Youth--Australia (Part 6)

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_ XIX

The work that I did as the most junior member of the Chronicle's literary staff no doubt possessed some of the merits which usually accompany enthusiasm.

Memory still burdens me with the record of one or two articles thought upon which makes my skin twitch hotly. It is remarkable that matter so astoundingly crude should have seen the light of print. But, when one comes to think of it, the large, careless newspaper-reading public, the majority, remains permanently youthful so far as judgment of the written word is concerned; and so it may be that raw youngsters, such as I was then, can approach the majority more nearly than the tried and trained specialist, who, just in so far as he has specialised as a journalist, has removed himself from the familiar purview of the general, and acquired an outlook which, to this extent, is exotic.

At all events, I know I achieved some success with articles in the Chronicle of a sort which no experienced journalist could write, save with his tongue in his cheek; and tongue-in-the-cheek writing never really impressed anybody. What seems even more strange to me, in the light of later life and experience, is the fact that upon several occasions I proved of some value to the business side of the Chronicle. My efforts actually brought the concern money, and increased circulation. I find this most surprising, but I know it happened. There were due solely to my initiative 'interviews' with sundry leading lights in commerce, and in the professional sporting world, which were highly profitable to the paper; and this at a time when the 'interview' was a thing practically unknown in Australian journalism.

Stimulated perhaps by the remarks of the good Mr. Smith, my room-mate, I planned ventures of this kind in bed, descending fully armed with them upon Mr. Foster by day, in most cases to fire him, more or less, by my own enthusiasm. Upon the whole I earned my pay pretty well while working for the Chronicle, even having regard to the several small increases made therein. If I lacked ability and experience, I gave more than most of my colleagues, perhaps, in concentration and initiative.

The two things most salient, I think, which befell in this phase of my life were my determination to go to England, and my only adolescent love affair; this, as distinguished from the sentimental episodes of infancy and childhood, which with me had been a rather prolific crop.

The determination to make my way to England, the land of my fathers, did not take definite shape until comedy, with a broad smile, rang down the curtain upon my love affair. But I fancy it had been a long while in the making. I am not sure but what the germ of it began to stir a little in its husk even at St. Peter's Orphanage; I feel sure it did while I browsed upon English fiction in my little wooden room beside the tool-shed at Dursley. It was near the surface from the time I began to visit Mr. Rawlence's studio in Macquarie Street, and busily developing from that time onward, though it did not become a visible and admitted growth, with features and a shape of its own, until more than two years had elapsed. Then, quite suddenly, I recognised it, and told myself it was for this really that I had been 'saving up.'

In the Old World the adventurous-minded, enterprising youth turns naturally from contemplation of the humdrum security of the multitudinously trodden path in which he finds himself to thoughts of the large new lands; of those comparatively untried and certainly uncrowded uplands of the world, which, apart from the other chances and attractions they offer, possess the advantage of lying oversea, from the beaten track--over the hills and far away. 'Here,' he may be supposed to feel, as he gazes about him in his familiar, Old World environment, 'there is nothing but what has been tried and exploited, sifted through and through time and again, all adown the centuries. What chance is there for me among the crowd, where there is nothing new, nothing untried? Whereas, out there--' Ah, the magic of those words, 'Out there!' and 'Over there!' for home-bred youth! It is good, wholesome magic, too, and it will be a bad day for the Old World, a disastrous day for England, when it ceases to exercise its powers upon the hearts and imaginations of the youth of our stock.

Well, and in the New World, in the case of such sprawling young giants among the nations of the future as Australia, what is the master dream of adventurous and enterprising youth there? Australia, like Canada, has its call of the west and the north, with their appealing tale of untried potentialities. Canada has also, across its merely figurative and political southern border, a vast and teeming world, reaching down to the equator, and comprising almost every possible diversity of human effort and natural resource. Australia, the purely British island continent, is more isolated. But, broadly speaking, the very facts which make the enterprising Old World youth fix his gaze upon the New World cause the same type of youth in Australia, for example, to look home-along across the seas, toward those storied islands of the north which, it may be, he has never seen: the land which, in some cases, even his parents have not seen since their childhood.

'Here,' he may be imagined saying, as he looks about him among the raw uprising products of the new land, where the past is nothing and all hope centres upon the future, 'Here everything is yet to do; everything is in the making. Here, money's the only reward. Who's to judge of one's accomplishment here? Fame has no accredited deputy in this unmade world. Whereas, back there, at home--' Oh, the magic of those words 'At Home!' and 'In England!' alike for those who once have seen the white cliffs fade out astern, and for those who have seen them only in dreams, bow on!

