The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 19

'No pocket-book?' I interrupted despondently. The policeman brightened at that.

'So there was a pocket-book? I thought so,' the brilliant creature said. And after that I lost all interest in these bedside proceedings.

I referred the man to the _Chronicle_ office, the bank, and the shipping-office, and requested as a special favour that Mr. Smith should be sent for; also, on a journalistic afterthought, a reporter from the _Chronicle_. The numbers of the bank-notes had been written down. Oh yes, on the advice of the bank clerk, I had done this carefully at the bank counter, and preserved the record scrupulously--in the missing pocket-book.

The police--marvellous men--ascertained next morning that the notes had been cashed at the Bank of New South Wales, in George Street, within half an hour of the time at which I obtained them from the savings bank. And that was the last I ever heard of them.

Twenty-four hours later I was called upon to identify an arrested suspect who had been seen in the vestibule of the bank at the time of my call. I did identify the poor wretch. He was the American reporter who had been discharged from the _Chronicle_ staff. But n.o.body at the Bank of New South Wales remembered ever having seen the man, and I said at once that I could not possibly identify my a.s.sailant, not even having known that any one had attacked me until I was told of it in hospital.

The police appeared to regard me as a most unsatisfactory kind of person, as I doubtless was from their point of view. But they had to release the American, although, when arrested, he had two shining new sovereigns in his ragged pockets, and was full of a.s.sorted alcoholic liquors. Their theory was that in some way or another the American had known of my movements and plans, and communicated these to a professional 'strong arm' thief; that I had been shadowed to and from the bank, and that I might possibly have escaped attack altogether but for my addiction to byways.

Their theory did not greatly interest me. For the time the central fact was all my mind seemed able to accommodate. My savings were gone, my pa.s.sage to England forfeited, my bank account closed, and--so my hot eyes saw it--my career at an end.

XXII

From the medical standpoint there were no complications whatever in my case; it was just as simple as a cut finger. Regarded from this point of view, a broken head is a small matter indeed, in a youth of abstemious habits and healthy life. Well, he was a very thoroughly chastened youth who accepted the cheery physician's congratulations upon his early discharge from hospital.

'Nuisance about the money,' admitted the doctor genially, as he twiddled his ma.s.sive gold watch-chain. 'But it might have been a deal worse, you know; a very great deal worse. After all, health's the thing, the only thing that really matters.'

The remark strikes me now as reasonable enough. At the time I thought it pretty vapid twaddle. Four quiet days I spent at my North Sh.o.r.e lodging, and then (by Mr. Foster's freely and most kindly given permission) back to the _Chronicle_ office again, just as before, save for one detail--I no longer had a banking account. But was it really, 'just as before,' in any single sense? No, I think not; I think not.

Often in the years that have pa.s.sed since that morning chat with the cheerful physician in Sydney Hospital, I have heard folk speak lightly of money losses--other people's losses, as a rule--and talk of the comparative unimportance of these as against various other kinds of loss. Never, I think, at all events, since those Sydney days of mine, could any one justly charge me with overestimating the importance of money. And yet, even now, and despite the theories of the philosophers, I incline to the opinion that few more desolating and heart-breaking disasters can befall men and women than the loss of their savings. I would not instance such a case as mine. But I have known cases of both men and women who, in the later years, have lost the thrifty savings of a working life, savings acc.u.mulated very deliberately--and at what a cost of patient, long-sustained self-denial!--for a specific purpose: the purchase of their freedom in the closing years; their manumission from wage-earning toil. And I say that, in a world const.i.tuted as our world is, life knows few tragedies more starkly fell.

As for my little loss I now think it likely that in certain ways I derived benefits from it; and, too, in other ways, permanent hurt. I was still standing in the doorway of my manhood; all my life and energy as a man before me. But it did not seem so at the time. At the time I thought of this handful of money as being the sole outcome and reward for six years of pretty strenuous working effort. (What a lot I overlooked!) I was far from telling myself that a lad of one-and-twenty had his career still to begin. On the contrary, it seemed my career had had for its culminating point the great adventure of going to England, to attain which long years of toilsome work had been necessary. These years had pa.s.sed, the work was done, the culmination at hand; and now it was undone, the career was broken, all was lost.

