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THE RECORD OF NICHOLAS FREYDON
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
[A novel by Alec John Dawson]
This etext prepared from the first edition published in 1914 by Constable and Company Ltd, London.
EDITOR'S PREFATORY NOTE
It would ill become any writer to adopt an apologetic tone in introducing the work of another pen than his own, and indeed I have no thought of apologia where Nicholas Freydon's writing is concerned. On the contrary, it is out of respect for my friend's quality as a writer that I am moved to a word of explanation here. It is this: there are circumstances, sufficiently indicated I think in the text of the book and my own footnote thereto, which tended to prevent my performance of those offices for my friend's work which are usually expected of one who is said to edit. It would be more fitting, I suppose, if a phrase were borrowed from the theatrical world, and this record of a man's life were said to be 'presented' rather than 'edited,' by me. I am advised to accept the editorial title in this connection, but it is the truth that the book has not been edited at all, in the ordinary acceptance of the term. A few purely verbal emendations have been made in it, but Nicholas Freydon's last piece of writing has never been revised, nor even arranged in deference to accepted canons of book-making. It is given here as it left the author's pen, designed, not for your eye or mine, but for that of its writer, to be weighed and considered by him. But that weighing and consideration it has not received.
So much I feel it incumbent upon me to say, as the avowed sponsor for the book, in order that praise and blame may be rightly apportioned. Touching the inherent value of this document, nothing whatever is due to me. Any criticism of its arrangement, or lack of arrangement, to be just, should be levelled at myself alone.
CONTENTS
[MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD]
[MANHOOD--ENGLAND: SECOND PERIOD]
THE RECORD OF NICHOLAS FREYDON
[INTRODUCTORY]
Back there in London--how many leagues and aeons distant!--I threw down my pen and fled here to the ends of the earth, in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind. Here I now take up the pen again and return in thought to London: that vast cockpit; still in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind.
That seems wasteful and not very hopeful. But, to be honest--and if this final piece of pen-work be not honest to its core, it certainly will prove the very acme of futility--I must add the expression of opinion that most of the important actions of my life till now have had the self-same goal in view: peace of mind. The surprising thing is that, right up to this present, every one of my efforts has been backed by a substantial if varying amount of solid conviction; of belief that that particular action would bring the long-sought reward. I suppose I thought this in coming here, in fleeing from London. Nay, I know I did.
The latest, and I suppose the last, illusion bids me believe that if, using the literary habit of a lifetime, I can set down in ordered sequence the salient facts and events of that restless, struggling pilgrimage I call my life, there is a likelihood that, seeing the entire fabric in one piece, I may be able truly to understand it, and, understanding it, to rest content before it ends. The ironical habit makes me call it an illusion. In strict truth I listen to the call with some confidence; not, to be sure, with the flaming ardour which in bygone years has set me leaping into action in answer to such a call; yet with real hope.
It is none so easy a task, this exact charting out of so complex a matter as a man's life. And it may be that long practice of the writer's art but serves to heighten its difficulties. For example, since writing the sentence ending on that word 'hope,' I have covered two whole pages with writing which has now been converted into ashes among the logs upon my hearth. For the covering of those pages two volumes had been fingered and referred to, if you please, and my faulty memory drawn upon for yet a third quotation. So much for the habit of literary allusiveness, engrained into one by years of book-making, and yet more surely, I suspect, by labour for hire on the newspaper press.
But, though I have detected and removed these two pages of irrelevance, I foresee that unessential and therefore obscurantic matter will creep in. Well, when I come to weigh the completed record, I must allow for that; and, meanwhile, so far as time and my own limitations as selector permit, I will prune and clear away from the line of vision these weeds of errant fancy. For the record must of all things be honest and comprehensive; rather than shapely, effective, or literary. To be sure the pundits would say that this is to misuse and play with words; to perpetrate a contradiction in terms. Well, we shall see. Whatever the critics might say, your author by profession would understand me well enough when I say: 'Honest, rather than literary.'
How, to begin with, may I label and describe my present self? There, immediately, I am faced with one of the difficulties of this task. One can say of most men that they are this or that; of this class, order, sect, party, or type; and, behold them neatly docketed! But in all honesty I cannot say that I am of any special class, or that I 'belong' anywhere in particular. There is no circle in any community which is indefeasibly my own by right of birth and training. I am still a member of two London clubs, I believe. They were never more than hotels for me. I am probably what most folk call a gentleman; but how much does that signify in the twentieth century? Many simple people would likely call me a person of education, even of learning, belike, seeing a list of books under my name. A schoolman who examined me would be pardoned (by me, at all events) for calling me an ignoramus of no education whatever. For--and this I never reflected upon until the present moment--I could not for the life of me 'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I know something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; something of three or four languages, but nothing of their grammar. I have met and talked with some of the most notable people of my time, but truly prefer cottage life before that of the greatest houses. And so, in a score of other ways, I feel it difficult informingly and justly to label myself.
But--let me have done with difficulties and definitions. My task shall be the setting forth of facts, out of which definitions must shape themselves. And, for a beginning, I must turn aside from my present self, pass by a number of dead selves, each differing in a thousand ways from every other, and bring my mind to bear for the moment upon that infinitely remote self: the child, Nicholas Freydon. It may be that curious and distant infant will help to explain the man.
[CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND]
I
The things I remember about my earliest infancy are not in the least romantic.
First, I think, come two pictures, both perfectly distinct, and both connected with domestic servants. The one is of a firelit interior, below street level: an immense kitchen, with shining copper vessels in it, an extremely hot and red fire, and a tall screen covered over with pictures. An enormously large woman in a blue and white print gown sits toasting herself before the fire; and a less immense female, in white print with sprays of pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support flaps. (To put a measuring-tape over that table nowadays, or over other things in the kitchen, for that matter, might bring disappointment, I suppose.) These legs formed fascinating walls and boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, caves, and suchlike resorts, among which a small boy could wander at will, when lucky enough to be allowed to visit this warm apartment at all. The whole place was pervaded by an odour indescribably pleasing to my infantile nostrils, and compact of suggestions of heat acting upon clean print gowns, tea-cakes done to a turn, scrubbed wood, and hot soap-suds.
But the full ecstasy of a visit to this place was only attained when I was lifted upon the vast table by the warm and rosy Amelia, and allowed to leap therefrom into her extended arms; she rushing toward me, and both of us emitting either shrill or growling noises as the psychological moment of my leap was reached. At the time I used to think that springing from a trapeze, set in the dome of a great building, into a net beneath, must be the most ravishing of all joys; but I incline now to think that my more homely feat of leaping into Amelia's warm arms was, upon the whole, probably a pleasanter thing.
This memory is of something which I believe happened fairly frequently. My other most distinct recollection of what I imagine to have been the same period in history is of a visit, a Sunday afternoon visit, I think, paid with Amelia. I must have been of tender years, because, though during parts of the journey I travelled on my own two feet, I recollect occasional lapses into a perambulator, as it might be in the case of an elderly or invalid person who walks awhile along a stretch of level sward, and then takes his ease for a time in victoria or bath-chair.
I remember Amelia lifting me out from my carriage in the doorway of what I regarded as a very delightful small house, redolent of strange and exciting odours, some of which I connect with the subsequent gift of a slab of stuff that I ate with gusto as cake. My mature view is that it was cold bread-pudding of a peculiarly villainous clamminess. It is interesting to note that my delight in this fearsome dainty was based upon its most malevolent quality: the chill consistency of the stuff, which made it resemble the kind of leathery jelly that I have seen used to moisten the face of a rubber stamp withal.
In this house--it was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean street--one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen, where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two bedrooms above. A door beside the stairway opened into a tiny scullery, from which light was pretty thoroughly excluded by the high, black wall which dripped and frowned no more than three feet away from its window. I have little doubt that this scullery was a pestilent place. At the time it appealed to my romantic sense as something rather attractive.
The elderly man in the kitchen was Amelia's father. That in itself naturally gave him distinction in my eyes. But, in addition, he was an old sailor, and, with a knife which was attached to a white lanyard, he could carve delightful boats (thoroughly seaworthy in a wash-hand basin) out of ordinary sticks of firewood. It is to be noted, by the way, a thing I never thought of till this moment, that these same sticks and bundles of firewood have a peculiarly distinctive smell of their own. It is the smell of a certain kind of grocer's shop whose proprietor, for some esoteric reason, calls himself an 'Italian warehouse-man.' In later life I occasionally visited such a shop, between Fleet Street and the river, when I had rooms in that locality.
Boat-building figured largely in that visit to Amelia's parents. (The girl had a mother; large, flaccid, and, on this occasion, partly dissolved in tears.) But the episode immediately preceding our departure is what overshadowed everything else for me that day, and for several subsequent nights. Amelia and the tearful mother took me up the dark little stairway, and introduced me to Death. They showed me Amelia's sister, Jinny, who died (of consumption, I believe) on the day before our visit. I still can see the alabaster white face, with its pronounced vein-markings; the straight, thin form, outlined beneath a sheet, in that tiny, low-ceiled, airless garret. What a picture to place before an infant on a sunny Sunday afternoon! It might be supposed that I had asked to see it, for I remember Amelia saying, as one about to give a child a treat:
'Now, mind, Master Nicholas, you're to be a very good boy, and you're not to say a word about it to any one.'
But, no, I do not think I can have desired the experience, for to this day I cherish a lively recollection of the agony of sick horror which swam over me when, in obedience to instructions given, I suffered my lips to touch the marble-like face of the dead girl.
How strange is that unquestioning obedience of childhood! Recognition of it might well give pause to careless instructors of youth. The kiss meant torture to me, in anticipation and in fact. But I was bidden, and never dreamed of refusing to obey. No doubt, there was also at work in me some dim sort of infantile delicacy. This was an occasion upon which a gentleman could have no choice....
Ah, well, I believe Amelia was a dear good soul, and I am sure I hope she married well, and lived happily ever after. I have no recollection whatever of how or when she drifted out of my life. But the visit to Jinny's deathbed, and the exciting leaps from the immeasurably long kitchen table into Amelia's print-clad arms, are things which stand out rather more clearly in my recollection than many of the events of, say, twenty years later.
II
How is it that my earliest recollections should centre about folk no nearer or dearer to me than domestic servants? I know that my mother died within three months of my birth. There had to be, and was, another woman in my life before Amelia; but I have no memories of her. She was an aunt, an unmarried sister of my mother's; but I believe my father quarrelled with her before I began to 'take notice' very much; and then came Amelia.
The large underground kitchen really was fairly big. I had a look at it no more than a dozen years ago. The house, too, was and is a not unpleasing one, situated within a stone's throw of Russell Square, Bloomsbury. Its spaces are ample, its fittings solidly good, and its area less subterranean than many. Near by is a select livery stable and mews of sub-rural aspect, with Virginia creeper climbing over a horse's head in stucco. Amelia shared with me a night nursery and a nursery-living room in this house, the latter overlooking the mews, through the curving iron rails of a tiny balcony. Below us my father occupied a small bedroom and a large sitting-room, the latter being the 'first floor front.'
At this time, and indeed during all the period of my first English memories--say, eight years--my father was engaged in journalistic work. I know now that he had been called to the bar, a member of Lincoln's Inn; but I do not know that he ever had a brief. He gave some years, I believe, to coaching and tutoring. I remember seeing, later in my boyhood, a tattered yellow prospectus which showed that he once delivered certain lectures on such subjects as 'Mediaeval English Poetry.' In my time I gather that my father called no man master or employer, but was rather the slave of a number of autocrats in Fleet Street. 'The office,' as between Amelia and myself, may have meant all Fleet Street. But my impression now is that it meant the building then occupied by the ----. (Here figures the name of one of London's oldest morning newspapers.--Ed.) And, it may be, the ---- Club; for I have reason to believe that my father did much of his work at his club. I have even talked there with one member at least who recollected this fact.
But the memory of my father as he was in this early period is curiously vague. It would seem that he produced no very clear impression on my mind then. Our meetings were not very frequent, I think. As I chiefly recall them, they occurred in the wide but rather dark entrance hall, and were accompanied by conversation confined to Amelia and my father. At such times he would be engaged in polishing his hat, sometimes with a velvet pad, and sometimes on his coat-sleeve. I used to hear from him remarks like these:
'Well, keep him out of doors as much as possible, so long as it doesn't rain. Eh? Oh, well, you'd better buy another. How much will it be? I will send up word if I am back before the boy's bed-time.'
And then he might turn to me, after putting on his hat, and absently pull one of my ears, or stroke my nose or forehead. His hands were very slender, warm, and pleasantly odorous of soap and tobacco. 'Be a good man,' he would say. And there the interview ended. He never said: 'Be a good child'; always 'a good man'; and sometimes he would repeat it, in a gravely preoccupied way.
Once, and, so far as I remember, only once, we met him out-of-doors; in the park, it was, and he took us both to the Zoological Gardens, and gave us tea there. (Yellowish cake with white sugar icing over it has ever since suggested to me the pungent smell of monkey-houses and lions' cages.) The meeting was purely accidental, I believe.
It must have been in about my ninth year, I fancy, that I began really to know something of my father, as a man, rather than as a sort of supernatural, hat-polishing, He-who-must-be-obeyed. We had a small house of our own then, in Putney; and the occasion of our first coming together as fellow-humans was a shared walk across Wimbledon Common, and into Richmond Park by the Robin Hood Gate. The period was the 'sixties of last century, and I had just begun my attendance each day at a local 'Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen.' To us, in the Academy, my father descended as from Olympus, while the afternoon was yet young, and carried me off before the envious eyes of my fellow sufferers and what I felt to be the grudging gaze of the usher, who had already twice since dinner-time severely pulled my ears, because of some confusion that existed in my mind between Alfred and his burnt cakes and Canute and his wet feet. (As I understood it, Canute sat on the beach upon one of those minute camp-stools which mothers and nurses used at the seaside before the luxurious era of canopied hammock chairs.)
In my devious childish fashion, I presently gathered that there had been momentous doings in London town that day, and that in the upshot my father had terminated his connection with the famous newspaper from which the bulk of his earnings had been drawn for some years. For a little while I fancied this must be almost as delightful for him as my own unexpected escape from the Academy that afternoon had been for me. But, gradually, my embryo intelligence rejected this theory, and I became possessed of a sense of grave happenings, almost, it might be, of catastrophe. Quite certainly, my father had never before talked to me as he did that summer afternoon in Richmond Park. His vein was, for him, somewhat declamatory, and his unusual gestures impressed me hugely. It is likely that at times he forgot my presence, or ceased, at all events, to remember that his companion was his child. His massive, silver-headed malacca cane did great execution among the bracken, I remember.
(I had been rather pleased for my school-mates to have had an opportunity of observing this stick, and had regretted the absence of my father's usual hat, equal in refulgence to the cane. Evidently, he had called at the house and changed his head-gear before walking up to the Academy, for he now wore the soft black hat which he called his 'wideawake.')
That he was occasionally conscious of me his monologue proved, for it included such swift, jerky sentences as:
'Remember that, my son. Have nothing to do with this accursed trade of ink-spilling. Literary work! God save the mark!' (I wondered what particular ink 'mark' this referred to.) 'The purse-proud wretches think they buy your soul with their starveling cheques. Ten years' use of my brain; ten years wasted in slavish pot-boiling for them; and then--then, this!'
'This,' I imagine, was dismissal; accepted resignation, say. I gathered that my father had been free to do his work where he chose; that he had used the newspaper office only as a place in which to consult with his editor before writing; and that now some new broom in the office was changing all that; that my father had been bidden to attend a certain desk during stated hours to perform routine work each day; that he had protested, refused, and closed his connection with the journal, after a heated interview with some managerial bashaw.
