Youth--Australia (Part 5)

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_ XV

My third day at J. Canning and Son's offices was a Saturday, and the establishment closed at one o'clock. My room-mate, Mr. Smith, had invited me to spend the afternoon with him at Manly, the favourite sea-beach resort close to Sydney Heads. I had other plans in view, but did not like to refuse Mr. Smith, and so spent the time with him, not without enjoyment.

Manly was not, of course, the thronged and crowded place it is to-day, but its Saturday afternoon visitors were fairly numerous, and most of them were people who showed in a variety of ways that they did not have to consider very closely the expenditure of a sovereign or so. For our part, Mr. Smith's and mine, I doubt if our outing cost more than five shillings; and, though I succeeded in paying my own boat-fares, my companion insisted upon settling himself for the refreshments we had: a cup of tea in the afternoon, and a sort of high tea or supper before leaving. I had not begun to tire of watching people, and was innocent enough to derive keen satisfaction from the thought that I, too, was one of these city folk, business people, office men, who gave their Saturday leisure to the quest of ocean breezes and recreation in this well-known resort.

Yes, from this distance, it is a little hard to realise perhaps, but it is a fact that at this particular time I was genuinely proud of being a clerk in an office, in place of being a handy lad, and one of the manual workers. It was my lot in later years to dictate considerable correspondence to young men who practised shorthand and typewriting--they called themselves secretaries, not correspondence clerks--and I always felt an interest in their characters and affairs, and endeavoured to show them every consideration. But I cannot say that those who served me in this capacity ever played just the sort of part I played as a correspondence clerk in Sussex Street. But they always interested me, none the less, and I showed them special consideration; no doubt because I remembered a period when I took much secret pride and satisfaction in having obtained entrance to their ranks, from what in all countries which I have visited is accounted a lowlier walk of life. And yet, as I see it now, I must confess that I am inclined to think the handy lad in the open air has rather the best of it. I admit this is open to question, however. Fortunately there are compensations in both cases.

'For a young fellow you do a lot of thinking,' said Mr. Smith to me as we walked slowly down to the ferry stage in leaving Manly. Of course I indulged in one of my idiotic blushes.

'No; oh no,' I told him. 'I was only watching the people.'

'Well, there's nothing to be ashamed of in thinking,' he justly said. 'If most of the youngsters in Sydney did a deal more of it, it would be a lot better for them.'

'Ah, you mean thinking about their work.' I knew instinctively, and because of remarks he had made, that my elderly room-mate thought well of me as being a very practical lad, seriously determined to get on in the world. And so, also instinctively, I played up, as they say, to this view of my character, and I dare say overdid it at times; certainly to the extent of making myself appear more practical, or more concentrated upon material progress, than I really was.

'Oh, I don't know about that,' said Mr. Smith as we boarded the steamer. 'Business isn't the only thing in life, and there are plenty other things worth thinking about.' Yes, odd as it seems, it was I who was being reminded that there were other things worth thinking of besides business; I ... 'No, but it would be better for 'em to do a lot more thinking about all kinds of things. Thinking is better than running after little chits of girls who ought to be smacked and put to bed.'

Two refulgent youths had just passed us, in the wake of damsels whose favour they apparently sought to win as favour is perhaps won in poultry-yards--by cackling.

'I've had to do a powerful lot of talking in my time,' continued Mr. Smith; 'and now I like to see any one, and especially any young fellow, understand that it's not necessary to talk for talking's sake, and that when you've nothing particular to say, it's better to be quiet and think, than--than just to blither, as so many do.'

I endeavoured to look as much as possible like a deep thinker as I acquiesced, and made mental note of the fact that I had evidently been rather neglecting my companion.

'Mind you,' he added, 'it isn't only in office hours and at his work that a man makes for success in business. Not a bit of it. It's when he's thinking things out away from the office. Why, some of the best business I ever brought off I've really done in bed--the planning out of it, you know.'

I nodded the understanding sympathy of a wily and experienced hand at business. I wonder if the average youth is equally adaptive! Probably not, for I suppose it means I was a good deal of a humbug. All I knew of business, so far, was what Sussex Street had shown me; and if I had been perfectly candid, I should have admitted that, so far from striking me as interesting, it seemed to me absurdly, incredibly dull and uninteresting; so much so as to have a guise of unreality to me. But my letters interested me none the less.

