"HERE, YOU"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21910, 20 September 1934, Page 5

"HERE, YOU"

,BY ISABKL M. CLUETT

A NEW ZEALAND STORY.

(COPYRIGHT./

Stop stop. You wanted something. Can I do anything for you? " she was staring at him with a vaguely-puzzled look, I-I should like to help you because—you—"

She stopped, knitting her brows, biting her lip. In another moment recognition would dawn' in those blue eyes . ■ . and he was ashamed. This old ragged vagrant with his pack and his mongrel dog . . . how could he say to this pretty low-voiced woman: "I am your father. Take me in. Feed me. Cherish me as your own flesh and blood? "

All thoso years ago he had gone out of her life to save her this shame and he would do it again. " Here you—" he called roughly to the dog and shuffled off to the gate. "I don't want anything, I tell you," he snapped as she hurried after him troubled and doubtful.

So she let him go but still that vague memory, that sentient instinct of the blood troubled her. Her father? No—it could not be. Ho had never written, never come to see her. He must be dead years ago. She had sorrowed and wept but she knew her aunt hoped that she would forget the tramp who was her father. She had not forgotten, but time had dulled her grief and now—she silenced the voice in her heart and watched him go. Then the child Patty with a roguish laugh and enticing little chirrup called to the dog. He stopped, hesitated, looked back and stood with up-lifted paw. "Here, come on —you," Jack growled, but Patty called coaxingly. Suddenly the dog bounded back to the child. Jack called angrily, incredulously, but the dog with an apologetic wag of his tail glanced after his master but nuzzled the child's hand gently. Furious, cut to the heart, Jack turned away muttering. Let him go then. The darned dog wasn't worth a thought. So he went on, blind and siok with rage and with something which cut deeper than rage . . . grief. Grief for Sally . . . and for the old faithful companion that had left him for Sally's child. Never mind the dog ... a worthless mongrel. Aimlessly, blindly he tramped on. It might have been minutes ... it might have been hours when there came a hurried panting . . . a thudding of flying paws in the roadway and the dog with lolling tongue and quick breathing was at his side. Blindly . . . furiously he struck at the blunt grey muzzle with his stick. " Be off, you mongrel. Clear out." Startled, but wary, the dog fell back and thereafter followed at a safe distance, noiselessly trotting along, head down, tail drooping. Several times. Jack turned in his jealous rage to curse the dog and fling stones. The dog would stop dead, squat down in the middle of the road on his haunches and with open mouth and quivering tongue watch, the shambling figure of his master retreat. Then noiselessly he would rise and follow. Once he drew too close and the old man, whirling fiercely, struck at him with the heavy stick. It caught his tender nose-tip. and with a yelp of pain and surprise he turned and fled. When Jack turned again the long road was empty and af pang of remorse shot through him, a pang of desolation. At dusk Jack sank down under a group of trees feeling feverish and dl. Languidly he opened his pack but he could not eat and at the sight of a meaty and somewhat highly-flavoured bone "he flung it violently from him, his face convulsed with rage and grief. • "Dog? Where's that rotten brutet Must find—my dog—" . s "Old-Jack rose unsteadily and lurched away, and silently, stealthdy as a shadow the dog followed the wavering footsteps. Crossing a moon-lit patch or road disaster came with the almost noiseless whirr of wheels and purring hum of a high-powered car. A confused angry shout, a jolt and Old Jack was sprawling in the dust. Slowly, painfully he gathered himself up. No damage done save a few bruises and strangely the shock seemed to have eased his difficult breathing. "Here you—" he snapped his fingers, jerked his head and slouched off. Silently the dog followed. Then Old Jack slowly slumped to his knees and fell forward on the grassy wayside. The dog waited patiently, then after smiting at his master a little uneasily, he curled up at -his back and fell asleep. Slowly the light of morning broadened, deepening from primrose to palest rose, fading to lavender pink which merged in heavenly blue as the sun rose glorious. The man lay where he had fallen, the dog whimpered in his dreams, twitched, fidgetted and then rose and yawned. He sniffed at his master, pawed him gently and whined anxiously. Glancing round, his brows wrinkled in recollection. They had retraced their steps to the farm they had visited the day before and suddenly, across the crisp morning air came the sound of a child s merry laughter. The dog sprang away to meet the child and woman coming across the dew-wet paddocks. He tore up to them, all his reticence, his surly reserve, gone in a passionate eagerness to make them understand. Urgently he invited them with barking and leaping; with cries and whimpers and crouchings of entreaty. , " It's Bill. It's the old man's nice dog, Mummy!" " 1 believe it is, Patty."

Beside the huddled figure on the grass the woman dropped on her knees drawing the rough, curly grey head on to her Tap and slowly the sea-blue eyes opened and looked straight up into those other blue eyes gazing down into his. He smiled and muttered. " Sally Little pal. Never desert your old dad—would you?" and then with feeble querulousness: "Where s that darn dog?" The dog crept up to lick the groping hand and a poignant rang out. " Oh, ' father! father! Oh, dad, I knew! Somehow I knew. But I could not believe it!"

The 'ending is a happy one after all . ... hwppy for Old Jack as for all gallant;old gipsies ~. at the end of the long, long trail a quiet resting place and a dreamless sleep . . . with loving eyes to watch his going over the far hill-top, and gentle hands to tend his last hours. An old dog sits and blinks his queer, odd-coloured eyes in the snn, dozes, dreams, whimpers, wakes and dreams again. Sometimes he raises his head with sudden alertness, a glad inquiry in his eyes at the sound of a voice: " Here you —" But he listens to the silence and presently with a sigh he sleeps again. Not yet! Not yet!

