The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 34

And then, apart from Mr. Heron and others, there will be a friend waiting to see you in London, and--and wanting to see you.... That's my agent, the man with the green-lined umbrella. Good-bye--friend!'

V

The _Oronta_ was a dull s.h.i.+p for me once she had pa.s.sed Adelaide; duller even than in the grey days between Tilbury and Naples. Adelaide pa.s.sed, an Australian-bound liner seems to have reached the end of her outward pa.s.sage, and yet it is not over. The remainder, for Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane-bound folk, is apt to be a weariness, even as a train journey is, with pa.s.sengers coming and going and trunks and boxes much in evidence.

I had lost my friend, though I had called this my method of retaining her friends.h.i.+p; and rightly, I dare say. To be worthy of her a man should have left in him ten times my vitality, I thought; he should be one who looked forward rather than back; he should bring to their joint wayfaring a far keener zest for life than my years in our modern Grub Street had left me. How vapid was the talk of my remaining fellow-pa.s.sengers; how slow of understanding, and how preoccupied with petty things they seemed! They discussed their luggage, and questions regarding the proper amounts for stewards' tips. Had not some traveller called Adelaide Australia's city of culture? It seemed a pleasant town. The Mount Lofty country near by was beautiful, I gathered. It might well have been better for me to have left the s.h.i.+p there. My musings were in this sort; somewhat lacking, perhaps, in the zest and cheerfulness which should pertain to a new departure in life.

I spent a few days in Sydney, chiefly given to walks through the city and suburbs. There was a certain interest, I found, to be derived from the noting of all the changes which a quarter of a century had wrought in this antipodean Venice. Some of the alterations I noticed were possibly no more than reflections of the changes time had wrought in myself; for these--the modifications which lie between ambitious youth and that sort of damaged middle-age which carries your dyspeptic farther from his youth than ever his three score years and ten take the hale man--had been radical and thorough with me. But, none the less, Sydney's actual changes were sufficiently remarkable.

At the spot whereon I made my entry into society (as I thought), in the studio of Mr. Rawlence, the artist, stood now an imposing red building of many storeys, given over, I gathered, to doctors and dentists. The artist, I thought, was probably gathered to his fathers ere this, as my old fellow-lodger, Mr. Smith, most certainly must have been. Mr. Foster, the editor of the _Chronicle_, had died some years previously. The offices and premises of Messrs. J. Canning and Son, my first employers in Sydney, were as though I had left them but yesterday, unchanged in any single respect. But the head of the firm, as I had known him, was no more; and his son, of whom I caught one glimpse on the stairway, had grown elderly, grey, and quite surprisingly stout.

There was some interest for me in prowling about the haunts of my youth; but to be honest, I must admit there was no pleasure, even of the mildly melancholy kind. However beautiful their surroundings, no New World cities are in themselves beautiful or picturesque. That which is new in them is--new, and well enough; and that which is not new or newish is apt to be rather shabby than venerable. I apprehend that Old World cities would be quite intolerably shabby and tumble-down but for the fact that, when they were built, joint stock companies were unknown, and men still took real pride in the durability of their work. We have made wondrous progress, of course, and are vastly cleverer than our forbears; but for the bulk of the work of our hands, there is not very much to be said when its newness has worn off.

I thought seriously for an hour or more of going to Dursley to visit its Omniferacious Agent, and, more particularly, perhaps to see his wife; possibly even to settle in the neighbourhood of that pretty little town. Then I reckoned up the years, and decided against this step. The Omnigerentual One would be an old man, if alive; and his wife--I recalled her fragile figure and hopeless invalidism, and thought I would sooner cherish my recollections of five-and-twenty years than put them to the test of inquiry.

