Chapter I

'What do you aim at in your life?' I said to Sidney Heron one night, when the first decade of the new century was drawing near its close. Heron had dined with me, and we had continued our talk in my rooms. It was a Saturday night, and therefore for me free of engagements.

'The end of it,' replied Heron, without a moment's hesitation.

'Ah! Nothing else? Nothing to come before the end?'

'Oh, well, to be precise, I suppose one does, in certain moods, cherish vague hopes of coming upon a--a way out, you know, some time before the end; time to compose one's mind decently before the prime adventure. Yes, one cherishes the notion vaguely; but I apprehend that realisation of it is only for such swells as you. I have sometimes known thrifty bursts, in which I have saved a little; but--a man doesn't buy estates out of my sort of work, you know. He's lucky if he can keep out-- Well, out of Fleet Street, say, saving your worship's presence.'

'Yes, yes; you've always done that, haven't you? A negative kind of ambition, perhaps, but----'

'Oh, naturally, you must pretend scorn for it, I see that,' said Heron.

'Not at all, my dear chap, not a bit of it. Indeed, I should be one of the last to scorn that particular aim. But I was wondering if you cherished any other. A "way out." Yes, there's something rather heart-stirring about the thought. I wonder if there is such a thing as a "way out." I forget the name of the Roman gentleman who hankered after a "way out." Once in a year or so he used to wake up, full of the conviction that he'd found it. Out came the family chariots, and off he would gallop across the Campagna to the hills beyond, where, no doubt, he had a villa of sorts, vineyards, and the rest of it. Here, in chaste seclusion, was his "way out": a glorious relief, the beginning of the great peace. And, a few weeks later, Rome would see his chariots dashing back again into the city, even harder driven than on the passage out. However, I suppose there is a "way out" somewhere for every one.'

'Well, I wouldn't say for every one,' said Heron thoughtfully. 'It doesn't matter how fast you drive, you can't get away from yourself, of course. The question of whether there is or is not a "way out" depends on what you want to get away from, and where you want to reach.'

It may be well enough to say with the poet: 'What so wild as words are?' But the fact remains that mere words, and the grouping of words, apart from their normal, everyday significance, have a notable influence upon the thoughts of some folk, and especially, I suppose, of writers. I know that Heron's careless 'way out' phrase occupied my mind greatly for many weeks after it was spoken.

'After all,' I sometimes asked myself, 'what has my whole life amounted to but an uneasy, restless, striving search for a "way out"? It has never been "to-day" with me, but always "to-morrow"; and the morrow has never come. Never for a moment have I thought: "This thing in my hand is what I want; this present Here and Now is what I desire. I will retain this, and so shall be content." No, my strivings--and I have been always striving--have been for something the future was to bring. And, behold, what was the future is more barren than the past; it is that thing which I seem incapable of valuing--the present. Is there a "way out" for me? Surely there must be. I certainly am no more fastidious than my neighbours, and indeed am much simpler in my tastes than most of them.'

And that was true. If I could lay claim to no other kind of progress, I could fairly say that I had cultivated simplicity in taste and appetite, and did in all honesty prefer simple ways. That otherwise abominable thing, my disabled digestive system, had perhaps influenced me in this direction. In days gone by, I should have said my most desired 'way out' would be the path to independent leisure for literary work. Now, if I desired anything, it was independent leisure, not for the production of immortal books, but for thinking; for the calm thought that should yield self-comprehension. Yes, I told myself, I hated the daily round of Fleet Street, with its never-slackening demand for the production of restrained moralising, polished twaddle, and non-committal, two-sided conclusions, or careful omissions, and one-eyed deductions. It was thus I thought of it, then.

'What you want is a holiday, my friend,' said Arncliffe, upon whose kindly heart and front of brass the beating of the waves of Time seemed powerless to develop the smallest fissure.

'You are right,' I thought. 'A holiday without an end is what I want. And, why not take it, instead of waiting till the other end comes, and shuts out all possibility of holidays, work, or thought? Why not?'

