Mark and Gus by famous author of New Zealand "Frank Anthony"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) January 5, 2012 -- Helping Out Gus

I’m not what you’d call a ladies’ man, at all. Far from it! I'm the sort of fellow you often see in the back blocks. I take a girl four or five miles to a hop, and sit in a corner half the night, twiddling my watch chain, or tearing pieces of paper into small bits, while she does the supper, dance, every other, and the last, with some good-looking stranger from the city.

Then I drive her home, and she goes into raptures all the way back, talking about the nice boy she met—“Didn't I notice him?” Then, when I say I didn't, and ask who the queer-looking chap was she had the supper waltz with, there's a row. That's me! I have a friend though, who isn't quite such a dismal failure that way as I am. He loses his head over a fresh girl about every three or four months. He likes to have me about with him, he says, to act as a foil. I don't know if I quite liked that, I wanted to know how; so then he explained, him being broad and fair, and me thin, and bony and sallow, it sort of set him off.

It sort of set me off, too, and it took him a minute or two to explain what he really did mean. He said, “You know, Mark, you tough wiry chaps are all a bit hot-tempered, that's why the girls all go nap on you the way they do.” I hadn't noticed it, but I took a swig at the drink he pushed at me, and decided that perhaps I wasn't very observant. I decided to keep my eyes open, next girl I talked to. I have an idea I could get on much better with girls if I didn't have any hands or feet, hands especially. It doesn't matter what I do with my hands, they don’t seem to be in the right place. Now, there's the difference between old Gus Tomlins and me. He's the friend I'm telling you about. Gus can stand in the midst of a bevy of topping looking girls, and smile, and chat, and look as natural, and as detached and nonchalant, as a dog on the hearth rug.

I always knew when Gus was going through the mill. He has a wheezy old motor cycle and sidecar, and when little Cupid is playing a joke on him, you can hear this affair backfiring and roaring over at Gus's place at all hours of the day and night. I live next to Gus, and he can't slip out without me knowing about it, and that cycle makes such a noise climbing the hill next to me that it wakes every neighbour for half a mile round, when he is coming home. Now and then, say one week in every quarter, Gus decides to cut out all this silly love stuff, and comes over to my place and interrupts me at my work.

He sits about, looking dreary and solemn, and passes strange remarks about the rotten world, and what a miserable, small, shallow lot of people live in it, until I get fidgety and uncomfortable myself. Then he switches off that, and starts to give me a lot about sticking to his friends. He always does. He goes on to explain just how much he thinks of me, and how he has found out at last,that a true-blue friend like myself, is worth all the girls in the country. I know what's coming after that. Gus hasn't got a lady friend just for the time, and sooner than go by himself, he wants me to ride in his sidecar with him to the next dance.

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