Miner’s Right – 7 September 1897, page 4
The Triumph of Delilah
by Smiler Hales
‘I don’t believe a word of it. I think it’s all a ‘blanky’ lie, ‘ remarked young Sid Gordon, as he tucked his knee well in under his small body on the lounge. He and half a dozen other goldfields men were chatting on the balcony of the Grand Turk Hotel in Kalgoorlie. They were smoking and drinking whiskey and retelling scandals, and some of the stories that went the round of that circle would have made many a husband’s ears hum furiously, if the ears and the tales had met.
‘So you don’t believe it, Sid’ drawled Tom Coates – ‘it’s true all the same, why the woman’s as crooked as an expert’s assays and God knows they are crooked enough.’ ‘Little Sid’s too almighty pure himself, he can’t conceive such wicked news in a woman — especially a woman he knows and has danced with and been kissed by’ snarled Ned Halahan.
‘Oh, dry up and pass the whiskey,’ snapped the first speaker. No one would accuse you of being too pure, Halahan, I’m no blanky saint, but I won’t eat a woman’s salt and abuse her afterwards, anyhow.’ ‘Her husband’s salt, little ‘un.’ ‘Well, put it that way, if you like; anyhow, I know you’re a liar where women are concerned, for I’ve found you out before, and I think you’re lying about her now.’
‘Delilah has a fierce champion’, laughed Tom Coates. ‘Oh Lord, how many men have I heard say those same old things — said ’em all and believed ’em all myself once upon a time,’ the speaker laughed ruefully. ‘I can’t understand where that woman’s charms come in; it gets past me when you chaps rave about her. What is the attraction, anyhow?’ This question came from a new import in tweed knickerbockers and stockings who signed himself ‘Randolph Cecil Evelyn Clarke, London, W.C.’
‘Don’t suppose you can understand it, ‘ chirruped little Sid. ‘Her chief attraction is her brains; that’s a commodity you know precious little about.’ ‘That’s ah, coarse—ah, deuced coarse, ejaculated the new arrival. ‘Coarse, perhaps; but it’s honest. And I’m damned if it’s honest to accept a woman’s invitations, eat her dinners, dance with her and her guests and then christen her Delilah and blacken her name.’ claimed Sid with pasion.
‘Bravo! Little ‘un; what a blessed criminal advocate you’d have made. But, really, young ‘un, you’re making an idol out of mud, Delilah has earned her name and her reputation.’ ‘You’re as bad as the others, Tom, and you’re an unmanly lot of beggars, anyhow.’ ‘I speak of the things whereof I do know, little ‘un — by my soul, there she is now,’ and as he spoke, he lifted his soft hat lazily and gracefully from his head to a lady who passed along the opposite side of Hannan street, and all the others did likewise.
Delilah bowed serenely, and passed on—a graceful, dignified, dainty figure, with a face like the peep of dawn upon a summer’s morning, lips that looked in their rosy moistness as if they had never been kissed since she left her cradle, though God knows many a moustache could have given the lie to the look. Eyes she had that could droop with all a maiden’s shyness, and yet look into the face of death or the windows of hell and not blench.
The little group of men on the balcony slipped back into their seats, and silence dwelt among them for a space. They smoked, and as the tobacco clouds rose upwards, they handed round the yellow liquid in the little black bottle.
Down the wide and busy thoroughfare of the great mining camp, a long string of camels driven by many Afghans padded their way softly and silently along. On the opposite side of the street, a small crowd of racing men had gathered round ‘Big Jim’ Wilkinson, the handicapper, chaffing him unmercifully about the weights for the Goldfield’s races. Teddy Lewis, Harry Urquhart, Jim Cassidy, and a lot of others were bandying opinions concerning the merits of the two contenders, Paul Pry and Le Var, and doing their best generally to make the big handicapper wish horses and horse-racing at the bottom of the bottomless pit, and their voices came in an indistinct jumble to the group on the balcony.
‘You said you knew ‘Delilah’ Tom, and that she had earned the name and the reputation that goes with it. Tell us what you know of your own knowledge; not lies picked up second-hand from women who love to tattle and men who delight to talk.’ It was Sid Gordon who asked, and there was a piteous note in the boy’s voice, and a look of pain in his eyes which Tom Coates did not fail to note, and he remarked mentally, ‘I like the youngster, and sooner or later he will have to know, and the sooner the better. After all, men are like dogs— they soon forget.’
Aloud, he said—’About Delilah, tell you all I know? Well, I’ll tell you enough to shake your faith. She was originally a dressmaker’s drudge in a London slum when she was picked up by a benevolent old widow lady, who fell in love with her innocent face and tender ways, for believe me, boys, she can fool women as well as men.
This philanthropic old lady had an only son, whom she adored. And it came to pass in the end that Delilah got in her fine fingers into him. He forged his mother’s name for much money, turned away from the church, of which she had fondly hoped he would prove an ornament, and skipped to Australia. He would have married Delilah, but she was not built on marriage lines, and so the pair, one sweet May morning, put the broad ocean between them, and the mother, the dear confiding grey haired mother, went to the grave broken hearted, she believed her son to be a scoundrel who had
taken advantage of a trustworthy, simple girl, and betrayed her to her ruin.