I began a reckoning up of my resources. But it was a perfunctory reckoning. The facts really did not greatly interest me. After all, had I not once calmly set up my establishment in the country, with a total capital of perhaps twenty pounds? Or, if one came to that, had I not cheerfully sallied forth into the world, armed only with a one-pound note? True, I told myself, with some bitterness, the youth had possessed many capabilities which the man lacked. Still, the reckoning did not greatly interest me. And, while I made it, my thoughts persistently reverted to Australian bush scenes; never, by the way, to my days of comparative prosperity in Sydney, but always to bush scenes: camp fires under vast and sombre red mahogany trees; lonely tracks in heavily timbered country; glimpses of towns like Dursley, seen from the rugged tops of high wooded ridges; little creeks, lisping over stones never touched by the feet of men or beasts; tiny clearings among the hills, where a spiral of blue smoke bespoke an open hearth and human care, though no sound disturbed the peaceful solitude save the hum of insects and the occasional cry of birds.

Now and again I would allow myself to compose a mental picture of some peaceful retreat upon the outskirts of a remote English village, where every stock and stone would have a history, and every inhabitant prove a repository of folklore and local tradition. From actual experience I still knew very little of rural England, though of late years I had done some exploring. But, vicariously, I had lived much in Wessex, East Anglia, the delectable Duchy, and other parts of the country, through the works of favourite writers. And so I did dream at times of an English retreat, but always such musings would end upon a note of scepticism. These parts were not far enough away to furnish anything so wonderful, so epoch-making, as my desired 'way out.' For persons of my temperament one of the commonest and most disastrous blunders of life is the tacit assumption that the thing easy of attainment and near at hand cannot possibly prove the thing one wants.

Gradually, then, the idea developed in my mind that the true solution of my problems lay in a working back upon my life's tracks. My thoughts wandered insistently to the northern half of the coast of New South Wales. Even now I could hardly say just how much of my retrospective vision was genuine recollection, and how much the glamour of youth. I tried to recall without sentiment the effects produced upon me, for example, by the climate of that undoubtedly favoured region. But I am not sure that my efforts gave results of any practical value. For practical purposes it is extremely difficult, in middle life, to form reliable estimates of the congeniality to one's self of any place to which one has been a stranger since youth. Recollections pitched in such a key as, 'How good one used to feel when--,' or,'How beautiful the country looked at ---- when one--,' are apt to be very misleading for a man of broken health and middle age; the one thing he cannot properly allow for being the radical change which has taken place in himself. I bore the name of the lad who tramped the roads from Myall Creek down to Dursley. In most other respects I was not now that person, but somebody else--a totally different somebody.

I could not very well talk of the plans which now took shape in my mind to Sidney Heron; because, in effect, he declined to discuss them.

'I think it would be a rather less reasonable step than suicide, and I have always declined to discuss suicide. One must see some glimmer of rationality in a project to be able to discuss it, and in this notion of yours I can see none, none whatever.'

A vague suspicion that others might be likely to share Heron's view prevented my seeking the counsel of my few friends; and also, I fear, tended rather to strengthen my inclinations to go my own way. The more I thought upon it, the more determined I became to cut completely adrift from my present life; to find a way of escaping all its insistent calls; to get far enough away from my life (so to say) to be able calmly and thoughtfully to observe it, and seek to understand it. I did not admit this, but I suppose my real aim was to escape from myself.

'Your lease is not a long one, in any case,' I told myself. 'While yet you have the chance cease to be a machine, and begin to live as a rational, reasoning creature. Be done with your petty striving after ends you have forgotten, or cannot see, or care nothing for. Get out into the open, and live, and think!'

I do not quite know the basis of my conviction that I should never make old bones, as the saying goes. The life assurance offices certainly shared this view, for they would have none of me. (I had long since thought of taking out what is called a double endowment policy.) My father died at an early age, and I had known good health hardly at all since my first two years in London. The doctor who had last examined me showed that he thought poorly of my heart; and, indeed, experience had taught me that prolonged gastric disorder is calculated to affect injuriously most organs of the human anatomy. But the thinking and planning with regard to a radical change in my life had given me a certain interest in living, and that had acted beneficially upon my health; so that, for the time being, I felt better than for a long while past.

While this fact gave a certain air of unreality to the resignation, on the grounds of ill-health, from my appointment as a member of Arncliffe's staff, it did not in the least affect my weariness of Fleet Street and all its works, or my determination to be done with them. The circle of my intimates was so very small that the task of explaining my intentions was not a formidable one, nor even one which I felt called upon to perform with any particular thoroughness. I proposed to take a voyage for the good of my health, and did not know precisely when I should return. That I deemed sufficient for most of those to whom anything at all needed to be said.