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The Record of Nicholas Freydon

by A. J. Dawson · English · Gutenberg #30704 · 732,632 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Record of Nicholas Freydon

Author: A. J. Dawson


        
Release date: December 18, 2009 [eBook #30704]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30704

Credits: E-text prepared by Clare Graham from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)


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E-text prepared by Clare Graham from page images generously made available
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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


INTRODUCTORY

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

BOYHOOD--AUSTRALIA

YOUTH--AUSTRALIA

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: SECOND PERIOD

THE LAST STAGE

EDITOR'S NOTE




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. 'Inev_it_able,' 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.

And so it was while going about my various duties, nursing the
pretence that in seven more weeks I should see my friend again, that I
came face to face with the man himself; then, after no more than one
little week of waiting, and when no visitors at all were due. I
gasped. Ted grinned cordially. Sister Mary was on duty. Ted showed her
a note from Father O'Malley, and she nodded amiably. Thrice blessed
goddess! Her fat, white face took on angelic qualities in my eyes. One
little movement of her hooded head, and I was wafted from purgatory,
not into heaven, but into a place which seemed to me more attractive,
into the freedom of the outside world--Ted's world. Not that I was
permitted to leave the island, but, until the time for evening
milking, I was allowed to walk about the farm and talk at ease with
Ted. By a further miracle of the goddess's complaisance I was
permitted to ignore the Orphanage dinner that day, and intoxicate
myself with Ted upon sandwiches and cakes and ginger-beer. That was a
banquet, if you like!

It seemed that Father O'Malley was quite well disposed toward Ted, and
had even allowed him to make a little contribution (which he could ill
spare) to the Orphanage funds. With what seemed to me transcendent
audacity Ted had actually tried to adopt me, to take me into his
service, as neighbouring farmers took other orphans from St. Peter's.
This had been firmly but quite pleasantly declined; but Ted had been
given permission to come and see me whenever he liked, on Sundays--upon
any Sunday. I could have hugged the man. His achievement seemed
to me little short of miraculous. I figured Ted manipulating threads
by which nations are governed. To be able to bend to one's will august
administrators, people like Father O'Malley! Truly, the world outside
St. Peter's was a wondrous place, and the life of its free citizens a
thing most delectable.

We talked, but how we did talk, all through that sunny, windy Sunday!
(A bright, dry westerly had been blowing for several days.) I gathered
that Ted was in his customary condition of impecuniosity, and that,
much against his inclination, it would be necessary for him to take a
job somewhere before many days had passed; or else--and I saw, with a
pang of desolate regret, that his own feeling favoured the
alternative--to pack his swag and be off 'on the wallaby'; on the
tramp, that is, putting in an occasional day's work, where this might
offer, and sleeping in the bush. He was a born nomad. Even I had
realised this. And he liked no other life so well as that of the
'traveller,' which, in Australia, does not mean either a bagman or a
tourist, but rather one who strolls through life carrying all his
belongings on his back, working but very occasionally, and camping in
a fresh spot every night.

It required no great penetration upon Ted's part to see that I was
weary of St. Peter's. (My first day at the Orphanage had brought me to
that stage.)

'Look here, mate,' he said, late in the afternoon. 'I've got pretty
near thirty bob left, and a real good swag. Why not come with me, an'
we'll swag it outer this into Queensland?'

I drew a quick breath. It was an attractive offer for a boy in my
position. But even then there was more of prudence and foresight in
me, or possibly less of reckless courage and less of the born nomad,
than Ted had.

'But how could I get away?'

'You can swim,' said Ted. 'I'd be waiting for ye at the wharf. We'd be
outer reach by daybreak.'

'And then, Ted, how should we live?' My superior prudence questioned
him. I take it the difference in our upbringing and tradition spoke
here.

'Live! why, how does any one live on the wallaby? It's never hard to
get a day's work, if ye want a few bob. Up in the station country they
never refuse a man rations, anyway; it's in the town the trouble is.
I've never gone short, travelling.'