Oh, it was a dourly tragical young man who shared Mr. Smith's bedroom during the next few months.

One odd apparent outcome of my catastrophe in a teacup has often struck me since. No doubt, if the truth were known quite other causes had been at work; but it is a curious fact that never, at any period of my life since the morning on which I so gaily closed that savings bank account, have I ever taken the smallest zest, interest, or pleasure in the saving of money. This seems to me rather odd and noteworthy. It is, I believe, strictly true.

For a few weeks after resuming my working routine I plodded along in a rather dazed fashion, and without any definite purpose. And then, during a wakeful hour in bed (while Mr. Smith snored quite gently and inoffensively on the far side of our little room), I came to a definite decision. The brutal episode of the crowbar--the weapon which had felled me was found beside me, by the way; a heavy bar used for opening packing-cases, which the thief had evidently picked up as he came after me through Hunt and Carton's yard--should not be allowed to divert me from my course. Diversion at this stage was what I could not and would not tolerate. I would go to England just the same, and soon.

I would put by a few pounds, and then work my pa.s.sage home. I was perfectly clear about it, and fell asleep now, quite content.

On the next day I began making inquiries. At first I thought I could manage it as a journalist, by writing eloquent descriptions of the pa.s.sage. A little talk at the shipping-office served to disabuse my mind of this notion. Then I would go as a deck-hand. I was gently apprised of the fact that my services as a deck-hand might not greatly commend themselves to the average ship-master. My decision was not in the least affected by the little things I learned.

Finally, I secured a personal introduction to the manager of the shipping-office in which my twenty pounds deposit was still held, and induced this gentleman to promise that he would, sooner or later, secure for me a chance to work my pa.s.sage home. He would advise me, he said, when the chance arrived.

With this I was satisfied, and returned in a comparatively cheerful mood to my plodding. I have a shrewd suspicion that my chief, Mr.

Foster, used his good offices on my behalf with the shipping company's manager.

Three months went slowly by. And then one morning a laconic note reached me from the shipping-office.

'Could you do a bit of clerking in a purser's office? If so, please see me to-day.'

It appeared that the a.s.sistant purser of one of the mail-boats had died while on the pa.s.sage between Melbourne and Sydney. The company preferred to fill such vacancies in England, and so a temporary clerical a.s.sistant for the purser would be shipped. Would I care to undertake it for a five-pound note and my pa.s.sage?

Forty-eight hours later I had said good-bye to Sydney friends, and was installed at a desk in the purser's office on board the _Orimba_. I had twenty-two pounds and ten shillings in my trunk, and the promise of a five-pound note when the steamer should reach London. It was a kind of outsetting upon my great adventure quite different from that which I had planned. But it was an outsetting, and a better one than I had expected, for I had been prepared to work my pa.s.sage as a deck-hand or steward.

And so it fell out that when I did actually leave Australia I was too busy at my clerking, and at inventing soporific answers to the mostly irrelevant inquiries of more or less distracted pa.s.sengers, to catch a glimpse of the land disappearing below the horizon--the land in which I had spent the most formative years of my life--or to spare a thought for any such matter as sea-sickness.

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD

I

Of late years the printers have given us reams and reams of first impressions of such world centres as London and New York. Not to mention the army of unknown globe-trotters and writers, celebrities of every sort and kind have recorded their impressions. I always smile when my eyes fall upon such writings; and, generally, I recall, momentarily at all events, some aspect of my own arrival in England as purser's clerk on board the _Orimba_.

