第8章

They stood for the scum of the streets.How they lived was a mystery,except to people who kept fowls,or forgot to lock their doors at night.

A few were vicious idlers,sponging on their parents for a living at twenty years of age;others simply mischievous lads,with a trade at their fingers'ends,if they chose to work.A few were honest,unless temptation stared them too hard in the face.On such occasions their views were simple as A B C."Well,if yer lost a chance,somebody else collared it,an'w'ere were yer?"The police,variously named "Johns","cops"and "traps",were their natural enemies.If one of the Push got into trouble,the others clubbed together and paid his fine;and if that failed,they made it hot for the prosecutors.Generally their offences were disorderly conduct,bashing their enemies,and resisting the police.

Both Jonah and Chook worked for a living--Chook by crying fish and vegetables in the streets,Jonah by making and mending for Hans Paasch,the German shoemaker on Botany Road.But Chook often lacked the few shillings to buy his stock-in-trade,and Jonah never felt inclined for work till Wednesday.Then he would stroll languidly down to the shop.

The old German would thrust out his chin,and blink at him over his glasses.And he always greeted Jonah with one of two set phrases:

"Ah,you haf come,haf you?I vas choost going to advertise for a man."This meant that work was plentiful.When trade was slack,he would shake his head sadly as if he were standing over the grave of his last sixpence,and say:

"Ah,it vas no use;dere is not enough work to fill one mouth."Jonah always listened to either speech with utter indifference,took off his coat,put on his leather apron,and set to work silently and swiftly like a man in anger.

Although he always grumbled,Paasch was quite satisfied.He had too much work for one,and not enough for two.So Jonah,who was a good workman,and content to make three or four days in a week,suited him exactly.

Besides,Jonah had started with him as an errand-boy at five shillings a week,years ago,and was used to his odd ways.

Hans Paasch was born in Bavaria,in the town of Hassloch.His father was a shoemaker,and destined Hans for the same trade.The boy preferred to be a fiddler but his father taught him his trade thoroughly with the end of a strap.

In his eighteenth year Hans suddenly ended the dispute by running away from home with his beloved fiddle.He made his way to the coast,and got passage on a cargo tramp to England.There he heard of the wonderful land called Australia,where gold was to be had for the picking up.The fever took him,and he worked his passage out to Melbourne on a sailing ship.

He reached the goldfields,dug without success,and would have starved but for his fiddle.A year found him back in Melbourne,penniless.Here he met another German in the same condition.They decided to work their way overland to Sydney,Hans playing the fiddle and his mate singing.

Then began a Bohemian life of music by the wayside inns,sleep in the open air,and meals when it pleased God to send them.

This had proved to be the solitary sunlit passage in his life,for when he reached Sydney he found that his music had no money value,and,under the goad of hunger,took to the trade that he had learned so unwillingly.

Twenty years ago he had opened his small shop on the Botany Road,and to-day it remained unchanged,dwarfed by larger buildings on either side.

He lived by himself in the room over the shop,where he spent his time reading the newspaper as a child spells out a lesson,or playing his beloved violin.He was a good player,but his music was a puzzle and a derision to Jonah,for his tastes were classical,and sometimes he spent as much as a shilling on a back seat at a concert in the Town Hall.Jonah scratched his ear and listened,amazed that a man could play for hours without finding a tune.The neighbours said that Paasch lived on the smell of an oil rag;but that was untrue,for he spent hours cooking strange messes soaked in vinegar,the sight of which turned Jonah's stomach.

Bob Fenner's dance-room,three doors away,was a thorn in his side.

Three nights in the week a brazen comet struck into a set of lancers,drowning the metallic thud of the piano and compelling his ear to follow the latest popular air to the last bar.

His solitary life,his fiddling,and his singular mixture of gruffness and politeness had bred legends among the women of the neighbourhood.

He was a German baron,who had forfeited his title and estates through killing a man in a duel;and never a milder pair of eyes looked timidly through spectacles.He was a famous musician,who had chosen to blot himself out of the world for love of a high-born lady;and,in his opinion,women were useful to cook and sew,nothing more.

JONAH DISCOVERS THE BABY

Joey the pieman had scented a new customer in Mrs Yabsley,and on the following Saturday night he stopped in front of the house and rattled the lids of his cans to attract her attention.His voice,thin and cracked with the wear of the streets,chanted his familiar cry to an accompaniment faintly suggestive of clashing cymbals:

"Peas an'pies,all 'ot,all 'ot!"

His cart,a kitchen on wheels,sent out a column of smoke from its stovepipe chimney;and when he raised the lids of the shining cans,a fragrant steam rose on the air.The cart,painted modestly in red,bore a strange legend in yellow letters on the front:

WHO'D HAVE THOUGHT IT,PEAS AND PIES WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT!

This outburst of lyric poetry was to inform the world that Joey had risen from humble beginnings to his present commercial eminence,and was not ashamed of the fact.

He called regularly about ten o'clock,and Jonah and Ada spent a delightful five minutes deciding which delicacy to choose for the night.