'I don't think I'd like begging for meals, Ted,' I said musingly. And
in a moment I was wishing with all my heart I could withdraw the
words. It seemed that, for the first time in all our acquaintance, I
had hurt and offended this simple, good-hearted fellow.

'Beggin', is it?' he cried, very visibly ruffled. 'I'd be sorry to ask
ye to, for it's what I've never done in me life, an' never would.
Would ye call a man a beggar for takin' a ration or a bitter 'baccy
from a station store? Why, doesn't every traveller do the same? An',
for that matter, can't a man always put in a day's work, gettin'
firewood or what not, if he's a mind to? Ye needn't fear Ted Reilly'll
ever come to beggin'!'

In my eager anxiety to placate my only friend I almost accepted his
offer. But not quite. Some little inherited difference held me back,
perhaps. I wonder! At all events, the thing was dropped between us for
the time; and, before he left, Ted promised he would tackle a bit of
work a Myall Creek farmer had offered him--to clear a bush paddock of
burrajong fern, which had poisoned some cattle. Thus, he would be able
to come and see me again on the following Sunday. On that we parted;
and, before I was half way through my milking, fear and regret
oppressed me as with a physical nausea; fear that I might have lost my
only friend, regret that I had not accepted his offer, and so won to
freedom and the big world outside St. Peter's.

The night that followed was one of the most unhappy spent by me at St.
Peter's. My prudence appeared to me the merest poltroonery, my remark
about 'begging' the most finicking absurdity, my failure to accept
Ted's offer the most reckless and offensive stupidity. Evidently I was
unworthy of any better lot than I had. I should live and die an
'inmate' and a drudge. I deserved nothing else. In short, I was a very
despicable lad, had probably lost the only friend I should ever have,
and, certainly, I was very miserable.

Monday brought some softening (helped by the fact that Sister Mary was
on duty at breakfast-time, so that I escaped the addition of
punishment to hunger), and, as the week wore slowly by, hope rose in
my breast once more, and with it a return of what I now regard as the
common-sense prescience which made me hesitate to adopt a swagman's
life. I could not honestly say that I had any definite ideas as to
another and more reputable sort of occupation or career. As yet, I had
not. But I did vaguely feel that there would be derogation in becoming
what my father would have called a 'tramp.'

My father's memory, the question of what he would have thought of it,
affected my attitude materially. He had accepted it as axiomatic, I
thought, that his son must be a gentleman. My present lot as an
'inmate' of St. Peter's hardly seemed to fit the axiom, somehow; and
Ted, whatever I might think or say about 'beggin'' or the like, was
all the friend I had or seemed likely to have, and a really good
fellow at that. But withal a certain stubbornly resistant quality in
me asserted that there would be a downward step for me, though not for
Ted, or for any of my fellow orphans, in taking to the road; that the
step might prove irrevocable, and that I ought not to take it. I dare
say there was something of the snob in me. Anyhow, that was how I felt
about it. Also, I remember deriving a certain comically stern sort of
satisfaction from contemplation of the spectacle of myself, alone,
unaided, declining to stoop, even though stooping should bring me
freedom from the Orphanage! Yes, there was a certain egotistical
satisfaction in that thought.

Ted came to see me again on the next Sunday, but our day was far less
cheery than its predecessor had been. We were good friends still, but
there was a subtle constraint between us, as was proved by the fact
that Ted did not again mention the suggestion of my taking to the road
with him. Also, Ted was for the moment a wage-earner, working during
fixed and regular hours for an employer; and I knew he hated that. In
such case he felt as one of the mountain-bred brumbies (wild horses)
of that countryside might be supposed to feel, when caught, branded,
and forced between shafts.

On the following Sunday Ted's downcast constraint was much more
pronounced, and I saw plainly that my Sabbath visitor was on the eve
of a breakaway. The name of the farmer for whom he had been working
was Mannasseh Ford, and, having such a name, the man was always spoken
of in just that way.

