Chapter X

I used to tell Heron, and others who came into my later life, that the happiest days I ever knew were the 'ten bob a week and all found' days of my handy-lad time. It was very likely true, I think; though really it is next door to impossible for any man to tell which period in his life has been the more happy; and especially is this so in the case of the type of man who finds more interest in the past than in the future. The other side of the road always will be the cleaner, the trees on the far side of the hill will always be the greener, for a great many of us. Any other time seems preferable before the present moment, to some folk; and to many, times past are in every sense superior to anything the future can have to offer.

At all events I was fortunate in the matter of my first situation, and I was contented in it, being satisfied that it was an excellent means to an end which I had decided should be very fine indeed.

I have never yet been able to make up my mind whether I am like or unlike to the majority of mankind in this: with me every phase of life, every occupation, every effort, almost every act and thought have been regarded, not upon their own merits or in relation to themselves, but as means to ends. The ends, it always appeared, would prove eminently desirable; they would give me my reward. The ends, once they were attained, would certainly bring me peace, happiness, fame, health, enjoyment, leisure, monetary gain, or whatever it was they were designed to bring. I am still uncertain whether or not the bulk of my fellow-men are similarly constituted; but I am tolerably certain that one misses a great deal in life as the result of having this kind of a mind.

To a great extent, for example, one misses whatever may be desirable in the one moment of time of which we are all sure--the present. One is not spared the worries and anxieties of the present, because they seem to have their definite bearing upon the end in view. But the good, the sound sweetness of the present, when it chances to be there, so far from cherishing and savouring every fraction of it, we spare it no more than a hurried smile in passing, as a trifling incident of our progress toward the grand end which (just then) we have in view. And how often time proves the end a thing which never actually draws one breath of life; a mere embryo, a phantom, vaporous product of our own imagination! So that for one, two, or fifty years, as the case may be, we have derived no benefit from a number of tangible good things, by reason of our strenuous pursuit of a shadow.

Is this a peculiar disease, or am I merely noting a characteristic of my own which is also a characteristic of the age in which I have lived? I wonder! It is, at all events, a way of living which involves a rather tragical waste of the good red stuff of life; and, yes, upon the whole it is a form of restless waste and extravagance which I fancy is far from rare among the thinking men and women of my time. They do not travel; they hurry from one place to another. They do not enjoy; they pursue enjoyment. They do not rest; they arrange very elaborately, cleverly, strenuously to catch rest--and miss it. Is it not possible that some of us do not live, but use up all the time at our disposal in sweating, toiling, scheming preparation for the particular sort of life we think would suit us; the kind of life we are aiming at; the end, in fact, in pursuit of which we expend and exhaust our whole share of life as a means?

Though these things strike me now, it is needless to say they formed no part of my mental outlook in Dursley.

As is often the case in Australian homes, the colony of out-buildings upon Mr. Perkins's premises at Dursley was more extensive than the parent building. Between the main house and the stable, with all its attendant minor sheds and lean-to, was a long, low-roofed wooden structure, divided into dairy, wash-house, tool-room, workshop, and, at the end farthest from the dairy, what is called a 'man's room.' This latter apartment was now my private sanctuary, entered by nobody else, unless at my invitation. I grew quite fond of this little room, which measured eight feet by twelve feet, and had a window looking down the ridge and across the creek to Dursley in its valley and the wooded hills beyond.

I had no lamp in my sanctuary, and no fireplace. But the climate of New South Wales is kindly, and, when one is used to it and one's eyes are young, the light of a single candle is surprisingly satisfying. That, at all events, was the light by which I mastered the intricacies of Pitman's system of shorthand, besides reading most of the volumes in Dursley's School of Arts library. The reading I accomplished in bed; the shorthand studies on the top of a packing-case which hailed originally from a match factory in east London, and doubtless had contained the curious little cylindrical cardboard boxes of wax vestas, stamped with a sort of tartan plaid pattern, that are seen so far as I know only in Australia, though made in England.

At first, like others who have trodden the same thorny path, I went ahead swimmingly with my shorthand, confining myself to the writing of it on the packing-case. Being at the end of the current bed-book (it was Charles Reade's _Griffith Gaunt_) I took my latest masterpiece of shorthand to bed with me one night, only to find that I could barely read one word in ten. That was a rather perturbed and unhappy night, and my progress thereafter was a somewhat slower and more laborious process.

The habit of rising with the sun was now fairly engrained in me. At about daybreak then my first duties would take me to the wood-heap, with axe and saw, and subsequently to the scullery with a heaped barrow-load of fuel for the day. Arrived there I polished the household's boots and knives, washed my hands at Mrs. Gabbitas's immaculate sink--a more scrupulously clean housewife I have yet to meet--and proceeded to the feeding and milking of Bella. Then I fed the horse, cleared out the stable, spruced myself up, and so to breakfast with 'The Gabbitular One.' Three meat meals and two snacks--'the eleven o'clock' and 'the four o'clock'--were the order of the day in this establishment. The snacks consisted of tea, which was also served at every meal, including dinner, and scones and butter; the meals included always some sort of flesh food and varying adjuncts. After the lean dietary of St. Peter's this regime seemed almost startling to me at first, a thing which could hardly be expected to last. But I adapted myself to it without difficulty or complaint, and thrived upon it greatly.

During the day my main work was the cultivation of the garden, and the care of the front lawn, in which Mr. Perkins took a very special pride and interest; chiefly, I think, because it was the foreground of his wife's daily outlook. But the routine work of the garden, which always was demanding a little more time than one had to spare for it, was subject, of course, to interruptions. I did the churning twice a week, and Mrs. Gabbitas the 'working' and 'making up' of the butter. And there were other matters, including occasional errands to the town--a message for a storekeeper, or a note for the master at his office.