Everything has been tried and accomplished there. The very thought that speeds the emigrant pulls at the heart-strings of the immigrant; drawing home one son from the outposts, while thrusting out another toward the outposts, there to learn what England means, and to earn and deserve the glory of his birthright. That, in a nutshell, is the real history of the British Empire....

But, as I said, before final recognition of the determination to go to England came my youthful love affair. With every apparent deference toward the traditions of romance, I fell in love with the daughter of my chief; and my fall was very thorough and complete. I was in the editorial sanctum one afternoon, discussing some piece of work, and getting instructions from Mr. Foster--'G.F.' as we called him--when the door was flung open, as no member of the staff would ever have opened it, and two very charming young women fluttered in, filling the whole place by their simple presence there. One was dark and the other fair: the first, my chief's daughter Mabel; the second, her bosom friend, Hester Prinsep.

'Oh, father, we're all going down to see Tommy off. I want to get some flowers, and I've come out without a penny, so I want some money.'

My chief had risen, and was drawing forward a chair for Miss Prinsep. I do not think he intended to pay the same attention to his daughter, but I did, and received a very charming smile for my pains. Upon which G.F. presented me in due form to both ladies. Turning then to his daughter, he said with half-playful severity:

'You know, Mabel, we are not accustomed to your rough and ready Potts Point manners here. We knock at doors before we open them, and do at least inquire if a man is engaged before we swoop down upon him demanding his money or his life.'

'Father! as though I should think of you as being engaged! And as for the money part, I thought this was the very place to come to for money.'

'Ah! Well, how did you come?'

'The cab's waiting outside.'

'Dear me! You may have noticed, Freydon, that cabmen are a peculiarly gallant class. They don't show much inclination to drive us about when we have no money, do they?'

Then he turned to Miss Prinsep. 'And so your brother really starts for England to-day, Hester? I almost think I'll have to make time to dash down and wish him luck.'

'Oh, do, Mr. Foster! Tommy would appreciate it.'

'Yes, do, father,' echoed Miss Foster. 'Come with us now. That will be splendid.'

'No, I can't manage that. You go and buy your flowers, and I'll try and get away in time to take you both home. Here's a sovereign; and-- Ah! you'd better have some silver for your cab. H'm! Here you are.'

'Thanks awfully, father. You are a generous dear. That will be lots. The cab's Gurney's, you see, so I can tell him to put it down in the account. But the silver's sure to come in handy, for I'm dreadfully poor just now.'

G.F. shrugged his shoulders, with a comic look in my direction. 'Feminine honesty! Take the silver, and tell the cabman to charge me! Freydon, perhaps you'd be kind enough to see this brigand and her friend to their cab, will you? I think we are all clear about that article, aren't we? Right! On your way ask Stone to come in and see me, will you?'

So he bowed us out, and I, in a state of most agreeable fluster, escorted the ladies to their waiting cab.

'Good-bye, Mr. Freydon,' said Mabel Foster as she gave me her softly gloved little hand over the cab door. And, from that moment, I was her slave; only realising some few minutes later that I had been so unpardonably rude as never even to have glanced in Miss Prinsep's direction, to say nothing of bidding her good-bye.

Miss Foster's was a well recognised and conventional kind of beauty, very telling to my inexperienced eyes, and richly suggestive of romance. Her eyes were large, dark, and, as the novelists say, 'melting.' Her face was a perfectly regular oval, having a clear olive complexion, with warm hints of subdued colour in it. Her lips were most provocative, and all about the edges of that dark cloud, her hair, the light played fitfully through a lattice of stray tendrils. A very pretty picture indeed, Miss Foster was perfectly conscious of her charms, and a mistress of coquettishness in her use of them. A true child of pleasure-loving Sydney, she might have posed with very little preparation as a Juliet or a Desdemona, and to my youthful fancy carried about with her the charming gaiety and romantic tenderness of the most delightful among Boccaccio's ladies. (Sydney was just then beginning to be referred to by writers as the Venice of the Pacific, and I was greatly taken with the comparison.)

A week or so later, I was honoured by an invitation to dine at my chief's house one Saturday night; and from that point onward my visits became frequent, my subjugation unquestioning and complete. This was the one brief period of my youth in which I flung away prudence and became youthfully extravagant, not merely in thought but in the expenditure of money. I suppose fully half my salary, for some time, was given to the purchase of sweets and flowers, pretty booklets and the like, for Mabel Foster; and, of the remainder of my earnings, the tailor took heavier toll than he had ever done before.

