-mine. Did I ever tell you about the nugget?”
He had told me about the nugget roughly once a week for the whole of my childhood. The facts, as I had pieced them together, were that in 1869, on the Mount Wheeler field near Rockhampton, my father and Uncle William had picked up two lumps of gold weighing between them some thirty-three pounds. The question of which boy had found which lump had divided the family for forty years, rather in the manner of the Wars of the Roses, and I was careful not to take sides.
“You have, Uncle William.”
“Ah. Well.” He took my arm and steered me up the jetty towards the town. “Come along. Lunch first. Then the matter of delicacy.”
The Pier Hotel, when we reached it, turned out to be a handsome two-storeyed affair with a wide verandah looking out over the bay and a public bar that had the slightly furtive air of a public bar that has been very busy at some point recently and is hoping nobody will ask about it. A large brown dog lay on the step and opened one eye at us, in the manner of a dog who knows a great deal and has decided to say nothing.
“The fact is, Jack,” said my uncle, when we were seated in the private parlour with a cold fowl and a bottle of something from the Hunter between us, “I have been summonsed.”
I said I had been afraid of something of the sort.
“Three counts,” he said, with what I can only describe as a kind of pride. “Three separate informations, laid by the constabulary of this town, of permitting persons to be upon licensed premises during prohibited hours. Persons, Jack! As though a hotel were meant to be kept empty, like a church on a weekday. They come in the night of the twelfth of January — Sergeant Pumphrey and two of his young men — and they find, in my bar, at eleven o’clock of the evening, a party of perfectly respectable timber-getters, the captain of a coastal steamer, a gentleman from Grafton in the patent-medicine line, and the Mayor’s brother-in-law.” He paused to let the full horror of it sink in. “Singing.”
“Singing what, Uncle William?”
“‘The Wild Colonial Boy,’ I believe. With harmonies. Very nicely done, as it happens. The captain has a fine baritone. Pumphrey was quite rude about it.”
I put down my knife and fork. “Uncle William,” I said, “I am only a Clerk of Courts. But I have entered a great many of these things in a great many ledgers, and I may tell you that three counts of the kind you describe will cost you a good deal of money, and very possibly your licence. Was the bar open to the public?”
“Certainly not. It was a private gathering.”
“Of whom?”
“Of friends.”
“Had they paid for their drinks?”
My uncle looked out of the window at the bay with the expression of a man contemplating the eternal verities. “There may,” he said, “have been some loose silver about the place. I cannot be expected to know where every shilling comes from. I am a man of affairs.”
III
It is not, I think, generally appreciated how wide my uncle’s affairs had been. I had heard bits of it all my life, as one hears the sea, without quite listening; but that evening on the verandah of the Pier Hotel, with the moon coming up over the Solitary Islands and a cigar the size of a belaying pin glowing between his fingers, he gave me the whole thing in order, as though it were evidence. Perhaps, in a sense, it was.
He had been a goldminer at twelve and a Methodist bridegroom at thirty-three. He had joined the West Australian police and walked fifty-one miles after a horse thief, on foot, because his horse had given out and he had not. (“A horse,” he said darkly, “is a creature with no sense of duty.”) He had been a sergeant at Coolgardie. He had kept Bowden’s Hotel in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, and sold it to go and look at America, and come back after five months, and taken the Surry, and then sold that and toured the State, and then managed the White Hart in Clarence Street for my Uncle Frank, and shot a sailor there. (“Only grazed him, Jack. He had come in through the window at three in the morning. A man must defend his brother’s property.”) He had set out for the Klondike in ’98 and got as far as some place in the Pacific where a man told him about the cold, and had turned straight round and gone home by way of London, arriving just in time to bury my grandfather. He had kept hotels in South Africa and in Japan. He had been in San Francisco on the eighteenth of April, 1906, staying at the Metropolitan Hotel, and had got up early that morning for a walk.
“Why?” I asked. I had always wanted to know this.
“I have no idea,” he said simply. “I have never in my life wanted to go for a walk before five in the morning, before or since. A man came by with a milk-cart and I thought, ‘Cadden, you have been sitting about too much,’ and I followed the milk-cart. And at twelve minutes past five the city fell down behind me. Of the four hundred guests in that hotel, Jack, two hundred and fifty were killed.” He paused, and the cigar glowed. “Or so I have always said. I did not stop to count.”
