Chapter I

My wife was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, a populous London city of the dead. And that afternoon I resigned my position on the staff of the _Advocate_.

I do not think that even at the time I had any definite reason for this step, and I do not know of any now. I remember Arncliffe remonstrated very kindly with me, spoke of plans he had in view for me, about which he was unable to enter into detail just then, and strongly urged me to reconsider the matter. I told him, without much relevance really, that I had buried my wife that morning; and he, very naturally, said he had not even known I was a married man.

'Look here, Freydon,' he said; 'be guided by me. Take a month's holiday, and then come and talk to me again.'

This was no doubt both wise and kindly advice, but I merely repeated that I must leave; and, within a week or two, I did leave, Arncliffe, in the most friendly way, making things easy for me, and agreeing to take a certain contribution from me once a week. This gave me three guineas a week, and I was grateful for the arrangement.

'You must let me see something of you occasionally. I'm really sorry to lose you. You know I've always appreciated your suggestions,' said Arncliffe, when I looked in to bid him good-bye. He spoke with a friendly sincerity which I valued; because it was a fact that he had, as editor, adopted and developed a good many suggestions of mine, without apparent acknowledgment, and after keeping them in his pigeon-holes until, as I thought, he had forgotten their existence, and come to think the ideas subsequently acted upon were his own.

With funds in hand amounting to something well under twenty pounds, I took lodgings on the outskirts of Dorking--a bedroom and a sitting-room in the rather pretty cottage of a jobbing carpenter and joiner named Gilchrist. Mrs. Gilchrist, a wholesome, capable woman, performed some humble duties in the church close by, in which she made use of a very long-handled feather duster, and sundry cloths of a blue and white checked pattern. Her husband had a small workshop in the cottage garden, but his work more often than not took him away from home during the day. Jasmine and a crimson rambler strayed about the window of my little study, from which the view of the surrounding hills was delightful. For some days I explored the neighbourhood assiduously. And then I began to write my fourth book. The third--a volume of short stories of mean streets, written in the days preceding my marriage--was then passing through the press.

When I first went to Dorking my health was in a very poor way. I imagine I must at the time have been on the verge of a pretty bad breakdown. The preceding six or eight months had greatly aggravated my digestive troubles, and I had also suffered a good deal from neuralgia. The constantly increasing stress of my domestic affairs, superimposed upon steady sedentary work in which the quest for new ideas was a continuous preoccupation, and combined with the effects of an irregular and indifferent dietary and lack of air and exercise, had reduced me physically to a low ebb.

During those last weeks in London, after Fanny's death, I was not conscious of this collapse; and my first week in Dorking had a curiously stimulating effect upon me. Indeed, I fancy that week was the saving of me. But at the end of it, after one long day's writing, I took to my bed with influenza, and remained there for some time, dallying also with bronchitis, incipient pneumonia, gastritis, and a diphtheritic throat.

Six weeks passed before I left my bedroom, but during only one of those weeks did I fail to produce my weekly contribution to the _Advocate_. If the quality of those contributions in any way reflected my low and febrile condition, Arncliffe mercifully refrained from drawing my attention to it. At the end of the six weeks I sat at an open window, amused by the ghostly refinement of my hands, and grateful to Providence for sunshine and clean air.

The doctor was a cheery soul, toward whom I felt most strongly drawn, because he was the only man I ever met in England who smoked my particular brand of Virginia plug tobacco. I had suffered from the lack of it since leaving Australia, but this good doctor told me how to get it in England, from an agent in Yorkshire; and I was deeply grateful to him for the information. He also told me, as I sat at the open window, that he did not think much of my stewardship of my own body.

'Let me tell you, Mr. Freydon, you have been sailing several points closer to the wind than a man has any right to sail. If you treated a child so, or a servant, aye, or a dumb beast, some preventive society would be at you for cruelty and neglect. They'd call me for the prosecution, and by gad, sir, my evidence would send you to Portland or Dartmoor--fine healthy places, both of 'em, by the way! But people seem to think they're licensed to treat their own bodies with any amount of cruelty and neglect. A grave mistake; a grave mistake! In the ideal state, sir, Citizen Jones will no more be allowed to maltreat and injure the health of Citizen Jones than he will be allowed to break the head or poison the food of Citizen Smith. Why should he? Each is of the same value in the eyes of the state; and, we may suppose, in the eyes of his Maker.'

The good man blew his nose, and endeavoured to introduce extreme severity into his kindly and indomitably cheerful expression.

'Yes, sir,' he resumed. 'You've got to turn over a new leaf from now on. Three good, plain meals a day, taken to the stroke of the clock. Eight hours in bed every night of your life, and nine if you can get 'em. Two hours of walkin', or other equally good exercise--if you can discover its equal; I can't--in the open air every day. And anything less will be a flat dereliction of duty, and bad citizenship, remember that. This is for by and by, of course. Just now you want twelve hours in bed, and half a dozen light meals a day. Mrs. Gilchrist knows all about that. Good, sensible woman, Mrs. Gilchrist. Wish there were more like her, these days. Oh, I'll be seeing you again, from time to time. Don't you bother your head about "accounts," my dear sir. And when you begin to get about now do oblige me by remembering your duty to yourself, as I've told you. As your doctor, I warn you, it's necessary in your case--absolutely necessary. _Good_-morning!'

And so he trotted off to his high dog-cart and his morning rounds. An excellent and kindly man, designed by Nature, his own temperament, and long use, for the precise part in life he played. Such adequacy and fitness are rare, and very admirable. I sometimes think that if I could have exactly obeyed this excellent physician, my whole life had been quite different. But then, to be able exactly to obey him, perhaps it would have been necessary for me to have been a different person in the beginning. And then, I might never have met him, and--there's the end of a profitless speculation.

As a fact I surreptitiously resumed work on that book long before the doctor gave permission, and within a week of settling his account I was once more living a life of which he would have strongly disapproved; though it certainly was a very much less wearing and unwholesome one than the life I had always lived in London. But, as against that, I now had a good deal less in the way of staying power and force of resistance. So far from having paid up in full, and wiped off all old scores, in the matter of those first years in London, I had barely discharged the first instalment of a penalty which was to prove part and parcel of every subsequent year in my life. And yet, as I have said, I sometimes think that doctor gave me my chance, if only it had been in me to live by his instructions. But, apparently, it was not.