Free Selected Stories by Henry Lawson Page A

herself.
    Presently Arvie sat bolt upright, and said quickly, “Mother! I thought the alarm went off!” Then, without waiting for an answer, he lay down as suddenly and slept.
    The rain had cleared away, and a bright, starry dome was over sea and city; over slum and villa alike; but little of it could be seen from the hovel in Jones’s Alley, save a glimpse of the Southern Cross and a few stars round it. It was what ladies call a “lovely night”, as seen from the house of Grinder—“Grinderville”—with its moonlit terraces and garden sloping gently to the water, and its windows lit up for an Easter ball, and its reception rooms thronged by its own exclusive set, and one of its charmingand accomplished daughters melting a select party to tears by her pathetic recitation about a little crossing sweeper.
    There was something wrong with the alarm clock, or else Mrs Aspinall had made a mistake, for the gong sounded startlingly in the dead of night. She woke with a painful start, and lay still, expecting to hear Arvie get up; but he made no sign. She turned a white, frightened face towards the sofa where he lay—the light from the alley’s solitary lamp on the pavement above shone down through the window, and she saw that he had not moved.
    Why didn’t the clock wake him? He was such a light sleeper! “Arvie!” she called; no answer. “Arvie!” she called again, with a strange ring of remonstrance mingling with the terror in her voice. Arvie never answered.
    “Oh! my God!” she moaned.
    She rose and stood by the sofa. Arvie lay on his back with his arms folded—a favourite sleeping position of his; but his eyes were wide open and staring upwards as though they would stare through ceiling and roof to the place where God ought to be.
    He was dead.
    “My God! My God!” she cried.

The Union Buries Its Dead
    WHILE out boating one Sunday afternoon on a billabong across the river, we saw a young man on horseback driving some horses along the bank. He said it was a fine day, and asked if the water was deep there. The joker of our party said it was deep enough to drown him, and he laughed and rode farther up. We didn’t take much notice of him.
    Next day a funeral gathered at a corner pub and asked each other in to have a drink while waiting for the hearse. They passed away some of the time dancing jigs to a piano in the bar parlour. They passed away the rest of the time skylarking and fighting.
    The defunct was a young union labourer, about twenty-five, who had been drowned the previous day while trying to swim some horses across a billabong of the Darling.
    He was almost a stranger in town, and the fact of his having been a union man accounted for the funeral. The police found some union papers in his swag, and called at the General Labourers’ Union Office for information about him. That’s how we knew. The secretary had very little information to give. The departed was a “Roman”, and the majority of the town were otherwise—but unionism is stronger than creed. Drink, however, is stronger than unionism; and, when the hearse presently arrived, more than two-thirds of the funeral were unable to follow. They were too drunk.
    The procession numbered fifteen, fourteen souls following the broken shell of a soul. Perhaps not one of the fourteen possessed a soul any more than the corpse did—but that doesn’t matter.
    Four or five of the funeral, who were boarders at the pub, borrowed a trap which the landlord used to carry passengers to and from the railway station. They were strangers to us who were on foot, and we to them. We were all strangers to the corpse.
    Ahorseman, who looked like a drover just returned from a big trip, dropped into our dusty wake and followed us a fewhundred yards, dragging his packhorse behind him, but a friend made wild and demonstrative signals from a hotel verandah—hooking at the air in front with his right hand and jobbing his left thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the