The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 9

And this tremendous undertaking, with all its infinite potentialities of good and evil, joy and agony, pride and despair, is in every country approached by somebody, by some one of our own kind, every single morning, and has been down through the ages since time began, and will be while time lasts. And there are folk who call modern life prosaic, dull, devoid of romance. Romance! Why, in the older lands there is hardly a foot of road s.p.a.ce that has not been trodden at one time or another by youth or maid, in the crucial moment of setting out upon this amazing adventure. There are men and women who drum their fingers on a window-pane after breakfast of a morning, and yawn out their disgust at the empty dullness of life, the vacant boredom of another day. And within a mile of them, as like as not, some one is setting forth--lips compressed, brow knit--upon the great adventure.

And, too, some one else is face to face with the other great adventure--the laying down of life. Somewhere close to us every single morning brings one or other, or both of these two incomparably romantic happenings.

Truly, to confess ennui, or make complaint of the dullness of life, is to confess to a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind. To be weary is comprehensible enough. Yes, G.o.d knows I can understand the existence of weariness or exhaustion. To be bored even is natural enough, if one is bored by, say, forced inaction, or obligatory action of a futile, meaningless kind. But negative boredom; to be uninterested, not because adverse circ.u.mstances confine you to this or that barren and uncongenial milieu, but because you see nothing of interest in life as a whole; because life seems to you a dull, empty, or prosaic business--that argues a kind of blindness, a poverty of imagination, which amounts to disease, and, surely, to disease of a most humiliating sort.

But this is digression of a sort I have not hitherto permitted myself in this record. To be precise, I should say, it is digression of a sort which up till now has, when detected, been religiously expunged--sent to feed my fire. Well, one has always pencils; the fire is generally at hand; we shall see. After all, a great deal of one's life is made up of digressions.

VII

In the summer-time there were sharks in Myall Creek, but I had never seen them there in the spring. It was, I think, still somewhere short of midnight when I stepped quietly out of the low window of the room I shared with seven other orphans. (The house was all of one storey.) I would have taken boots, but, excepting on visitors' Sundays, these were kept in a locked cupboard in the sisters' building. My outfit consisted of a comparatively whole pair of trousers--not those immortalised in Mr. Rawlence's sketch--a strong, short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt of hard, grey woollen stuff, a dilapidated waistcoat, a belt, my little book of bush flowers and trees, and my one-pound note. Oh, and an ancient grey felt hat with a large hole in the crown of it. That was all; but I dare say notable careers have been started upon less; in cash, if not in clothing.

Beside the punt I hesitated for a few moments, half inclined to cross by that obvious means, and leave Tim to do the swimming by daylight.

Finally, however, I slipped off my clothes, tied them in a bundle on my head, and stepped silently into the water, closely and interestedly observed by one of the Orphanage watch-dogs, chained beside the landing-stage. If he had barked, it would have been only from desire to come with me, in which case, to save trouble, I should probably have become guilty of dog-stealing. The dogs were all good friends of mine.

The water was cold that spring night, but I was soon out of it, and using my s.h.i.+rt for a hard rub down in the scrub beside the creek wharf. As a precaution I had waited for a moonless night, and had made my exit with no more noise than was caused by one of the night birds or little beasts that visited our island. I had seen maps, and knew the compa.s.s bearings of the locality. My ultimate destination being Sydney, I turned to the southward, and stepped out briskly along the track leading towards Milton, and away from Werrina.

That was the simple fas.h.i.+on of my outsetting into the world, and for a time I gave literally no thought at all to its real significance. My recognition of it as the beginning of the great adventure of independent life was temporarily obscured by my preoccupation with its detail.

At the end of a silent hour or two, when I suppose half a dozen miles lay between myself and the Orphanage, the reflective faculties came into play again. I began to see my affair more clearly, and to see it whole, or pretty nearly so. From that point onward, I put in quite a good deal of steady thinking with regard to the future. I had two or three definite objects in view, and the first of these was to reach as quickly as possible some point not less than about fifty miles distant from Myall Creek, at which I could feel safe from any likely encounter with a chance traveller from that district.