The facts of the situation were unreal. I cared nothing about Canning and Son's profits, or the prices of Mr. Gubbins's butter; nothing whatever. But I derived considerable satisfaction from turning out a letter the fluent suavity of which I thought would impress Mr. Gubbins. Primarily, my satisfaction came from the impression the letters made upon me personally. Also, I enjoyed the sense of importance it gave me to open the firm's letters myself, and to tell myself that, given certain bald facts to be acquired from this man or the other, I could reply to them far better than Mr. John could. I liked to make him think my smugly correct phrasing was his own, because I knew it was much more polished, and I thought it much more effective than his own; and I liked to figure myself a sort of anonymous power behind the throne--the Sussex Street throne!

As we breasted the hill together from the North Shore landing-place, Mr. Smith delivered himself of these sapient words, designed, I am sure, to be of real help to me:

'What they call success in life is a simple business, really; only nobody thinks so, and so very few find it out. They're always looking round for special dodges, and wasting time following up special methods recommended by this fool or the other. There's only one thing wanted really for success, and that's just keeping on. Just keeping on; that's all. If you never let go of yourself--never, mind you, but just keep on, steady and regular, you can't help succeeding. It just comes to you. But you must keep on. It's no good having a shot at this, and trying the other. The way is just to keep on.'

My mentor was in a seriously practical vein on this Saturday night; partly perhaps because, as the event proved, he was within four days of one of his periodical disappearances.

XVI

In the early afternoon of Sunday I set out upon the visit I had originally intended to pay on the previous day.

Three o'clock found me rather nervously ringing a bell at the door of Filson House in Macquarie Street. Under the brightly polished bell-pull was the name C. F. Rawlence, and the legend: 'Do not ring unless an answer is required.' It was my first experience of such a notice, and I felt uncertain how it was intended to apply. Neither for the moment could I understand why in the world any sane person should ring a bell unless desirous of eliciting a response of some kind. Finally, I decided that it must be a plaintive and exceedingly trustful appeal to the good nature of urchins who might be tempted to ring and run away.

A smiling young Chinaman presently opened the door to me, and said: 'You come top-side alonga me, pease; Mr. Lollance he's in.'

So I walked upstairs behind the silent, felt-shod Asiatic, and wondered what was coming next. I had hitherto associated Chinamen in Australia exclusively with market-gardening and laundry work. The house was not a very high one, but it really was its 'top-side' we walked to, and, arrived there, I was shown into what I thought must certainly be the largest and most magnificent apartment in Sydney.

I dare say the room was thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, without counting the huge fireplace at one end, which formed a room in itself, and did actually accommodate several easy chairs, though I cannot think the weather was ever cold enough in Sydney to admit of people sitting so close to a log fire as these chairs were placed. There were suits of armour, skins of beasts, strange weapons, curious tapestries, and other stock properties of artists' studios, all conventional enough, and yet to me most startling. I had never before visited a studio, and did not know that artists affected these things. The magnificence of it all impressed me enormously. It almost oppressed me with a sense of my own temerity in venturing to visit any one who maintained such state.

'This is what it means to be a famous artist,' I told myself, well assured now, in my innocence, that Mr. Rawlence must be very famous. 'Every one else probably knew it before,' I thought. And just then the great man himself appeared, not at the door behind me, but between heavy curtains which hid some other entrance. He came forward with a welcoming smile. Then, for a moment this gave place to rather blank inquiry. And then the smile returned and broadened.

'Why, it's-- No, it can't be. But it is--my young friend of St. Peter's. I'm delighted. Welcome to Sydney. Sit down, sit down, and let me have your news.'

He reclined in a sidelong way upon a sort of ottoman, and gracefully waved me to an enormous chair facing him.

'There are always a few charitable souls who drop in upon me of a Sunday afternoon, but I'd no idea you would be the first of them to-day.'

Here was a disturbing announcement for me!

'Perhaps it would be more convenient if I came one evening, Mr. Rawlence,' I said awkwardly, half rising from the chair.

'Tut, tut, my dear lad! Sit down, sit down. Why should other visitors disturb you? There will only be good fellows like yourself. Ladies are rarities here on a Sunday. And in any case-- Why, you are quite the man of the world now.' This with kindly admiration. Then he screwed up his eyes, moved his head backward and from side to side, as though to correct his view of a picture. 'Just one point out of the picture. Dare I alter it? May I?' And, stepping forward, he thrust well down in my breast coat pocket Mrs. Gabbitas's gorgeous silk handkerchief. 'Yes,' as he moved backward again, 'that's better. One never can see these things for oneself. But let me make sure of your important news before we are interrupted.'

