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But, as is common, her far-seeing eyes had neglected the things that lay under her nose. Ada, in open revolt, had chosen Jonah the larrikin, a hunchback, crafty as the devil and monstrous to the sight. In six months the inevitable had happened. She was dismayed, but unshaken, and set to work to repair the damage with the craft and strategy of an old general.
And they emerged staggering under the weight of their plunder, laden like ants with food for hungry mouths the insatiable maw of the people. The push was gathered under the veranda at the corner of Cardigan Street, smoking cigarettes and discussing the weightier matters of life horses and women. They were all young from eighteen to twenty-five for the larrikin never grows old.
If Alice had only blacked her face with a piece of cork before she started out, the picture would have been complete. And where did a girl like that go to in a place like this? The heart-shaped Fijian fan beat scornfully at that lovely bright mane. She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible common larrikin and they'd go off into the bush together.
And not so long ago people could remember when he was a common larrikin, reputed leader of the Cardigan Street Push, and working for old Paasch, whose shop was now empty, his business absorbed by Jonah with the ease one swallows a lozenge. And they say he began life as a street-arab, selling papers and sleeping in the gutter. Well, some people's luck was marvellous!
An enterprising person named "The Whiteley of Crime," the universal Provider of Iniquity. In fact, he anticipated Sir Arthur Doyle's Professor Moriarty. The rest were detectives, old ladies, mob, and a wealthy young Colonial larrikin.
The gamin of Paris, grown up to early manhood, fed on three meat meals a day, supplied with plenteous pocket money, and allowed to rule a tribe of tailors, would be a larrikin. The New York hoodlum is a larrikin with a difference. The British rough is a larrikin also with a difference.
The next the whole crowd had flung themselves upon him, and the miniature champion of "Rule Britannia" was borne to the ground in the centre of a whirl of legs, arms, chairs, bottles, and the other weapons usually preferred by the German larrikin to bare fists. Dick could stand no more, and the members of that Peace Conference must have thought about that time that a cyclone had struck them.
Which is much worse. If a man wants your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a subscription-list, instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian larrikin; a "brumby," with as much breed as the boy; a brace of chumars in gold-laced caps; three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag.
He was dressed like like a bush larrikin. His name was Jim. He had been to a ball where some blank had "touched" his blanky overcoat. The overcoat had a cheque for ten "quid" in the pocket. He didn't seem to feel the loss much. "Wot's ten quid?" He'd been everywhere, including the Gulf country. He still had three or four sheds to go to.
The orderly processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome Court ceremonial surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awful power and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal character at all, merely some blackguardly larrikin kicking his heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent to the fact that he is causing it....
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