On the fourth or fifth day I drove with my bags to the handsome new railway station which had taken the place of the rambling old Redfern terminal I remembered, and took train for the north. I found I had no wish, at present, to visit Werrina, Myall Creek, or Livorno Bay, and my journey came to an end a full fifty miles south of St. Peter's Orphanage. Here, within five miles of the substantial towns.h.i.+p of Peterborough, I came, with great ease, upon the very sort of place I had in mind: a tiny cottage of two rooms, with a good deep verandah before, and a little lean-to kitchen, or, in the local phrase, skillion, behind; two rough slab sheds, a few fruit trees past their prime, an acre of paddock, and beyond that illimitable bush.

I bought the tiny place for a hundred and five pounds, influenced thereto in part by the fact that the daughter of its owner, a small 'c.o.c.katoo' farmer's wife, lived no more than a quarter of a mile away; and was willing, for a modest consideration, to come in each day and 'do' for me, to the extent of cooking one hot meal, was.h.i.+ng dishes, and tidying my little gunyah. Thus, simply and swiftly, I became a landed proprietor, and was able to send to Sydney for my heavy chattels, knowing that, for the first time in my life, I actually possessed in my own right a roof to shelter them withal, though it were only of galvanised iron. (The use of stringy bark for the roofing of small dwellings seemed to have ceased since my last sojourn in these parts, the practical value of iron for rain-water catchment having thrust aside the cooler and more picturesque material.)

In the towns.h.i.+p of Peterborough I secured, for the time being, the services of a decent, elderly man named Fetch--Isaiah Fetch--and together we set to work to make a garden before my little house; to fence it in against the attacks of bandicoots and wandering cattle, and to effect one or two small repairs, additions and improvements to the place. This manual work interested me, and, I dare say, bettered my health, though I was ashamed to note the poor staying power I had as compared with Isaiah Fetch, who, whilst fully ten years my senior, was greatly my superior in toughness and endurance.

VI

Wages for labour had soared and soared again since my day in Australia, even for elderly and 'down-along more than up-along 'men like Isaiah Fetch. (The phrase is his own.) And, in any case, I told myself, it was not for the likes of me to keep hired men. And so, when the garden was made, and the other needed work done, I parted with Isaiah--a good, honest, homespun creature, rich in a sort of bovine contentment which often moved me to sincere envy--and was left quite alone in my hermitage, save for the morning visit of perhaps a couple of hours, which the worthy Mrs. Blades undertook to pay for the purpose of tidying my rooms and cooking a midday meal for me. Her coming between nine and ten each morning, and going between twelve and one, formed the chief, if not the only, landmarks in the routine of my quiet days. So it was when I parted with Isaiah. So it is to-day, and so it is like to remain--while I remain.

Parting with Isaiah Fetch made a good deal of difference to me; more difference than I should have supposed it possible that anything connected with so simple a soul could have made. The plain fact is, I suppose, that while Isaiah worked about the place here, I worked with him, in my pottering way. I developed quite an interest in my bit of garden, because of the very genuine interest felt in the making of it by Isaiah. I had worked at it with him; but, once he had left it, I regret to say the ordered ranks of young vegetables tempted me but little, and soon became disordered, for the reason that the war I waged against the weeds was but a poor, half-hearted affair. And so it was with other good works we had begun together. I gave up my cow, because it seemed far simpler to let Mrs. Blades have her for nothing, on the understanding that she brought me the daily trifle of milk I needed. I left the feeding and care of my few fowls to Mrs. Blades, and finally made her a present of them, after paying several bills for their pollard and grain. It seemed easier and cheaper to let Mrs.

Blades supply the few eggs I needed.

My horse Punch I kept, because we grew fond of each other, and the surrounding bush afforded ample grazing for him. When Punch began his habit of gently biting my arm or shoulder every time I led him here or there, he sealed his own fate; and now will have to continue living with his tamely uninteresting master w.i.l.l.y nilly. Lovable, kindly, spirited beast that he is, I never could have afforded the purchase of his like but for a slight flaw in his near foreleg, which in some way spoils his action, from your horsey man's standpoint, and pleases me greatly, because it brought the affectionate rascal within my modest reach. I give him very little work, and rather too much food; but he has to put up with a good deal of my society, and holds long converse with me daily, I suppose because he knows no means of terminating an interview until that is my pleasure.

