page 28

A Clean Sweep

(By A.D.M. )

Hearken to the story of Angus MacPherson, whose soft. Highland accent is as pure today as it was when he went aboard the steamer at Kyle of Lochalsh and embarked on the great adventure to make his fortune in the New World. His accent still clings to him like the dew on the heather of his native hills, or like the last lingering rays of the red sun on the topmost heights of the Coolins of Mull. Indeed, he has had at times as much difficulty in comprehending what was said to him even by intelligent New Zealanders as they have had in making sense out of his replies, which are inclined to be staccato and non-committal.

Romance, however, waited for Angus MacPherson, and after many years it overtook him in an avalanche of riotous emotion the like of which had never been dreamed of in bis placid philosophy. Romance? Yes, and then some.

It all began with a razor blade.

Once, in the years long gone, aboard the “Wahuhui,” which everyone who knows anything knows to be one of the pioneering vessels that took the emigrants from Home over the waste of seas to their new haven in the Britain of the South, Angus had won a competition for musical ability. True, the competition was for the best representation of South Sea Island music, and many of the entrants were armed with ukeleles. banjoleles, Hawaiian guitars, and many other appropriate music-making instruments; yet Angus MacPherson, with nothing but a chanter, which may be described as a set of bagpipes without any of the pipes but one—puffed out his cheeks and blew into the short, reed-like instrument to such good effect that there was only one competitor in it. The sea-girt, rugged isle from which he came had taught him the tune that the waves play on a moonlit beach at midnight; and, anyhow, apart from the colour of their skins, there is not a deal of difference between the islanders of the south and the highlanders of the north so far as their closeness to the elemental forces of Nature is concerned. The prize given to Angus MacPherson, aged fifteen, curly haired and powerfully lunged, was a patent safety razor; and it was not for many a long day that he discovered any useful purpose to which it might be put. But he kept it, and with it he retained his stake in the romantic adventures that life offers only to the chosen few.

Arrived in Auckland, Angus was land-sick. He had been sea-sick; more than once he had been home-sick, but here was a ghastly experience that had never hitherto swung into his ken. The streets of the city were as the waves of the sea, and the kit-bag slung over his shoulder seemed designed for no other purpose than to drag him down to the unplumbed depths of misery and despair. He thought for a moment of the safety razor outfit, and there flashed across his mind the memory of horrible things read in the “Police Budget” in far-away Skye and of the desperate uses to which such lethal weapons had been put by human creatures driven to the last stage of endurance. But Angus MacPherson held on, for he was a Scot, he was game, and he was fifteen. Besides, the razor was destined to do better service for him than to cut the mortal coil and so enable him to shuffle off to that bourne whence no traveller returns—the quotation is mixed, but the sense is good. Very good, as you will see: good for the razor and good for him.

Angus got over his malaise, gathered his swag together, hitched his footwagon to the star of destiny and slogged it along the North Island highways until he met his fate. Some would call that fate peculiarly drab and uninteresting. It was to herd, muster, dip, drive, shear and otherwise attend to the material needs of mob after mob of Romneys, Southdowns, wethers, hoggets, ewes, fat lambs, lean lambs, and just plain sheep, in the employ of one Jock Jackson, a good boss, who had never been twenty miles away from his farm and whose farm was forty miles from anywhere.

The dots above represent the interval, during which you have been out to imbibe soft drinks. The curtain parts, the lights go out, and the story proceeds. Twenty years have passed, and Angus MacPherson still herds sheep for Jock Jackson. You may scarcely have noticed the small, slim, black-haired, dark-eyed female child who stood on the doorstep of the Jackson station these years ago when Angus unslung his swag and looked page 29 in the direction of the whare that was to be his, plus tucker and ten shillings a week, in consideration of his services. Even if you had noticed her you would scarcely recognise her now, for she is a lovely, vital, entrancing, fascinating specimen of ripe womanhood, aged twenty-six, and wearing that alluring expression which only unattached females of the species can wear at that age.

It may also be doubted if you would recognise Angus himself now, his eyes on Jeannette Jackson, and his long, lean fingers busy with the idle whittling of a stick for no purpose whatsoever. He is brawny, bronzed, bowlegged, bearded, and bordering on middle age; for he is thirty-five, albeit still game, still dour, and with the stirrings of a new and unnamed ambition within him.