For example, when that first invitation to dinner reached me--on a Monday--I had never had my arms through the sleeves of a dress-coat. Mr. Smith kindly offered the loan of his time-honoured evening suit, pointing out, I dare say truly, that such garments were being 'cut very full just now.' But, no; I felt that the occasion demanded an epoch-marking plunge on my part; and to this end Mr. Smith was good enough to introduce me to his own tailor, through whom, as I understood, I could obtain the benefit of some sort of trade reduction in price, by virtue of Mr. Smith's one time position as a commercial traveller.

During the week the eddies caused by my plunge penetrated beyond the world of tailoring, and doubtless produced their effect upon the white tie and patent leather shoe trade. But despite my lavish preparations, Saturday afternoon found me in the blackest kind of despair. Fully dressed in evening kit, I had been sitting on my bed for an hour, well knowing that all shops were closed, and facing the lamentable fact that I had no suitable outer garment with which to cloak my splendour on the way to Potts Point. It was Mr. Smith who discovered the omission, and he, too, who had made me feel the full tragedy of it. The covert coat he pressed upon me would easily have buttoned behind my back, and Mrs. Hastings's kindly offer of a shawl (a vivid plaid which she assured me had been worn and purchased by no less an authority upon gentlemen's wear than her father) had been finally, almost bitterly, rejected by me.

It was then, when my fate seemed blackest to me, that Mr. Smith discovered in the prolific galleries of his well-stored memory the fact that it was perfectly permissible for a gentleman in my case to go uncovered by any outer robe, providing--and this was indispensable--that he carried some preferably light cloak or overcoat upon his arm.

'And the weather being close and hot, too, as it certainly is to-night, I'll wager you'll find you're quite in the mode if you get to Potts Point with my covert coat on your arm. So that settles it.'

It did; and I was duly grateful. It certainly was a hot evening, and in no sense any fault of Mr. Smith's that its warmth brought a heavy thunderstorm of rain just as I began my walk up the long hill at Potts Point, so that, taking shelter here and there, as opportunity offered, but not daring to put on the enormously over-large coat, I finally ran up to the house in pouring rain, with a coat neatly folded over one arm. A few years later, no doubt, I should have been glad to slip the coat on, or fling it over my head. But--it did not happen a few years later....

My worshipful adoration of Miss Foster made me neglectful even of Mr. Rawlence's Sunday afternoon receptions. To secure the chance of being rewarded by five minutes alone with her, in the garden or elsewhere, I suppose I must have given up hundreds of hours from a not very plentiful allowance of leisure. And it is surprising, in retrospect, to note how steadfast I was in my devotion; how long it lasted.

The young woman had ability; there's not a doubt of that. For, ardent though I was, she allowed no embarrassing questions. I am free to suppose that my devotion was not unwelcome or tiresome to her, and that she enjoyed its innumerable small fruits in the shape of offerings. But she kept me most accurately balanced at the precise distance she found most agreeable. My letters--the columns and columns I must have written!--were most fervid; and a good deal more eloquent, I fancy, than my oral courtship. But yet I have her own testimony for it that Mabel approved my declamatory style of love-making; the style used when actually in the presence.

The end was in this wise: I called, ostensibly to see Mrs. Foster, on a Saturday afternoon, when I knew, as a matter of fact, that my chief and his wife were attending a function in Sydney. It was a winter's day, very blusterous and wet. The servant having told me her mistress was out, and Miss Mabel in, was about to lead me through the long, wide hall to the drawing-room, which opened through a conservatory upon a rear verandah, when some one called her, and I assured her I could find my own way. So the smiling maid (who doubtless knew my secret) left me, and I leisurely disposed of coat and umbrella, and walked through the house. The shadowy drawing-room was empty, but, as I entered it, these words, spoken in Mabel's voice, reached me from the conservatory beyond:

'My dear Hester, how perfectly absurd. A little unknown reporter boy, picked up by father, probably out of charity! And, besides, you know I should always be true to Tommy, however long he is away. Why, I often mention my reporter boy to Tommy in writing. And he is delicious, you know; he really is. I believe you're jealous. He is a pretty boy, I know. But you'd hardly credit how sweetly he-- Well, romances, you know. He really is too killingly sweet when he makes love-- Oh, with the most knightly respect, my dear! Very likely he will come in this afternoon, and you shall hear for yourself. You shall sit out here, and I'll keep him in the drawing-room. Then you'll see how well in hand he is.'

It was probably contemptible of me not to have coughed, or blown my nose, or something, in the first ten seconds. But the whole speech did not occupy very many seconds in the making, and was half finished before I realised, with a stunning shock, what it meant. It went on after the last words I have written here, but at that point I retired, backward, into the hall to collect myself, as they say. I had various brilliant ideas in the few seconds given to this process. I saw myself, pitiless but full of dignity, inflicting scathing punishment of various kinds, and piling blazing coals of fire upon Mabel's pretty head. I thought, too, of merely disappearing, and leaving conscience to make martyrdom of my fair lady's life. But perhaps I doubted the inquisitorial capacity of her conscience. At all events, in the end, I rattled the drawing-room door-handle vigorously, and re-entered with a portentous clearing of the throat. There was a flutter and patter in the conservatory, and then the hitherto adored one came in to me, an open book in her hand, and witchery in both her liquid eyes.