In the light of all I now know, I apprehend that my father had just been brought into contact with the first stirrings of those radical changes which revolutionised the London world of literature and journalism during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The Board School had not quite arrived, but the social revolution was at hand; and, there among the bracken in Richmond Park, my father with his malacca cane was defying the tide--like my friend of the camp-stool: Canute. Remembered phrases like: 'Underbred little clerk!'; 'His place is the counting-house, and ---- [the editor] should have known better than to leave us at the mercy of this impudent cad,' convince me that my father's wrath was in great part directed less against an individual than a social movement or tendency.
Much that my father said that afternoon would probably have a ridiculous seeming in this twentieth century. Compulsory education and the æsthetic movement, not to mention the Labour Party, Tory Democrats, and the Halfpenny Press, were as yet undiscovered delights when my father talked to me in Richmond Park. A young man of to-day, reading or listening to such words, would almost certainly be misled by them regarding the character and position of the speaker. My father was no scion of a noble house, but the only son of a decayed merchant. His attitude of mind and disposition, however, were naturally somewhat aristocratic, I think. Also, as I have said, our talk was in the 'sixties. He was sensitive, very proud, inclined, perhaps, to scornfulness, certainly to fastidiousness, and one who seldom suffered fools either gladly or with much show of tolerance. It was a somewhat unfortunate temperament, probably, for a man situated as he was, possessed of no private means and dependent entirely upon his earnings. In my mother, I believe he had married a lady of somewhat higher social standing than his own, who never was reconciled to the comparatively narrow and straitened circumstances of her brief wifehood.
'The people who have to do with newspapers are the serfs and the prostitutes of literature. It was not always so, but I've felt it coming for some time now. It is the growing dominion of the City, of commerce, of their boasted democracy. The People's Will! Disgusting rubbish! How the deuce should these office-bred hucksters know what is best? But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet--there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are--And, of course--H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a salary is humiliating--unworthy of one's manhood. Good heavens! why was I born, not one of them, and yet dependent on the caprices of such people?'
It may be filial partiality, but something makes me feel genuinely sorry for my father, as I look back upon that outpouring of his in Richmond Park. And that was in the 'sixties. I wonder how the twentieth-century journalism would have struck him. The later subtleties of unadmitted advertising, the headline, the skittishly impressionistic descriptive masterpieces of 'our special representative,' and the halfpenny newspapers, were all unthought-of boons, then. And as for the advancing democracy of his prophecies, why, there were quite real sumptuary laws of a sort still holding sway in the 'sixties, and well on into the 'eighties, for that matter!
We walked home from the Roehampton Gate, and in some respects I was no longer quite a child when I climbed into bed that night.
III
In my eyes, at all events, there was a kind of a partnership between my father and myself from this time onward. Before, there had been three groups in my scheme of things: upon the one hand, Amelia (or her successor) and myself, with, latterly, some of the people of the Putney Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen; in another and quite separate compartment, my father; and, finally, the rest of the world. Gradually, now, I came to see things rather in this wise: upon the one hand, my father and myself, with, perhaps, a few other folk as satellites; and, on the other hand, the rest of the world.
And at this early stage I began to regard the world--every one outside our own small camp--in an antagonistic light, as a hostile force, as the enemy. Life was a battle in which the odds were fearfully uneven; for it was my father and myself against the world. Needless to say, I did not put the matter to myself in those words; but at this precise period I am well assured that I acquired this attitude of mind. It dated from the admittance into partnership with my father, which was signalised by the walk and talk among the bracken in Richmond Park.
I ought to say that I had always had a great admiration for my father. He seemed to me clearly superior in a thousand ways to other men. But never before the Richmond episode had there been personal sympathy, nor yet any loyal feeling of fellowship, mingled with this admiration.
I remember very distinctly the pride I felt in my father's personal appearance. He was not a dandy, I think; but there was a certain quiet nicety and delicacy about his dress and manner which impressed me greatly. The hair about his ears and temples was silvery grey; one of the marks of his superiority, in my eyes. He always raised his hat in leaving a shop in which a woman served; his manner of accepting or tendering an apology among strangers was very grand indeed. In saluting men in the street, he had a spacious way of raising his malacca stick which, to this day, would charm me, were it possible to see such a gesture in these rushing times. The photograph before me as I write proves that my father was a handsome man, but it does not show the air of distinction which I am assured was his. And, let me record here the fact that, whatever might be thought of the wisdom or otherwise of his views or actions, I never once knew him to be guilty of an act of vulgar discourtesy, nor of anything remotely resembling meanness.
In these days it is safe to say that the very poorest toiler's child has more of schooling than I had, and, doubtless, a superior sort of schooling. I spent rather less than a year and a half at the Putney Academy, and that was the beginning and the end of my schooling. Before being introduced to the Academy, I was a fairly keen reader; and that remained. At the Academy I was obliged to write in a copy-book, and to commit to memory sundry valueless dates. There may have been other acquisitions (irrespective of ear-tweakings and various cuts from a vicious little cane), but I have no recollection of them; and, to this day, the simplest exercises of everyday figuring baffle me the moment I take a pencil in my hand. If I cannot arrive at solution 'in my head' I am done, and many a minor monetary loss have I suffered in consequence.
I trust I am justified in believing that to-day there are no such schools left in England as that Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen, in Putney. As a training establishment it was more suitable, I think, for the sons of parrots or rabbits. I never even learned to handle a cricket bat or ball there. Neither, I think, did any of my contemporaries in that futile place. The headmaster and proprietor was a harassed and disappointed man, who exhausted whatever energies he possessed in interviewing parents and keeping up appearances. His one underpaid usher was a young man of whom I remember little, beyond his habit of pulling my ears in class, and the astoundingly rich crop of pimples on his face, which he seemed to be always cultivating with applications of cotton-wool, plaster, and nasty stuff from a flat white jar. His mind, I verily believe, was as innocent of thought as a cabbage. When sent to play outdoor games with us, and instruct us in them, he always reclined on the grass, or sat on a gate, reading the Family Herald, or a journal in whose title the word 'Society' figured; except on those rare occasions when his employer came our way for a few moments. Then, cramming his book into his pocket, the poor pimply chap would plunge half hysterically into our moody ranks (forgetful probably of what we were supposed to be playing) with muttered cries of: 'Now then, boys! Put your heart into it!' and the like. 'Put your heart into it!' indeed! Poor fellow; he probably was paid something less than a farm labourer's wage, and earned considerably less than that.
No, any education which I received in boyhood must have come to me from my father; and that entirely without any set form of instruction, but merely from listening to his talk, and asking him questions. Also, the books I read were his property; and I do not recall any trash among them. It was the easiest thing in the world to evade the 'home-work' set me by the usher, and I consistently did so. As a rule, he was none the wiser, and when he did detect me, the results rarely went beyond perfunctory ear-pulling; a cheap price for free evenings, I thought. The usher was frankly sick of us all, and of his employment, too; and I do not wonder at it, seeing that he was no more equipped for his work than for administering a state. He never had been trained to discharge any function in life whatever. How then could he be expected to know how to train us?
Withal, I somehow did acquire a little knowledge, and the rudiments of some definite tastes and inclinations, during this period. Recently, in London, I have once or twice endeavoured to probe the minds of County Council schoolboys of a similar age, with a view to comparing the sum of their knowledge with my own in those Putney days. And, curious though it seems, it does certainly appear to me that the comparison was never to the advantage of the modern boy; though I am assured he must enjoy the benefits of some kind of thought-out educational system. I certainly did not. These things partake of the nature of mysteries.
I suppose the successive servant maids who chiefly controlled my early childhood must have been more ignorant than any member of their class in post-Board School days. Yet it seems beyond question clear to me that such beginnings of a mind as I possessed at the age of ten, such mental tendencies as I was beginning to show, were at all events more hopeful, more rational, better worth having, than those I have been able to discern in the twentieth-century London office boy, fresh from his palatial County Council School. I may be quite wrong, of course, but that is how it appears to me--despite all the uplifting influences of halfpenny newspapers, and picture theatres, and the forward march of democracy.
Then there is that notable point, the question of speech; the vehicle of mental expression and thought transference. Between the ages of one year and nine years, society for me was confined almost exclusively to servant girls. From their lips it was that I acquired the faculty of speech. Yet I am certain that the boy who walked in Richmond Park with my father in the 'sixties spoke in his dialect, and not in that of Cockney nursemaids. Why was that? If my father ever corrected my speech it was upon very rare occasions. I remember them perfectly. They were not such corrections as would very materially affect a lad's accent or choice of words.
Having read a good deal more than I had conversed, I was mentally familiar with certain words which I never had happened to have heard pronounced. One instance I recall. (It was toward the end of my Academy period.) I had occasion to read aloud some passage to my father, and it included the word 'inevitable,' which in my innocence I pronounced with the accent on the third syllable. Up went my father's eyebrows. 'Inevitable,' he mimicked, with playful scorn. And that was all. He offered no correction. I recall that I was covered in rosy confusion, and, guessing rightly, by some happy chance (or unconscious recollection) hit upon the conventional pronunciation, never to forget it. But, judged by any scholastic standard I ever heard expounded, there is no doubt about it, I was, and for that matter am, a veritable ignoramus.
During all the year which followed the beginning of intimacy between us, my impression is that my father was increasingly worried and depressed. Children have a shrewder consciousness of these things than many of their elders suppose; and I was well aware that things were not going well with my father. I saw more of him, and missed no opportunities of obtaining his companionship. He, for his part, saw a good deal less of other people, I fancy, and lost no opportunity of avoiding intercourse with his contemporaries. He brooded a great deal; and was very fitful in his reading, writing, and correspondence. I began to hear upon his lips significant if vague expressions of his desire to 'Get away from all this'; to 'Get out of this wretched scramble'; to 'Find a way out of it all.'
And then with bewildering suddenness came the first big event of my career; the event which, I suppose, was chiefly responsible also for its latest episode.
IV
No doubt one reason why our migration to Australia seemed so surprisingly sudden a step to me was that the preliminaries were arranged without my knowledge. Apart from this, I believe the step was swiftly taken.
My father had no wife or family to consider. I do not think there was a single relative left, beside myself, with whom he had maintained intercourse of any kind. Our household effects were all sold as they stood in the house, to a singularly urbane and gentlemanly old dealer in such things, a Mr. Fennel, whose stock phrase: 'Pray don't put yourself about on my account, sir, I beg,' seemed to me to form his reply to every remark of my father's. And thus, momentous though the hegira might be, and was, to us, I suppose it did not call for any very serious amount of detailed preparation, once my father had made his decision.
Looking back upon it now, in the light of some knowledge of the subject, and of old lands and new, it seems to me open to question whether, in all the moving story of British oversea adventuring, there is an instance of any migration more curious than ours, or of any person emigrating who was less suited for the venture than my father. In the matter of our baggage and personal effects, now, the one thing to which my father devoted serious care was something which probably would not figure at all in any official list of articles required for an emigrant's kit: his books.
His library consisted of some three thousand volumes, the gleanings of a quarter of a century when books were neither so numerous nor so cheap as they are to-day. From these he set himself the maddening task of selecting one hundred volumes to be taken with us. The rest were to be sold. The whole of our preparations are dominated in the retrospect for me, by my father's absorption in the task of sifting and re-sifting his books. Acting under his instructions, I myself handled each one of the three thousand and odd volumes a good many times. Eventually, we took six hundred and seventy-three volumes with us, of which more than fifty were repurchased, at a notable advance, of course, upon the price he paid for them, from the dealer who bought the remainder.
This was my first insight into the subtleties of trade, and I noted with loyal anger, in my father's interest, how contemptuously the dealer belittled our books in buying them, and how eloquently he dilated upon their special values in selling back to us those my father found he could not spare. In every case these volumes were rare and hard to come by, greatly in demand, 'the pick of the basket,' and so forth. Well, I suppose that is commerce. At the time it seemed to me amply to justify all my father's lofty scorn and hatred for everything in any way connected with business.
If only the book-dealer could have adopted Mr. Fennel's praiseworthy attitude, I thought: 'Pray don't put yourself about, sir, on my account, I beg.' But then, Mr. Fennel, I make no doubt, was heading straight for bankruptcy. I have sought his name in vain among Putney's modern tradesfolk. Whereas, Mr. Siemens, the gentleman who bought our library, apart from his various thriving establishments in London, now cherishes his declining years, I believe, in a villa in the Italian Riviera, and a manor house in Hampshire. Though young, when I met him in Putney, he evidently had the root of the matter in him, from a commercial point of view, and was possibly even a little in advance of his time in the matter of business ability. He drove a very smart horse, I remember, was dressed smartly, and had a smart way of saying that business was business. Yes, I dare say Mr. Siemens was more a man of his time than my poor father.
It was on the afternoon of May 2, 1870, the day after my tenth birthday, that we sailed from Gravesend for Sydney, in the full-rigged clipper ship Ariadne, of London, with one hundred and forty-seven other emigrants and eighteen first-class passengers. It was, I suppose, a part of my father's enthusiastically desperate state of mind at this time that we were booked as steerage passengers. We were to lay aside finally all the effete uses of sophisticated life. We were emigrants, bent upon carving a home for ourselves out of the virgin wilderness. Naturally, we were to travel in the steerage. And, indeed, I have good reason to suppose that my father's supply of money must have been pretty low at the time. But we occupied a first-class railway carriage on the journey down to Gravesend; and I know our porter received a bright half-crown for his services to us, for my father's hands were occupied, and the coin was passed to me for bestowal.
Long before the tug left us, we sat down to our first meal on board; perhaps a hundred of us together. A weary poor woman with two babies was on my left, and a partly intoxicated man of the coal-heaving sort (very likely a Cabinet Minister in Australia to-day) on my father's right. This simple soul made the mistake of endeavouring to establish an affectionate friendship with my father, who was sufficiently resentful of the man's mere proximity, and received his would-be genial advances with the most freezing politeness. But the event which precipitated a crisis was the coal-heaver's removal of his knife from his mouth--the dexterity with which his kind can manipulate these lethal weapons, even when partly intoxicated, is little less than miraculous--after the safe discharge there of some succulent morsel from his plate, to plunge it direct into the contents of the butter-dish before my father.
Black wrath descended upon my father's face as he rose from the table, and drew me up beside him. 'Insufferable!' he muttered, as we left that curious place for the first and last time. I see it now with its long, narrow, uncovered tables, stretching between clammy iron stanchions, and supported by iron legs fitting into sockets in the deck. It was lighted by hanging lanterns which threw queer, moving shadows in all directions, and stank consumedly.
'Are we hogs that we should be given our swill in such a sty?' asked my father, explosively, of some subordinate member of the crew whom we met as we reached the open deck.
'I dunno, matey,' replied this innocent. 'Feelin' sickish, are ye? You've started too soon.'
'Yes, I'm feeling pretty sick,' said my father, as the glimmer of the humorous side of it all touched his mind. 'Look here, my man,' he continued, 'here's half a crown for you. I want to see the purser of this ship. Just show me where I can find him, like a good fellow, will you?'
We found the purser in that condition of harassment which appears to belong, like its uniform, to his post, when a ship is clearing the land. He was inclined at first to adopt a pretty short way with us. He really didn't know what emigrants wanted these days. Did they think a ship's steerage was a ho-tel? And so forth.
But my father was on his mettle now, and handled his man with considerable skill and suavity. There was no second-class accommodation on the ship. But in the end we were taken into the first-class ranks, at a substantial reduction from the full first-class fares, on the understanding that we contented ourselves with a somewhat gloomy little single-berth cabin which no one else wanted. Here a makeshift bed was presently arranged for me, and within the hour we emigrants from the steerage had become first-class passengers. The translation brought such obvious and real relief to my father that my own spirits rose instantly; I began to take great interest in our surroundings, and, from that moment, entirely forgot those prophetic internal twinges, those stomachic forebodings which, in the 'other place,' as politicians say, had begun to turn my thoughts toward the harrowing tales I had heard of sea-sickness.
