Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/72

 blowing in huge volleys: and the black Cornish nights, with nothing but the violent weather outside.

"Oh, I remember it, I remember it," said William James. "Though I was a half-starved youngster on a bit of a farm out there, you know, for everlasting chasing half a dozen heifers from the cliffs, where the beggars wanted to fall over and kill themselves, and hunting for a dozen sheep among the gorse-bushes, and wading up to my knees in mud most part of the year, and then in summer, in the dry times, having to haul water for a mile over the rocks in a wagon, because the well had run dry. And at the end of it my father gave me one new suit in two years, and sixpence a week. Ay, that was a life for you. I suppose if I was there still he'd be giving me my keep and five shillin' a week—if he could open his heart as wide as two half-crowns, which I'm doubting very much."

"You have money out here, at least," said Somers. "But there was a great fascination for me, in Cornwall."

"Fascination! And where do you find the fascination? In a little Wesleyan chapel of a Sunday night, and a girl with her father waiting for her with a strap if she's not in by nine o'clock? Fascination, did you say?"

"It had a great fascination for me—magic—a magic in the atmosphere."

"All the fairy tales they'll tell you?" said William James, looking at the other man with a smile of slow ridicule. "Why ye didn't go and believe them, did ye?"

"More or less. I could more easily have believed them there than anywhere else I've been."

"Ay, no doubt. And that shows what sort of a place it be. Lot of dum silly nonsense." He stirred on his seat impatiently.

"At any rate, you're well out of it. You're set up all right here," said Somers, who was secretly amused. The other man did not answer for some time.

"Maybe I am," he said at last. "I'm not pining to go back and work for my father, I tell you, on a couple of pasties and a lot of abuse. No, after that, I'd like you to tell me what's wrong with Australia."

"I'm sure I don't know," said Somers. "Probably nothing at all."

Again William James was silent. He was a short, thick