And then a most embarrassing and unexpected thing happened. My wrath fell from me, carrying with it all my smarting sense of humiliation, and every vestige of the desire to humiliate or punish Mabel. I was left horribly unprotected, because conscious only of the totally unexpected fact that Mabel was still adorable, and that now, when about to leave her for ever, I wanted her more than at any previous time. Then help came to me. I heard a tiny footfall, light as a leaf's touch, on the paved floor of the conservatory. I pictured the listening Hester Prinsep, and pride, or some useful substitute therefor, came to my aid.

'I'm afraid I've interrupted you,' I said, making a huge effort to avoid seeing the witchery in Mabel's eyes. 'I only came to bring this book for Mrs. Foster. I had promised it.'

'But why so solemn, poor knight? What's wrong? Won't you sit down?' said Mabel gaily.

'No, I mustn't stay,' I replied, with Spartan firmness. And then, on a sudden impulse: 'Don't you think we've both been rather mistaken, Mabel? I've been silly and presumptuous, because, of course, I'm nobody--just a penniless newspaper reporter. And you--you are very dear and sweet, and will soon marry some one who can give you a house like this, in Potts Point. I--I've all my way to make yet, and--and so I'd like to say good-bye. And--thank you ever so much for always having been so sweet and so patient. Good-bye!'

'Why? Aren't you--Won't you--Good-bye then!'

And so I passed out; and, having quite relinquished any thought of reprisals, I believe perhaps I did, after all, bring a momentary twinge of remorse to pretty, giddy Mabel Foster. I never saw her again but once, and that as a mere acquaintance, and when almost a year had passed.

XX

I have no idea what made me fix upon the particular sum of two hundred pounds as the amount of capital required for my migration oversea to England; but that was the figure I had in mind. At the time it seemed that the decision to go home--England is still regularly spoken of as 'home' by tens of thousands of British subjects who never have set eyes upon its shores, and are not acquainted with any living soul in the British Isles--came to me after that eventful afternoon at Potts Point. And as a definite decision, with anything like a date in view, perhaps it did not come till then. But the tendency in that direction had been present for a long while.

It would seem, however, that at every period of my life I have always been feeding upon some one predominant plan, desire, or objective. For many months prior to that afternoon at Potts Point, my adoration of Mabel Foster had overshadowed all else, and made me most unusually careless of other interests. This preoccupation having come to an abrupt end was succeeded almost immediately by the fixed determination to go to England as soon as I could acquire the sum of two hundred pounds. Into the pursuit then of this sum of money I now plunged with considerable vehemence.

As a matter of fact, I suppose the task of putting together a couple of hundred pounds, in London say, would be a pretty considerable one for a youngster without family or influence. It was not a hard one for me, in Sydney. I might probably have possessed the amount at this very time, but for my single period of extravagance--the time of devotion to Miss Foster. Putting aside the vagaries of that period, I saved money automatically. Mere living and journeying to and from the office cost me less than a pound each week. My pleasures cost less than half that amount all told; and as one outcome of my year's extravagance, I was now handsomely provided for in the matter of clothes.

But I will not pretend that hoarding for the great adventure of going to England did not involve some small sacrifices. It did. To take one trifle now. I had formed a habit of dropping into a restaurant, Quong Tart's by name, for a cup of afternoon tea each day; in the first place because I had heard Mabel Foster speak of going there for the same purpose with her friend Hester Prinsep. Abstention from this dissipation now added a few weekly shillings to the great adventure fund. To the same end I gave up cigarettes, confining myself to the one foul old briar pipe. And there were other such minor abstinences, all designed to increase the weight of the envelope I handed across the bank counter each week.

The disadvantages of the habit of making life a consecutive series of absorbing preoccupations are numerous. The practice narrows the sphere of one's interests and activities, tends to introspective egoism, and robs the present of much of its savour. But, now and again, it has its compensations. Save for a single week-end of rather pensive moping, the end of my love affair changed the colour of my outlook but very little indeed. Its place was promptly filled, or very nearly filled, by the other preoccupation. And, keen though I was about this, I did not in any sense become an ascetic youth held down by stern resolves. I think I rather enjoyed the small sacrifices and the steady saving; and I know I very much enjoyed applying for and obtaining another small increase of salary, after completing a trumpery series of sketches of pleasure resorts near Sydney, the publication of which brought substantial profit to the Chronicle.