My father, poor man, was not so fortunate. He began before long to pay a heavy price in bodily affliction for all the stress and excitement of the past few days. For a full fortnight the most virulent type of sea-sickness had him in its horrid grip. I have since seen many other folk in evil case from similar causes, but none so vitally affected by the complaint as my father was, and never one who bore it with more patient courtesy than he did. Not in the cruellest paroxysm did he lose either his self-respect, or his consideration for me, and for others. The mere mention of this fell complaint excites mirth in the minds of the majority; but rarely can a man or woman be found whose self-control is proof against its attacks; and I take pleasure in remembering my father's admirable demeanour throughout his ordeal. In the steerage he had hardly survived it, I think. Here, with decent privacy, no single complaint passed his lips; and there was not a day, hardly an hour, I believe, in which he ceased to take thought for his small son's comfort and wellbeing. His courtesy was no skin-deep pose with my father. No doubt we are all much cleverer and more enlightened nowadays, but--however, that is one of the lines of thought which it is quite unnecessary for me to pursue here.
I was quite absurdly proud of my father, I remember, when, at length, he made his first appearance on the poop, leaning on my shoulder, his own shoulders covered by the soft rug we called the 'Hobson rug,' because, years before, a friend of that name had bequeathed it to us, after a visit to the house near Russell Square. In all the time that came afterwards, I am not sure that my father's constitution ever fully regained the tone it lost during our first fortnight aboard the Ariadne. But, if his health had suffered a set-back, his manner had not; that distinction of bearing in him which always impressed me, in which I took such pride, seemed to me now more than ever marked.
Child though I was, I am assured that this characteristic of my father's had a very real existence, and was not at all the creation of my boyish fancy. From my very earliest days I had heard it commented upon by landladies and servants, and, too, in remarks casually overheard from neighbours and strangers. Now, among our fellow-passengers on board the Ariadne, I heard many similar comments.
Looking back from this distance I find it somewhat puzzling that in my father's personality there should have been combined so much of real charm, dignity, and distinction, with so marked a distaste for the society of his fellows. Here was a man who seemed able always to inspire interest and admiration when he did go among his equals (or those not his equals, for that matter), who yet preferred wherever possible to avoid every form of social intercourse. By nature he seemed peculiarly fitted to make his mark in society; by inclination and habit, more especially in later life, it would seem he shunned society as the plague itself. Withal, there was not the faintest suggestion of moroseness about him, and when circumstances did lead him into converse with others he always conveyed an impression of pleased interest. This product of his exceptional courtesy and considerateness must have puzzled many people, taken in conjunction with his invariable avoidance of intercourse wherever that could be managed with politeness. Far more than any monetary or more practical consideration, it was, I am certain, this desire of my father's to get away from people which had led to our migration.
'People interrupt one so horribly,' was a remark he frequently made to me.
V
Folk whose experience of sea travel is confined to the passengers' quarters on board modern steamships of high tonnage can have but a shadowy conception of what a three months' passage round the Cape means, when it is made in a 1200 ton sailing vessel. I can pretend to no technical knowledge of ships and seafaring; but it is always with something of condescension in my mental attitude that I set foot on board a steamship, or hear praise of one of the palatial modern 'smoke-stacks.' It was thus I remember that the Ariadne's seamen spoke of steamships.
I suppose room could almost be found for the Ariadne in the saloons of some of the twentieth-century Atlantic greyhounds. But I will wager that the whole fleet of them could not show a tithe of her grace and spirited beauty in a sea-way. And, be it noted, they would not be so extravagantly far ahead of the Ariadne even in point of speed, say, between the Cape and Australia, when, in running her easting down with a living gale on her quarter, she spurned the foam from her streaming sides to the tune of a steady fourteen to fifteen knots in an hour; 'snoring along,' as seamen say, with all her cordage taut as harp-strings, and her clouds of canvas soaring heavenward tier on tier, strained to the extreme limit of the fabric's endurance.
From talk with my father, I knew the Ariadne of mythology, and so the sight of the patent log-line trailing in the creamy turmoil of our wake used always to suggest imaginings to me, as I leaned gazing over our poop rail, of a modern Theseus being rescued by this line of ours from the labyrinthine caverns of some submarine Minotaur.
Aye, she was a brave ship, and these were brave days of continuously stirring interest to the lad fresh from Putney and its Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen; or, as I should probably say, from one of its academies. I do not recall that life itself, the great spectacle, had at this period any interest for me, as such. My musings had not carried me so far. But the things and people about me, the play of the elements, and the unceasing and ever-varying activities of the ship's working, appealed to me as his love to a lover, filling my every hour with waiting claims, each to my ardour more instant and peremptory than its fellow.
Rhapsodies have been penned about the simple candour of children, the unmeasured frankness of boys. These qualities were not, I think, conspicuous in me. At least, I recall a considerable amount of play-acting in my life on board the Ariadne, and, I think, in even earlier phases. As a boy, it seems to me, I had a very keen appetite for affection. I was somewhat emotional and sentimental, and always interested in producing an impression upon the minds of those about me. Without reaching the point of seeing life as a spectacle, I believe my own small personality presented a spectacle of which I was pretty generally and interestedly conscious. There was a good deal of drama for me, in my own insignificant progress. I often watched myself, and strove to gauge the impression I produced on others, and to mould and shape this to my fancy. There may possibly be something unpleasant, even unnatural about this, in so young a boy. I do not know, but I am sure it is true; and so it is rightly set down here.
There was a Mrs. Armstrong among our passengers, who was accompanied by two daughters; a bonny, romping girl of sixteen, in whom I felt little or no interest, and a serious young woman of two or three-and-twenty, with whom I fell in love in an absurdly solemn fashion. Miss Armstrong had a great deal of shining fair hair, a good figure, and pleasing dark blue eyes. That is as far as memory carries me regarding her appearance. She rather took me up, as she might have taken up crewel work, whatever that may be, or district visiting, or what not. No doubt she was among the majority in whom my father inspired interest. She talked to me in an exemplary way, and held up before me, as I remember it, a sort of blend of little Lord Fauntleroy and the dreadful child in East Lynne, as an ideal to strive after.
She assuredly meant most kindly by me, but the influence was not, perhaps, very wholesome; or, it may be, I twisted and perverted it to ill uses. At least, I remember devious ways in which I sought to earn her admiration, and other yet more devious ways in which I schemed to win petting from her. I actually used to invent small offences and weave circumstantial romances about pretended wrong-doings, in order to have the pleasure of confessing, with mock shame, and getting absolution, along with caresses and sentimental promises of help to do better in future. In retrospect it seems I was a somewhat horrid little chap in this. I certainly adored Miss Armstrong; though in an entirely different way from the manner of my subsequent passion for little black-haired Nelly Fane. The Fane family consisted of the father, mother, one boy, and two girls: Nelly, and her sister Marion, both charming children, the first very dark, the other fair. Nelly was a year older than I, Marion two years younger. The boy, Tom, was within a month or two of my own age.
It might be that I was wearying a little of the solemn sentimentality of my attachment to Miss Armstrong; possibly the pose I thought needful for holding this young lady's regard withal proved exhausting after a time. At all events, I remember neglecting her shamefully in equatorial latitudes, when the Ariadne was creeping along her zig-zag course through the Doldrums. For me this period, fascinating in scores of other ways, belongs to Nelly Fane, with her long black curls, biscuit-coloured legs and arms, and large, melting dark eyes. At the time the thought of being separated from this imperious little beauty meant for me an abomination of desolation too dreadful to be contemplated. But, looking back upon the circumstances of my suit, I think it likely my heart had never been captivated but for jealousy, and my trick of seeing myself as the first figure in an illustrated romance.
There was another boy on board--I remember only his Christian name: Fred--who, in addition to being a year older than myself, had the huge advantage of being an experienced traveller. He was an Australian, and had been on a visit with his parents to the Mother-country. At a quite early stage in our passage, he won my cordial dislike by means of his old traveller's airs, and--far more unforgiveable--the fact that he had the temerity to refer to my father, in my hearing, as 'The old chap who can't get his sea-legs.' I fear I never should have forgiven him for that.
In addition, as we youngsters played together about the decks, this Fred used to arrogate to himself always the position of leader and director. He knew the proper names of many things of which the rest of us were ignorant, and, where his knowledge did not carry him, I was assured his conceit and hardihood did. To such ears as Nelly Fane's, for instance, 'Jib-boom,' 'Fore topmast-staysail,' must have an admirably knowledgeable note about them, I thought, even if ever so wrongly used. My first attack upon Fred consisted in convicting him of some such swaggering misuse of a nautical term to the which, as luck had it, I had given careful study on the fo'c'sle-head during the previous evening's second dog-watch, when my friends among the crew were taking their leisure. He bore no malice, I think; in any case, his self-esteem was a very hardy growth, and little liable to suffer from any minor check.
We never came to blows, the Australian and myself, which was probably as well for me, since I make no doubt the lad could have trounced me soundly, for he was disgustingly wiry and long of limb. That was how I saw his physical advantages. But, apart from this matter of physical superiority, he was no match for me. In the subtler qualities of intrigue I was his master; and he, never probably having observed himself as a hero of romance, had to yield to my proficiency in the art of producing a desired impression. It was in his capacity as an old campaigner, a knowing dog, and a seasoned salt, that he had carried Nelly Fane's heart by storm, and established himself an easy first in her regard. And seeing this it was, I believe, which first weakened my devotion to the fair Miss Armstrong, by turning my attention to Nelly Fane.
I did not really deserve to win Nelly, my suit at first being based upon foundations so unworthy. But the pursuit of her stirred me deeply; and in the end--say, in a couple of days--I was her very humble and devoted slave. She really was an attractive child, I fancy, in her wilful, imperious way. And, Cupid, how I did adore her by the time I had driven Master Fred from the field! Even my father suffered a temporary eclipse in my regard during the first white-hot fervour of my devotion to Nelly. I lied for her, in word and deed; I stole for her--from the cabin pantry--and I am sure I risked life and limb for her a dozen times, in my furious emulation of any achievement of Fred's, in my instant adoption of any suggestion of Nelly's, however mischievous. And how many of us could truthfully say as much of their enthusiasm in any mature love affair? How many grown men would deliberately risk life to win the passing approval of a mistress?
For example, I recall two typical episodes. Neither had been remarkable, perhaps, for a boy devoid of fear or imagination; but I was one shrewdly influenced by both qualities. There was a roomy cabin under the Ariadne's starboard counter, which served the Fane family as a sort of sitting-room or day nursery. It had two circular port-holes, brass-rimmed, of fairly generous proportions. Under the spur of verbal taunts from Fred, and passive challenges from Nelly's dark eyes, I positively succeeded in wriggling my entire body out through one of those port-holes, feet first, until I hung by my hands outside, my feet almost touching the water-line. And then it seemed I could not win my way back.
Nelly, moved to tears of real grief now, was for seeking the aid of grown-ups. I wasted precious breath in adjuring her as she loved me to keep silence. For my part death seemed imminent and certain. But I pictured Fred's grinning commiseration should our elders rescue me, and--I held on. By slow degrees I got one arm and shoulder back into the cabin, pausing there to rest. From that moment I was safe; but I was too cunning to let the fact appear. My reward began then, and most voluptuously I savoured it. I had Mistress Nelly on her biscuit-coloured knees to me before I finally reached the cabin floor on my hands, my toes still clinging to the port-hole. Poor Fred could not possibly equal this feat. His girth would not have permitted it.
Again, there was the blazing tropical afternoon, in dead calm, when I established a new record by touching the ship's prow under water. It was siesta time for passengers. The watch on deck was assembled right aft, scraping bright-work. Pitch was bubbling in the deck seams, and every one was drowsy, excepting Nelly, Marion, Tom, Fred, and myself. We were plotting mischief in the shadow of the Ariadne's anchors, right in the eyes of the ship. I forget the immediate cause of this piece of foolhardiness, but I remember Fred's hated fluency about 'dolphin-strikers,' 'martingales,' and what not; and, finally, my own assertion that I would touch the ship's forefoot, where we saw it gleaming below the glassy surface of the water, and Fred's mocking reply that I jolly well dared do no such a thing. Nelly's provocative eyes were in the background, of course.
Three several times I tried and failed, swinging perilously at a rope's end below the dolphin-striker. And then the Ariadne, with one of those unaccountable movements which a ship will make at times in the flattest of calms, brought me victory, and the narrowest escape from extinction in one and the same moment. I swung lower than before, and the ship ducked suddenly. I not only touched her bows below the water-line, but had all the breath knocked out of me by them, and was soused under water myself, as thoroughly as a Brighton bathing woman could have done the trick for me. To this day I remember the breathless, straining agony of the ascent, when my clothes and myself seemed heavier than lead, and the ship's deck miles above me. My clothes--a jersey and flannel knickerbockers--dried quickly in the scorching sun, and no grown-up ever knew of the escapade, I think. But, the peril of it, in a shark-infested sea!
No doubt these feats helped me to the subjugation of Nelly. Yet, after all, in sheer physical prowess, I could not really rival Fred, who stood a full head taller than I did. But I had a deal more of finesse than he had, made very much better use of my opportunities, and was a far more practised poseur. Fred was well supplied with self-esteem--a most valuable qualification in love-making--but he lacked the introspectively seeing eye. He might compel admiration, in his rude fashion. He could never force a tear or steal a sigh.
Fred--Fred without a surname, I wonder what has been your lot in life, and where you air your prosperity to-day! For, prosperous I feel certain you are. And, who knows? Nelly may be Mrs. Fred to-day, for aught I can tell. When all is said and done, you all of you had more in common, one with another, and each with all, than I had with any of you!
And that reminds me of a trifle overlooked. During all my association with these my contemporaries on board the Ariadne, but with special keenness in the beginning, I was conscious of something outside my own experience, which they all shared. At that time it was to me just a something which they had and I had not; a quality I could not define. Looking back upon it I see clearly that the thing was in part fundamental, a flaw in my temperament; and, in part, the family sense. They all knew what 'home' meant, in a way in which I knew it not at all. They were more carelessly genial and less serious and preoccupied than I was. They all had mothers, too.
I do not wish to say that they were necessarily much better off than I. They had certain qualities which I lacked, the product of experiences I had never enjoyed. And I had various qualities which they had not. On the whole, perhaps, I was more mature than they were; and they, perhaps, were more happy and care-free--certainly less self-conscious--than I was. There was a kind of Freemasonry of shared experience among them, and I had never been initiated. They were established members of a recognised order, to which I did not belong. They were members of families of a certain defined status. I was an isolated small boy, with a father, and no particular status.
[BOYHOOD--AUSTRALIA]
I
It has often occurred to me to wonder why my recollections of our arrival and first days in Sydney should be so blurred and unsatisfactorily vague. One would have thought such episodes should stand out very clearly in retrospect. As a fact, they are far less clear to me than many an incident of my earlier childhood.
What I do clearly recall is lying awake in my makeshift bunk for some time before daylight on the morning we reached Sydney, and, finally, just before the sun rose, going on deck and sitting on the teak-wood grating beside the wheel. There, on our port side, was the coast of Australia, the land toward which we had been working through gale and calm, storm and sunshine, for more than ninety days. Botany Bay, said the chart. I thought of the grim record I had read of early settlement here. And then came the pilot's cutter, sweeping like a sea-bird under our lee. The early sunshine was bright and gladsome enough; but my recollection is that I felt somehow chilled, and half frightened. That sandy shore conveyed no kindly sense of welcome to me.
The harbour--oh, yes, the harbour was, and is, beautiful, and I can remember thrilling with natural excitement as we opened up cove after cove, while the Ariadne--stately as ever, but curiously quiescent now, with her trimly furled and lifeless sails--was towed slowly to her anchorage. The different bays--Watson's, Mossman's, Neutral, and the rest--had not so many villas then as now. Manly was there, in little; but surf-bathing, like some other less healthful 'notions' from America, was still to come. From the North Shore landing-stage one strolled up the hill, and, very speedily, into the bush.