'I pretty near bruk my back finishing Mannasseh Ford's paddick last
night,' explained Ted moodily. 'There was three days' fair work left
in it when I got there in the morning. But I meant gettin' shut of it,
an' I did. Mannasseh Ford opened his eyes pretty wide when I called up
for me money las' night, an' he looked over the paddick. Wanted to
take me on regler, he did; pounder week an' all found, he said. I
thanked him kindly, him an' his pounder week! Well, he said he'd make
it twenty-five shillin', an' I thanked him for that.'

Thanks clearly meant refusal with Ted, and I confess he rose higher in
my esteem somehow, for the fact that he could actually refuse what to
me seemed like wealth. I recalled the fact that my father had paid Ted
exactly half this amount, and had found him quite willing to stay with
us for half that again, or even for occasional tobacco money. Perhaps
there was a mercenary vein in me at the time. I think it likely. The
talk of my fellow orphans was largely of wages, and materialism
dominated the atmosphere in which I lived. I know this refusal of
twenty-five shillings a week and 'all found' struck me as tolerably
reckless; splendid, in a way, but somewhat foolhardy, and I hinted as
much to Ted.

'Och, bother him an' his twenty-five shillin'!' said Ted. 'Just
because I cleared his old paddick, he thinks I'm a workin' bullick. He
offered me thirty shillin' after, if ye come to that; an' I told him
he hadn't money enough in the bank to keep me. Neither has he.'

'But, Ted,' I urged, 'why not? It's good money, and you've got to work
somewhere.'

'Aye,' said Ted, his constraint lifting for a moment to admit the
right vagabondish twinkle into his blue eyes. 'Somewhere! An'
sometimes. But not there, mate, an' not all the time, thank ye; not
me. It's all right for Mannasseh Ford; but, spare me days, I'd sooner
be in me grave.'

I pondered this for a time, while a voice within me kept on repeating
with sickening certainty: 'He's going away; he's going away. You've
lost your friend; you've lost your friend.' And then, as one thrusts a
foot into cold water before taking a plunge: 'Well, then, what shall
you do, Ted?' I asked him. But, for the moment, I was not to have the
plunge.

'Oh, if ye come to that,' he said, weakly smiling, 'I've money in
hand, an' to spare. Look at the wealth o' me.' And he drew out for my
edification a little bundle of greasy one-pound notes, which, for me,
certainly had a very substantial look. I knew instinctively that my
friend wanted me to help him out by pursuing the inquiry; but for the
time I shirked it, and we talked of other things. Later in the day I
returned to it, as a moth to a candle, undeterred, partly impelled
thereto, in fact, by the assured foreknowledge that the process would
hurt.

'But what will you do, Ted, now you've given up Mannasseh Ford? Will
you take another job round the Creek here, or----'

I paused, scanning my only friend's face, and seeing my loss of him
writ plainly in his downcast eyes and half-shamed expression. (I am
not sure but what there may have been more of the human boy, the
child, in Ted, than in myself.)

'Oh, well, mate,' he said haltingly, and then stopped altogether. He
was drawing an intricate pattern in the dust with the blade of his
pen-knife, a favourite pastime with bushmen. The pause was pregnant.
At last he looked up with a toss of his head. 'Oh, come on, mate,' he
said impatiently. 'Swim across to-night, an' we'll beat up Queensland
way. I tell ye, travellin' 's fine. Ye've got no boss to say do this
an' that. You goes y'r own way at y'r own gait. Ye'd better come.'

'So you'll go, Ted. I knew you would,' I said, musing in my rather
old-fashioned way. It seems a smallish matter enough now; but I know
that at the time I was conscious of making a momentous sacrifice, of
taking a step of epoch-making significance. Somehow, the very
greatness of the sacrifice made me the more determined about it. I
should lose my only friend, a devastating loss; and the more clearly I
realised how naked this loss would leave me, the more convinced I felt
that my decision was right. There is, of course, a kind of gluttony in
self-denial; one's appetite for sacrifice, and particularly in youth,
may be undeniably avid.