One thing that did rather hurt me at this time was a comment made upon myself, and accidentally overheard by me in the reporters' room at the office. This was a remark made by an American newspaper man, who, having been a month or two on the staff, was dismissed for drunkenness. He spoke in a penetrating nasal tone as I approached the open door of the room, and what he said to his unknown companion came as such a buffet in the face to me that I turned and walked away. The words I heard were:

'Freydon? Oh yes; clever, in his ten cent way. I allow the chap's honest, mind, but, sakes alive, he's only what a N'York thief would call a "sure thing grafter."'

The phrase was perfectly unfamiliar to me, but intuitively I knew exactly what it meant, and I suppose it hurt because I felt its applicability. A 'sure thing grafter' was a criminal who took no chances, I felt; an adventurer who played for petty stakes only, because he would face no risks. Even the American pressman knew I was no criminal. He probably would have despised me less if he thought I stole. But--there it was. The chance shaft went home. And it hurt.

I dare say there was considerable pettiness about the way in which I saved my earnings instead of squandering them with glad youthfulness, as did most of my colleagues. There was something of the huckster's instinct, no doubt, in many of the trivial journalistic ideas I evolved, took to my chief, and pleased my employers by carrying out successfully. I suppose these were the petty ways by which I managed somehow to clamber out of the position in which my father's death had left me. They are set down here because they certainly were a part of my life. I am not ashamed of them, but I do wonder at them rather as a part of my life; not at all as something beneath me, but as something suggesting the possession of a kind of commercial gift for 'getting on,' of which my after life gave little or no indication. In all my youth there was undoubtedly a marked absence of the care-free jollity, the irresponsible joyousness, which is supposed to belong naturally to youth. This was not due, I think, to the mere fact of my being left alone in the world as a child. We have all met urchins joyous in the most abject destitution. I attribute it to two causes: inherited temperamental tendencies, and the particular circumstances in which I happened to be left alone in the world. Had I been born in a slum, and subsequently left an orphan there; or had my father's death occurred half a dozen years earlier than it did; in either case my circumstances would, I apprehend, have influenced me far less.

As things were with me when I found myself in the ranks of the friendless and penniless, I had formed certain definite tastes and associations, the influence of which was such as to make me earnestly anxious to get away from that strata of the community which my companions at St. Peter's Orphanage, for example, accepted unquestioningly as their own. Now when a youngster in his early teens is possessed by an earnest desire of that sort, I suppose it is not likely to stimulate irresponsible gaiety and carelessness in him.

But, withal, I enjoyed those Sydney years; yes, I savoured the life of that period with unfailing zest. But, incidents of the type which dear old Mrs. Gabbitas called 'Awful warnings,' were for me more real, more impressive, than they are to youths who live in comfortably luxurious homes, and know the care of mother and sisters. The normal youth is naturally not often moved to the vein of--'There, but for the grace of God, goes ---- etc.' But I was, inevitably.

For instance, there was the American journalist who so heartily despised my bourgeois prudence and progress. As I walked through the Domain one evening, not many months after I had heard myself compared with a 'sure thing grafter,' I saw a piece of human wreckage curled up under a tree in the moonlight. It was not a very infrequent sight of course, even in prosperous Sydney, This particular wreck, as he lay sleeping there, exposed the fact that he wore neither shirt nor socks. He was dreadfully filthy, and his stertorous breathing gave a clue to the cause of his degradation. As I drew level with him, the moon shone full on his stubble-grown face. He was the American reporter.

Here was a chance to return good for evil. I might have done several quite picturesque things, and did think of leaving a coin beside the poor wretch. Then I pictured its inevitable destination, and impatiently asked myself why sentimentality should carry money of mine into public-house tills. So I passed on. Finally, after walking a hundred yards, I retraced my steps and slid half a crown under the man's grimy hand, where it lay limply on the grass.

XXI

The work that gave me most satisfaction at this time was writing of a kind which I could not induce my chief to favour for his own purposes. He said it was not sufficiently 'legitimate journalism' for the Chronicle. (The 'eighties were still young.) And only at long intervals was I able to persuade him to accept one or two examples, though I insisted it was the best work I had ever attempted for the paper; as, indeed, it very likely was.

'But this is practically a story,' or 'This is really fiction,' or 'This is a sketch of a personal character, not a newspaper feature,' he would say. And then, one day, in handing me back one of my rejected offspring, he said: 'Look here, Freydon, see if you can condense this a shade, and then send it to the editor of the Observer. I've written him saying I should tell you this.'