There was a short silence. Somewhere down on the jetty a fisherman was singing, and I thought, not for the first time, that underneath the white suit and the Panama hat my uncle was a stranger and a sadder man than he let on. He had married Aunt Alison at Emerald when she was nineteen. She had divorced him in Sydney in 1906, and told the court a good deal about his travels that he would rather she had not. Since then he had described himself, on every form that asked, as unmarried. It was perfectly true, in law. It was also, I suspected, the saddest word he knew.
“And the Conqueror Manufacturing Company?” I said, to change the subject. I had heard rumours.
His face brightened at once, like a lamp turned up. “Ah! Brisbane, 1909. A partnership with a gentleman named Neustadt. We were going to conquer, Jack. That was the whole idea. It was in the name.”
“Conquer what?”
My uncle looked at me with deep affection and some surprise, as a man might look at a child who had asked him what the sea was for.
“The market, my boy,” he said. “The market.” And he would say no more about it, then or ever, except that the partnership had been dissolved that December, with my Uncle Frank signing the papers as his attorney.
“Frank is a sound man,” he added. “Frank was a postmaster once. A man who has been a postmaster never entirely gets over it.”
IV
The hearing was set down for the third of March before the Police Magistrate, a lean, grey, beetle-browed man named Mr Truscott, whom my uncle described, with some justice, as having a face like a disappointed tortoise. I spent the intervening days in the manner of all clerks everywhere: I read things.
I read the Liquor Act, which is a document of extraordinary dullness, written apparently by a committee of Methodist ministers in a fit of pique. I read the informations, laid that week, which the obliging clerk of the local bench — a young man named Phibbs who was, I discovered, as passionately interested in procedure as I was, and who had very few people in Coffs Harbour to talk to about it — let me copy out in full. I read the Justices Act, the Licensing Act and a small pamphlet on the Diseases of Bananas which had somehow found its way into the same pigeon-hole. And on the evening of the first of March, sitting in the parlour of the Pier Hotel with a lamp at my elbow and a large brown dog asleep on my feet, I found it.
It was a small thing. The great discoveries of history usually are. Newton’s apple was not large. It was simply that, under section so-and-so of the Act, an information for an offence of the kind alleged must be laid within one calendar month of the offence. The offences were alleged to have taken place on the night of the twelfth of January. The informations, in Sergeant Pumphrey’s large, honest, laborious hand, had been laid on the fourteenth of February. Somebody had held them in a drawer while the paperwork went up and down the coast. And the statutory month had run out on the twelfth — two days before.
I sat back in my chair. The dog woke up and looked at me. I looked at the dog.
“Two days,” I said aloud. “Two days, by George.”
The dog, a sensible animal, went back to sleep.
You cannot, in New South Wales, prosecute a man for something he did more than a month before you got round to saying so. It is one of the great bulwarks of British liberty, along with the jury system and the right of a man to sing ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ in his own hotel in reasonable harmony.
V
I will not attempt to describe the scene in the Coffs Harbour Police Court on the morning of the hearing, partly because it would take too long and partly because, even now, the memory of it brings on a slight dizziness.
My uncle had dressed for the occasion in a black frock-coat, a white waistcoat, a grey silk tie with a pearl pin and an expression of wounded innocence that would have made a stained-glass window look shifty. He was not represented by counsel. He had, he explained to the bench in a rich and carrying voice, every confidence in the impartiality of British justice, and besides, his nephew from Western Australia was a Clerk of Courts and would assist him in any technical matters, if the Bench permitted. The Bench, after peering at me over its spectacles for some time in the manner of a tortoise examining a lettuce of doubtful provenance, permitted.
Sergeant Pumphrey gave his evidence. It was good evidence. It was clear, detailed and accurate, and I felt rather sorry for him, because he was obviously an honest man who had been kept up very late listening to harmonies and had a right to feel aggrieved. He described the timber-getters. He described the steamer captain. He described the gentleman from Grafton in the patent-medicine line, who had apparently offered him a free sample of Somebody’s Celebrated Embrocation as a token of goodwill. He described the Mayor’s brother-in-law, at some length, and there was a stir at the back of the court where, I gathered, the Mayor’s brother-in-law was sitting.
Then Mr Truscott turned to my uncle and asked whether he had anything to say.
My uncle rose. He looked round the court with the sad, kind, faintly puzzled expression of a bishop who has found a frog in the font.