'Well, I did try to stop,' he muttered, almost sullenly for him. And
then, with that toss of his head, and the glimmering of a frank smile:
'But I can't stick it. Humpin' a swag's about all I'm fit for, I
reckon. You're right, too, it's no game for your father's son.' And
here his kindly face lost all trace of anything but friendliness.
'Only, what beats me is what in the world else can ye do, mewed up in
this--this blessed work'us. That's what has me beat.'

The crisis was passed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced
constraint. It was admitted between us that he must be off again to
his wandering, and that I must stay behind. And now Ted had no thought
for anything but my welfare. There was no more awkwardness between us,
but only the warmth of this good fellow's real affection, and the
almost agreeable melancholy and self-righteous consciousness of wise
denial which possessed me. Ted fumbled under his coat with a packet of
some food he had brought me: 'Spare me days, the cats might give a lad
a bit o' bread to his breakfast--drat 'em!'--and, finally pressed it
into my hands, with injunctions to be careful in opening it, as he had
put a scrap of writing in with it, for me to remember him by.

And so we parted, with no shadow on our friendship, on the track down
to the punt.

But though my friend was gone, after these three Sunday visits, and I
was alone again, the influence of his coming remained. I should not
revert to the unhoping inertia of my previous state. Some instinct
told me that. And the instinct was right. My curiosity had been too
fully roused. My relationship to the world of people outside St.
Peter's had been definitely re-established by the kindly, rather
childlike, bushman, and would not again be allowed to lapse. The mere
talk of swimming to the wharf, of cutting the painter, of walking
forth into the real world which was not ruled by a Sister-in-charge--all
this had wrought a permanent change in me.

The 'scrap of writin'' fumblingly inserted into the packet of cakes was
no writing of Ted's, but a crumpled, greasy one-pound Bank of New South
Wales note; one of his little store, useless to me at St. Peter's--yes;
but, even as my eyes pricked to the emotion of gratitude, some inner
consciousness told me my friend's gift would yet prove of very real use
to me outside the Orphanage, one day. And, before Ted came, I had been
unable to descry any future outside the Orphanage.


V


I do not remember the exact period that elapsed between Ted's
departure and the visit of the artist, Mr. Rawlence. But it must have
been early winter when Ted was at Myall Creek, because my fifteenth
birthday fell at about that time; and it was spring when Mr. Rawlence
came, for I know the wattle was in bloom then. Very likely it was in
August or September, three or four months after Ted's departure. At
all events my mind was still much occupied by thoughts of the outside
world and of my future.

Some one had told me that a Sydney artist, a Mr. Rawlence, had
permission to land on the island, as he wished to sketch there. But he
had not been much about the house or the yards, and I had not seen
him. And then, one late afternoon, when I had arrived at the
milking-yards a few minutes before the others of the milking gang, I
stood with two pails in my right hand, leaning over the slip-rails at the
very spot upon which I had caught my first glimpse of Ted at St.
Peter's. I was thinking of that Sunday when I had recognised his broad
shoulders, and recalling the thrill that recognition had brought me.

The romantic hazardousness of life had for some considerable time now
made its appeal felt by me. It seemed infinitely curious and
interesting to me that I and my father ever should have known Ted
intimately, as one who shared our curious life on the _Livorno_; Ted
who was born and bred there in Werrina; we who came there across
thousands of miles of ocean from the world's far side, from Putney,
from places whose names Ted had never heard. And then that I should
have walked down to that milking-yard with my pails, and, so to say,
stumbled upon Ted, after his long wanderings in Queensland, where at
this moment he was probably wandering again, hundreds of miles away
and, possibly, thinking of me, of that same milking-yard, of these
identical slip-rails and splintery grey fence. A wonderful and
mysterious business, this life in the great world, I thought; and with
that I threw up my left hand to lift the rails down.

'Oh, hold on! Don't move! Stay as you were a minute!'