So much accomplished my plans represented in effect a pedestrian journey to Sydney. But I recognised that the journey might occupy some time, since, in the course of it, I was to earn money and then learn shorthand; the money, by way of working capital and insurance against accidents; the shorthand, to furnish my stock-in-trade and pa.s.sport in the metropolitan world. So mine was not to be exactly a holiday walking tour. Yet I do not think any one could have set out upon a holiday tour with more of zest than I brought to my tramping. My mood was not of gaiety, rather it was one attuned to high and almost solemn emprise; but, yes, I was full of zest in my walking.

An hour or so before daybreak I lay down on some dead fern at the foot of a huge and sombre red mahogany tree, where the track forked. It was partly that I wanted a rest, and partly that I was uncertain which track led to the towns.h.i.+p of Milton, where I purposed buying some food before any chance word of my flight from the Orphanage could have travelled so far. The authorities at the Orphanage were little likely to trouble themselves greatly over a runaway orphan; but I cherished a hazy idea that in my case the matter might be somehow a little different, in the same way that I had not been farmed out to any one in the district, possibly because in receiving me St. Peter's had also received some money, certainly more than could be represented by the cost of my maintenance. In any case, I did not want to take any unnecessary risks.

Two minutes after lying down I was asleep. When I waked the sun was clear of the horizon, and I was partly covered over by dead bracken.

The dawn hours had been chilly, and evidently I had grappled the fern leaves to me in my sleep, as one tugs a blanket over one's shoulder, without waking, when cold. While I was chuckling to myself over this, and picking the twigs from my clothes, I heard the pistol-like crack of a bullock whip, and then, quite near at hand, the cries of a 'bullocky,' as they called the bullock-drivers thereabout, full of morning-time vehemence.

'Woa, Darkey! Gee, Roan! Baldy, gee! n.i.g.g.e.r! Strawberry! Gee, now, Punch! I'll ----y well trim you in a minute, me gentleman. Gee, Baldy; ye ----y cow, you!'

It was thus the unseen bushman discoursed to his cattle, and in a minute or two the horns of his leaders, swaying slightly in their yoke, appeared at the bend of the track, the bolt-heads in the yoke s.h.i.+ning like bosses of silver in the slanting rays of the new-risen sun. Clearly the wagon had been loaded overnight, for the huge tallow-wood log slung on it could hardly have been placed in its bed since sun-up.

'I'm your ----y man, if it's Milton you want,' said the driver good-humouredly, in response to my inquiries. 'I'm taking this stick into the Milton saw-mill. ----y solid stick, eh? My oath, yes; there's not enough pipe in that feller to stick a ----y needle in. No, he ought to measure up pretty well, I reckon.' A pause for expectoration, and then: 'Livin' in Milton?'

'No,' I told him, 'just travelling that way.' I flattered myself I had put just the right note of nonchalance into what I knew was a typically familiar sort of phrase. But the bullocky eyed me curiously, all the same, and I instantly made up my mind to part company with him at the earliest convenient moment.

'You travel ----y light, sonny,' he said; 'but I suppose that's the easiest ----y way, when all's said.'

'Yes,' I agreed, with fluent mendacity; 'I got tired of the swag, and I've not very far to go anyway.'

'Ah! Where might ye be makin' for, then?'

At this point I realised for the first time the grave disadvantages of redundance in speech, of unnecessary verbiage. There had been no earthly need for my last words, and now that my fatal fluency had found me out, for the life of me I could not think of the name of a likely place. At length, with clumsily affected carelessness, I had to say, 'Oh, just down south a bit from Milton.'

'H'm! Port Lawson way, like?' suggested the curious bullocky.

'Yes, that's it,' I said hurriedly. 'Port Lawson way.'

'Ah, well, I've got a brother works in the ----y saw-mills there.

Ye'll maybe know him--Jim Gray; big, slab-sided chap he is, with his nose sorter twisted like, where a ----y brumby colt kicked him when he was a kid. ----y good thing for him it was a brumby, or unshod, anyway; he'd a' bin in Queer Street else, I'm thinkin'. Jever meet him down that way?'

I admitted that I never had, but promised to look out for him.