She made her will before she died and left her property away from her son, bequeathing a greater portion of it to the innocent Delilah, and she, the wanton with her matchless hair, gathered in the old dame’s shackles, and straightway told the son that life with the same face forever before her at bed and board was a thing she could not tolerate, and asked him ever so sweetly to remove himself and make no fuss and she would think of him kindly every time she heard his favourite songs at the opera.’
‘What did he do?’ asked Sid. ‘ Do, what could he do. He was a man, a real live man at the bottom, though she had made him a tool, and he yawned in her face, and told her she had saved him from making a brute of himself, for he too was tired of the alliance, and would be glad to go, but had not cared to tell her so.’
She knew he lied, and she was nearer loving him than ever before, but she went to him, reaching up on tip-toe, took his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth, and sent him away with a smile and the hum of a song in his ears. ‘What became of him?’ asked little Sid – drink?’ ‘Drink be darned, not he. He went across the sea and joined a regiment of the line going out to India, and was cut to pieces by a big native in some despicable little frontier row which the English so grandiosely call their Indian wars.’
‘Then she went to Sydney and lorded it there as a society queen for quite a long time until her name was upon the lips of all men. Eh! What a dainty little darling she looked in the saddle, or when yachting upon the beautiful Sydney harbour, or in the. ballroom, for she was mistress of all arts as well as empress of most hearts; she could ride and row and fence and dance and look like a saint and act like a devil. When she had made it through all of her money, she married Frank Ferguson, the king of the sharebrokers, and the devil’s own tattoo she played on his banking account, backing horses and subsidising churches,
one foot on the throne of Grace, and the other on the hob of hell.
Rich as Ferguson was, she soon brought him down to poverty point, and then she curled up on his lap as he sat in his arm chair in the lamplight one night, and, tangling her fingers in his beard she drew his head down and sobbed on his shoulder, and told him a tale that made him spring from the chair and dash out of the house in search of one whom he had loved as a brother, for she, the sweet, coy Delilah had told him that this friend had led her from the pebbly paths of peace and virtue into the shady rose scented bye paths of shame, and she was no more worthy to be called wife.’
‘What do you think of that, Sid?’ ‘I think you’re an awful liar, Tom, but go on. What was the upshot of it all!’ ‘Oh, Ferguson met his friend down at Manly Beach and nearly killed him. Then he took up with a woman of the ‘Light Brigade,’ and flaunted around openly with her until people branded him a blackguard for treating his wife so shamefully. Then he wrote her and told her she had better institute proceedings for divorce, which she promptly did, and the infernal idiot stood off and never said a word about her faithlessness, and he drifted off the scene and became a sop and a scarecrow; a thing that gets the horrors once a quarter and goes out and bays the moon.
After that, she went to Adelaide for her health, she having been shocked so dreadfully, so her lady friends said as they hung about her on the boat at Circular Quay. In the smart city of Churches ‘Delilah’ met Greatrix Parkes, a man whose name was a thing to conjure with in religious and banking circles, and though he had a nice little wife of his own and a couple of pretty kiddies, he drifted away from his social anchorage, and God only knows how he carried on with ‘Delilah.’ There were long drives in the twilight from Adelaide to the fashionable seaside resorts, and whispering and caresses only seen by the stars—and the coachman. There were late suppers at Waterfall Gully and the Eagle on the Hill, there were costly presents and big overdrafts at the bank that Parkes managed, and through it all, Delilah managed so that people said one to the other,
‘Poor dear little woman, how that fellow does persecute her with his odious attentions, to be sure.’
Then came the crash, the auditing of the bank books, and the trial of the banker. And he, as he stood in the dock, haggard and wan, with deep circles round his eyes, looked over the head of his sweet little wife, who clung to him in his disgrace and looked in vain for the woman who had fooled him. He scarcely heard the judge’s words that sentenced him to fourteen years’ hard labour. He did not hear the despairing shriek of the gentle woman who bore his name as the sentence worse than death was passed upon him. He listened for a sob, for some sign from the back of the court, from the lips he had caressed so often—but Delilah was not doing any sobbing, she was at home playing “nap” with the fool who is now telling you this story and —’
‘You liar, you awful liar, take that, and with one deft turn of his arm, Sid Gordon threw the empty whiskey bottle at his head and sprang down the stairs into the street. ‘Ah,’ muttered Tom Coates, as he tenderly staunched the blood on his forehead with a handkerchief, ‘ Little Sid has got it bad, and it’s a devilish good job that a man in love can seldom throw straight.’
Moya Sharp
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Thanks for the story of Delilah , precious. We have been in Broken Hill chasing down my grandmothers uncle Smiler Hales. Thanks for publishing the story , just one thing! He doesn’t have a y in his surname , thanks again , George Laslett
Hi George My apologies about the wrong name spelling, all fixed now. Your grandmothers uncle was a very proligic writer and one of my favorites.
Another fantastic article. Loved it. Thank you. Look forward to more.