Read Online Best Australian Short Stories by Douglas Stewart, Beatrice Davis - Free Book Online Page A

found it so suddenly that I filled my eye with grease and wick, and in my anguish I prayed that the eleven devils which howl for ever round Judas Iscariot might trample on the person who made the bed and on all his or her descendants till they became extinct.
    It was just at this moment that I noticed someone pounding at the front door, and when I listened intently I became aware that there was an individual in tears on the footpath below. I opened the window and implored her in a loud voice to go home— to go and sleep on the fence—to go to bed—to go to Palestine if she preferred it, but, anyhow, to keep quiet and go, but as she still wept and pounded I went out on the balcony and considered the situation with my ungreased eye.
    There was a girl below with a carpet-bag and a hat-box, and she was wailing bitterly and rushing at the door with her feet. Sometimes she jumped at it with both feet and at others she took running kicks with only one, and between these exercises she would put her inflamed eye to the keyhole and pray for admittance. Evidently she was in dire distress, and for a while I was in doubt whether to be a father to her or whether to look at the matter from a purely selfish standpoint and empty the contents of the water-jug over the balcony. While I was debating this point she sat down in the road and threatened to grow hysterical, and then I suddenly gave way to a sympathetic mood and addressed her.
    “Here,” I shouted, “for heaven’s sake stop that row, and go away.”
    “Let me in,” she responded.
    “I can’t,” I answered briefly. “It isn’t my hotel, and anyhow I’m not in full dress. Besides, I don’t know where the door is, and I want to go to sleep, and I wouldn’t let you in anyhow. What on earth are you weeping in the street with a carpetbag for?”
    Apparently this aggravated her, for she began to bang on the door with stones, and then I put my head in at the window of the next room, and roused the landlord, and informed him that an insane girl was reducing his house to general smash. He came out with a gun, just in time to find his daughter breaking the bar-window. It was evidently an irresponsible outburst on her part, for when he hailed her with considerable reproach she broke down miserably in the gutter—and explained.
    She was the individual who eloped that morning, and she had come back to report that marriage had been a failure. The bride-groom had taken her home, and had straightway gone out with some old-time bachelor friends, and consequently she had packed her carpet-bag and her hat-box, and run for the old public-house in a repentant mood. As there was evidently nothing else to be done her male parent opened the door and threw the carpet-bag and the hat-box into the passage. Also, he admonished his daughter severely on the stairs, and, judging from sundry sounds that reached me, that young lady went to bed in a repentant mood.
    Then I went to bed also, and lay down with the clothes rolled up in a hard ball on my chest, and fell asleep till the steamer at the wharf commenced to blow its whistle with a melancholy cadence that broke off into shrieks and variations at intervals, and filled the town with a solemn note of woe. At the same moment a rooster eight feet high began to offer a few remarks in the back-yard, and a man went by shoving a barrow with an ungreased wheel. I sat up in bed, and consigned the rooster, and the wheel-barrow, and the distracted mother in the next room, and the broken-hearted daughter with the carpet-bag to all the infernal gods, and then I began to smoke. It was rather difficult work, owing to the extreme steepness of the bed, and I had to hold my head down with both feet in order to preserve my equilibrium, but I got on pretty well for a while, and then—
    Evidently the old woman was awake, and mourning for her absent child, and evidently also the stern male parent was consoling her with the information that the joy and sunshine of