One piece of outdoor work I have continued religiously, for the reason, no doubt, that I love wood fires, even in warm weather. I never neglect my wood-stack, the foundations of which were laid for me by Isaiah Fetch. Every day I take axe and saw and cut a certain amount of logwood. My hearth will take logs of just four feet in length, and I feed it royally. The wood costs nothing; when burning it is highly aromatic, and I like to be profuse with it; I who can recall an interminable London winter, in a garret full of leaks and draught holes, in which the only warming apparatus, besides the poor lamp that lighted my writing-table, was a miserable oil-stove, which I could not afford to keep alight except for the brief intervals during which it boiled my kettle for me.

Yes, I know every speck and every cranny of my cavernous hearth, and it is rarely that it calls for any kindling wood of a morning. As a rule a puff from the bellows and a fresh log--one of the little fellows, no thicker than your leg, which I split for this purpose--is enough to set it on its way flaming and glowing for another day of comforting life. I often tell myself it would never do for me to think of giving up my hermitage and returning to England, because of Punch and my ever-glowing hearth; even if there were no other reasons, as of course there are.

For, whilst the comparative zestfulness of the first months, when I worked with Isaiah Fetch to improve my rough-hewn little hermitage, may not have endured, yet are there many obvious and substantial advantages for me in the life I lead here, in this little bush back-water, where the few human creatures who know of my existence regard me as a poor, harmless kind of crank, and no one ever disturbs the current of my circling thoughts. Never was a life more free from interruptions from without. And if disturbance ever emanates from within, why, clearly the fault must be my own, and should serve as a reminder of how vastly uneasy my life would surely be in more civilised surroundings, where interruptions descend upon one from without, thick as s.m.u.ts through the window of a London garret--save where the garreteer cares to do without air. Here I sit with a n.o.ble fire leaping at one end of my unlined, wooden room, and wide open doors and windows all about me. As regards climate, in New South Wales a man may come as near as may be to eating his cake and having it too.

And, for that long-sought mental restfulness, content, peace, whatever one may call it, is not my present task a long step towards its attainment? A completed record of the fitful struggle one calls one's life, calmly studied in the light of reason untrammelled by sentiment, never interrupted by the call of affairs; surely that should bring the full measure of self-comprehension upon which peace is based! To doubt that contentment lies that way would be wretchedness indeed. But why should I doubt what the world's greatest sages have shown? True, my own experience of life has suggested that contentment is rather the monopoly of the simplest souls, whose understanding is very limited indeed. A stinging thought this, and apt to keep a man wakeful at night, if indulged. But I think it should not be indulged. To doubt the existence of a higher order of content than that of the blissfully ignorant is to brush aside as worthless and meaningless the best that cla.s.sic literature has to offer us, and--such doubts are pernicious things.

Living here in this clean, sweet air, so far removed from the external influences which make for fret and stress, my bodily health, at all events, has small excuse for failure one would suppose. And, indeed, at first it did seem to me that I was acquiring a more normal kind of hardihood and working efficiency in this respect. But I regret to say the supposition was not long-lived. Four or five months after my arrival here I took to my bed for a fortnight, as the result of one of the severest attacks I have ever had; and in the fifteen months which have elapsed since then, my general health has been very much what it was during the years before I left London, while the acute bouts of neuritis and gastric trouble, when they have come, have been worse, I think, than those of earlier years.

But, none the less, without feeling it as yet, I may be building up a better general condition in this quiet life; and the bitterly sharp attacks that seize me may represent no more than a working off of arrears of penalties. I hope it may be so, for persistent ill-health is a dismal thing. But, as against that, I think I am sufficiently philosophic--how often that blessed word is abused by disgruntled mankind--to avoid hopes and desires of too extravagant a sort, and, by that token, to be safeguarded from the sharper forms of disappointment.