'Aye, ye might,' said the bullocky. 'An', if ye see him, tell him ye met me--Bill's my name--Bill Gray, ye see--an' tell him-- Oh, tell him I said to mind his ----y p's an' q's, ye know, an' be good to his ----y self.'

I readily promised that I would, and our conversation lapsed for a time, while Bill Gray filled his pipe, cutting the tobacco on the ball of his left thumb from a good-sized black plug. For the rest of our walk together, I used extreme circ.u.mspection, and was able to confine our desultory exchanges to such safe topics as the bullocks, the weather, the roads, and so forth, all favourite subjects with bushmen.

And then, as we drew near the one street of the little towns.h.i.+p, there was the saw-mill, and my opportunity for bidding good-day to a too inquisitive companion.

'So long, sonny,' said he, in response to my salutation. 'Take care of your ----y self.' (His favourite adjective had long ceased to have any meaning whatever for this good fellow. He now used it even as some ladies use inverted commas, or other commas, in writing. And sometimes, when he had occasion to use a word as long as, say, 'impossible,' he would actually drag in the meaningless expletive as an interpolation between the first and second syllables of the longer word, as though he felt it a sinful waste of opportunities to allow so many good syllables to pa.s.s unburdened by a single enunciation of his master word.)

VIII

The freedom of the open road was infinitely delightful to me after the incessant task work of St. Peter's. And perhaps this, quite as much as the policy of getting well away from the Myall Creek district, was responsible for the fact that I held on my way, with never a pause for work of any sort, through a whole week. My lodging at night cost me nothing, of course; and the expenditure of something well under a s.h.i.+lling a day provided a far more generous dietary than that to which St. Peter's had accustomed me. I began to lay on flesh, and to feel strength growing in me.

Mere living, the maintenance of existence, has always been cheap and easy in Australia, where an entirely outdoor life involves no hards.h.i.+p at any season. This fact has no doubt played an important part in the development of the Australian national character. The Australian national character is the English national character of, say, seventy or eighty years ago, subjected to isolation from all foreign influences, and to general conditions much easier and milder than those of England; given unlimited breathing-s.p.a.ce, and freed from all pressure of confined population; cut off also, to a very great extent, from the influence of tradition and ancient inst.i.tutions. For the lover of our British stock and the student of racial problems, I always think that Australia and its people offer a field of unique interest.

I did not come upon Jim Gray, the slab-sided one, in Port Lawson, so was unable to bid him mind his ensanguined p's and q's. Indeed, up to this point, I sternly repressed my social instincts, and refrained, so far as might be, from entering into talk with any one. But after the third day I began to feel that my freedom was a.s.sured, and that the chances of meeting any one from the Orphanage neighbourhood were too remote to be worth considering. My tramping became then so much the more enjoyable, for the reason that I chatted with all and sundry who showed sociable inclinations, and at that time this included practically every wayfarer one met in rural Australia. (There has been no great change in this respect.)

'The curse o' this country, my sonny boy,' said one red-bearded traveller whom I met and walked with for some miles, 'is the near-enough system. It's a great country, all right; whips o' room, good land, good climate, an' all the like o' that; but, you mark my words, the curse of it is the "near-enough" system--that an' the booze, o'

course; but mainly it's the "near-enough" system, from the nail in your trousers in place of a brace b.u.t.ton to the saplin's tied wi'

green-hide in place of a gate, an' the bloomin' agitator in parliament in place of a gentleman. It's "near-enough" that crabs us, every time.

Look at me! I owned a big store in Kempsey one time. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would ye? Well, an' I didn't booze, either.

But it was "near-enough" in the accounts, an' "near-enough" in the buyin', an' "near-enough" in the prices, an'--here I am, barely makin'

wages--worse wages than I paid counter hands--cuttin' sleepers. But I get me tucker out of it, an' me bitter 'baccy, an' that; an'---well, it's "near-enough," an' so I stick at it.'