Yes, the place was naturally beautiful enough; but the Ariadne was home; her every deck plank was familiar to me; I knew each cleat about her fife-rails, every belaying-pin along her sides, every friendly projection from her deck that had a sheltering lee. The shining brass-bound, teak-wood buckets ranged along the break of her poop--the crew's lime-juice was served in one of these, and they all were painted white inside--I see them now. Ay di mi! as the Spanish ladies say; I am not so sure that any place was ever more distinctly home to me. Over the rail, across the dancing waters of the harbour, where the buildings clustered about Circular Quay; as yet, of course, there could be nothing homely for me about all that. And, as to me, it never did become very homely; perhaps that is why my recollections of our first doings there are so vague.
How often, in later years, my heart swelled with vague aspiring yearnings toward what lay beyond, while my eyes ranged over that same smiling scene, from the Domain, Lady Macquarie's Chair, and the purlieus of Circular Quay! (There were no trams there then.) Here one saw the ships that carried folk to and from--what? To and from Home, was always my thought; though what home I fancied that distant island in her grey northern sea had for me, heaven knows! Here one rubbed shoulders, perchance, with some ruddy-faced, careless fellow in dark blue clothes, who, but a short couple of months ago, walked London's streets, and would be there again in the incredibly brief space of six weeks or so. Dyspepsia itself knows no more fell and spirit-racking anguish than nostalgia brings; and at times I have fancied the very air--bland, warm, and kindly seeming--that circulates about the famous quay must be pervaded and possessed by germs of this curious and deadly malady. At least, that soft air is breathed each day by many a victim to the disease; old and young, and of both sexes.
No doubt we must have spent some days in Sydney, my father and myself; but from the Ariadne, and the parting with Nelly Fane and my other companions, memory carries me direct to the deck of a little intercolonial steamer, bound north from Sydney, for Brisbane and other Queensland ports. I see myself in jersey and flannel knickers sitting beside my father on the edge of a deck skylight, and gazing out across dazzlingly sunlit waters to the near-by northern coast of New South Wales. Suddenly, my father laid aside the book which had been resting on his knee, and raised to his eyes the binoculars he used at sea.
'How extraordinary,' he murmured. And, my gaze naturally following his, I made out clearly enough, without glasses, a vessel lying high and dry on the white sand of a fair-sized bay.
My father's keen interest in that derelict ship always seemed to me to spring into being, as it were, full-grown. There was in it no period of gradual development. From the moment his eyes first lighted upon the tapered spars of the Livorno, where she lay basking in her sandy bed, his interest in her was absorbing. Everything else was forgotten. In a few minutes he was in eager conversation about the derelict with the chief officer of our steamer. I remember the exact words and intonation of the man's answer to my father's first question:
'Well, I couldn't say for that, Mr. Freydon' (In Australia no one ever forgets your name, or omits to use it in addressing you), 'but I can tell you the day I first saw her. She was lying there exactly as she is to-day. I was third mate of the Toowoomba then; my first trip in her, and that was seven years ago come Queen's Birthday. Seen her every trip since--just the same. No, she never seems to alter any. She's high and dry, you see; bedded there on an even keel, same's if she was afloat. Yes, it is a wonder, as you say, Mr. Freydon; but it's a lonely place, you see; nothing nearer than--what is it? Werrina, I think they call it; fifteen mile away; and that's a day's march from anywhere, too. Oh yes, there might be an odd sundowner camp aboard of her once in a month o' Sundays; but I doubt it. She isn't in the track to anywhere, as ye might say. No, I guess it would only be bandicoots, an' the like o' that you'd find about her; an' birds, maybe. Only thing I wonder about her is, how she landed there without ever losing her top-hamper, and why nobody's thought it worth while to pick her bones a bit cleaner. Must be good stuff in her stays an' that, to have stood so long, with never a touch o' the tar-brush.'
There was more in the same vein, but this much comes back to me as though it were yesterday that I heard the words. I see the mate's hard blue eye, and crisply curling beard; I see the upward tilt of the same beard as he spat over the rail, and my father's little retreating movement at his gesture. (My father never lost his sensitiveness about such things, though I doubt if he ever allowed it to appear to eyes less familiar with his every movement than my own.) It seems to me that my father talked of the derelict--we did not know her name then, and spoke of her simply as 'the ship'--for the rest of the day, and for days afterwards; and the key to his thoughts was given in one of his earliest remarks:
'What a home a man might make of that ship--all ready to his hand for the asking! The sea, trees--there were plenty of trees--sunshine, solitude, and space. Think of the peacefulness of that sun-washed bay. Nothing nearer than fifteen miles away, and that a mere hamlet, probably. Werrina--not a bad name, Nick--Werrina. Aboriginal origin, I imagine. And all that for the mere taking; open to the poorest--even to us. You liked the Ariadne, Nick. What would you think of a ship of our own?'
Assuredly, we were the strangest pair of emigrants....
II
Naturally, my father's suggestion, thrown out as it were in jest, whimsically, fired my fancy instantly. 'How glorious!' I said. 'But can we, really, father?'
It was less than a week later that we walked out of Werrina's one street into the bush to the westward of that township, accompanied by Ted Reilly and a heavily-laden pack-horse--Jerry. Ted was one of Werrina's oddities, and, in many respects, our salvation. The Werrina storekeeper shook his grizzled head over Ted, and vowed there wasn't an honest day's work in the man.
'What's the matter with Ted is he's got no Systum; never had since he was a babby.' (My thoughts reverted at once to a highly coloured anatomical diagram which hung in the cabin of the Ariadne's captain: the flayed figure of a man whose face wore the incredibly complacent look one sees on the waxen features of tailors' dummies, though the poor fellow's heart, liver, kidneys, and other internal paraphernalia were shamelessly exposed to the public gaze. The storekeeper's tone convinced me for the time that poor Ted had been born lacking some one or other of the important-looking purple organs which the diagram had shown me as belonging to the human system.) 'He's a here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow, come-day-go-day-God-send-Sunday sort of a customer, is Ted--my oath! Wanter Systum. That's what I'm always telling 'em in this place. It's wanter Systum that's the curse uv Australia; an' Ted's got it worsen most. Don't I know it? I gave him a chanst here in my store. Might ha' made a Persition frimself. But, no; no Systum at all. He was off in a fortnight, trappin' dingoes in the bush, or some such nonsense. He's for no more use than--than a bumble bee, isn't Ted Reilly; nor never will be.'
Well, he was of a good deal of practical use to us, the storekeeper notwithstanding; but I admit that there was a notable absence of 'Systum' about the man. He was singularly unmethodical and haphazard, even as his kind go in the remoter parts of Australia. He made our acquaintance very casually by asking my father for a match, almost before we had descended from the coach outside the Royal Hotel, Werrina. (There was nothing royal, or even comfortable, about this weatherboard and iron inn, except its name.) And, oddly enough, my father fell into conversation with him, and seemed rather to take to the man forthwith.
I know it was by his advice, as kindly meant, I am sure, as it was shrewd, that my father said nothing to any one else in the township of his fantastic ideas regarding what we now knew to be the derelict Italian barque, Livorno, of Genoa. It was given out that we were going camping, between Werrina and the coast; and, no doubt my father was credited by the local wiseacres with the possession of some crafty prospecting scheme or another. Most of the folk thereabouts had been always wont to look to the bush (chiefly for timber) as a source of livelihood, but their attention was usually turned inland rather than seaward; for the bulk of the country between Werrina and the sea is poor and swampy, or sandy. The belt of timber we had seen behind our derelict's bay was not extensive.
It was Ted who bought Jerry for us for the modest price of £3, 15s.; and I make no doubt that serviceable beast would have cost my father £7 if he had had 'the haggling of it.' Pack-saddle and tent, with a number of other oddments, had come with us from across the Queensland border; first, by rail, and thence by numerous devious coach routes to Werrina. The only thing about our expedition which I think Ted really mistrusted and disliked was the fact that we set forth on foot. He told my father of horses he could buy, if not for three a penny, certainly at the rate of two for a five-pound note. (Animals no better, or very little better, are selling for £20 apiece in the same country to-day.) But my father spoke of the cost of saddlery and the like. He had been brought up in a land where horse-keeping means considerable expense, and the need for husbanding his slender resources was strongly foremost in his mind just now. But Ted had all his life long thought of horses as a natural and necessary adjunct to man's locomotion. I have seen him devote considerable time and energy to the task of catching Jerry in order to ride across a couple of hundred yards of sand to his favourite wood-cutting spot. To be poor, that is, short of money, was a natural and customary thing enough in Ted's eyes; but to go ajourneying as a footman suggested a truly pitiable kind of destitution, and did, I am convinced, throw a shadow over what otherwise had been the outset of a jaunt entirely after his own heart.
As the morning wore on, however, and we left behind us all likelihood of chance encounters with more fortunately placed and therefore critical people, bestriding pigskin, Ted's spirits rose again to their normal easy altitude, and mounted beyond that to the level of boyish jollity. Myself, I incline to think that walking along a bush track, with a long stick in his hand and a pack-horse to drive before him, was really an ideal situation for Ted, despite his preference for riding. Afoot, he could so readily step aside to start a 'goanner' up a tree, or pluck an out-of-the-way growth to show me.
There never was such a fellow for 'noticing' things, as they say of children. Print he never read, so far as I know, and perhaps this helped to make him so amazingly keen a reader of Nature. Not the littlest comma on that page ever eluded him.
'Hullo!' he would say when Werrina was miles away behind us. 'Who'd've thought o' that baldy-faced steer o' Murdoch's bein' out here?' One gazed about to locate the beast. But, no. No living thing was in sight. In passing, quite casually, Ted's roving eye had spied a hoof mark, perhaps a day old or more, in the soft bottom of a tiny billabong; a print I could hardly make out, leave alone identify as having been made by this beast or the other, even under the guidance of Ted's pointing finger. Yet for Ted that casual glance--no stooping, no close scrutiny--supplied an accurate and complete picture: the particular beast, its gait, occupation, and way of heading, and the period at which it had passed that way. Withal, it was true enough, as the storekeeper said, poor Ted had no 'Systum'; or none, at all events, of the kind cultivated in shops and offices.
III
However much at fault I may be in recollection of our arrival at Sydney, my memories of our first night at Livorno Bay (so my father christened the derelict's resting-place) could hardly be more vivid and distinct. That night marks for me the beginning of a definite epoch in my life.
I passed the spot in a large inter-state steamer last year. There was no sign of any ship there then, so far, at all events, as I could make out with a borrowed pair of glasses; and the place looked very much the same as any other part of the Australian coast. There are thousands of such indentations around the shores of the island continent, with low headlands of jagged rock by way of horns, and terraces of shell-strewn sand dotted over with ti-tree scrub, which merges into a low-lying bush of swamp oak and suchlike growths, among which, as like as not, you shall find, as we found, a more or less extensive salt-water lagoon, over the sandy bar of which big, tossing breakers will roll in from the Pacific in stormy weather. Yes, I would say now that there is nothing very peculiar or distinctive about Livorno Bay for the observer who is familiar with other parts of Australia's coast.
But in my youthful eyes, seen on the evening of our arrival, after a fifteen miles' walk, and, seen, too, in the glow of a singularly angry-looking evening sky, Livorno Bay, with its derelict barque to focus one's gaze, presented a spectacle almost terrifying in its desolation. Years must have passed since anything edible could have been found on board the Livorno. Yet I hardly think I should exaggerate if I said that two thousand birds rose circling from various points of vantage about the derelict as we approached her sides. That this winged and highly vocal congregation resented our intrusion was not to be doubted for a moment. Short of actually attacking us with beak and claw, the creatures could hardly have given more practical expression to their sentiments. The circumstance was trivial, of course, but I think it somewhat dashed my father's ardour, and I know it struck into my very vitals.
'Begone, you interlopers, or we will rend you! This is no place for humans. Here is only death and desolation for the likes of you. This place belongs of immemorial right to us, and to our masters, the devouring elements. Begone!'
So it seemed we were screamed at from thousands of hoarse throats.
For my part I was well pleased when my father agreed to Ted's suggestion that we should postpone till morning our inspection of the ship, and, in the meantime, concentrate upon the more immediate necessity of pitching camp for the night in the shelter of the timber belt and outside the domain of the screaming sea-birds. Our tent was fortunately not one of the cumbersome sort I had seen on Wimbledon Common at home, but a light Australian contrivance of cotton, enclosing a space ten feet by eight, and protected by a good large fly. Thanks mainly to Ted and his axe we had the necessary stakes cut, and the tent pitched before dark. Meanwhile, the little fire Ted had lighted against a blackened tree-stump had grown into the sort of fiery furnace that was associated in my mind with certain passages in the Old Testament; and, suspended by a piece of fencing wire from a cross stake on two forked sticks, our billy was boiling vigorously.
In all such bush-craft as this Ted was facile princeps, and he asked no better employment. Jerry was turned out to graze, belled and hobbled (for safety in a strange place), and just as actual darkness closed in upon us--no moon was visible that night--we sat down at the mouth of the tent to sup upon corned beef, bread and cheese and jam; the latter in small tins with highly coloured paper wrappers.
By this time my sense of chill and depression had pretty well evaporated. The details of our domesticity were most attractive to me. But I am not sure that my father quite regained his spirits that evening. We each had a canvas camp-stretcher of the collapsible sort. In ten minutes Ted had made himself a hammock bed of two sacks, two saplings, and four forked stakes, which for comfort was quite equal to any camp cot I have yet seen. Sleep came quickly to me, at all events, and whenever I woke during the night, as I did some three or four times, there was booming in my ears that rude music which remained the constant accompaniment of all our lives and doings in Livorno Bay: the dull roar of Pacific breakers on the sand below us, varied by a long sibilant intaking of breath, as it seemed, caused by the back-wash of every wave's subsidence.
Very gently, to avoid disturbing my father--I can see his face on the flimsy cot pillow now, looking sadly fragile and worn--I crept out from our tent in time to see the upper edge of the sun's disc (like a golden dagger of the Moorish shape) flash out its assurance across the sea, and gild with sudden bravery the trucks and spars and frayed rigging of the barque Livorno. Life has no other reassurance to offer which is quite so emphatic as that of the new risen sun; and it is youth, rather than culture, which yields the finest appreciation of this. In its glad light I ran and laughed, half naked, where a few hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost with terror. I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the back-wash of their surf very insistent.
The fire of his enthusiasm was once more alight in my father when I got back to our camp that morning; and one might have supposed it nourished him, if one had judged from the cursory manner in which his share of our simple breakfast was dispatched. Then, carrying with him a tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the ship lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered part of the Livorno, was encrusted in the droppings of multitudinous sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we resented their claims, in the broad light of day; even as they, on the previous evening, had resented us. Ted promised them a warm time of it, and congratulated himself on having brought his old gun.
'I'll show 'em whose ship it is,' he said, 'to-night.' And the boy in me rose in sympathetic response. I suppose I looked forward to the prospect of those birds being given a taste of the fear they had helped to inspire in me.
The Livorno had a long, low poop, no more than three feet high, and extending forward to the mainmast. She had none of the Ariadne's bright-work, as the polished teak was always called on that ship. Her rails and deck-houses had been painted in green and white, and I made out the remains of stencilled ornamentation in the corners of panels. No doubt my father had his preconceptions regarding the derelict of which he had thought so much in the past week. In any case he did not linger by the way, but walked direct to the cuddy or saloon, which we entered by a deeply encrusted, sun-cracked scuttle, just forward of the mizzen-mast. So here we were, at length, at the heart of our quest.
Personally, I was for the moment disappointed. My father, being wiser and knowing better what to expect, was pleased, I think. My anticipations had doubtless taken their colour from recent experience of the trim, well-ordered smartness of the Ariadne's saloon. Here, on board the derelict, nothing was left standing which could easily be carried away. The cabins opening into the little saloon had no doors, save in the case of one--the captain's room--that had been split down the centre, apparently with an axe, and its remains hung drunkenly now upon one hinge, which, at a touch from Ted's hand, parted company with its bulkhead, leaving the door to fall clattering to the deck. But, curiously enough, the good hardwood bunks were all intact, except in the case of one, which had, apparently, been wantonly smashed, perhaps by the same insensate hand that smashed the door.