I followed this kindly advice, and, a month later, enjoyed the profound satisfaction of reading my little contribution in the famous Australian weekly journal. The fact would have no interest for any one else, of course, but I have always remembered this little sketch of a type of Australian bushman, because it was the first signed contribution from my pen to appear in any journal of standing; the first of a series which appeared perhaps once in a month during the rest of my time in Sydney.

People I met in Mr. Rawlence's studio occasionally mentioned these sketches, and I took great pleasure in them. Incidentally, they added to my hoard at the bank. Mr. Smith, my room-mate at North Shore, had hitherto regarded my newspaper work strictly from a business standpoint; judging it solely by the salary it brought. Suddenly now I found I had touched an unsuspected vein of his character. He was surprisingly pleased about these signed Observer sketches. This was authorship, he said; and he spoke to every one, with most kindly pride, of his young friend's work.

My account at the savings bank touched the desired two hundred pounds mark, when I had been just three years and nine months in Sydney. I decided to add to it until I had completed my fourth year; and, meantime, made inquiries about the passage to England. From this point on I made no secret of my intentions, and a very kindly reply came from Mrs. Perkins in Dursley to the letter in which I told her of my plan. At a venture I addressed a letter to Ted, my old friend of Livorno days; but it brought no answer. Neither had the letter of nearly four years earlier, in which his loan of one pound had been returned with warm thanks.

The months slipped by, and the fourth anniversary of my start in Sydney arrived; and still I postponed from day to day the final step of resigning my appointment, and booking my passage. I cannot explain this at all, for I had become more and more eager for the adventure with every passing month. I do not think timidity restrained me. No, I fancy a kind of epicurean pleasure in the hourly consciousness that I was able now to take the step so soon as I chose induced me to prolong the savouring of it; just as I have sometimes found myself deliberately refraining for hours, and even for a day or so, from opening a parcel of books which I have desired and looked forward to enjoying for some time previously.

The awakening from this sort of epicurean dalliance was, as the event proved, somewhat sharp and abrupt.

I did presently resign my post and engage my second-class berth in the mail steamer Orion. Upon this reservation I paid a deposit of twenty pounds; and it seemed that when my passage had been fully paid, and one or two other necessary expenses met, I might still have my two hundred pounds intact to carry with me to England.

Thus I felt that I was handsomely provided for; and, upon the whole, I think the average person who has reached middle life, at all events, would find it easy to regard with understanding tolerance the fact that I was rather proud of what I had accomplished. It really was something, all the attendant circumstances being taken into account. But, perhaps, it is not always safe to trust too implicitly in the genial old faith that Providence helps those who help themselves; though the complementary theory, that Providence does not help those who do not help themselves, may be pretty generally correct. Maybe I was too complaisant. (If I have a superstition to-day, it is that a jealous Nemesis keeps vengeful watch upon human complaisance.)

On a certain Thursday morning, and in a mood of some elation, I walked into the bank to close my account. The amount was two hundred and forty-seven pounds ten shillings. Of this some twenty-five pounds was destined to complete the payment that morning of my passage money. The cashier was able to furnish me with Bank of England notes for two hundred pounds, and the balance, for convenience and ready-money, I drew in Australian notes and gold. Never before having handled at one time a greater sum than, say, five-and-twenty pounds, it was with a sense of being a good deal of a capitalist that I buttoned my coat as I emerged from the bank, and set out for the shipping-office. The sun shone warmly. My arrangements were all completed. I was going home. Yes, it was with something of an air, no doubt, that I took the pavement, humming as I passed along the bright side of Pitt Street.

All my life I have had a fondness for byways. Main thoroughfares between the two great arteries, Pitt and George Street, were at my service; but I preferred a narrow alley which brings one to the back premises of Messrs. Hunt and Carton's, the wholesale stationers. Bearing to the left through that firm's stableyard, one passes through a little arched opening which debouches upon Tinckton Street, whence in twenty paces one reaches George Street at a point close to the office for which I was bound.

I can see now the sleek-sided lorry horses in Hunt and Carton's yard, and I recall precisely the odour of the place as I passed through it that morning; the heavy, flat wads of blue-wrapped paper, and the fluttering bits of straw; the stamp of a draught horse's foot on cobble-stones. I saw the black, clean-cut shadow of the arched place. I turned half round to note the cause of a soft sound behind me. And just then came the dull roar of a detonation, in the same instant that a huge weight crashed upon me, and I fell down, down, down into the very bowels of the earth....

* * * * *

'No actual danger, I think. Excuse me, nurse!'

Those were the first words I heard. The first I spoke, I believe, were:

'I suppose the arch collapsed?'

'Ah! To be sure, yes. There was quite a collapse, wasn't there?' said some one blandly. 'However, you're all right now. Just open your mouth a little, please. That's right. Better? Ah! H'm! Yes, there's bound to be pain in the head; but we'll soon have that a bit easier.'

