The Speech Of The
Outside Men At This Point Becomes Fearfully Mixed With Pidgin-English
And Local Chinese Terms, Rounded With Corrupt Portuguese.
At Melbourne,
in a long verandah giving on a grass plot, where laughing-jackasses
laugh very horribly, sit wool-kings, premiers, and breeders of horses
after their kind.
The older men talk of the days of the Eureka Stockade
and the younger of 'shearing wars' in North Queensland, while the
traveller moves timidly among them wondering what under the world every
third word means. At Wellington, overlooking the harbour (all
right-minded clubs should command the sea), another, and yet a like,
sort of men speak of sheep, the rabbits, the land-courts, and the
ancient heresies of Sir Julius Vogel; and their more expressive
sentences borrow from the Maori. And elsewhere, and elsewhere, and
elsewhere among the Outside Men it is the same - the same mixture of
every trade, calling, and profession under the sun; the same clash of
conflicting interests touching the uttermost parts of the earth; the
same intimate, and sometimes appalling knowledge of your neighbour's
business and shortcomings; the same large-palmed hospitality, and the
same interest on the part of the, younger men in the legs of a horse.
Decidedly, it is at the Overseas Club all the world over that you get to
know some little of the life of the community. London is egoistical, and
the world for her ends with the four-mile cab radius. There is no
provincialism like the provincialism of London.
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