So I told my story as well as I could, and Mr. Rawlence was in the act of expressing his kindly interest therein, when I heard steps and voices on the stairs below.

'If you're not otherwise engaged you must stay till these fellows go, Nick,' said my host. 'We haven't half finished our talk, you know. And--er--if you should be talking to any one here of--er--your present situation, I should leave it quite vague, if I were you; secretarial work you know--something of that sort. We may have some newspaper men here who might be useful to you one day--you follow me?'

'Ah! Hail! Good of you to have come, Landon. Ah, Foster! Jones! Good men! Do find seats. Oh, let me introduce a new arrival--Mr. Nicholas Freydon; Mr. Landon, the disgracefully well-known painter, Mr. Foster and Mr. Jones, both of the Fourth Estate, though frequently taken for quite respectable members of society. We may not have a Fleet Street here, you know, Freydon, but we have one or two rather decent newspapers, as you may have noticed.'

He turned to the still smiling young Chinaman. 'Let's have cigars and cigarettes, Ah Lun.'

I gathered that I had been presented as a new arrival from England. It was rather startling; but so far I found that an occasional smile was all that seemed expected of me, and I was of course anxious to do my best. 'Good thing I've started smoking,' I thought, as Ah Lun began passing round two massive silver boxes, with cigars and cigarettes. The visitors were mostly young, rather noticeably young, I thought, in view of the greying hair over Mr. Rawlence's temples; and I felt less and less alarmed as I listened to their talk. In fact, shamelessly disrespectful though the idea was, I found myself, after a while, wondering whether Mr. Smith might not have called some of the conversation 'cackle.' And then some technicalities, journalistic and artistic, began to star the talk, and I meekly rebuked my own presumption. But I have no doubt whatever that Mr. Smith would have called most of it 'cackle,' and it is possible he would have been tolerably near the truth.

Within an hour I had been introduced to perhaps a score of visitors, and Ah Lun was just as busy as he could be, serving tea, whisky, wine, soda-water, cigars, cigarettes, sandwiches, and so forth. It was all tremendously exciting to me. The mere sound of so many voices, apart from anything else, I found wonderfully stimulating, if a trifle bewildering.

'This,' I told myself, in a highly impressive, though necessarily inarticulate stage-whisper of thought, 'This is Society; this is what's called the Social Vortex; and I am right in the bubbling centre of it.' And then I thought how wonderful it would have been if Mr. Jokram, of Dursley's School of Arts Committee, and one or two others--say, Sister Agatha, for example--could have been permitted to take a peep between the magnificent curtains, and have a glimpse of me, engaged in brilliant conversation with a celebrity of some kind, whose neck-tie would have made an ample sash for little Nelly Fane--of me, the St. Peter's orphan, in Society!

Truly, I was an innocent and unlicked cub. But I believe I managed to pull through the afternoon without notably disgracing my distinguished host and patron; and, too, without referring even to 'secretarial work.' I might have been heir to a dukedom, a distinguished remittance man, or even a congenital idiot, for all the company was allowed to gather from me as to my means of livelihood.

XVII

Towards six o'clock the company began to thin out somewhat, and within the hour I found myself once more alone with Mr. Rawlence.

'Well, and what do you think of these few representatives of Sydney's Bohemia?' asked my host. 'They are not, perhaps, leading pillars of our official society, as one may say--the Government House set, you know--but my Sunday afternoon visitors are apt to be pretty fairly representative of our best literary and artistic circles, I think. Interesting fellows, are they not? I was glad to notice you had a few words with Foster, the editor of the Chronicle. If you still have literary or journalistic ambitions, and have not been entirely captivated by the pundits of commerce and money-making, Foster might be of material assistance to you.'

Just then Ah Lun passed before us (still smiling), carrying a tray full of used glasses.

'We'll have a bit of dinner here, Ah Lun. I won't go out to-night. I dare say you have something we can pick over. Let us know when it's ready.'

Really, as I look back upon it, I see even more clearly than at the time that the artist was extraordinarily kind to me; to an obscure and friendless youth, none too presentable, and little likely just then to do him credit. I would prefer to set down here only that which I understood and felt at the time. Perhaps that is not quite possible, in the light of subsequently acquired knowledge and experience. This much I can say: there was no hint at this time of any wavering or diminution in the almost worshipful regard I felt for Mr. Rawlence.