After that, it seemed to me that I began to take some kind of warm drink, and to talk almost at once. As a fact, I believe there was another somnolent interval of an hour or so before I did actually reach this stage of taking refreshment and asking questions. It was then late evening, and I was in bed in the Sydney Hospital. There had been no earthquake, nor yet even the collapse of an archway. Nothing at all, in fact, except that I had been smitten over the head with an iron bar. There had been two blows, I believe; and, if so, the second must really have been a work of supererogation, for I was conscious only of the one crash.

In one illuminating instant I recalled my visit to the bank, my two hundred and forty-seven pounds ten shillings, my intended visit to the shipping-office, the approaching end and climax of my work in Sydney and Dursley--six years of it.

'Nurse,' I said, with sudden, low urgency, 'will you please see if my pocket-book is in my coat?'

'Everything is taken out of patients' pockets and locked up for safety,' she said.

'Well, will you please inquire what amount of money was taken from my pockets, nurse. It's--it's rather important,' I told her.

The nurse urged the importance of my not thinking of business just now; but after a few more words she went out, gave some one a message, and, returning, said my matter would be seen to at once.

It seemed to me that a very long time passed. My head was full of a tremendous ache. But my thoughts were active, and full of gloomy foreboding. Just as I was about to make another appeal to the nurse, the doctor came bustling down the ward with another man, a plain clothes policeman, I thought, with recollection of sundry newspaper reporting experiences. The surmise was correct. The doctor had a look at my head--his fingers were furnished apparently with red-hot steel prongs--and held my right wrist between his fingers. The police officer sat down heavily beside the bed, drew out a shiny-covered note-book, and began, in an astoundingly deep voice, to ask me laboriously futile questions.

'Look here!' I said, after a few minutes, 'this is all very well, but would you be kind enough to tell me what money was found in my pockets?'

'Two sovereigns, one half sovereign, seven shillings in silver, and tuppence in bronze,' said the sepulchral policeman, as though he thought 'tuppence' was usually 'in' marble, or lignum vitae, or something of the sort. 'Also one silver watch with leather guard, one plated cigarette-case, and----'

'No pocket-book?' I interrupted despondently. The policeman brightened at that.

'So there was a pocket-book? I thought so,' the brilliant creature said. And after that I lost all interest in these bedside proceedings. I referred the man to the Chronicle office, the bank, and the shipping-office, and requested as a special favour that Mr. Smith should be sent for; also, on a journalistic afterthought, a reporter from the Chronicle. The numbers of the bank-notes had been written down. Oh yes, on the advice of the bank clerk, I had done this carefully at the bank counter, and preserved the record scrupulously--in the missing pocket-book.

The police--marvellous men--ascertained next morning that the notes had been cashed at the Bank of New South Wales, in George Street, within half an hour of the time at which I obtained them from the savings bank. And that was the last I ever heard of them.

Twenty-four hours later I was called upon to identify an arrested suspect who had been seen in the vestibule of the bank at the time of my call. I did identify the poor wretch. He was the American reporter who had been discharged from the Chronicle staff. But nobody at the Bank of New South Wales remembered ever having seen the man, and I said at once that I could not possibly identify my assailant, not even having known that any one had attacked me until I was told of it in hospital.

The police appeared to regard me as a most unsatisfactory kind of person, as I doubtless was from their point of view. But they had to release the American, although, when arrested, he had two shining new sovereigns in his ragged pockets, and was full of assorted alcoholic liquors. Their theory was that in some way or another the American had known of my movements and plans, and communicated these to a professional 'strong arm' thief; that I had been shadowed to and from the bank, and that I might possibly have escaped attack altogether but for my addiction to byways.

Their theory did not greatly interest me. For the time the central fact was all my mind seemed able to accommodate. My savings were gone, my passage to England forfeited, my bank account closed, and--so my hot eyes saw it--my career at an end.

XXII

From the medical standpoint there were no complications whatever in my case; it was just as simple as a cut finger. Regarded from this point of view, a broken head is a small matter indeed, in a youth of abstemious habits and healthy life. Well, he was a very thoroughly chastened youth who accepted the cheery physician's congratulations upon his early discharge from hospital.

'Nuisance about the money,' admitted the doctor genially, as he twiddled his massive gold watch-chain. 'But it might have been a deal worse, you know; a very great deal worse. After all, health's the thing, the only thing that really matters.'

The remark strikes me now as reasonable enough. At the time I thought it pretty vapid twaddle. Four quiet days I spent at my North Shore lodging, and then (by Mr. Foster's freely and most kindly given permission) back to the Chronicle office again, just as before, save for one detail--I no longer had a banking account. But was it really, 'just as before,' in any single sense? No, I think not; I think not.