Contentment depends, I apprehend, not upon obtaining possession of this or that, but upon the wise schooling of one's desires and requirements. My aims and desires in life--behind the achievement of which I have always fancied I discerned Contentment sitting as a G.o.ddess, from whose beneficent hands come all rewards--have naturally varied with the pa.s.sing years. In youth, I suppose, first place was given to Position. Later, Art stood highest; later, again, Intellect; then Morality; and, finally. Peace, Tranquillity--surely the most modest, and therefore practical and hopeful of all these goals.

VII

The portion of my days here in the bush which I like best (when no bodily ill plagues me) is the very early morning. Directly daylight comes, while yet the sun's Australian throne is vacant--all hung about in cool, pearly draperies--I slip a waterproof over my pyjamas, having first rolled up the legs of these garments and thrust my feet into rubber half-boots, and wander out across the verandah, down through the garden patch, over the road, with its three-inch coating of sandy dust, and into the bush beyond, where every tiny leaf and twig and blade of gra.s.s holds treasure trove and nutriment, in the form of glistening dewdrops.

The early morning in the coastal belt of New South Wales is rapture made visible and responsive to one's faculties of touch, and smell, and hearing. And yet---no. I believe I have used the wrong word. It would be rapture, belike, in a Devon coomb, or on a Hamps.h.i.+re hill-top.

Here it is hardly articulate or sprightly enough for rapture.

Rather, I should say, it is the perfection of pellucid serenity. It lacks the full-throated eternal youthfulness of dawn in the English countryside; but, for calmly exquisite serenity, it is matchless. To my mind it is grateful as cold water is to a heated, tired body. It smooths out the creases of the mind, and is wonderfully calming. Yet it has none of the intimate, heart-stirring kindliness of England's rural scenery. No untamed land has that. Nature may be grand, inspiring, bracing, terrifying, what you will. She is never simply kind and loving--whatever the armchair poets may say. A countryside must be humanised, and that through many successive generations, before it can lay hold upon your heart by its loving-kindness, and draw moisture from your eyes. It is not the emotionless power of Nature, but man's long-suffering patient toil in Nature's realm that gives our English country-side this quality.

But my rugged, unkempt bush here is n.o.bly serene and splendidly calm in the dawn hours. It makes me feel rather like an ant, but a well-doing and unworried ant. And I enjoy it greatly. As I stride among the drenching scrub, and over ancient logs which, before I was born, stood erect and challenged all the winds that blow, I listen for the sound of his bell, and then call to my friend Punch:

'Choop! Choop! Choop, Punch! Come away, boy! Come away! Choop! Choop!'

But not too loudly, and not at all peremptorily. For I do not really want him to come, or, at least, not too hurriedly. That would cut my morning pleasure short. No; I prefer to find Punch half a mile from home, and I think the rascal knows it. For sometimes I catch glimpses of him between the tree-trunks--we have myriads of cabbage-tree palms, tree-ferns, and bangalow palms, among the eucalypti hereabouts--and always, if we are less than a quarter of a mile or so from home, it is his rounded haunches that I see, and he is walking slowly away from me, listening to my call, and doubtless grinning as he chews his cud--a great ruminator is my Punch.

At other times, when it chances that dawn has found him a full half mile from home, he does not walk away from me, but stands behind the bole of a great tree, looking round its side, listening, waiting, and studiously refraining from the slightest move in my direction, until I am within twenty paces of him. Then, with a loud whinny, rather like a child's 'Peep-bo!' in intent, I think, he will walk quickly up to me, wis.h.i.+ng me the top of the morning, and holding out his head for the halter which I always carry on these occasions.

In the first months of our acquaintance I used to clamber on to his back forthwith, and ride home. He knows I cannot quite manage that now, and so walks with me, rubbing at my shoulders the while with his gra.s.s-stained, dewy lips, till we see a suitable stump or log, from which I can conveniently mount him. Then, with occasional thrusts round of his head to nuzzle one of my ankles, or to s.n.a.t.c.h a tempting bit of greenery, he carries me home, and together--for he superintends this operation with the most close and anxious care, his foreparts well inside the feed-house--we mix his breakfast, first in an old four-gallon oil-can, and then in the manger, and I sit beside him and smoke a cigarette till the meal is well under weigh.