The saloon table had gone, of course, and the chairs; but the brass cleats which had held them to their places in the deck were there still to show us where our predecessors here had sat and taken their meals. Here they had done their gossiping, no doubt, over the remains of savoury macaroni, with, perchance, an occasional flagon of Chianti or Barolo. There was a sort of buffet built into the forward bulkhead; and by a most surprising chance this was unhurt, save for a great star in the mirror behind it. Even its brass rail was intact. Some idle boor must have observed this solid little piece of man's handiwork, and then, I suppose, struck at the mirror with his axe--a savage and blackguardly act. But here, at all events, was our little store cupboard.
'Sideboard's all right then,' was Ted's grinning comment. 'And a man could still see to shave in the glass.'
The saloon skylight had been removed bodily, perhaps to serve some cockatoo bush farmer for a cucumber frame! And the result of this, more than any other circumstance, had been to give the saloon its desolate look; for, beneath the yawning aperture where once the skylight had stood, there was now an unsavoury mound of bird's droppings, near three feet high at its apex. This was now dust-dry; but the autumnal rains of bygone seasons had streamed upon it no doubt, with the result that all the rest of the saloon was several inches deep in the same sort of covering. There were naturally no stores in the pitch-black lazareet which one reached through a trap-door in the saloon deck; but among the lumber there we found an old bucket, a number of empty tins, packing-cases, and the like, a coal shovel with a broken handle, and two tanks in which ship's biscuits had been kept. How these latter commodities came to have been spared by marauding visitors it would be hard to say; for, in the bush, every one, without exception, requires tanks for the storage of rain-water.
From the saloon we made our way right forward to the forecastle, in which practically no damage had been done; for the reason, I suppose, that little was there which easily could be damaged or removed. No anchors or cables were to be seen, but the seamen's bunks remained much as I imagine they had left them; and, on the side of one, some sundowner had contrived to scrawl, apparently with a heated wire, this somewhat fatuous legend:
'Occewpide by me Captin Ned Kelli Bushranger. Chrismas day 1868. Not too bad.'
In many other parts of the ship we found, when we came to do our cleaning, initials, dates, and occasional names, rudely carved. But the only attempt at a written tribute to the derelict's quality as a camping-place was the pretended bushranger's 'Not too bad'; a thoroughly Australian commentary, and probably endorsed in speech at the time of writing by the exclamation: 'My word!'
Internally, the Livorno had been very thoroughly gutted, even to the removal of many of her deck joists and 'tween-decks' stanchions. But in her galley, which, having remained closed, was in quite good order, we found the cooking range, though rusty, intact. It had been built into the deck-house, and, being partly of tiles, would hardly have lent itself to easy transport or use in another place. Ted had a fire burning in it that very day, and water boiling on it in tins. Hidden under much mouldering rubbish in the boatswain's locker were found two deck scrapers, which proved most useful.
Ted strongly advised the adoption, as living-room, of the forecastle; and he may have been in the right of it. The place was weather-proof, its tiny skylight being intact. But sentiment, I think, attracted my father to the quarter-deck. 'The weather side of the poop's my only promenade,' he said gaily. 'And those square stern ports, with the carving under them--it would be a sin to leave them to the birds. Oh, the saloon is clearly our place, and we must rig a shelter over the skylight by and by.'
In the end we accomplished little or nothing beyond inspection that day. Towards evening Ted laid in a stock of firewood beside our camp, while my father wrote a letter to the Werrina storekeeper, which Ted was to take in next day with a cheque. I say we accomplished nothing, because I can remember no useful work done. Yet I do vividly remember falling asleep over my supper, and feeling more physically weary than I had ever been before. We were on our feet all day, of course. We were gleaning new impressions at a great rate. The day was, I suppose, a pretty full one; and assuredly one of us slept well after it.
IV
When my eyes opened next morning, dawn, though near at hand, had not yet come. His pale-robed heralds were busy, however, diffusing that sort of nacreous haze which in coastal Australia lights the way for each day's coming. Looking out over the pillow of my cot I saw Ted among the trees, girthing the pack-saddle on Jerry. In a very few moments I was beside him, and in five minutes he had started on his journey.
'I'll be in Warrina for breakfast,' he said.
I walked a few hundred yards beside him, and the last glimpse I caught of him, at a bend over which the track rose a little, showed Ted seated sideways on the horse's hindquarters, one hand resting on the pack-saddle, the other waving overhead to me. A precarious perch I thought it, but as it saved him from the final degradation of walking, I have no doubt it suited Ted well enough.
The sun was still some little way below the horizon when Ted disappeared, and I was perhaps a quarter of a mile from camp. Inland, I had very likely been bushed. Here, vague though the track was, the sea's incessant call was an unfailing guide. But it was in those few minutes, spent in walking back towards our tent, that I was given my first taste of solitude in the Australian bush; and, boy that I was, it impressed me greatly. It was a permanent addition to my narrow store of impressions, and it is with me yet.
At such times the Australian bush has qualities which distinguish it from any other parts of the world known to me. I have known other places and times far more eerie. To go no farther there are parts of the bush in which thousands of trees, being ring-barked, have died and become ghosts of trees. Seen in the light of a half moon, when the sky is broken by wind-riven cloud, these spectral inhabitants of the bush, with their tattered winding sheets of corpse-white bark, are distinctly more eerie than anything the dawn had to show me beside Livorno Bay.
Withal, the half-hour before sunrise has a peculiar quality of its own, in the bush, which I found very moving and somewhat awe-inspiring upon first acquaintance. There was a hush which one could feel and hear; a silence which exercised one's hearing more than any sound. And yet it was not a silence at all; for the sea never was still there. It was as though the bush and all that dwelt therein held its breath, waiting, waiting for a portent; and, meantime, watching me. In a few moments I found myself also waiting, conscious of each breath I drew. It was not so much eerie as solemn. Yes, I think it was the solemnity of that bush which so impressed me, and for the time so humbled me.
A few moments later and the kindly brightness of the new-risen sun was glinting between tree-trunks, the bush began to breathe naturally, and I was off at a trot for my morning dabble in the surf.
My father and I made but a poor show as housekeepers that day. I suppose we neither of us had ever washed a plate, or even boiled a kettle. In all such matters of what may be called outdoor domesticity (as in the use of such primitive and all-round serviceable tools as the axe), the Colonial-born man has a great advantage over his Home-born kinsman, in that he acquires proficiency in these matters almost as soon and quite as naturally as he learns to walk and talk. And not otherwise can the sane easy mastery of things be acquired.
My father had some admirably sound theories about cooking. He had knowledge enough most heartily to despise the Frenchified menus which, I believe, were coming into vogue in London when we left it, and warmly to appreciate the sterling virtue of good English cookery and food. The basic aim in genuine English cookery is the conservation of the natural flavours and essences of the food cooked. And, since sound English meats and vegetables are by long odds the finest in the world, there could be no better purpose in cooking than this. Subtle methods and provocative sauces, which give their own distinctive flavour to the dishes in which they are used, are well enough for less favoured lands than England, and a much-needed boon, no doubt. They are a wasteful mistake in England, or were, at all events, so long as unadulterated English food was available.
My father taught me these truths long ago, and I am an implicit believer in them to-day. All his theories about such matters were sound; and it may be that, in a properly appointed kitchen, he could have turned out an excellent good meal--given the right mood for the task. But I will admit that in Livorno Bay, both on this our first day alone there, and ever afterwards, my father's only attempts at domestic work were of the most sketchy and least satisfactory description; his grip of our housekeeping was of the feeblest, and in a very short time the matter fell entirely into my hands when Ted was not with us. Ted was my exemplar; from him such knowledge and ability as I acquired were derived. But to his shrewd practicality I was able to add something, in the shape of theory evolved from my father's conversation; and thus presently I obtained a quite respectable grasp of bush domesticity.
This day of Ted's absence in Werrina we devoted to a more or less systematic exploration of our territory. My father was in a cheery vein, and entertained me by bestowing names upon the more salient features of our domain. The two horns of Livorno Bay, I remember, were Gog and Magog; the lagoon remained always just The Lagoon; the timber belt was Arden; our camp, Zoar; and so forth. We found an eminently satisfactory little spring, not quite so near at hand as the water-hole from which Ted had drawn our supplies till now, but yielding brighter, fresher water. And we botanised with the aid of a really charming little manuscript book, bound in kangaroo-skin, and given to my father by the widow of a Queensland squatter whom we had met on the coasting steamer. That little volume is among my few treasured possessions to-day. Some of its watercolour sketches look a little worn and pallid, after all these years, but it is a most instructive book; and from it came all my first knowledge of the various wattles, the different mahoganies, the innumerable gums, the ferns, creepers, and wild flowers of the bush.
It was almost dark when Ted returned--in a cart. We were greatly surprised to see Jerry between the shafts of this ancient vehicle, and my father found it hard to credit that any cart could be driven over the bush track by which we had travelled, with its stumps and holes and sudden dips to watercourses. However, there the cart was, its harness plentifully patched with pieces of cord and wire; and it seemed well laden, too.
'Who lent it you?' asked my father. And Ted explained how the cart had been offered to him for £3, and how, at length, he had bought it for £2, 5s. and a drink. It seemed a sin to miss such a chance, but if my father really did not want it, well, he, Ted, would pay for it out of his earnings. Of course my father accepted responsibility for the purchase, and very useful the crazy old thing proved as time went on; for, though its collapse, like that of other more important institutions, seemed always imminent, it never did actually dissolve in our time, and only occasionally did it shed any vital portion of its fabric. Even after such minor catastrophes, it always bore up nobly under the rude first (and last) aid we could give with cord, or green-hide and axed wood.
To my inexperience it seemed that Ted had brought with him a wide assortment of most of the commodities known to civilisation. The unloading of the cart was to me as the enjoyment of a monstrous bran-pie; an entertainment I had heard of, but never seen. And when I heard there was certainly one more load, and probably two, to come, I felt that we really were rich beyond the dreams of most folk. I recalled the precise manner in which Fred (the Ariadne rival and fellow-passenger, whose surname I never knew) had wilted when he heard that my father and I had intended travelling steerage, and from my heart I wished he could see this cart-load of assorted goods. 'Goods' was the correct word, I thought, for such wholesale profusion; and 'cart-load' had the right spaciousness to indicate a measure of our abundance.
There were several large sheets of galvanised iron, appearing exactly as one in the cart, but covering a notable expanse of ground when spread out singly. These were for a roof in the place of the saloon skylight. My father had pished and tushed and pressed for a bark roof; but Ted, in his bush wisdom, had insisted on the prosaic 'tin,' as a catchment area for rain-water to be stored in the two ship's tanks. There were brooms, scrubbing-brushes, kettles, pots, pans, crockery, fishing-lines, ammunition for Ted's highly lethal old gun, and there were stores. I marvelled that stores so numerous and varied could have come out of Werrina. My imagination was particularly fired by the contemplation of a package said to contain a gross of boxes of matches. Reckoning on fifty to the box, I struggled for some time with a computation of the total number of our matches, giving it up finally when I had reached figures which might have thrilled a Rothschild. Our sugar was not in blue paper packages of a pound weight, but in a sack, as it might be for the sweetening of an army corps' porridge. And our tea! Like the true Australian he was, Ted had actually brought us a twenty-six pound case of tea. It was a wondrous collection, and I drew a long breath when I remembered that there was more, much more, to come. Here were nails, not in spiral twists of paper, but in solid seven-pound packages, and quite a number of them.
Had I been a shopkeeper's son, I suppose these trifles from Werrina would have been esteemed by me at something like their real value. So I rejoice that I was not a shopkeeper's son, for I still cherish a lively recollection of the glad feeling of security and comfortable well-being which filled my breast as I paced round and about our cart and all it had brought us. Long before sun-up next morning, Ted was off again to Werrina; but, seeing our incapacity on the domestic side, the good fellow gave an hour or two before starting to washing up and cooking work; and I pretended to work with him, out there in the star-light, conversing the while in whispers to avoid disturbing my father.
Two more journeys Ted made, and returned fully laden both times, the old cart fairly groaning under the weight of goods it held. And then the services of a bullock-driver and his team and dray had subsequently to be requisitioned to bring out our English boxes and baggage, including the cases of my father's books. Those books, how they tempt one to musing digressions.... But of that in its place.
By the time the carrier's work was done we had established something of a routine of life, though this was subject to a good deal of variation and disorder, as I remember, so long as the tent was in use. Ted had arranged with butcher and storekeeper both to meet one of us once a week at a point distant some six miles from Livorno Bay, where our track crossed a road. Our bread, of course, we baked for ourselves; and excellent bread it was, while Ted made it. I believe that even when the task of making it fell into my hands, it was more palatable than baker's bread; certainly my father thought so, and that was enough for me.
Our hardest work, by far, was the cleaning of the Livorno. There was a spring cleaning with a vengeance! We used a mixture of soft soap and soda and sand, which made our hands all mottled: huge brown freckles over an unwholesome-looking, indurated, fish-belly grey. The stuff made one's finger-ends smart horridly, I remember. For days on end it seemed we lived in this mess; our feet and legs and arms all bare, and perspiration trickling down our noses, while soapy water and sand crept up our arms and all over our bodies. My father insisted on doing his share, though frequently driven by mere exhaustion to pause and lie down at full length upon the nearest dry spot. I have always regretted his persistence at this task, for which at that time he was totally unfit.
However, the scraping and sanding and scrubbing were ended at last, and I will say that I believe we made a very creditable job of it. We could not give back to our barque the soundness of her youth, her sea-going prime, but I think we made her scrupulously clean and sweet; and I shall not forget the jubilant sense of achievement which spurred us on all through the scorching hot day upon which we really installed ourselves.
Ted had rigged an excellent table between the saloon stanchions, and three packing-cases with blankets over them looked quite sumptuous and ottoman-like, as seats. Our bedding was arranged in the solid hardwood bunks which had accommodated the captain and mates of the Livorno what time she made her first exit from the harbour of Genoa. Our stores were neatly stowed in various lockers, and in Ted's famous 'sideboard'; our kitchen things found their appointed places in the galley; our incongruous skylight roof, with its guttering and adjacent tanks, awaited their baptism of rain; my father's books were arranged on shelves of Ted's construction; our various English belongings, looking inexpressibly choice, intimate, and valuable in their new environment, were disposed with a view to convenience, and, be it said, to appearances; and--here was our home.
We were all very tired that night, but we were gay over our supper, and it was most unusually late before I slept. Late as that was, however, I could see by its reflected light on the deck beams that my father's candle was burning still. And when I chanced to wake, long afterwards, I could hear, until I fell asleep again, the slight sound he made in walking softly up and down the poop deck--a lonely man who had not found rest as yet; who, despite bright flashes of gaiety, was far from happy, a fact better understood and more deeply regretted by his small son than he knew.
V
My first serious preoccupation regarding ways and means--the money question--began, I think, in the neighbourhood of my eleventh birthday, and has remained a more or less constant companion and bedfellow ever since.
Now, as I write, I am perhaps freer than ever before from this sordid preoccupation; not by reason of fortunate investments and a plethoric bank balance, but because my needs now are singularly few and inexpensive, and the future--that Damoclean sword of civilised life--no longer stretches out before me, a long and arid expanse demanding provision. This preoccupation began for me in the week of my eleventh birthday, when my father asked me one evening if I thought we could manage now without Ted's services.
'It's not that I pay him much,' said my father, stroking his chin between thumb and forefinger, as his manner was when pondering such a point; 'but the fact is we can by no manner of juggling pretend to be able to afford even that little. Then, again, you see, the poor chap must eat. The fish he brings us are a real help, and no wage-earner I ever met could take pot-luck more cheerfully than Ted. What's more, I like him, you like him, and he is, I know, a most useful fellow to have about. But, take it any way one can, he must represent fifty pounds a year in our rate of expenditure, and-- Well, you see, Nick, we simply haven't got it to spend.'
