stranger stood on the pavement beside the big, cream-coloured taxi, and looked across at the group of men on the grass. He did not want to address them.
“Want a taxi?” called Jack.
“Yes. Where are the drivers?” replied the stranger, in unmistakable English: English of the old country.
“Where d’you want to go?” called the driver of the cream-coloured taxi, without rising from the grass.
“Murdoch Street.”
“Murdoch Street? What number?”
“Fifty-one.”
“Neighbour of yours, Jack,” said Dug, turning to his mate.
“Taking it furnished, four guineas a week,” said Jack in a tone of information.
“All right,” said the driver of the cream-coloured taxi, rising at last from the grass. “I’ll take you.”
“Go across to 120 first,” said the little bloke, pointing to the house. “There’s my wife and the bags. But look!” he added quickly. “You’re not going to charge me a shilling each for the bags.”
“What bags? Where are they?”
“There at the top of the steps.”
“All right, I’ll pull across and look at ’em.”
The bloke walked across, and the taxi at length curved round after him. The stranger had carried his bags to the foot of the steps: two ordinary-sized gladstones, and one smallish square hat-box. There they stood against the wall. The taxi-driver poked out his head to look at them. He surveyed them steadily. The stranger stood at bay.
“Shilling apiece, them bags,” said the driver laconically.
“Oh no. The tariff is three-pence,” cried the stranger.
“Shilling apiece, them bags,” repeated the driver. He was one of the proletariat that has learnt the uselessness of argument.
“That’s not just, the tariff is threepence.”
“All right, if you don’t want to pay the fare, don’t engage the car, that’s all. Them bags is a shilling apiece.”
“Very well, I don’t want to pay so much.”
“Oh, all right. If you don’t, you won’t. But they’ll cost you a shilling apiece on a taxi, an’ there you are.”
“Then I don’t want a taxi.”
“Then why don’t you say so. There’s no harm done. I don’t want to charge you for pulling across here to look at the bags. If you don’t want a taxi, you don’t. I suppose you know your own mind.”
Thus saying he pushed off the brakes and the taxi slowly curved round on the road to resume its previous stand.
The strange little bloke and his wife stood at the foot of the steps beside the bags, looking angry. And then a hansom-cab came clock-clocking slowly along the road, also going to draw up for the dinner hour at the quiet place opposite. But the driver spied the angry couple.
“Want a cab, sir?”
“Yes, but I don’t think you can get the bags on.”
“How many bags?”
“Three. These three,” and he kicked them with his toe, angrily.
The hansom-driver looked down from his Olympus. He was very red-faced, and a little bit humble.
“Them three? Oh yes! Easy! Easy! Get ’em on easy. Get them on easy, no trouble at all.” And he clambered down from his perch, and resolved into a little red-faced man, rather beery and henpecked-looking. He stood gazing at the bags. On one was printed the name: “R.L. Somers.”
“R.L. SOMERS! All right, you get in, sir and madam. You get in. Where d’you want to go? Station?”
“No. Fifty-one Murdoch Street.”
“All right, all right, I’ll take you. Fairish long way, but we’ll be there under an hour.”
Mr. Somers and his wife got into the cab. The cabby left the doors flung wide open, and piled the three bags there like a tower in front of his two fares. The hat-box was on top, almost touching the brown hairs of the horse’s tail, and perching gingerly.
“If you’ll keep a hand on that, now, to steady it,” said the cabby.
“All right,” said Somers.
The man climbed to his perch, and the hansom and the extraneous tower began to joggle away into the town. The group of workmen were still lying on the grass. But Somers did not care about them. He was safely jogging with his detested baggage to his destination.
“Aren’t they VILE!” said Harriet, his wife.
“It’s God’s Own Country, as they always tell you,” said Somers. “The hansom-man was quite nice.”
“But the taxi-drivers! And the man charged you eight shillings on Saturday for what would be two shillings in London!”
“He rooked me. But there you are, in a free country, it’s the man who makes you pay who is free — free to charge you what he likes, and you’re forced to pay it. That’s what freedom amounts to. They’re free to charge, and you are forced to pay.”
In which state of mind they jogged through the city, catching a glimpse from the top of a hill of the famous harbour spreading out with its many arms and legs. Or at least they saw one bay with warships and steamers lying between the houses and the wooded, bank-like shores, and they saw the centre of the harbour, and the opposite squat cliffs — the whole low wooded table-land reddened with suburbs and interrupted by the pale spaces of the many-lobed harbour. The sky had gone grey, and the low table-land into which the harbour intrudes squatted dark-looking and monotonous and sad, as if lost on the face of the earth: the same Australian atmosphere, even here within the area of huge, restless, modern Sydney, whose million inhabitants seem to slip like fishes from one side of the harbour to another.
Murdoch Street was an old sort of suburb, little squat bungalows with corrugated iron roofs, painted red. Each little bungalow was set in its own hand-breadth of ground, surrounded by a little wooden palisade fence. And there went the long street, like a child’s drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and yet apart, like modern democracy, each one fenced round with a square rail fence. The street was wide, and strips of worn grass took the place of kerb-stones. The stretch of macadam in the middle seemed as forsaken as a desert, as the hansom clock-clocked along it.
Fifty-one had its name painted by the door. Somers had been watching these names. He had passed “Elite” and “Tres Bon” and “The Angels’ Roost’ and “The Better ‘Ole’”. He rather hoped for one of the Australian names, Wallamby or Wagga-Wagga. When he had looked at the house and agreed to take it for three months, it had been dusk, and he had not noticed the name. He hoped it would not be U-An-Me, or even Stella Maris.
“Forestin,”