I jumped half out of my skin as these words, apparently spoken in my
very ear, reached me; and, wheeling abruptly round, I saw a man
wearing a very large grey felt hat, and holding pencils and a paper
block in his hands, peering at me from a little wooded hummock at the
end of the cowshed. The skin about his eyes was all puckered up, he
held a pencil cross-wise between his white teeth, and was shaking his
head from side to side as though very much put about over something.

'What a pity! It's gone now,' he said, as he strode down the slope
towards me.

He clearly was disappointed about something; but yet I thought that
never since the days when my father was with me had I heard any one
speak more pleasantly, or seen any one smile in kindlier fashion.
Later, I realised that no one I had met since my father's death
possessed anything resembling the sort of manner, address, intonation,
or mental attitude of this Mr. Rawlence. I had no theories then about
social divisions, and the like; but here, I thought, was a man who
would find nobody in the district having anything in common with
himself. By the same token, I thought, had my father been alive this
newcomer would have recognised a possible companion in him. And,
finally, as Mr. Rawlence came to a standstill before me, this absurd
reflection flitted through my mind:

'If he only knew it, there's me! But he will never know--how could
he?'

The absurd vanity and audacity of the thought made me blush like a
bashful schoolgirl. The ridiculous pretentiousness of the thought that
in me, the 'inmate' of St. Peter's, this splendid person could find a
companion, impressed me now so painfully that I felt it must be
plainly visible; that the visitor must see and be scornfully amused by
it. Yet, with really extraordinary cordiality, he was holding out his
right hand in salutation. Here again my awkwardness made me bungle.
What he meant by his gesture I could not think. Some amusing trick,
perhaps. It did not occur to me in that moment of self-abasement that
he wished to shake an 'inmate's' hand.

'Won't you shake?' he asked, with that smile of his--so unlike any
expression one saw on folks' faces at St. Peter's.

'I beg your pardon,' I faltered, and gave him a limp hand, reviling
myself inwardly for conduct which I felt would utterly and for ever
condemn me in this gentleman's eyes. 'Of course,' I told myself,
'he'll be thinking: "What can one expect from these unfortunate
inmates--friendless orphans, living on charity?"' As a fact, I suppose
no man's demeanour could have been less suggestive of any such
uncharitable thought.

'I suspect you thought it like my cheek, yelling at you like that. The
fact is, I had just begun to sketch you. See!'

He showed me his sketch-block, upon which I saw in outline the figure
of a boy carrying pails and leaning over a fence. What chiefly caught
my eye in this was the reproduction of my absurd trousers, one torn
leg reaching midway down the calf, the other in jagged scallops about
my knee. He might have idealised my rags a little, I thought, in my
ignorance. No doubt I had been better pleased if Mr. Rawlence had
endowed me in the sketch with the dress of, say, a smart clerk. And,
apart from the artistic aspect, the man who would sniff at this as
evidence of contemptible snobbishness in me, would take a more lenient
view, perhaps, if he had ever spent a year or two in an orphanage like
St. Peter's.

'It has the makings of quite a good little character study, I fancy.
Later on, when you're free--perhaps, to-morrow--I'll get you to give
me half an hour, if you will, to make a real sketch of it.'

It was in my mind that if only I could make a remark of the right kind
I might immediately differentiate myself in this artist's eyes from
the general run of 'inmates.' This again may have been an unworthy and
snobbish thought, but I know it was mine at the time, based in my mind
upon the unvoiced but profound conviction that I was different in
essence from the other orphans. This was not mere conceit, I think,
because it emanated rather from pride in my father than from any
exalted opinion of myself. But, whatever the rights of it, no suitable
remark came to me. Indeed, beyond an incoherent mumble over the
hand-shaking, I might have been a mute for all the part I had so far
taken in this interview. And just then I caught a glimpse of Sister
Agatha emerging from behind the wood-stack at the end of the vegetable
garden, and that gave me something else to think about.