It was on the tip of my tongue, I remember, to ask my father why he did not send to the bank and ask for more money; and by that may be gauged the crudely unsophisticated stage of my development. But I must remember, too, that I bit back the question, and, ignorant of all detail though I was, felt intuitively sure, first, that the whole subject was a sore and difficult one for my father, and, secondly, that I must never ask for or expect anything calling for monetary expenditure. My vague feeling was that the World had somehow wronged my father by not providing him with more money. I felt instinctively that It never would give him any more; and that It had given him whatever he had, only as the result of personal sacrifices which should never have been demanded of him. I resented keenly what seemed to me the World's callous and unreasonable discourtesy to such a man as my father, whom, I thought, It should have delighted to honour.
As illustrating the World's coarse and brutal injustice, I thought, there was the case of a man like Nelly Fane's father, or, again, the storekeeper in Werrina. (Mr. Fane would hardly have thanked me for the conjunction.) Neither, it was clear, possessed a tithe of the brains, the distinction, the culture, or the charm of my father; yet it was equally obvious (in different ways) that both were a good deal more liberally endowed with this world's gear than we were. I felt that the whole matter ought to be properly explained and made clear to those powers, whoever they were, who controlled and ordered It. I distinctly remember the thought taking shape in my mind that Mr. Disraeli ought to know about it! Meantime, my concern was, as far as might be, to relieve my father of anxiety, and so minimise as much as possible the effects of a palpable miscarriage of justice.
The thing has a rather absurd and pompous effect as I set it down on paper; but I have stated it truly, none the less, however awkwardly.
The fact that I had known no mother, combined with the progressive weakening of my father's health and peace of mind during the previous year or so, may probably have influenced my attitude in all such matters, may have given a partly feminine quality to my affection for my father. I know it seemed to me unfitting that he should ever take any part in our domestic work on the Livorno, and very natural that I should attend to all such matters. Also I had felt, ever since the day in Richmond Park when, to some extent, he gave me his confidence regarding the severance of his connection with the London newspaper office, that my father needed 'looking after,' that it was desirable for him to be taken care of and spared as much as possible; and that, obviously, I was the person to see to it. Our departure from England had been rather a pleasure than otherwise for me, because it had seemed to place my father more completely in my hands. Such an attitude may or may not have been natural and desirable in so young a boy; I only know that it was mine at that time.
It follows therefore that I told my father we could perfectly well manage without Ted, though, as a fact, I viewed the prospect, not with misgiving so much as with very real regret. I had grown to like Ted very well in the few months he had spent with us, and to this day I am gratefully conscious of the practical use and value of many lessons learned from this simple teacher, who was so notably wanting, by the Werrina storekeeper's way of it, in 'Systum.' A more uniformly kindly fellow I do not think I have ever met. The world would probably pronounce him an idler, and it is certain he would never have accumulated money; but he was not really idle. On the contrary, he was full of activity, and of simple, kindly enthusiasms. Rut his chosen forms of activity rarely led him to the production of what is marketable, and he very quickly wearied of any set routine.
'Spare me days!' Ted cried, when my father, with some circumlocutionary hesitancy and great delicacy, conveyed his decision to our factotum. 'Don't let the bit o' money worry ye, Mr. Freydon. It's little I do, anyway. Give me an odd shilling or two for me 'baccy an' that, when I go into Werrina, an' I'll want no wages. What's the use o' wages to the likes o' me, anyhow?'
I could see that this put my father in something of a quandary. A certain delicacy made it difficult for him to mention the matter of Ted's food--the good fellow had a royal appetite--and he did not want to appear unfriendly to a man who simply was not cognisant of any such things as social distinctions or obligations. Finally, and with less than his customary ease, my father did manage to make it plain that his decision, however much he might regret being forced to it, was final; and that he could not possibly permit Ted's proposed gratuitous sacrifice of his time and abilities.
'There's the future to be thought of, you know, Ted,' he added. (For how many years has that word 'future' stood for anxiety, gloom, depression, and worry?) 'Such a capable fellow as you are should be earning good pay, and, if you don't need it now, banking it against the day when you will want it.' (My father was on firmer ground now, and a characteristic smile began to lighten his eyes and voice, besides showing upon his expressive mouth. I am not sure that I ever heard him laugh outright; but his chuckle was a choice incentive to merriment, and he had a smile of exceptional sweetness.) 'There'll be a Mrs. Ted presently, you know, and how should I ever win her friendship, as I hope to, if she knew I had helped to prevent her lord and master from getting together the price of a home? No, no, Ted; we can't let you do that. But if anything I can say or write will help you to a place worth having, I'm very much at your service; and if you will come and pay us a visit whenever you feel like sparing a Sunday or holiday, we shall both take it kindly in you, and Nick here will bless you for it, won't you, Nick?'
I agreed in all sincerity, and so the matter was decided. But Ted positively insisted on being allowed to stay one further week with us, without pay, in order, he said, 'to finish my mate's eddication as a bushman.' 'My mate,' of course, was myself. In the Old World such freedom of speech would perhaps indicate disrespect, and would almost certainly be resented as such. But we had learned something of Australian ways by this time; and if my father's eyebrows may have risen ever so slightly at that word 'mate,' I was frankly pleased and flattered by it. Then, as now, I could appreciate as a compliment the inclination of such a good fellow to give me so friendly a title; and yet I fear me no genuine democrat would admit that I had any claim to be regarded as a disciple of his cult!
His mind deliberately bent on conveying instruction, Ted proved rather a poor teacher. In that rôle he was the least thing tiresome, and given to enlargement upon unessentials, while overlooking the things that matter. Unconsciously he had taught me much; in his teaching week he rather fretted me. But, all the same, I was sorry when the end of it arrived. We had arranged for him to drive with me to the point at which our track crossed a main road, where we should meet the storekeeper's cart. There would be stores for me to bring back, and Ted would finish his journey with the storekeeper's man. Ted insisted on making me a present of his own special axe, which he treated and regarded as some men will treat a pet razor. He had taught me to use and keep it fairly well. I gave him my big horn-handled knife, which was quite a tool-kit in itself; and my father gave him a hunting-crop to which he had taken a desperate fancy.
The storekeeper's man witnessed our parting, and that kept me on my dignity; but when the pair of them were out of sight, I felt I had lost a friend, and had many cares upon my shoulders. Driving back alone through the bush with our stores, I made some fine resolutions. I was now in my twelfth year, and very nearly a man, I told myself. It would be my business to keep our home in order, to take particularly good care of my father, and to see that he was as comfortable as I could make him. Certainly, I was a very serious-minded youngster; and it did not make me less serious to find when I got back to the Livorno that my father was lying in his bunk in some pain, and, as I knew at first glance, very much depressed. He had strained or hurt himself in some way in cutting firewood.
'You oughtn't to have done it, you know, father,' I remember saying, very much as a nurse or parent might have said it. 'We've plenty stacked in the main hatch, and you know the wood's my job.'
He smiled sadly. 'I'm not quite sure that there's any work here that doesn't seem to be your "job," old fellow,' he said. 'At least, if any of it's mine, it must be a kind that's sadly neglected.'
'Well, but, father, you have more important things; you have your writing. The little outside jobs are mine, of course. I've learned it all from Ted. You really must trust me for that, father.'
'Ah, well, you're a good lad, Nick; and we must see if I cannot set to seriously in the matter of doing some of this writing you talk of. It's high time; and it may be easier now we are alone. No, I don't think I'll get up to supper this evening, Nick. I'm not very well, to tell the truth, and a quiet night's rest here will be best for me.'
We had a few fowls then in a little bush run, and I presently had a new-laid egg beaten up for my patient. This he took to oblige me; but his 'quiet night's rest' did not amount to much, for each time I waked through the night I knew, either by the light burning beside him, or by some slight movement he made, that my father was awake.
VI
In this completely solitary way we lived for some eight months after Ted left us. There were times when my father seemed cheery and in much better health. In such periods he would concern himself a good deal in the matter of my education.
'It may never be so valuable to you as Ted's "eddication,"' he said; 'but a gentleman should have some acquaintance with the classics, Nick, both in our tongue (the nobility of which is not near so well understood as it might be) and in the tongues of the ancients.'
Once he said: 'We have lived our own Odyssey, old fellow, without writing it; but I'd like you to be able to read Homer's.'
As a fact, I never have got so far as to read it with any comfort in the original; and I suppose a practical educationalist would say that such fitful, desultory instruction as I did receive from my father in our cuddy living-room on board the Livorno was quite valueless. But I fancy the expert would be wrong in this, as experts sometimes are. In the schoolman's sense I learned little or nothing. But natheless I believe these hours spent with my father among his books, and yet more, it may be, other hours spent with him when he had no thought of teaching me, had their very real value in the process of my mental development. If they did not give me much of actual knowledge, they helped to give me a mind of sorts, an inclination or bent toward those directions in which intellectual culture is obtainable. Else, surely, I had remained all my days a hewer of wood and a drawer of water--with more of health in mind and body and means, perhaps, than are mine to-day! Well, yes; and that, too, is likely enough. At all events I choose to thank my father for the fact that at no period of my life have I cared to waste time over mere vapid trash, whether spoken or printed.
Outside his own personal feelings and mental processes, the which he never discussed with me, there was no set of subjects, I think, that my father excluded from the range of our conversations. Indeed, I think that in those last months of our life on the Livorno, he talked pretty much as freely with me, and as variously, as he would have talked with any friend of his own age. In the periods when we were not together, he would be sitting at the saloon table, with paper and pens before him, or pacing the seaward side of the poop, or lying resting in his bunk, or on the deck. Frequent rest became increasingly necessary for him. His strength seemed to fade out from him with the mere effluxion of time. He often spoke to me of the curious effects upon men's minds of the illusions we call nostalgia. But he allowed no personal bearing to his remarks, and never hinted that he regretted leaving England, or wished to return there.
Physically speaking, I doubt if any life could be much healthier than ours was on the Livorno. Dress, for each of us alike, consisted of two garments only, shirt and trousers. Unless when going inland for some reason, we went always barefoot. Of what use could shoes be on the Livorno's decks--washed down with salt water every day--or the white sands of the bay. Our dietary, though somewhat monotonous, was quite wholesome. We lacked other vegetables, but grew potatoes, pumpkins, and melons in plenty. Fresh fish we ate most days, and butcher's meat perhaps twice or thrice a week. Purer air than that we breathed and lived in no sanatorium could furnish, and the hours we kept were those of the nursery; though, unfortunately, bed-time by no means always meant sleeping-time for my father.
Withal, even my inexperience did not prevent my realisation of the sinking, fading process at work in my father. Its end I did not foresee. It would have gone hard with me indeed to have been consciously facing that. But I was sadly enough conscious of the process; and a competent housewife would have found humorous pathos, no doubt, in my efforts, by culinary means, to counteract this. My father's appetite was capricious, and never vigorous. There was a considerable period in which I am sure quite half my waking hours (not to mention dream fancies and half waking meditations in bed) were devoted to thinking out and preparing special little dishes from the limited range of food-stuffs at my command.
'A s'prise for you this morning, father,' I would say, as I led the way, proudly, to our dining-table, or, in one of his bad times, arrived at his bunk-side, carrying the carefully pared sheet of stringy bark which served us for a tray. There would be elaborate uncoverings on my side, and sniffs of pretended eagerness from my father; and, thanks to the unvarying kindliness and courtesy of his nature, I dare say my poor efforts really were of some value, because full many a time I am sure they led to his eating when, but for consideration of my feelings, he had gone unnourished, and so aggravated his growing weakness.
'God bless my soul, Nick,' he would say, after a taste of my latest concoction; 'what would they not give to have you at the Langham, or Simpson's? I believe you are going to be a second Soyer, and control the destinies of empires from a palace kitchen. Bush cooking, forsooth! Why this--this latest triumph is nectar--ambrosial stuff, Nick--more good, hearty body in it than any wines the gods ever quaffed. You'll see, I shall begin forthwith to lay on fat, like a Christmas turkey.'
My father could not always rise to such flights, of course; but many and many a time he took a meal he would otherwise have lacked, solely to gratify his small cook.
There came a time when my father passed the whole of every morning in bed, and, later, a time when he left his bunk for no more than an hour or two each afternoon. The thought of seeking a doctor's help never occurred to me, and my father never mentioned it. I suppose we had grown used to relying upon ourselves, to ignoring the resources of civilisation, which, indeed, for my part, I had almost forgotten. Not often, I fancy, in modern days has a boy of eleven or twelve years passed through so strange an experience, or known isolation more complete.
The climax of it all dates in my memory from an evening upon which I returned with Jerry from a journey to the road (for stores) to find my father lying unconscious beside the saloon table, where his paper and pens were spread upon a blotting-pad. Fear had my very heart in his cold grip that night. There was, no doubt, a certain grotesqueness, due to ignorance, about many of my actions. In some book (of Fielding's belike) I had read of burnt feathers in connection with emotional young ladies' fainting fits. So now, like a frightened stag, I flew across the sand to our fowl run, and snatched a bunch of feathers from the first astonished rooster my hand fell upon. A few seconds later, these were smoking in a candle flame, and thence to my father's nostrils. To my ignorant eyes he showed no sign of life whatever, but none the less--again inspired by books--I fell now to chafing his thin hands. And then to the feathers again. Then back to the hands. Lack of thought preserved me from the customary error of attempting to raise the patient's head; but no doubt my ignorance prevented my being of much real service, though every nerve in me strained to the desire.
My father's recovery of robust health, or my own sudden acquisition of a princely fortune, could hardly have brought a deeper thrill of gladness and relief than that which came to me with the first flutter of the veined, dark eye-lids upon which my gaze was fastened. A few moments later, and he recognised me; another few minutes, and, leaning shakily on my shoulder, he reached the side of his bunk. When his head touched the pillow, he gave me a wan smile, and-- 'So you see you can't trust me to keep house even for one afternoon, Nick,' he said.
This almost unbalanced me, and only an exaggerated sense of responsibility as nurse and housekeeper kept back the tears that were pricking like ten thousand needles at my eyes. Savagely I reproached myself for having been away, and for having no foreknowledge of the coming blow. In one of his bags my father had a flask of brandy, and, guided by his directions, I unearthed this and administered a little to the patient. Promising that I would look in every few minutes, I hurried off then to relight the galley fire and prepare something for supper.
Later in the evening my father became brighter than he had been for weeks, and, child-like, I soon exchanged my fears for hopes. And then it was, just as I was turning in, that, speaking in quite a cheery tone, my father said:
'I haven't taken half thought enough for you, Nick boy; and yet you've set me the best possible kind of example. It's easy to laugh at the simple folks' way of talking about "if anything happens" to one. But the idea's all right, and ought not to be lost sight of. Well then, Nick, if "anything" should "happen" to me, at any time, I want you to harness up Jerry and drive straight away into Werrina, with the two letters that I left on the cuddy table. One is for the doctor there--deliver that first--and the other is for a Roman Catholic priest, Father O'Malley; deliver that next. It is important, and must not be lost, for there's money in it. I wish it were more--I wish it were. Bring them here now, Nick.'
I brought the letters, and they were placed under a weight on the little shelf over my father's head.
'Don't forget what I said, Nick; and do it--exactly, old fellow. And now, let us forget all about it. That gruel, or whatever it was you gave me just now, has made me feel so comfortable that I'm going to have a beautiful sleep, and wake up as fit as a fiddle to-morrow. Give me your hand, boy. There--good-night! God bless you!'
He turned on his shoulder, perhaps to avoid seeing my tears, and again, perhaps, I have thought, to avoid my seeing the coming of tears in his own eyes. He had kissed my forehead, and I could not remember ever being kissed by him before. For, as long as my memory carried me, our habit had been to shake hands, like two men....