Seen in his own chosen setting, he was the most magnificent person I had met. Aestheticism of a pronounced sort was becoming the fashion of the day in London; and, as I presently found, Mr. Rawlence followed the fashions of London and Paris closely. Indeed, I gathered that at one time he had settled down, determined to live and to end his days in one or other of those Old World capitals. But after a year divided between them, he had returned to Sydney, and gradually formed his Macquarie Street home and social connections. No doubt he was a more important figure there than he would have been in Europe. His private income made him easily independent of earnings artistic or otherwise. I apprehend he lived at the rate of about a thousand pounds a year, or a little more, which meant a good deal in Sydney in those days. I remember being told at one time that he did not earn fifty pounds in a year as a painter; but, of course, I could not answer for that.

I think he derived his greatest satisfactions from the society of young aspirants in art, literature, and journalism; and I incline to think it was more to please and interest, to serve and to impress these neophytes, than from any inclination of his own, that he also assiduously cultivated the society of a few maturer men who were definitely placed in the Sydney world as artists, writers, editors, and so forth. But such conclusions came to me gradually, of course. I had not thought of them during that delightfully exciting experience--my first visit to the Macquarie Street studio.

The simple little dinner was for me a thrilling episode. The deft-handed Chinaman hovering behind our chairs, the softly shaded table-lights, the wine in tall, fantastically shaped Bohemian glasses, the very food--all unfamiliar, and therefore fascinating: olives, smoked salmon--to which I helped myself largely, believing it to be sliced tomato--a cold bird of sorts, no slices of bread but little rolls in place of them, no tea, and no dishes ever seen in Mrs. Gabbitas's kitchen, or at my North Shore lodging. And then the figure of my host, lounging at table in the rosy light, a cigarette between the shapely fingers of his right hand--I had not before seen any one smoke at the dinner-table--his brown velvet coat, his languidly graceful gestures, the delicate hue of his flowing neck-tie, the costly sort of negligence of his whole dress and deportment--all these trifling matters were alike rare and exquisite in my eyes.

After their fashion the day, and in particular the evening, were an education for me. I spent a couple of hours over the short homeward journey to Mill Street, the better to savour and consider my impressions. The previous day belonged to my remote past. I had travelled through ages of experience since then. For example, I quite definitely was no longer proud of being a clerk in an office. As I realised this I smiled down as from a great height upon a recollection of the chorus of a Scots ditty sung by a sailor on board the Ariadne. I have no notion of how to spell the words, but they ran somewhat in this wise:

'Wi' a Hi heu honal, an' a honal heu hi,
Comelachie, Ecclefechan, Ochtermochty an' Mulgye,
Wi' a Hi heu honal, an' a honal heu hi,
It's a braw thing a clairk in an orfiss.'

Well, it was no such a braw thing to me that night, as it had seemed on the previous day. I had heard the word 'commercial' spoken with an intonation which I fancied Mr. Smith would greatly resent. But I did not resent it. And that was another of the fruits of my immense experience: Mr. Smith would never again hold first place as my mentor. How could he? Why, even some of my own innocent notions of the past--of pre-Macquarie Street days--seemed nearer the real thing than one or two of poor Mr. Smith's obiter dicta. I had noted the hats of that elect assemblage, and there had not been a billycock among them. Not a single example of the headgear which Mr. Smith held necessary for the self-respecting man in Sydney! But, on the contrary, there had been quite a number of a kind which approximated more or less to the soft brown hat purchased by me in Dursley, and discarded upon Mr. Smith's urgent recommendation in favour of the more rigid and precise billycock. I reflected upon this significant fact for quite a long while.

Certainly, the world was a very wonderful place. Was it possible that a week ago I had been a handy lad, dressed merely in shirt and trousers, and engaged in planting out tomatoes? I arrived at the corner of Mill Street, and turning on my heel walked away from it. I wanted to try over, out loud, one or two such phrases as these:

'I've been dining with an artist friend in Macquarie Street!'--'I was saying this afternoon to the editor of the Chronicle'--'I met some delightful people at my friend Mr. Rawlence's studio this afternoon!'

But, upon the whole, there was a more subtle joy in the enunciation of certain other remarks, supposed to come from somebody else:

'I met Mr. Freydon, Mr. Nicholas Freydon, you know, this afternoon. He had looked in at Rawlence's studio in Macquarie Street. In fact, I believe he stayed there to dinner before going on to his rooms at North Shore. Rawlence certainly does get all the most interesting people at his place. Landon, the painter, was deep in conversation with Mr. Freydon. No, I don't know what Mr. Freydon does--some secretarial appointment, I fancy. He's evidently a great friend of Rawlence's.'