'Excuse me!' I said, angrily conscious that I was flushing again and
that all my limbs were in my way, and that I was presenting a most
uncouth appearance. 'I must get on with the milking.' And then I made
my plunge. 'Perhaps you would speak to Sister-in-charge. Not this one
here, but Sister-in-charge,' I hurriedly added as Sister Agatha drew
nearer, her thin lips tightly compressed, her gimlet eyes full of
promise of ear-tweakings. 'She would perhaps give me leave to--to do
anything you wanted. I--I am sure she would. Good-bye!'

Having hurriedly fired this last shot, I bolted into the milking-shed.
Just for an instant I had succeeded in meeting Mr. Rawlence's eye. I
had very much wanted to show him something, as, for example, that I
would gladly do anything he liked, even to the extent of allowing him
to trample all over me--if only I had been a free agent. In some way I
had longed to claim kinship with him, in a humble fashion; to say that
I understood him and his kind, despite my ragged trousers and scarred,
dusty bare feet. Now, with a pail between my knees, and my head in a
cow's flank, I was very sure I had utterly failed to convey anything,
except that I was an uncouth creature. My eyes smarted from
mortification; and the grotesque thought crossed my mind that if only
I had had a photograph of my father, and could have shown it to Mr.
Rawlence, the position would have been quite different! I suppose I
must have been a rather fatuous youth. Also, I was obsessed to the
point of mania by the determination not to become a veritable 'inmate'
of St. Peter's, like my fellows there, however long I might be
condemned to live in the place.

During the next three days I was greatly depressed by the fact that I
never caught a glimpse of the artist anywhere. In fact, it was said
that he had gone away from Myall Creek altogether. And then, greatly
to my secret joy, the Sister-in-charge sent for me one morning and
said:

'There is an artist gentleman coming here, Mr. Rawlence. You are to do
whatever he tells you, and carry his things for him while he is here.
Be careful now. I have word from Father O'Malley about this. Be sure
you don't neglect your milking. You can tell the gentleman when you
have to go to that. You can do some wood-chopping after tea, if he
should want you in your chopping time. Run along now, and go over in
the punt with Tim when he goes to meet the gentleman.'

It would seem the good-will of the Great Powers had once more been
invoked in connection with me; and I learned afterwards that Mr.
Rawlence had not left the district, but had been staying in Werrina
for a few days. While there, no doubt, he had met Father O'Malley, and
very casually, I dare say, had mentioned his fancy for sketching me.
At the time these trivial events stirred me deeply. That Father
O'Malley should have been approached seemed to me a fact of high
portent. If only I had had a portrait of my father!

As Destiny ruled it, Mr. Rawlence spent but the one day at St.
Peter's, in place of the enthralling vista of days, each of more
romantic interest than its predecessor, of which I had dreamed. He had
news demanding his return to Sydney; and, as he said, he ought not to
have come out to St. Peter's even for this one day. But he wanted to
complete his sketch. So that, in a sense, he really came to see me
again. This radiant being's swift and important movements in the great
world outside the Orphanage were directly influenced by me. It was a
stirring thought, and went some way toward compensating me for the
shattered vista of many days spent in leisurely attendance upon the
man belonging to my father's order. It was thus I thought of him.

I cannot of course recall every word spoken and every little event of
that momentous day, and it would serve no useful purpose if I could.
It was important for me, less by reason of anything remarkable in
itself, than by virtue of what was going on in my own mind while I
posed for Mr. Rawlence (possibly in more senses than one) and
subsequently carried his paraphernalia for him, showed him his way
about the island, and generally attended upon him. I had hoped that he
would question me about my life before coming to St. Peter's, and he
did. By this time I was at my ease with him, and I think I told my
brief story intelligently. In any case, I interested him; so much I
saw clearly and with satisfaction. I noted, too, that he was impressed
by the name of the London newspaper with which my father had been
connected before his determination to seek peace in the wilds.

'H'm!' 'Ah!' 'Strange!' 'A recluse indeed!' 'And you think he had
never seen this--St. Peter's, that is, when he wrote the letter
arranging for you to come here? Well, to be sure, there was little
choice, of course, little choice enough, and in such a lonely,
isolated place.'