Old Jack was as brown as a berry and as wrinkled as a prune, but even in old age a picturesque and imposing figure,/ with his rough lion's mane of grizzled hair, short curly silver beard, and sea-blue eyes set in a mesh of wrinkles. His dog was his constant companion. He had no breed, no beauty and no name. " A born gipsy," the farmers' wives said of Jack, and truly the nomad'instinct seemed in his blood. And yet Jack had once had a home, a wife, a child, for whose sake ho had conquered that wandering strain in his blood and settled down on a small farm. But tho wife died 'when the child was only ten years old, and though Jack struggled for a time for the sake of little Sally, little by little the farm fell back, for his heart was not in it. He got into arrears with his payments, and a year after his wife's death he " walked off " the land, the child's hand in his, and all their worldly possessions in the bundle strapped upon his back. His wife's sister begged for the little girl, but Jack refused indignantly. " What, part little pal and her old dad? Well, just try it. What does Sally say?"

Of course, Sally elected to stay with dad, and so they went out " on the road " together, scratching a precarious living as best they could, the child receiving a meagre education from odds and ends of schooling, in which Jack reluctantly complied with the law.

But children grow—and all too soon Sally had shot up into a tall, blue-eyed, girl, with a new wistfulness in her face. • It bothered her father to see the pensive mood which often stilled her eager tongue for many a wandering mile, or ever many a simple meal. He saw this tall, sunburned girl, with shabby clothing and rough hair was no longer the jolly ragged imp of a child who had stepped out so blithely beside him, wanting nothing save his companionship, food and warmth and freedom—like himself. Dimly now he began to comprehend that the child was turning into a woman, and he knew the wrong ho had done her by making her a mere waif of the roads. After a sleepless, brooding night he arose at dawn without awakening her and tramped the tan miles into the town where his wife's sister lived. She received this ragged tramp of a brother-in-law coldly, for she was ashamed of him, but she eagerly welcomed his suggestion that die should adopt the girl. ; Unacknowledged even to himself deep down in his heart he cherished the hope that his "little pal" would indignantly scout the idea of leaving him. But at the look which flashed into her eyes—amazement —incredulous joy—deep content —he knew. His little pal was lost to him. And even though in a passion of self-reproach Sally threw herself into his arms and sobbed out that she would never leave him . . . that look in her eyes could not be wiped out. t'He would give Sally her chance and not encumber her with a worthless tfe'er-do-weU of a gipsy father. Jack knew nothing of the higher morality, - but some obscure instinct of fatherhood taught him the divfte art of sacrifice. Lonely nights and days followed, when; the silence ntaddened him with the echoes of a child's voice, a child's laughter; nights when waking in the starry dark he would stretch out a groping hand and touch —nothingness— and listen for the sound of sleeper's quiet breathing—in vain. But all things pass and time dulls the edge of human pain. Months and years rolled by and Jack still tramped from farm to farm, §till debonair and jolly, with a laugh, a song, a story. But the silence began to breed strange sounds . . the profound emptiness—the profound quipt of the night—would awake him suddenly from a. .sound sleep under hedge or hayrick to the mocking echo oi a remembered voice which faded into utter silence, even as he listened with thumping heart and strained ears. So he got a dog; he had a succession of dogs as the years went on, none of which he named, and they met with a variety of fates and passed on. The present dog was a weird mixture of breeds with a somewhat morose disposition. He followed Jack faithfully, shared good and ill fortune with him, fine weather and foul; he seldom had an affectionate word or look, but at night when old Jack stretched out his gnarled old hand there was always a blunt head thrust into it, or the fugitive swift lick of a smooth pink tongue, and at the lightest foot-fall in the night the broad, ugly head of the dog was raised with a warning growl and a rising (if the short hairs on the back of his neck. A queer pair! One would say little affection was wasted between them. *' Here you—" a curt motion of the head or a short whistle and the dog would trot morosely at his master's heels with no eager, wide-mouthed grin or tail-wagging, no ecstatic slavering or barking or leaping. #/ • # • * ■* Old Jack on the road. Older now, his broad shoulders bowed under the Sackf once borne so, lightly, but the roll light in his sea-blue eyes undimrned at sight of a pretty girl or laughing child-. F°r-them the whimsical welcome, the gallant flourish - of his old hat with its broken peacock feather, but when they had passed by the broad shoulders so bravely squared would droop 1 again. And at the command, " Here you—" an old. grey-muzzled dog would look up into his face, perhaps divining that the curt summons covered a pathetic craving for companionship . . . for love. , On his seventieth birthday a whim sent Old Jack miles off his usual hefit into the district where he once had his farm. Weary and footsore with a queer, hot pain in his chest Old Jack stopped at a once-familiar five-barred gate. Then with sudden resolution he opened the gate and passed in. . " Here you—" he called to his dog. " they ought to be cood for a_ feed here, p'raps a, bed. I'll string em a tale jvbout old times." Curiously faint and breathless as he reached the neat well-kept.yard, Jack sank down on a big chopping block, closing his eyes, suddenly dim with the rush of old memories. " H'lloa, ole man." With a start Old Jack opened his eyes and saw a little curly-headed girl with 'eves as blue his own Btandiuc at knee. " Look here, lovey," Jack was his old wheedling self Again. "Think your mother would give .an old man and his dos a bite to eat and—a mug o' tea i " Pat," a woman came hurriedly across the yard, and .Jack with that strange breathless pain in his chest rose ar.d swept off his hat with whimsical gallantry. " Ladv," he began and then stopped sudde/ily, staring, stricken dumb. Her eves were as bright and sea-blue as his own, as blue as those of the child. After t all these years he knew her .. • grown-up . . . married ... a mother . . . but still his Little Pal. Fiercely he blinked away the rush of tears which nearly choked him. "I—l must be. going." he muttered And turned away.