It is surprising that I can set these things down with no particular sense of shame. I distinctly remember striding along the deserted roads, speaking these absurdities aloud, in an only slightly subdued conversational voice. My mood was one of remarkable exaltation. I wonder if other young men have been equally mad!

'How d'ye do, Foster?' I would murmur airily as I swung round a corner. 'Have you seen my new book?'; or, 'I noticed you published that article of mine yesterday!' Presently I found myself in open, scrub-covered country, and singing, quite loudly, the old sailor's doggerel about its being a braw thing to be a 'clairk in an orfiss'; my real thought being that it was a braw thing to be Nicholas Freydon, a clerk in an office, who was very soon to be something quite otherwise.

I am not quite sure if this mood was typical of the happy madness of youth. There may have been a lamentable kind of snobbery about it; I dare say. I only know this was my mood; these were my apparently crazy actions on that remote Sunday night. And, too, before getting into bed that night--fortunately for himself, perhaps, poor Mr. Smith was already asleep, and so safe from my loquacity--I carefully folded the two magnificent rainbow-hued silk handkerchiefs which good Mrs. Gabbitas had given me, and stowed them away at the very bottom of my ancient carpet-bag.

The sort of remarks which I had been addressing to the moon were not remarks which I ever should have dreamed of addressing to any human being. I think in justice I might add that. But I had greatly enjoyed hearing myself say them to the silent night.

XVIII

Actually, I dare say the process of one's sophistication was gradual enough. But looking back now upon my Dursley period, and the four years spent in Sydney--and, indeed, my stay in the Orphanage, and my life with my father in Livorno Bay--it appears to me that my growth, education, development, whatever it may be called, came at intervals, jerkily, in sudden leaps forward. The truth probably is that the development was constant and steady, but that its symptoms declared themselves spasmodically.

It would seem that there ought to have been a phase of smart, clerkly dandyism; but perhaps Mr. Rawlence's kindly hospitality in Macquarie Street nipped that in the bud, substituting for it a kind of twopenny aestheticism, which made me affect floppy neckties and a studied negligence of dress, combined with some neglect of the barber. In these things, as in certain other matters, there were some singular contradictions and inconsistencies in me, and I was distinctly precocious. The precocity was due, I take it, to the fact that I had never known family life, and that my companions had always been older than myself. I fancy that most people I met supposed me to be at least three or four years older than I was, and were sedulously encouraged by me in that supposition. I was precocious, too, in another way. I could have grown a beard and moustache at seventeen. Instead, I assiduously plied the razor night and morning, and derived satisfaction from something which irritated me greatly in later years--the remarkably rapid and sturdy growth of my beard.

As against these extravagances I must record the fact that my parsimony in monetary matters survived. Mr. John, in Sussex Street, presently raised my salary to two pounds ten shillings a week; but I continued to share Mr. Smith's bedroom, and to pay only sixteen shillings weekly for my board and lodging. What was more to the point, I was equally careful in most other matters affecting expenditure, and never added less than a pound each week to my savings bank account; an achievement by no means always equalled in after years, even when earnings were ten times larger. I may have, and did indulge in the most extravagant conceits of the mind. But these never seriously affected my pocket.

There is perhaps something rather distasteful in the idea of so much economic prudence in one so young. A certain generous carelessness is proper to youth. Well, I had none of it, at this time, in money matters. And, distasteful or not, I am glad of it, since, at all events, it had this advantage: at a very critical period I was preserved from the grosser and more perilous indulgences of youth. When the time did arrive at which I ceased to be very careful in money spending, I had presumably acquired a little more balance, and was a little safer than in those adolescent Sydney years.

Here again my qualities were presumably the product of my condition and circumstances. To be left quite alone in the world while yet a child, as I had been, does, I apprehend, stimulate a certain worldly prudence in regard, at all events, to so obvious a matter as the balance of income and expenditure. I felt that if I were ever stranded and penniless there would be no one in the whole world to lend me a helping hand, or to save me from being cut adrift from all that I had come to hold precious, and flung back into the slough of manual labour--for that, curiously enough, is how I then regarded it. Not, of course, that I had found manual work in itself unpleasant in any way; but that I then considered my escape from it had carried me into a social and mental atmosphere superior to that which the manual worker could reach.