I remember these among his exclamations and comments upon my story.
And then he asked me what ideas I had about my future, and I told him,
none. I also told him of Ted's visit and of his offer to me, and my
refusal of it.

'Yes,' he said, 'that was wise of you, I think; that certainly was
best. In some countries now, in the Old World, one might advise you to
stick to the country. But here-- Well, you know, there must be some
real reason for the rapid growth of the Australian capital cities, and
the comparative stagnation of the countryside. The more cultured
people won't leave the capitals, and that affects country life. Yes,
but why won't they leave the cities? They do in the Old World, for
I've met 'em in the villages and country towns there. But why is it?'

Mr. Rawlence could hardly have expected an answer from me; but part of
his charm was that he made it seem, while he talked and I listened,
that we were jointly discussing the subject of his monologue, and that
he was much interested by my views. He had that air; his smile and his
manner made one feel that.

'Well, you know,' he continued, 'it must be partly the crude material
difficulties which the actual and physical conditions of country life
here present to educated people, and partly the fact that our country
in Australia has got no traditions, no associations, no atmosphere. It
is just a negation, a wilderness; not a rural civilisation, but a mere
gap in civilisation. Pioneering is picturesque enough--in fiction. In
fact, it permits of no leisure and no idealisation; and without those
things----'

Mr. Rawlence paused with outstretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and
the smile of one who should say--'You understand, of course.' My
modest contribution was in three words, delivered with emphatic
gestures of acquiescence--'That's just it.'

'Exactly,' resumed the artist. 'Without leisure, without time for
anything outside the material things of life, where is your culture?
Where is art? Where is romance? Where, in short, is civilisation? And
so, as I say, I cannot advise you to stick to the country here. No,
one really can't conscientiously advise that, you know.'

A listener might fairly have supposed that I was a young gentleman of
means who had sought advice as to the desirability of investing
capital in rural New South Wales, and taking up, say, the pastoral
life, in preference to a professional career in Sydney. I pinched my
knees exultingly; perhaps to demonstrate to myself the fact that all
this was no dream. It was I, the orphan, who was carrying on this
thrilling conversation with an accomplished man of the world, a
distinguished artist. I felt that Mr. Rawlence must clearly be a
distinguished artist.

'And so what--what would you advise me to do?' I asked when a pause
came. And, immediately, I reproached myself, feeling that I had broken
a delightful spell, and risked abruptly ending the most interesting
conversation in which I ever took part. The words of my question had
so crude a sound. They dragged our talk down to a lower plane, to a
plane merely utilitarian, almost squalid by comparison with the
roseate heights we had been easily skimming. That was how the sound of
my own poor words struck me; but my companion was not so easily
dashed. My crudity could not fret his accomplished _savoir-faire_.
(Mr. Rawlence impressed me as the most finished man of the world I had
ever met, with the single exception of my father; and, indeed, the
Sydney artist did shine brightly beside the sort of people I had lived
among of late.)

'Well,' he said, with smiling thoughtfulness, 'I would advise you,
when--when the time comes, to make your way to Sydney, and to--to work
up a place for yourself there. Of course, there is your native
country--England. Who knows? Some day, perhaps-- But, meantime, I
think Sydney offers better chances than any other place in this
country. Yes, I think so. Have you any special leanings? Is there any
particular work that you are specially keen on?'

Like a flash the thought passed through my mind: 'What a miserable
creature I must be! There's nothing I particularly want to do. If he
finds that out, there's an end to any interest in me, of course. Why
haven't I thought of this before? What can I say?' And in the same
moment, without appreciable pause, I was startled, but agreeably
startled, to hear my own voice saying in quite an intelligent way:
'Well, my father wrote, of course; his work was literary work,
and--newspapers, you know.'

