While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson (best value ebook reader .txt) 📕

told me all about it. First he asked me would I mind shifting round to the other side, as he was rather deaf in that ear. He’d been kicked by a horse, he said, and had been a little dull o’ hearing on that side ever since.

He was as good as blind. “I can see the people near me,” he said, “but I can’t make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur.” He looked up: “That ceiling is a kind of white, ain’t it? And this,” tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, “is a sort of green, ain’t it?” The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of the wallpaper had originally been blue and red, but it was mostly green enough now⁠—a damp, rotten green; but I was ready to swear that the ceiling was snow and that the walls were as green as grass if it would have made him feel more comfortable. His sight began to get bad about six years before, he said; he didn’t take much notice of it at first, and then he saw a quack, who made his eyes worse. He had already the manner of the blind⁠—the touch of every finger, and even the gentleness in his speech. He had a boy down with him⁠—a “sorter cousin of his,” and the boy saw him round. “I’ll have to be sending that youngster back,” he said, “I think I’ll send him home next week. He’ll be picking up and learning too much down here.”

I happened to know the district he came from, and we would sit by the hour and talk about the country, and chaps by the name of this and chaps by the name of that⁠—drovers mostly, whom we had met or had heard of. He asked me if I’d ever heard of a chap by the name of Joe Scott⁠—a big sandy-complexioned chap, who might be droving; he was his brother, or, at least, his half-brother, but he hadn’t heard of him for years; he’d last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone overland to Western Australia with Tyson’s cattle to the new country.

We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and shearing⁠—all about the bush⁠—and it all came back to me as we talked. “I can see it all now,” he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn’t see the dirty blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the greasy washstand; he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the grassy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of sheoak here and there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringy-bark and the apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains⁠—and all. I could see it, too⁠—plainer than ever I did.

He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about timber. He didn’t believe in having fencing-posts with big butts; he reckoned it was a mistake. “You see,” he said, “the top of the butt catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I’d back posts without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with ’em⁠—that’s if the fence is well put up and well rammed.” He had supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and⁠—well, you can get more posts without butts out of a tree than posts with them. He also objected to charring the butts. He said it only made more work⁠—and wasted time⁠—the butts lasted longer without being charred.

I asked him if he’d ever got stringy-bark palings or shingles out of mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and said he had. He had also got them out of various other kinds of trees.

We talked about soil and grass, and gold-digging, and many other things which came back to one like a revelation as we yarned.

He had been to the hospital several times. “The doctors don’t say they can cure me,” he said, “they say they might, be able to improve my sight and hearing, but it would take a long time⁠—anyway, the treatment would improve my general health. They know what’s the matter with my eyes,” and he explained it as well as he could. “I wish I’d seen a good doctor when my eyes first began to get weak; but young chaps are always careless over things. It’s harder to get cured of anything when you’re done growing.”

He was always hopeful and cheerful. “If the worst comes to the worst,” he said, “there’s things I can do where I come from. I might do a bit o’ wool-sorting, for instance. I’m a pretty fair expert. Or else when they’re weeding out I could help. I’d just have to sit down and they’d bring the sheep to me, and I’d feel the wool and tell them what it was⁠—being blind improves the feeling, you know.”

He had a packet of portraits, but he couldn’t make them out very well now. They were sort of blurred to him, but I described them and he told me who they were. “That’s a girl o’ mine,” he said, with reference to one⁠—a jolly, good-looking bush girl. “I got a letter from her yesterday. I managed to scribble something, but I’ll get you, if you don’t mind, to write something more I want to put in on another piece of paper, and address an envelope for me.”

Darkness fell quickly upon him now⁠—or, rather, the “sort of white blur” increased and closed in. But his hearing was better, he said, and he was glad of that and still