Chapter XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

I gave an eager affirmative, and the editor nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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