Get this picture clearly in mind. A running stream with green-blue water and the sea not far away. A benevolent summer sun sucking the colour out of the massed pohutukawas. The gleam of the white fleece of sheep, pure as the peak of a snow-capped mountain at dawn. A sky blue as the Madonna's robe and shimmering in the summer haze. A trig little garden where Jeannette sits, perched like a sparrow on an old saw-bench adjacent to the lean-to wood-shed. Angus on the bottom step of his whare, whittling. Birds singing—all kinds of birds, and singing hard—that is, all the kinds that can sing.

“Angus!”

The whittling ceased. The tousled head jerked upward with a start.

“Ay, Miss Jeannette.”

An admonitory finger punctuated what followed, and as Angus looked beyond the finger, beyond the hand, beyond the shapely arm with the dimple at the elbow, he saw two dark eyes levelled at him like a gangster's over a gate—steady, cold, accusing.

“Do you know,” came the icy tones from the girl perched on the sawbench, “that you have been sitting there, Angus MacPherson, for the whole of the last hour, doing nothing but spoiling a long length of perfectly good wood by whittling it into small and useless pieces? I have made up my mind at last to speak to you seriously about your habits, and I am going to do it now. You are slipping, Angus MacPherson, that's what you are doing, and it is time that you took a pull. I happened to peep into your whare by accident yesterday, and I declare that I have never in all my life witnessed such an intolerable mess. And look at yourself. Do you not realise that you could be quite presentable if you would only take some trouble with yourself? You could—”

Angus stuck his knife into the ground, put his elbows on his knees and his feet on a pile of shavings and gave Jeannette his full attention.

“Ay, Miss Jeannette.”

“You could be quite” —(Was that a break in her voice?)—“if you .would just take a little pride in yourself.”

A reminiscent gleam, like the resuscitation of old ambition, flared for a moment in the collie-brown eyes of Angus MacPherson.

“Get a move on, you old silly,” she said, with rather a nice kind of sever ity; “you and I are going to start in right now.”

Bewildered, awkward, slow, driven ruthlessly by loving kindness out of a twenty years’ groove, Angus MacPherson first of all stared at the lightning tornado which swept down on his humble home, coughed as the dust of long years in its passing caught him by the throat, followed as the moth follows a candle or a wagon its star, and helped to lay bare the sordid secrets of his whare to the benign eye of the summer sun.

“Now, a broom, quickly!”

Angus actually ran to fetch one.

“Why, Angus MacPherson. what's this?”

Jeannette stood in the doorway holding in her hand the still unused shaving outfit that had reposed on a top shelf during all these years.

Angus stammered without saying anything that anyone could make sense of.

“I'm puffed,” said Jeannette, “so you sit down right here and tell me why you have had these things all this time and have never used them.” Angus had nothing to say.

“Wait you here,” said Jeannette.

“We are going to make a job of this. First, though, in with all this stuff again. Move! No; don't put it where it was. That goes here, and this goes there—”

Half-an-hour later, Angus MacPherson sat on his own doorstep, with a large towel round his neck, while an energetic girl in the near vicinity first weilded a pair of scissors and a comb to splendid effect on the not too raven locks of Angus. Next she violated his whiskers with the same implements, and rounded off events in a lather of sweet-smelling shaving soap and with the swift, smooth action of a perfectly good razor blade. The pump was then requisitioned, and therefrom the high lights emerged in Angus MacPherson's hair and disappeared from his beard, being substituted for in the latter case by a baby-smooth chin that was a little lighter in colour than the rest of his countenance, but nevertheless nice and comfortably strong and clean looking.

Here ends the story of Angus MacPherson. Why? Because Jeannette, proud of her handiwork, passed her cool, smooth hand over his smooth, shining hair. And Angus? At that touch he forgot the sun, moon and stars and anything and everything else you can add to these not too readily forgotten phenomena.

“Why,” cried Jeannette in delight, “your face is now as smooth as mine. Feel mine, Angus, and prove it.”

“Ay, Miss.”

Angus MacPherson did, and that did it. He just could not take his hand away again until he had tilted the face above the chin a little higher, and yet just a little higher. The cynic may say that that was just what she was after. But why be cynical about it, even if it is so?

Angus made an incomprehensible sound. Jeannette responded with a meaningless murmur, and for a long time they compared faces for smoothness.