Often in the years that have passed since that morning chat with the cheerful physician in Sydney Hospital, I have heard folk speak lightly of money losses--other people's losses, as a rule--and talk of the comparative unimportance of these as against various other kinds of loss. Never, I think, at all events, since those Sydney days of mine, could any one justly charge me with overestimating the importance of money. And yet, even now, and despite the theories of the philosophers, I incline to the opinion that few more desolating and heart-breaking disasters can befall men and women than the loss of their savings. I would not instance such a case as mine. But I have known cases of both men and women who, in the later years, have lost the thrifty savings of a working life, savings accumulated very deliberately--and at what a cost of patient, long-sustained self-denial!--for a specific purpose: the purchase of their freedom in the closing years; their manumission from wage-earning toil. And I say that, in a world constituted as our world is, life knows few tragedies more starkly fell.

As for my little loss I now think it likely that in certain ways I derived benefits from it; and, too, in other ways, permanent hurt. I was still standing in the doorway of my manhood; all my life and energy as a man before me. But it did not seem so at the time. At the time I thought of this handful of money as being the sole outcome and reward for six years of pretty strenuous working effort. (What a lot I overlooked!) I was far from telling myself that a lad of one-and-twenty had his career still to begin. On the contrary, it seemed my career had had for its culminating point the great adventure of going to England, to attain which long years of toilsome work had been necessary. These years had passed, the work was done, the culmination at hand; and now it was undone, the career was broken, all was lost. Oh, it was a dourly tragical young man who shared Mr. Smith's bedroom during the next few months.

One odd apparent outcome of my catastrophe in a teacup has often struck me since. No doubt, if the truth were known quite other causes had been at work; but it is a curious fact that never, at any period of my life since the morning on which I so gaily closed that savings bank account, have I ever taken the smallest zest, interest, or pleasure in the saving of money. This seems to me rather odd and noteworthy. It is, I believe, strictly true.

For a few weeks after resuming my working routine I plodded along in a rather dazed fashion, and without any definite purpose. And then, during a wakeful hour in bed (while Mr. Smith snored quite gently and inoffensively on the far side of our little room), I came to a definite decision. The brutal episode of the crowbar--the weapon which had felled me was found beside me, by the way; a heavy bar used for opening packing-cases, which the thief had evidently picked up as he came after me through Hunt and Carton's yard--should not be allowed to divert me from my course. Diversion at this stage was what I could not and would not tolerate. I would go to England just the same, and soon. I would put by a few pounds, and then work my passage home. I was perfectly clear about it, and fell asleep now, quite content.

On the next day I began making inquiries. At first I thought I could manage it as a journalist, by writing eloquent descriptions of the passage. A little talk at the shipping-office served to disabuse my mind of this notion. Then I would go as a deck-hand. I was gently apprised of the fact that my services as a deck-hand might not greatly commend themselves to the average ship-master. My decision was not in the least affected by the little things I learned.

Finally, I secured a personal introduction to the manager of the shipping-office in which my twenty pounds deposit was still held, and induced this gentleman to promise that he would, sooner or later, secure for me a chance to work my passage home. He would advise me, he said, when the chance arrived.

With this I was satisfied, and returned in a comparatively cheerful mood to my plodding. I have a shrewd suspicion that my chief, Mr. Foster, used his good offices on my behalf with the shipping company's manager.

Three months went slowly by. And then one morning a laconic note reached me from the shipping-office.

'Could you do a bit of clerking in a purser's office? If so, please see me to-day.'

It appeared that the assistant purser of one of the mail-boats had died while on the passage between Melbourne and Sydney. The company preferred to fill such vacancies in England, and so a temporary clerical assistant for the purser would be shipped. Would I care to undertake it for a five-pound note and my passage?

Forty-eight hours later I had said good-bye to Sydney friends, and was installed at a desk in the purser's office on board the Orimba. I had twenty-two pounds and ten shillings in my trunk, and the promise of a five-pound note when the steamer should reach London. It was a kind of outsetting upon my great adventure quite different from that which I had planned. But it was an outsetting, and a better one than I had expected, for I had been prepared to work my passage as a deck-hand or steward.

And so it fell out that when I did actually leave Australia I was too busy at my clerking, and at inventing soporific answers to the mostly irrelevant inquiries of more or less distracted passengers, to catch a glimpse of the land disappearing below the horizon--the land in which I had spent the most formative years of my life--or to spare a thought for any such matter as sea-sickness. _

Read next: Manhood--England: First Period

Read previous: Youth--Australia (Part 5)

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