I have made Punch something of a gourmand, and each meal has to contain, besides its foundation of wheaten chaff and its _piece de resistance_ of cracked maize, a flavouring of oats--say, three double handfuls--and a thorough sprinkling, well rubbed in, of bran. If the proportions are wrong, or any of the const.i.tuents of the meal lacking, Punch snorts, whinnies, turns his rump to the manger, and demands my instant attention. I was intensely amused one day when, sitting in the slab and bark stable, through whose crevices seeing and hearing are easy, to overhear the mail-man telling Mrs. Blades that, upon his Sam, I was for all the world like an old maid with her canary in the way I dry-nursed that blessed horse; by ghost, I was! He was particularly struck, was this good man, by my insane practice of sometimes taking Punch for a walk in the bush, as though he were a dog, and without ever mounting him.

Punch provided for, my own ablutions are performed in the wood-shed, where I have learned to bathe with the aid of a sponge and a bucket of water, and have a shower worked by a cord connected with a perforated nail-can. By this time my billy-can is probably spluttering over the hearth, and I make tea and toast, after possibly eating an orange. And so the day is fairly started, and I am free to think, to read, to write, or to enjoy idleness, after a further chat with Punch when turning him out to graze. My wood-chopping I do either before breakfast or towards the close of the day; the latter, I think, more often than the former. It makes a not unpleasant salve for the conscience of a mainly idle man, after the super-fatted luxury of afternoon tea and a biscuit or scone.

An Australian bushman would call my tea no more than water bewitched, and my small pinch of China leaves in an infuser spoon but a mean mockery of his own generous handful of black Indian leaves, well stewed in a billy to a strength suited for hide-tanning. Of this inky mixture he will cheerfully consume (several times a day) a quart, as an aid to the digestion of a pound or two of corned beef, with pickles and other deadly things, none of which seem to do him much harm. And if they should, the result rather amuses and interests him than otherwise; for, of all amateur doctors (and lawyers), he is the most enthusiastic and ingenuous. He will tell you (with the emphatic winks, nods, and gestures of a man of research who has made a wonderful discovery, and, out of the goodness of his heart, means to let you into the secret) of some patent medicine which is already advertised, generally offensively, in every newspaper in the land; and, having explained how it made a new man of him, will very likely insist with kindly tyranny upon buying you a flagon of the costly rubbish.

'I a.s.sure you, Mr. Freydon, you won't know yourself after takin' a bottle or two of Simpkins's Red Marvel.' I agree cordially, well a.s.sured that in such a case I should not care to know myself. 'Why, there was a chap down Sydney way, Newtown I think it was he lived in, or it mighter bin Balmain. Crooil bad he was till they put him on to the Red Marvel. Fairly puzzled the doctors, he did, an' all et up with sores, somethin' horrible. Well, I tell you, I wouldn't be without a bottle in my camp. Sooner go without 'baccy. An', not only that, but it's such comfortin' stuff is the Red Marvel. Every night o' my life I takes a double dose of it now; sick or sorry, well or ill--an' look at me! I useter to swear by Blick's Backache Pills; but now, I wouldn't have them on me mind. They're no cla.s.s at all, be this stuff. Give me Simpkins's Red Marvel, every time, an' I don't care if it snows! You try it, Mr. Freydon. I was worsen you afore I struck it; an' now, why, I wouldn't care to call the Queen me aunt!' (His father before him, in Queen Victoria's reign, had no doubt used this quaint phrase, and it was not for him to alter it because of any such trifling episodes as the accession of other sovereigns.)