I find an unexpected difficulty in setting down the details of an experience which, upon the whole, produced a deeper impression on me, I think, than any other event in my life. When all is said, can any useful purpose be served by observing at this stage of my task a particularity which would be exceedingly depressing to me? I think not. There is assuredly no need for me, of all people, to court melancholy. I think that, without great fullness at this point in my record, I can gauge pretty accurately the value as a factor in my growth of this particular experience, and so I will be very brief.
On the fifth evening after that of the attack which left him unconscious on the saloon deck, my father died, very peacefully, and, I believe, quite painlessly. He spoke to me, and with a smile, only a few minutes before he drew his last breath.
'I'm going, Nick--going--to rest, boy. Don't cry, Nick. Best son.... God bless....'
Those were the last words he spoke. For two hours or more before that time, he had lain with eyes closed, breathing lightly, perhaps asleep, certainly unconscious. Now he was dead. I was under no sort of illusion about that. Something which had been hanging cold as ice over my heart all day had fallen now, like an axe-blade, and split my heart in twain. So I felt. There was the gentle suggestion of a smile still about the dead lips, but something terrible had happened to my father's eyes. I know now that mere muscular contraction was accountable for this, and not, as it seemed, sudden terror or pain. But the effect of that contraction upon my lonely mind! ...
Well, I had two things to do, and with teeth set hard in my lower lip I set to work to do them. With shaking hands I closed my father's eyelids and drew the sheet over his face. Then I took the two letters from the shelf and thrust them in the breast of my shirt.
Walking stiffly--it seemed to me very necessary that I should keep all my muscles quite rigid--I left the ship, harnessed Jerry, and drove off into the darkling bush towards Werrina. The sun had disappeared before I left my father's side, and the track to Werrina was fifteen miles long. A strange drive, and a queer little numbed driver, creaking along through the ghostly bush, exactly as a somnambulist might, the most of his faculties in abeyance. Three words kept shaping themselves in my mind, I know, and then fading out again, like shadows. They never were spoken. My lips did not move, I think, all through the long, slow night drive. The three words were:
'Father is dead.'
[YOUTH--AUSTRALIA]
I
We wore no uniform at St. Peter's Orphanage, but there were plenty of other reminders to keep us conscious that we were inmates of an institution, and what is called a charitable institution at that. At all events I, personally, was reminded of it often enough; but I would not say that the majority of the boys thought much of the point. My upbringing, so far, had not been a good training for institutional life. And then, again, my ignorance of the Roman Catholic religion was complete. I had not been particularly well posted perhaps regarding the church of my fathers--the Church of England; but I had never set foot in a Roman Catholic place of worship, nor set eyes upon an image of the Virgin. Occasionally, my father had gone with me to church in London; but, as a rule, the companion of my devotions had been a servant. And in Australia neither my father nor I had visited any church.
I gathered gradually that my father had once met and chatted with Father O'Malley for a few minutes in Werrina, learning in that time of the reverend father's supervisory connection with St. Peter's Orphanage at Myall Creek, eleven miles down the coast. It is easy now to understand how, pondering sadly over the question of what should become of me when 'anything happened' to him, my father had seized upon the idea of this Orphanage, the only institute of its kind within a hundred miles. He had never seen the place, and knew nothing of it. But what choice had he?
And so I became a duly registered orphan, and an inmate of St. Peter's. The letter I took to Father O'Malley contained, in bank-notes, all the money of which my father died possessed. To this day I do not know what the amount was, save that it was more than one hundred pounds, and, almost certainly, under three hundred pounds. The letter made a gift of this money to the Orphanage, I believe, on the understanding that the Orphanage took me in and cared for me. It also, I understood, authorised Father O'Malley to sell for the benefit of the Orphanage all my father's belongings on board the Livorno, with the exception of the books and papers, which were to be held in trust for me, and handed over to me when I left the institution. Knowing nobody in the district, I do not see that my father could with advantage have taken any other course than the one he chose; and I am very sure that he believed he was doing the best that could be done for me in the circumstances.
Like every other habitation in that countryside, the Orphanage was a wooden structure: hardwood weatherboard walls and galvanised iron roof. But, unlike a good many others, it was well and truly built, with a view to long life. It stood three feet above the ground upon piers of stone, each of which had a mushroom-shaped cap of iron, to check, as far as might be, the onslaught of the white ant, that destructive pest of coastal Australia and enemy of all who live in wooden houses. Also, it was kept well painted, and cared for in every way, as few buildings in that district were. In Australia generally, even in those days, labour was a somewhat costly commodity. At the Orphanage it was the one thing used without stint, for it cost nothing at all.
As I was being driven to the Orphanage in Father O'Malley's sulky, behind his famous trotting mare Jinny, I hazarded upon a note of interrogation the remark that my father would be buried.
'Surely, surely, my boy; I expect he will be buried at Werrina to-morrow.'
This was on the morning after my delivery of the letters in Werrina. I had spent the night in Father O'Malley's house. Somehow, I conveyed the suggestion that I wanted to attend that burying. The priest nodded amiably.
'Aye,' he said; 'we'll see about it, we'll see about it, presently. But just now you're going to a beautiful house at Myall Creek--St. Peter's. And, if ye're a real good lad, ye'll be let stay there, an' get a fine education, an' all--if ye're a good lad. Y'r poor father asked this for ye, like a wise man; and if we can get ut for ye, the sisters will make a man of ye in no time--if ye're a good lad.'
'Yes, sir,' I replied meekly; and, so far as I remember, spake no other word while seated in that swiftly drawn sulky. I learned afterwards that the reverend father was not only a good judge of horse-flesh, but a famous hand at a horse deal, just as he was a notably shrewd man of business, and good at a bargain of any kind. So I fancy was every one connected with the Orphanage.
I did not, as a fact, attend my father's funeral, nor was I ever again as far from Myall Creek as Werrina during the whole of my term at the Orphanage.
There were fifty-nine 'inmates,' as distinguished from other residents there, when my name was entered on the books of St. Peter's Orphanage. So I brought the ranks of the orphans up to sixty. The whole institution was managed by a Sister-in-charge and three other sisters: Sister Agatha, Sister Mary, and Sister Catharine. No doubt the Sister-in-charge had a name, but one never heard it. She was always spoken of as 'Sister-in-charge.' There was no male member of the staff except Tim the boatman; and he was hardly like a man, in the ordinary worldly sense, since he was an old orphan, and had been brought up at St. Peter's. He played an important part in the life of the place, because, in a way, he and his punt formed the bridge connecting us with the rest of the world.
St. Peter's stood on a small island, under three hundred acres in area, at the mouth of the Myall Creek, where that stream opens into the arm of the sea called Burke Water. Our landing-stage was, I suppose, a couple of hundred yards from the Myall Creek wharf--the 'Crick Wharf,' as it was always called; and it was Tim's job to bridge that gulf by means of the punt, which he navigated with an oar passed through a hole in its flat stern. The punt was roomy, but a cumbersome craft.
The orphans ranged in age all the way from about three years on to the twenties. Alf Loddon was twenty-six, I believe; but he, though strong, and a useful hand at the plough, or with an axe, or in the shafts of one of our small carts, was undoubtedly half-witted. We had several big fellows whose chins cried aloud for the application of razors. And none of us was idle. Even little five-year-olds, like Teddy Reeves, gathered and carried kindling wood, and weeded the garden; while boys of my own age were old and experienced farm hands, and had adopted the heavy, lurching stride of the farm labourer.
I suppose there never was a 'charitable' institution conducted more emphatically upon business lines than was St. Peter's Orphanage. The establishment included a dairy farm, a poultry farm, and a market garden. Indeed, at that period, so far as the production of vegetables went, we had no white competitors within fifty or a hundred miles, I think. As in many other parts of Australia, the inhabitants of this countryside regarded any form of market gardening as Chinaman's work, pure and simple. There were any number of settlers then who never tasted vegetables from one year's end to another, though the ground about their houses would have grown every green thing known to culinary art. In the townships, too, nobody would 'be bothered' growing vegetables; but, unlike many of the 'cockatoo' farmers, the town people were ready enough to buy green things; and therein lay our opportunity. We rarely ate vegetables at St. Peter's, but we cultivated them assiduously; and sixpence and eightpence were quite ordinary prices for our cabbages to fetch.
So, too, with dairy products. We 'inmates' saw very little of butter at table, treacle being our great standby. (The sisters had butter, of course.) But St. Peter's butter stamped 'S.P.O.' was famous in the district, and esteemed, as it was priced, highly. Exactly the same might be said (both as regards our share of these commodities and the public appreciation of them) of the eggs and milk produced at St. Peter's. Save in the way of occasional pilferings I never tasted milk at St. Peter's; but between us, the members of the milking gang, of which I was at one time chief, milked twenty-nine cows, morning and evening. I have heard Jim Meagher, the chief poultry boy, boast of a single day's gathering of four hundred and sixty-eight eggs; but eggs, save when stolen, pricked, and sucked raw, never figured in our bill of fare. At first glance this might appear unbusinesslike, but the prices obtainable for these things were good, as they still are and always have been in Australia; and the various items of our dietary--treacle, bread, oatmeal, tea, and corned beef--could of course be bought much more cheaply.
Father O'Malley did most of the purchasing for the Orphanage, and audited its accounts, I believe. Sister Catharine and the Sister-in-charge, between them, did all the collecting throughout the countryside for the Orphanage funds. And I have heard it said they were singularly adept in this work. I have heard a Myall Creek farmer tell how the sisters 'fairly got over' him, though, as he told the story, it seemed to me that in this particular case he had been the victor. They were selling tickets at the time for a 'social' in aid of the Orphanage funds. The farmer flatly refused to purchase, saying he could not attend the function.
'Ah, well, but ye'll buy a ticket, Misther Jones; sure ye will now, f'r the Orphanage.' But Mr. Jones was obdurate. Well, then, he would give a few pounds of tea and sugar? But he was right out of both commodities. Some of his fine eggs, or, maybe, a young pig? Mr. Jones continued in his obduracy. He was a poor man, he said, and could not afford to give.
'May we pick a basket av y'r beautiful oranges thin, Misther Jones?' They might not, for he had sold them on the trees.
'Ah, well, can ye let us have a whip, just a common whip, Misther Jones, for we've come out without one, an' the horse is gettin' old, an' needs persuasion.' Mr. Jones would not give a whip, as he had but the one.
'Ah, thin, just a loan of it, Misther Jones, till this evening?' No, the farmer wanted to use the whip himself.
'Well, well, thin, Misther Jones, I see we'll have to be gettin' along; so I'll wish ye good-morning--if ye'll just let us have a cup o' milk each, for 'tis powerful warm this morning, an' I'm thirsty.' At this the farmer forgot his manners, in his wrath, and said explosively:
'The milk's all settin', an' the water tank's near empty, so I'll wish ye good-morning, anyhow, mum!' And this valiant man moved to the door.
But I am well assured that such a defeat was a rare thing in the sisters' experience. Indeed, Mr. Jones made it his boast that he was the only man in that district--'Prodesdun or Papish'--who ever received a visit from the Orphanage sisters without paying for it. On the other hand, it was very generally admitted that no farm in that countryside was more profitable than ours; and that no one turned out products of higher quality, or obtained better prices. These smaller rural industries--dairying, market gardening, and the like--demand much labour of a more or less unskilled and mechanical sort, but do not provide returns justifying the payment of high wages. In this regard St. Peter's was, of course, ideally situated. It paid no wages, and employed twenty pairs of hands for every one pair employed by the average producer in the district.
II
Looking back now upon the period I spent as an 'inmate' of St. Peter's Orphanage, it seems a queer unreal interlude enough; possessing some of the qualities of a dream, including brevity and detachment from the rest of my life. But well I know that in the living there was nothing in the least dream-like about it; and, so far from being brief, I know there were times when it seemed that all the rest of my life had been but a day or so, by comparison with the grey, interminable vista of the St. Peter's period.
It appears to me now as something rather wonderful that I ever should have been able to win clear of St. Peter's to anything else; at all events, to anything so unlike St. Peter's as the most of my life has been. How was it I did not eventually succeed Tim, the punt-man, or become the hind of one or other of the small farmers about the district, as did most of the Orphanage lads? The scope life offered to the orphans of St. Peter's was something easily to be taken in by the naked eye from Myall Creek. It embraced only the simplest kind of labouring occupations, and included no faintest hint of London, or of the great kaleidoscopic world lying between Australia and England; no sort of suggestion of the infinitely changeful and various thing that life has been for me.
It is certain that I cherish no sort of resentment or malice where the Orphanage and its sisters are concerned. But neither will I pretend to have the slightest feeling of gratitude or benevolence towards them. I should not wish to contribute to their funds, though I possessed all the wealth of the Americas. And I will say that I think those responsible for the conduct of the place were singularly indifferent, or blind, to the immense opportunities for productive well-doing which lay at their feet.
Here were sixty orphans; lads for the most part plastic as clay. The sisters were the potters. No ruling sovereign possesses a tithe of the absolute authority that was theirs. They literally held the powers of life and death. Unquestioned and god-like they moved serenely to and fro about the island farm, in their floating black draperies, directing the daily lives of their subjects by means of a nod, a gesture of the hand, a curt word here or there. They were the only gods we had. (There was nothing to make us think of them as goddesses.) And, so blind were they to their opportunities, they offered us nothing better. By which, I do not mean that our chapel was neglected. (It was not, though I do not think it meant much more for any of us than the milking, the wood-chopping, or the window-cleaning.) But, rather, that these capable, energetic women entirely ignored their unique opportunities of uplifting us. It was an appalling waste of god-like powers.
I could not honestly say that I think the sisters ever gave anything fine, or approximately fine, to one of their young slaves. They taught us, most efficiently, to work, to do what Americans call 'Chores.' No word they ever let fall gave a hint of any real conception of what life might or should mean. I recall nothing in the nature of an inspiration. Some of us, myself included, possessed considerable capacity for loving, for devotion. This latent faculty was never drawn upon, I think, by any of the sisters. We feared them, of course. We even respected their ability, strength, and authority. We certainly never loved them.
In fact, I do not think it was ever hinted to one of us that there was anything beautiful in life. There were wonderful and miraculous things connected with the Virgin and the Infant Christ. But these were not of the world we knew, and, in any case, they were matters of which Father O'Malley possessed the key. They had nothing to do with the farm, with our work, or with us, outside the chapel. Heaven might be beautiful. There was another place that very certainly was horrible. Meantime, there was our own daily life, and that was--chores. That this should have been so means, in my present opinion, a lamentable waste of young life and of unique powers. I consider that our young lives were sterilised rather than developed, and that such sterilisation must have meant permanent and irrevocable loss for every one of the orphans, myself included.
But I would be the last to deny the very real capacity and ability of the sisters in their discharge of the duties laid upon them. I have no doubt at all about it that they succeeded to admiration in doing what Father O'Malley and the powers behind him (whoever they may have been) desired done. I can well believe that the Orphanage justified itself from a utilitarian standpoint. I believe it paid well as a farm. And I do not see how any one could have extracted more in charity from the inhabitants of the district (and, too, from the orphans) than the sisters did. Oh, I give them all credit for their competence and efficiency.
Indeed, I find it little less than wonderful to recall the manner in which the Sister-in-charge and her three assistants maintained the perfect discipline of that Orphanage, with never an appeal for the assistance of masculine brute force. The Australian-born boy is not by any means the most docile or meek of his species; and, occasionally, a newly arrived orphan would assert himself after the universal urchin fashion. Such minor outbreaks were never allowed to produce scenes, however. We had no intimidating executions; no birch-rods in pickle, or anything of that sort. Sister Agatha and Sister Catharine were given rather to slappings, pinchings, and the vicious tweaking of ears. I have seen Sister Agatha kick an orphan's bare toes, or his bare shin, with the toe of her boot; and at such times she could throw a formidable amount of venom into two or three words, spoken rather below than above the ordinary conversational pitch of her voice. But ceremonial floggings were unknown at St. Peter's. And indeed I can recall no breaches of discipline which seemed to demand any such punishment.