Except when he was absent from Sydney, Mr. Rawlence always received his friends at the Macquarie Street studio on Sundays, and none was more regular in attendance than myself. It would be very easy, of course, to be sarcastic at Mr. Rawlence's expense; to poke fun at the well-to-do gentleman approaching middle age, who clung to the pretence of being a working artist, and to avoid criticism, or because more mature workers would not seek his society, liked to surround himself with neophytes--a Triton among minnows. And indeed, as I found, there were those--some old enough to know better, and others young enough to be more generous--who were not above adopting this attitude even whilst enjoying their victim's hospitality; aye, and enjoying it greedily.

But neither then nor at any subsequent period was I tempted to ridicule a man uniformly kind and helpful to me; and this, not at all because I blinded myself to his weaknesses and imperfections, but because I found, and still find, these easily outweighed by his good and genuinely kindly qualities. His may not have been a very dignified way of life; it was too full of affectations for that; particularly after he began to be greatly influenced by the rather sickly aesthetic movement then in vogue in London. But it was, at least, a harmless life; and, upon the whole, a generous and kindly one.

Its influence upon me, for example, tended, I am sure, to give me a pronounced distaste for the coarse and vulgar sort of dissipation which very often engaged the leisure of my office companions, and other youths of similar occupation in Sydney. It may be that the causes behind my aloofness from mere vulgar frivolity, and worse, were pretty mixed: part pride, or even conceit, and part prudence or parsimony. No matter. The influence was helpful, for the abstention was real, and the distaste grew always more rooted as time wore on. Also, the same influence tended to make me more fastidious, more critical, less crude than I might otherwise have been. It led me to give more serious attention to pictures, music, and literature of the less ephemeral sort than I might otherwise have given. It was not that Mr. Rawlence and his friends advised one to study Shakespeare, or to attend the better sort of concerts, or to learn something of art and criticism. But talk that I heard in that studio did make me feel that it was eminently desirable I should inform myself more fully in these matters.

Listening to a discussion there of some quite worthless thing more than once moved me to the investigation of something of real value. I was still tolerably credulous, and when a man's casual reference suggested that he and every one else was naturally intimate with this or that, I would make it my business, so far as might be, really to obtain some knowledge of the matter. I assumed, often quite mistakenly, no doubt, that every one else present had this particular knowledge. Thus the spirit of emulation helped me as it might never have done but for Mr. Rawlence and his sumptuous studio, so rich in everything save examples of his own work.

* * * * *

I fancy it must have been fully a year after my arrival in Sydney that I met Mr. Foster, the editor of the Chronicle, as I was walking down from Sussex Street to Circular Quay one evening.

'Ah, Freydon,' he said; 'what an odd coincidence! I was this moment thinking of you, and of something you said last Sunday at Rawlence's. I can't use the article you sent me. It's-- Well, for one thing, it's rather too much like fiction; like a story, you know. But, tell me, what do you do for a living?'

'I'm a correspondence clerk, at present, in a Sussex Street business house.'

'H'm! Yes, I rather thought something of the sort--and very good practical training, too, I should say. But I gather you are keen on press work, eh?'

I gave an eager affirmative, and the editor nodded.

'Ye--es,' he said musingly as we turned aside into Wynyard Square. 'I should think you'd do rather well at it. But, mind you, I fancy there are bigger rewards to be won in business.'

'If there are, I don't want them,' I rejoined, with a warmth that surprised myself.

'Ah! Well, there's only one way, you know, in journalism as in other things. One must begin at the foundations, and work right through to the roof. I'll tell you what; if you'd care to come on the Chronicle--reporting, you know--I could give you a vacancy now.'

No doubt I showed the thrill this announcement gave me when I thanked him for thinking of me.

'Oh, that's all right. There's no favour in it. I wouldn't offer it if I didn't think you'd do full justice to it. And, mind you, there's nothing tempting about it, financially at all events. I couldn't start you at more than two or three pounds a week.'

Now here, despite my elation, I spoke with a shrewdness often recalled, but rarely repeated by me in later life. A curious thing that, in one so young, and evidence of one of the inconsistencies about my development which I have noted before in this record.

'Oh, well,' I said, 'I should not, of course, like to lose money by the change; but if you could give me three pounds a week I shouldn't be losing, and I'd be delighted to come.'

It falls to be noted that I was earning two pounds ten shillings a week from Messrs. J. Canning and Son at that time. I do not think there was anything dishonest in what I said to Foster; but it certainly indicated a kind of business sharpness which has been rather noticeably lacking in my later life. The editor nodded ready agreement, and it was in this way that I first entered upon journalistic employment. _

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