Over the entrance to this office of Mr. Perkins's hung a huge board on which were boldly painted in red letters on a white ground the name of George Perkins, and the impressive words--'Dursley's Omnigerentual and Omniferacious Agent.' It really was a remarkable notice-board, and residents invariably pointed it out to visitors as one of the sights of the town. Indeed, Dursley was very proud of its Omniferacious Agent, who for three successive years now had been also its mayor.

But I gathered from veteran gossips in the town's one street that this had not always been so. Mr. Perkins had originally arrived in the town but very slightly more burdened with worldly gear than I was. The tools of his craft as a cobbler had left room enough in one bundle for the rest of his property. Dursley did not want a cobbler at that time, I gathered; so in this respect Mr. Perkins had been less fortunate than I was; for when I arrived some one had wanted a handy lad. However, what proved more to the point was the fact that the cobbler did want Dursley. He stayed long enough to teach the townsfolk to appreciate him as a cobbler of boots--and of affairs, of threatened legal proceedings, frayed friendships, and the like. And then, for some months prior to a general election, the cobbler edited the local weekly newspaper, and was largely instrumental in returning the Dursley-born candidate to parliament, in place of an interfering upstart from Kempsey way. It was not at all a question of politics, but of Dursley and its interests.

By this time Mr. Perkins had gone some way towards Omniferacious Agenthood. He had very successfully negotiated sundry sales and purchases for townsmen, who shared that disinclination to call in conventionally recognised professional assistance which I have often noticed in rural Australia. Then he married the daughter of the newspaper proprietor, whose brother was one of Dursley's leading storekeepers. Everybody now liked him, except a few crotchety or petty souls, who, not understanding him, suspected him of ridiculing or exposing them in some way, and in any case mistrusted his jollity, his success, and his popularity. Even in the beginning, before the famous notice-board was thought of, and while Mr. Perkins's work was yet 'awlicular,' I gathered that several old residents had set their faces firmly against this invincibly merry fellow, and done all they could to 'keep him in his place.'

And now he bought and sold for them: their houses, land, timber, fruit, produce, live-stock, and property of every sort and kind, making a larger income than most of them in the doing of it, and accomplishing all this purely by force of his personality. He succeeded where others failed, because so few could help liking him; and if he failed but seldom in anything he undertook, that was probably due in part to the fact that he never thought and never spoke of failure, preferring always as topics more cheerful matters. His wife had become a permanent invalid very shortly after their marriage, yet no person could possibly have made the mistake of thinking George Perkins's marriage a failure. I doubt if a happier married pair could have been found in Australia.

The meal we called tea (though we drank tea at every other meal) was partaken of by Mrs. Gabbitas and myself at half-past five, and by Mr. and Mrs. Perkins at six o'clock. I was given to understand at the outset that no work was expected of me after tea. Once or twice of a summer evening I went out into the garden to perform some trifling task I had overlooked, and upon being seen there by Mr. Perkins was saluted with some such remark as:

'Stealing time, Nickperry, stealing time! You an' me'll fall out, my friend, if you can't manage to keep proper working hours. Applicatiousness is all very well, but stealing time after tea is gluttish and greedular, and must be put down with an iron hand, with an iron hand, Nickperry. Tssp! Howzashorthandgetnon?'

Before expelling the last interrogative omnibus word, he would clench one fat fist and knead the air downward with it, to illustrate the process of putting down greediness with an iron hand.

I saw comparatively little of him, of course, owing to his preoccupation with business, his own and that of Dursley and most of its inhabitants; but we were excellent good friends, and it was rarely that he missed his Sunday morning walk round the whole place with me, when my week's work would be passed in more or less humorous review, and the programme for the next week discussed. After this tour of inspection I generally went to church, and the afternoon I almost invariably spent in my room over the packing-case. That is a period which many people give to letter-writing, and it is queer to recall the fact that, so far as I can remember, I had written only two letters in my life up to this period--one to a Sydney bookseller, whose address I got from Mr. Perkins, and one to Mr. Rawlence, the Sydney artist, to tell him of my present position, and to say that I had made a start upon shorthand. His kindly and encouraging reply was, I think, the first letter I ever received through the post. But I now began to write letters by the score, addressed to imaginary correspondents, and based in style upon my studies of correspondence in various books. These epistles, however, all ended their brief careers under the kindling wood in Mrs. Gabbitas's kitchen grate.

'Applicatious and industrial, with bettermentatious ambitions,' Mr. Perkins had said of me within a few moments of our first meeting, and at this period I think I justified the sense of his comment. My daily work was pleasant enough, of course, healthy and not fatiguing. Still, it was perhaps odd in a youth of my age that I should have had no desire for recreation or amusement. My study of shorthand did not interest me in the faintest degree; but I was greatly interested by my growing mastery of it, because I thought of the mastery of shorthand, as Mr. Rawlence had described it, as a very valuable means to an end, to various ends. I thought of it, in short, as the key which should open Sydney's doors to me; for, happy as my life was in Dursley, I never regarded it in any other light than as a useful preliminary to the next stage of my career. And that again, from all I have since been told, was hardly an attitude proper to my years.

It certainly was not due to any conscious discontent with my life and work in Dursley. I must suppose it was the beginning of that restless temperamental itch which all through life has made me regard everything I did as no more than the necessary prelude to some more or less vague thing I meant presently to do, which should be much better worth doing. A praiseworthy doctrine I have heard it called. It may be. But I would like to be able to warn all and sundry who cultivate or inculcate it in this present century, that the margin between it and the wastefully extravagant body and soul-devouring restlessness which I sometimes think the key-note of our time--the margin is a perilously slender one.