The most usual form of punishment was the docking of a meal. We fed at three long tables, and sat upon forms. Meals were a fairly serious business, because we were always hungry. A boy who was reported to the Sister-in-charge, say, for some neglect of his work, would have his dinner stopped. In that case it would be his unhappy lot to stand with his hands penitentially crossed upon his chest, behind his place at table, while the rest of us wolfed our meal. By a refinement which, at the time, seemed to me very uncalled for, the culprit had to say grace, before and after the meal, aloud and separately from the rest of us.
There were occasions upon which we were one and all found wanting. Eggs had been stolen, work had been badly done; something had happened for which no one culprit could be singled out, and all were held to blame. Upon such an occasion we were made to lay the dinner-tables as usual, and to wait upon the sisters at their own table, and for the rest of an hour to stand to attention, with hands crossed around the long tables. Then we cleared the tables and marched out to work, each nursing the vacuum within him, where dinner should have been, and, presumably, resolving to amend his wicked ways.
Boys are, of course, curious creatures. I have said that we were always hungry. I think we were. And yet the staple of our breakfast (which never varied during the whole of my time there) was never once eaten by me, though I was repeatedly punished for leaving it. The dish was 'skilly,' or porridge of a kind, with which (except on the church's somewhat numerous fast-days) we were given treacle. The treacle I would lap up greedily, but at the porridge my gorge rose. I simply could not swallow it. Ordinary porridge I had always rather liked, but this ropy mess was beyond me; and, hungry though I was, I counted myself fortunate on those mornings when I was able to go empty away from the breakfast-table without punishment for leaving this detestable skilly. If Sister Agatha or Sister Catharine were on duty, it meant that I would have at least one spoonful forced into my mouth and held there till cold sweat bedewed my face. In addition there would be pinchings, slappings, and ear-tweakings--very painful, these last. And sometimes I would be reported, and docked of that day's dinner to boot. But Sister Mary would more often than not pass me by without a glance at my bowl, and for that I was profoundly grateful. In fact, I could almost have loved that good woman, but that she had a physical affliction which nauseated me. Her breath caused me to shudder whenever she approached me. She had a mild, cow-like eye, however, and I do not think I ever saw her kick a boy.
Yes, when I look back upon that queer chapter of my life, I am bound to admit that, however much they may have neglected opportunities that were open to them, as moulders of human clay, those four sisters did accomplish rather wonderful results in ruling St. Peter's Orphanage, without any appeal to sheer force of arms. There were young men among us, yet the sisters' rule was never openly defied. I think the secret must have had to do chiefly with work and food. We were never idle, we were always hungry, and we never had any opportunities for relaxation. I never saw any kind of game played at the Orphanage; and on Sundays devotions of one kind or another were made to fill all intervals between the different necessary pieces of work, such as milking, feeding stock, cleaning, and so forth.
We began the day at five o'clock in the summer, and six in the winter, and by eight at night all lights were out. We had lessons every day; and there, oddly enough, in school, the cane was adjudged necessary, as an engine of discipline, and used rather freely on our hands--hands, by the way, which were apt at any time to be a good deal chipped and scratched, and otherwise knocked about by our outdoor work. So far as I remember our schooling was of the most primitive sort, and confined to reading aloud, writing from dictation, and experimenting with the first four rules of arithmetic. History we did not touch, but we had to memorise the names of certain continents, capitals, and rivers, I remember.
All this ought to have been the merest child's play for me; it certainly was a childish form of study. But I did not appear to pick up the trick of it, and I remember being told pretty frequently to 'Hold out your hand, Nicholas!' I had a clumsy knack of injuring my finger-tips, and getting splinters into my hands, in the course of outdoor work. The splinters produced little gatherings, and I dare say this made penmanship awkward. I know it gave added terrors to the canings, and, too, I thought it gave added zest to Sister Agatha's use of that instrument in my case. Unfortunately for me Sister Agatha, and not the mild-eyed Sister Mary, was the schoolmistress.
It may be, of course, that I lay undue stress upon the painful or unpleasant features of our life at the Orphanage, because I was unhappy there, and detested the place. But certainly if I could recall any brighter aspects of the life there I would set them down. I do not think there were any brighter aspects for me, at all events. I not only had no pride in myself here; I took shame in my lot.
On the first Sunday in each month visitors were admitted. Any one at all could come, and many local folk did come. They made it a kind of excursion. I was glad that our devotions kept us a good deal out of the visitors' way, because, especially at first, I had a fear of recognising among them some one of the handful of people in Australia whom I might be said to have known--fellow-passengers by the Ariadne. The thought of being recognised as an 'inmate' by Nelly Fane was dreadful to me; and even more, I fancy, I dreaded the mere idea of being seen by Fred-without-a-surname. I pictured him grinning as he said: 'Hallo! you in this place? You an orphan, then?' I think I should have slain him with my wood-chopping axe.
On these visitors' days we all wore boots and clothes which were never seen at other times. I hated mine most virulently, because they were not mine, but had been worn by some other boy before they came to me. It was never given to me to learn what became of the ample store of clothing I had on board the Livorno. The sisters were exceedingly thorough in detail. On the mornings of these visitors' Sundays, before going out to work, we 'dressed' our beds. That is to say we were given sheets, and made to arrange them neatly upon our beds. Before retiring at night we had to remove these sheets and refold them with exact care, under the sister's watchful eyes, so that they might be fresh and uncreased for next visitors' Sunday. We never saw them at any other times. Our boots really were rather a trial. Running about barefoot all day makes the feet swell and spread. It hardens them, certainly, but it makes the use of boots, and especially of hard, ill-fitting boots, abominably painful.
And with it all, having said that I detested the place and was unhappy during all my time there, how is it I cannot leave the matter at that? For I cannot. I do not feel that I have truly and fully stated the case. It is not merely that I have made no attempt to follow my life there in detail. No such exhaustive and exhausting record is needed. But I do desire to set down here the essential facts of each phase in my life.
I have referred already to the precociously developed trick I had of savouring life as a spectator, of observing myself as a figure in an illustrated romance--probably the hero. Now, as I am certain this habit was not entirely dropped during my life at St. Peter's, I think one must argue that I cannot have been entirely and uniformly unhappy there. Indeed, I am sure I was not, because I can distinctly remember luxuriating in my sadness. I can remember translating it into unspoken words, the while my head was cushioned in the flank of a cow at milking time, describing myself and my forlorn estate as an orphan and an 'inmate' to myself. And, without doubt, I derived satisfaction from that. I can recall picturesquely vivid contrasts drawn in my mind between Master Nicholas Freydon, as the playmate of Nelly Fane on the Ariadne, and the son of the distinguished-looking Mr. Freydon whom every one admired, and as the 'inmate' of St. Peter's, trudging to and fro among the other orphans, with corns on the palms of his hands and bruises and scratches on his bare legs and feet.
And then when visitors were about: 'If they only knew,' 'If they could have seen,' 'If I were to tell them'--such phrases formed the beginning of many thoughts in my mind. I can remember endeavouring to mould my expression upon such occasions to fit the part I consciously played; to adopt the look I thought proper to the disinherited aristocrat, the gently-nurtured child now outcast in the world, the orphan. Yes, I distinctly remember, when a visitor of any parts at all was in sight, composing my features and attitude to suit the orphan's part, as distinguished from that of the mere typical 'inmate,' who, incidentally, was an orphan too. I found secret consolation in the conception that however much I might be in St. Peter's Orphanage, I would never be wholly of it--a real 'inmate' I remember, as I thought not unskilfully, scheming to arouse Sister Mary's interest in me, as I had aroused the interest of other people in myself on the Ariadne and elsewhere, and only relinquishing my pursuit when baffled, upon contact, by the poor sister's physical infirmity before-mentioned. I am bound to say that she made less response to my overtures than that made by the cows I milked, who really did show some mild, bovine preference for me.
But there it is. In view of these things I cannot have been wholly unhappy, for I remained a keenly interested observer of life, and of my own meanderings on its stage. But I will say that I liked St. Peter's less than any other place I had known, and that mentally, morally, emotionally, and spiritually, as well as physically, I was rather starved there. The life of the place did arrest my development in all ways, I think, and it may be that I have suffered always, to some extent, from that period of insufficient nutrition of mind and body.
III
The custom of St. Peter's Orphanage was to allow farmers and local residents generally to choose an orphan, as they might pick out a heifer or a colt from a stockyard, and take him away for good--or ill. I believe the only stipulation was that the orphan could not in any case be returned to St. Peter's. If the selector found him to be a damaged or incomplete orphan, that was the selector's own affair, and he had to put up with his bargain as best he might. The person who chose an orphan in this way became responsible for the boy's maintenance while boyhood lasted, and I believe it was not customary to send out lads under the age of ten or twelve years. After a time the people who took these lads into their service were, theoretically, supposed to allow them some small wage, in addition to providing them with a home.
It was rather a blow to my self-esteem, I remember, to see my companions being removed from the institution one by one as time ran on, and to note that nobody appeared to want me. I may have been somewhat less sturdy than the average run of 'inmates,' but I think we were all on the spare and lean side. It is possible, however, that in view of my father's legacy to St. Peter's, the authorities felt it incumbent upon them to keep me. The departure of a boy always had an unsettling effect upon me; and when, as happened now and again, an ex-inmate paid us a visit on a Sunday, possibly with members of the family with whom he worked, I was filled with yearning interest in the life of the world outside our island farm and workshop.
But these yearnings of mine were quite vague; mere amorphous emanations of the mind, partaking of the nature of nostalgia, and giving birth to nothing in the shape of plans, nor even of definite desires. Then, suddenly, this vague uneasiness became the dominant factor in my daily life, as the result of one of those apparently haphazard chances upon which human progress and development so often seem to pivot.
In the late afternoon of a visitors' Sunday, as I was making my way down to the milking-yard with a pail on either arm, my eyes fell upon the broad shoulders of a man who was leaning contemplatively over the slip-rails of the yard. The sight of those shoulders sent a thrill right through me; it touched the marrow of my spine. I, who had thought myself the most forlorn and friendless of orphans; I had a friend, and he was here before me. There was no need to see his face. I knew those shoulders.
'Ted!' I cried. And positively I had to exercise deliberate self-restraint to prevent myself from rushing at our Livorno friend and factotum, and flinging my arms about him, as in infantile days I had been wont to make embracing leaps at Amelia from the kitchen table of the house off Russell Square.
'God spare me days! Is it you, then, chum?' exclaimed Ted, as he swung round on his high heels. (In those days the Sunday rig of men like Ted Reilly comprised much-polished, pointed-toe, elastic-side boots with very high heels, and voluminously 'bell-bottomed' trousers.) I rattled questions at him, as peas from a pea-shooter; and when I had laid aside my buckets he pumped away at my right arm, as though providing water to put a fire out.
It seemed he had only that week returned to the district, after a long spell of wandering and desultory working in southern Queensland. No, he had not had time yet to go out to the Livorno, and he had not heard of my father's death--'Rest his soul for as good an' kindly a gentleman as ever walked!' And so--'Spare me days!'--I was an orphan at St. Peter's! The queer thing it was he had taken it into his head to be wandering that way, an' all, having nothing else to do to pass the time, like! How I blessed the casual ways of the man, the marked absence of 'Systum' in his character, that led him to make such excursions! He squatted beside me on his heels, whilst I, fearing admonition from above, got to work with my cows, and saw the rest of the milking gang started.
Passionate disappointment swept across my mind when I learned that he had been several hours on the island before I saw him, and that it wanted now but ten minutes to five o'clock, the hour at which the punt made its last trip with visitors. And in almost the same moment joy shook and thrilled me as I realised the romantic hazard of our meeting at all, which was accentuated really by the narrowness of our margin of time. A matter of minutes and he would be gone. A matter of minutes and I should never have seen him at all. But that could not have been. I refused to contemplate a life at St. Peter's in which this inestimable amelioration (now nearly five minutes old) played no part. The hopeless emptiness of life at the Orphanage without a meeting with Ted was something altogether too harrowing to be dwelt upon. It could not have been borne.
'You'll be here first thing next visitors' Sunday, Ted--first thing?' I charged him, as he rose in response to the puntman's bell. 'I couldn't stand it if you didn't come, Ted.'
'Oh, I'll come, right enough, chum. But that's a month. Why, spare me days, surely I---'
'You'll have to go, Ted. That's his last ring. Sister Agatha's looking. Don't seem to take much notice o' me, Ted, or she might-- Oh, good-bye, Ted! Don't seem to be noticing. Good-bye, good-bye!'
My head was back in the cow's flank now, and very hot tears were running down my cheeks and into the milk-pail. My lip was cut under my front teeth, and--'Oh, Ted, first thing in the morning--don't forget the Sunday,' I implored, as he passed away, drawing one hand caressingly across my shoulder as he went.
In a hazy, golden dream I finished my milking, staggering and swaying up to the dairy under my two brimming pails, and turned to the remaining tasks of the evening, longing for bed-time and liberty to review my amazing good fortune in privacy; thirsting for it, as a tippler for his liquor. I dared not think about it at all before bed-time. In some recondite way it seemed that would have been indecent, an exposure of my new treasure to the vulgar gaze. Now, it was securely locked away inside me, absolutely hidden. And there it must remain until, lights being doused, I could draw it out under the friendly cover of my coarse bed-clothes (after visiting-day sheets had been removed) and voluptuously abandon myself to it. Meantime, I moved among my fellows as one having possession of a talisman which raised him far above the cares and preoccupations of the common herd. I even looked forward with pleasure to the next day, to Monday! I should have no breakfast. Sister Agatha would be on duty. I should be pestered, and probably robbed of dinner, too. But what of that? The coming of that cheerless and hungry Monday would carry me forward one whole day toward the next visitors' Sunday, and--Ted.
I had not begun yet to consider in any way the question of how seeing Ted could help me. Enough for me that I had seen him; that I had a friend; and that I should see him again. Indeed, even if I had had no hope of seeing him again, I still should have been thrilled through and through by the delicious kindliness, the romantic interest of the thought that, out there in the world beyond Myall Creek, I had a friend; a free and powerful man, moving about independently among the citizens of the great world, in which Sister Agatha was a mere nobody; in which all sorts of delightful things continually happened, in which task work was no more than one incident in a daily round compact of other interests, hazards, meetings, and--and of freedom.
It was extraordinary the manner in which ten minutes in the society of a man, who would have been adjudged by many most uninspiring, had transformed me. It seemed the mere sight of this simple bushman, in his 'bell-bottomed' Sunday trousers, had lifted me up from a slough of hopeless inertia to a plane upon which life was a master musician, and all my veins the strings from which he drew his magic melodies.
IV
A week passed, and brought us to another Sunday. On this morning I stepped out of bed into the dimness of the dawn light, full of elation.
'It's only seven weeks now to next visitors' day. In seven weeks I shall see Ted again. Seven times seven days--why, it's nothing, really,' I told myself.
By this time I had devised a plan for helping Time on his way. It hardly commends itself to my mature judgment, but great satisfaction was derived from it at the time. It consisted merely of telling myself in so many words that a month comprised eight weeks. Thus, ostensibly, I had seven weeks to wait. But my secret self knew that the reality was incredibly better than that. Next Sunday, outwardly, I should have only six weeks to wait, the following Sunday only five. And then, a week later, with only a paltry four weeks to wait, my secret self would be thrilling with the knowledge that actually the day itself had come, and only an hour or so divided me from Ted. Childish, perhaps, but it comforted me greatly; and, to some extent, I have indulged the practice through life. With a mile to walk when tired, I have caught myself, even quite late in life, comforting myself with the absurd assurance that another 'couple of miles' would bring me to my destination! To the naturally sanguine temperament this particular folly would be impossible, though its antithesis is pretty frequently indulged in, I fancy.