It was on a Sunday morning of delicious brightness and virginal freshness that I reached the irregularly spreading outskirts of Dursley, a pretty little town in Gloucester county, the appearance of which, as I approached it from the highest point of the long ridge upon whose lower slopes it lay, appealed to me most strongly. Though still small Dursley is an old town, for Australia. The figures against it in the gazetteers are not imposing: 'School of Arts, 1800 vols., etc.--' But, even in the late 'seventies, it possessed that sort of smoothness, that comparative trimness and humanised air of comfort, which only the lapse of years can give. Your new settlement cannot have this attraction, no matter how prosperous or well laid out; and it is a quality which must always appeal especially to the native of an old, much-handled land, such as England. A newcomer from old Gloucester might have thought Dursley raw and new-looking enough, with its galvanised iron roofs and water-tanks, and its painted wooden houses, fences, and verandah posts. But in such a matter my standards had become largely Australian, no doubt. At all events, as I skirted the orchard fence of the most outlying residence of Dursley, I remember saying to myself aloud, as my habit was since I had taken to the road:

'Now this Dursley is the sort of place I'd like to get a job in. I'd like to live here, till----'

'H'm! Outer the mouths o' babes and suckerlings! Tssp! Well, I admire your perspicashon, youngfellermelad, anyhow, an' you can say I said so.'

At the first sound of these words, apparently launched at me from out the _Ewigkeit_, I spun round on my bare heels in the loamy sand of the track, with a moving picture thought in my mind of little gnomes in pointed caps and leathern jerkins, with diminutive miner's picks in their hands, and a fancy for the occasional bestowal of magical gifts upon wandering mortals. The picture was gone in a second, of course; and I glared at the orchard fence as though that should make it transparent.

'Higher up, sonny! Think of your arboracious ancestors, an' that sorter thing.'

This time my ears gave me truer guidance as to the direction from which the voice came, and, looking up, I saw a man reclining at his ease upon a 'possum-skin rug, which was spread on a sort of platform set between the forked branches of a giant Australian cedar, fully thirty feet from the ground, and higher than the chimneys of the house near by. The man's head and face seemed to me as round and red as any apple, and what I could see of his figure suggested at least a comfortable tendency to stoutness. Whilst not at all the sort of person who would be described as an old man, or even elderly, the owner of the mysterious voice and round, red face had clearly pa.s.sed that stage at which he would be spoken of by a stranger as a young man.

'He doesn't look a bit like a tree-climber,' I thought. The girth of the great cedar prevented my seeing the species of ladder-stairway which had been built against its far side. I had breakfasted as the sun rose this fine Sunday morning, and walked no more than a couple of miles since, so that the majority of Dursley's inhabitants had probably not begun to think of breakfast yet. My 'arboracious'

gentleman, anyhow, was still in his pyjamas, the pattern and colouring of which were, for that period, quite remarkably daring and bright.

'Well, young peripatater, I suppose you're wondering now if I've got a tail, hey? No, sir, I am fundamentally innocent--virginacious, in fact. But, all the same, if you like to just go on peripatating till you get to my side gate, and then come straight along to this arboracious retreat, I will a tale unfold that may appeal greatly to your matutinatal fancy. So peri along, youngfellermelad, an' I'll come down to meet ye.'

'All right, sir, I'll come,' I told him. And those were the first words I spoke to him, though he seemed already to have said a good deal to me.

By this time I had become seized with the idea that here was what is called 'a character.' I had, as it were, caught on to the whimsical oddity of the man, and liked it. Indeed, he would have been a singularly dull dog who failed to recognise this man's quaint good-humour as something jolly and kindly and well-meaning. The gentleman spoke by the aid, not alone of his mouth, but of his small, bright, twinkling eyes, his twitching, almost hairless brows, his hands and shoulders, and his whole, rosy, clean-shaved, mult.i.tudinously lined, puckered, and dimpled face. And then his words; the extraordinary manner in which he twisted and juggled with the longer and less familiar of them--arboreal, peripatetic, matutinal, and the like! He had an entirely independent and original way of p.r.o.nouncing very many words, and of converting certain phrases, such as 'young fellow my lad,' into a single word of many syllables. I never met any one who could so clearly convey hyphens (or dispense with them) by intonation.

Having pa.s.sed through a small gateway, I skirted the side of a comfortable-looking house of the spreading, bungalow type, with wide verandahs; and so, by way of a shaded path, arrived at the foot of the big cedar, just as the rosy-faced gentleman reached the ground from his stairway.