VIII

I gladly abide by my word of yesterday. The portion of my days here in the bush which I like best is the dawn time. But the nights have their good, and--well--and their less good times, too. My evening meal is apt to be sketchy. There is a special vein of laziness in me which makes me s.h.i.+rk the setting out of plates and cutlery, and, even more, their removal when used; despite the fact that I have had, perhaps, rather more experience than most men of catering for myself. Hence, the evening meal is apt to be sketchy; a furtive and far from creditable performance, with the vessels of the midday meal for its background.

Then, with a sense of relief, I shut the door upon that episode, and the evidences thereof, and betake me to the room which is really mine; where the big hearth is, and the camp-bed, and the writing-table, the books, and the big Ceylon-made lounge-chair. The first evening pipe is nearly always good; the second may be flavoured with melancholy, but yet is seldom unpleasing. The third--there are decent intervals between--bears me company in bed, with whatever book may be occupying me at the time. The first hour in the big chair and the first hour in bed are both exceedingly good when I am anything like well. I would not say which is the better of the two, lest I provoke a Nemesis. Both are excellent in their different ways.

Nine times out of ten I can be asleep within half an hour of dousing the candle, and it is seldom I wake before three hours have pa.s.sed.

After that come hours of which it is not worth while to say much. They are far from being one's best hours. And then, more often than not, will come another blessed two hours, or even more, of unconsciousness, before the first purple grey forecasts of a new day call me out into the bush for my morning lesson in serenity: Nature's astringent message to egoists and all the sedentary, introspective tribe, that bids us note our own infinite insignificance, our utter and microscopical unimportance in her great scheme of things, and her sublime indifference to our individual lives; to say nothing of our insectile hopes, fears, imaginings, despairs, joys, and other forms of mental and emotional travail.

It may or may not be evidence of mental exhaustion or indolence, but I notice that I have experienced here no inclination to read anything that is new to me. I have read a good deal under this roof, including a quite surprising amount of fiction; but nothing, I think, that I had not read before. During bouts of illness here, I have indulged in such debauches as the rereading of the whole of Hardy, Meredith, Stevenson, W. E. Henley's poems, and the novels of George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells. Some of the better examples of modern fiction have always had a special topographical appeal to me. I greatly enjoy the work of a writer who has set himself to treat a given countryside exhaustively. This, more even than his masterly irony, his philosophy, his remarkable fullness of mind and opulent allusiveness, has been at the root of the immense appeal Hardy's work makes to me. ('Q,' in a different measure, of course, makes a similar appeal.) Let the Wess.e.x master forsake his countryside, or leave his peasants for gentlefolk, and immediately my interest wanes, his wonderful appeal fails.

Since I have been here in the bush I have understood, as never before, the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have.

There is that second edition of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ now, with its delicious woodcuts by H. Paterson. It is dated 1874--I was a boy then, newly arrived in this antipodean land--and the frontispiece shows Gabriel Oak soliciting Bathsheba: 'Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?' No, I cannot say my readings of Hardy have been good for me here. There is _Jude the Obscure_ now, a masterpiece of heart-bowing tragedy that. And, especially insidious in my case, there are pa.s.sages like this from that other tragedy in the idyllic vein, _The Woodlanders_:

_Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident.... They are old a.s.sociation--an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansions, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind._

No, that was not discreet reading for a dyspeptic man of letters, alone in a two-roomed gunyah in the midst of virgin bush, in a land where the respectably old dates back a score of years, the historic, say, fifty years, and 'the mists of antiquity' a bare century. One recollection inevitably aroused by such a pa.s.sage brought to mind words comparatively recent, spoken by Mrs. Oldcastle:

'In the Old World, even for a man who lives alone on a mountain-top, there is more of intellectuality--in the very atmosphere, in the buildings and roads, the hedges and the ditches--than the best cities of the New World have to offer.'

Quite apart from its grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the earthy quality--'take of English earth as much as either hand may rightly clutch'--of the Wess.e.x master's work makes it indigestible reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; unless, of course, he is of the fine and robust type, whose minds and const.i.tutions function with the steadiness of a good chronometer, warranted for all climes and circ.u.mstances.