I can answer for it that I had never till that moment given a single
thought to any such notion as a literary career for myself. As well
think of a prime minister's career, I should have thought. But, as I
well remember, my very accent, intonation, and choice of words had all
insensibly changed to fit, as I thought, the taste and habit of my new
friend. And I felt it would be an extravagant folly to talk to him as
I had talked with Ted, or as I talked with fellow orphans at St.
Peter's, of 'pound-er-week-an'-all-found' jobs, or the 'good money'
there was 'in carting,' or the fine careers that offered in connection
with the construction of new railways. I had often been told you could
not beat the job of cooking for a shearers' or a navvies' camp; and
that a wideawake boy could earn 'good money' while learning it, as a
rouseabout assistant. It seemed to me that there would have been
something too absurdly incongruous in attempting to talk of such
things to Mr. Rawlence. Hence, perhaps, my audacious suggestion of the
literary career. There I might secure his interest. And, sure enough,
I did.

'Ah! to be sure, to be sure,' he said, nodding encouragingly. 'Well,
with that in view, Sydney is practically the only place, you know.
Mind you, I don't say it's easy, or that one could hope to make
headway quickly; but gradually, gradually, a fellow could feel his way
there, if anywhere in the colony. It is undoubtedly our centre of art
and literature, and culture generally. At first you might have to do
quite different sort of work; but, while doing it, you know, you could
be always on the lookout, always feeling your way to better things.
Sydney is, at all events, a capital city, you see. There is society in
Sydney, in a metropolitan sense. There is culture. One is continually
meeting interesting people who are doing interesting things. It's not
Paris or London, you know, but----'

He had a trick of using a radiant smile in place of articulation, by
way of finishing a sentence; and I found it more eloquent than any
words, and, to me, more subtly flattering. It said so clearly, and
more tactfully than words: 'But you follow me, I see; I know _you_
understand me.' And I felt with rare delight that I could and did
follow this fascinating man, and understand all his airy allusions to
things as far beyond the purview of my present life and prospect as
the heavens are beyond the earth, or as Mr. Rawlence was above an
'inmate' of St. Peter's. To a twentieth-century English artist, Mr.
Rawlence might have seemed a shade crude, possibly rather pompous and
affected, somewhat jejune and trite, perhaps. But our talk took place
in the 'seventies of last century, in New South Wales. The Board
School was a new invention in England, and in Australia there was
quite a lot of bushranging still to come, and the arrival of
transported convicts had but recently ceased.

I have not attempted to set down anything like the whole of the talk
between the artist and myself; rather, to indicate its quality. Much
of it, I dare say, was trivial, and all of it would appear so in
written form. Its effect upon me was altogether out of proportion to
its real significance, no doubt. It was all new talk to me, but I
admit it is not easy now to understand its profoundly stirring and
inspiring influence. A casual phrase or two, for example, affected my
thoughts for long months afterwards. Mr. Rawlence said:

'There's an accomplishment coming into general use now that might help
you enormously: phonography, shorthand-writing, you know. I am told it
will mean a revolution in ordinary clerical work, and newspaper work
already rests largely on it. The man who can write a hundred words a
minute--I think that's about what they manage with it--will command a
good post in any office, or on any newspaper, I should think. I should
certainly learn shorthand, if I were you. Perhaps you could get them
to introduce it here.'

I thought of Sister Agatha, and pictured myself suggesting to her the
introduction of shorthand into our curriculum in the Orphanage school.
And at the same moment I recalled the occasions, only yesterday, upon
which I had had to 'hold out' my hand to this bitterly enthusiastic
wielder of the cane. My palms had purple weals on them at that moment,
tough though they were from outdoor work. I clenched my hands
involuntarily, and was thankful the artist could not see their palms.
That would have been a horrid humiliation; the very thought of it made
me flush. No, this shorthand would hardly be introduced at St.
Peter's; but I would learn it, I thought, all the same; and in due
course I did, to find (again in due course) that even the acquisition
of this mystery hardly represented quite the infallible key to fame
and fortune that Mr. Rawlence thought it in the 'seventies.

But my attitude toward this sufficiently casual suggestion was typical
of the immensely stirring and impressive influence which all the
artist's talk of that day had upon me. It was undoubtedly most kindly
of him to show all the interest 

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