“Your Worship,” he said, “I have kept hotels in Sydney, in Gosford, in San Francisco, in the Transvaal and in the Empire of Japan, and in none of those places, I may say, have I ever been treated as I have been treated in this beautiful town, to which I came in a spirit of — ”
I tugged at his coat-tail. He bent down. I whispered. He straightened up.
“ — in a spirit of public service,” he went on smoothly, “and to which, I need hardly say, I bear no ill will whatever. However. My nephew, who is a Clerk of Courts, Your Worship, in the State of Western Australia, desires me to draw the attention of the Bench to the dates upon the informations.”
There was a pause. Mr Truscott picked up the informations. He looked at them. He looked at them again. He turned them over, as though hoping there might be a more satisfactory date on the back. He beckoned to young Phibbs, who came up to the bench with the air of a man going to the scaffold, and the two of them conferred in whispers for some time over the Act, which Phibbs had very helpfully brought with him, open at the relevant page. Then the magistrate looked at Sergeant Pumphrey with an expression of the deepest sympathy, and at my uncle with an expression of no sympathy at all, and at me with an expression I could not quite read, but which I have since thought may have been professional respect.
“Sergeant,” he said, “these informations appear to have been laid two days outside the statutory period. Do you wish to say anything?”
The Sergeant, to his eternal credit, said that he did not. He said that the matter had been delayed in the office, and that he would withdraw the informations, and that he trusted the defendant would bear in mind for the future that the law of the State applied at Coffs Harbour precisely as it did in Japan. The Bench said it trusted so too. The informations were withdrawn. And my uncle, putting on his Panama hat at an angle of about forty-five degrees, walked out into the February sunshine a free man, and the Mayor’s brother-in-law, at the back of the court, cheered.
VI
We celebrated, naturally. My uncle insisted. The steamer captain came, and the timber-getters, and the man from Grafton, who turned out to be very good company and gave me a bottle of the embrocation, which I still have. Sergeant Pumphrey did not come, but he was sent a case of the Hunter wine with my uncle’s compliments, and I understand that he drank it, and that there were no hard feelings. Everybody sang. I am told that I sang. There was certainly a point in the evening at which the captain and I gave a rendering of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ in what I can only call harmony, and the large brown dog went outside and lay down on the jetty with his paws over his ears.
Very late, when the party had gone home, my uncle and I sat on the verandah with the sea breathing below us in the dark.
“Jack,” he said, “you have saved my bacon. I shall not forget it. I am going to give you a present.”
I said there was no need.
“There is every need.” He fished in his waistcoat pocket and brought out something and pressed it into my hand. It was small and heavy and warm from his body, and when I held it up to the lamp I saw that it was a little worn lump of gold, about the size of a pigeon’s egg.
“Mount Wheeler,” he said. “Eighteen sixty-nine. Your father found the big one. I found this one. I have carried it ever since — through the West, and Coolgardie, and America, and the earthquake. It has been the only thing about me, Jack, that I have never lost and never sold.” He looked out at the bay. “I am leaving here, I think, in a month or two. There is a hotel in Alexandria, the Park View. A fine house. A man could do something with it. And after that — who knows? But you had better have the nugget now. I have a feeling it would be safer with a Clerk of Courts.”
I did not know what to say. I said, eventually, “Uncle William, what did the Conqueror Manufacturing Company actually make?”
He laughed so loudly that the dog came back in from the jetty to see what was the matter.
“My boy,” he said, wiping his eyes, “I have absolutely no idea. Neustadt handled all that. I was only ever in charge of the conquering.”
He took the Park View at Alexandria in the November, as he had said he would, and later the Cambridge at Woollahra, the Pottery in Lansdowne Street and the Bellbird near Cessnock; and at fifty-seven, when the war came, he put his age down and enlisted, and was discharged five weeks later because the unit was over establishment, which he regarded as a personal slight on the part of the War Office. He died in Dublin in 1924, of all places, and a newspaper in Melbourne printed a paragraph about him which said that he had ridden in pursuit of the Kelly gang. He had done nothing of the sort. But I have always thought that he would have been delighted, and that if anybody had told him so, he would have said that it was very probably true, and that he could not be expected to remember every bushranger he had ever pursued, being a man of affairs.
I kept the nugget. I kept it through the war, too, when they made me a provost officer in France and set me to arresting men for being out after hours — which struck me, as I stood in the mud at some crossroads near Bapaume directing the traffic of an entire army, as the most extraordinary reversal of fortune in the history of the family. I thought of my uncle every time I did it. I thought of him singing. And I never once, I am glad to say, laid an information more than a month late.
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