When I read, for example, the celebrity's first impressions of New York--a confused blend of bouquets, automobiles, newspaper interviewers, incredibly high buildings, sumptuous luncheons, barbaric lavishness, bad road surfaces, frenetic hospitality, wild expenditure of paper money--I think it would be more interesting perhaps, certainly more instructive, to have the first impressions of the immigrant, who lands with five pounds, and it may be a wife and a child or two. Then there is the immigrant from the same end of the ship who is not allowed to land, who is rejected by the guardians of this Paradise on earth, because he has an insufficient number of shillings, or a weakness in his lungs. The bouquets, automobiles, sumptuous luncheons, and things do not, one may apprehend, figure largely in the first impressions of these last uncelebrated people, though their impressions may embrace quite as much of the reality concerned as do those of the famous; and, it may be, a good deal more.

Broadly speaking, and as far as outlines go, I was in the position of one who sees England for the first time. There were, I know, subtle differences; yet, broadly speaking, that was my position. The native-born Australian, approaching the land of his fathers for the first time, comes to it with a ma.s.s of cherished lore and a.s.sociations at least equal in weight and effect to my childhood's knowledge and experience of England. He very often comes also to relatives. I came, not only having no claim upon any single creature in these islands, but having no faintest knowledge of any one among them. I carried two letters of introduction: one from Mr. Foster to a London newspaper editor whom he knew only by correspondence, and the other from Mr.

Rawlence to a painter, who just then (though I knew it not) was in Algiers.

The purser paid me my five pounds before I left the ship, wished me luck, and vowed, as his habit was in saying good-bye to people, that he was very glad he had met me. And then I got into the train with my luggage, and set out for Fenchurch Street and the conquest of London.

The pa.s.sengers had all disappeared long since. England swallows up shiploads of them almost every hour without winking. My arrival differed in various ways from theirs. For instance, I had had no leisure in which to think about it, to antic.i.p.ate it, until I was actually seated in the train, bound for Fenchurch Street. They had been arriving, in a sense, ever since we left the Mediterranean; after a pa.s.sage, by the way, resembling in every particular all other pa.s.sages from Australia to England in mail steamers.

To be precise, I think the first impression received by me was that the England I had come to was a quite astonishingly dingy land. The people seemed to me to have a dingy pallor, like the table-linen of the cheaper sort of lodging-house. They looked, not so much ill as unwashed, not so much poor as cross, hipped, tired, worried, and annoyed about something. They wore their hats at an angle then unfamiliar to me, with a forward rake. They must laugh or, at any rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where _Punch_ comes from. It is the land of d.i.c.kens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily under sunny blue skies upon bright and cheery scenes.

Since then I have again and again encountered the most indomitable cheerfulness in Londoners, in circ.u.mstances which would drive any Australian to tears, or blasphemy, or suicide, or to all three. And I know now that many Londoners wash as frequently as Australians, or nearly so. But my first impression of the appearance of those I saw was an impression of sour, cross, unwashed sadness. And, being an impressionable person, I immediately found an explanatory theory. The essential difference between these folk and people following similarly humble avocations in Sydney, I thought, is that these people, even those of them who, personally, were never acquainted with hunger, live in the shadow of actual want; even of actual starvation. In Sydney they do not. That accounts for the don't-care-a-d.a.m.n light-heartedness seen in Australian faces, and for the dominance of care in these faces.

I still had everything to learn, and have since learned some of it.

And I do not think now that my theory was particularly incorrect. The mere physical fact that the working men in Sydney take a bath every day as a matter of course, and that in London they do not all take one every week, trifling as it may seem, is itself accountable for something. But the ever-present knowledge that starvation is a real factor in life, not in Asia, but in the house next door but one, if not in one's own house--that is a great moulder of facial expression.

It plays no part whatever in the life of the country from which I had come.

As my train drew to within half a dozen miles of its destination, I became vaguely conscious of the real inner London as distinguished from its extraordinary dockland and water approaches. We pa.s.sed a huge and grimy dwelling-house, overlooking the railway, a 'model'

dwelling-house; and in pa.s.sing I caught sight of an incredible legend, graven in stone on the side of this building, intimating that here were the homes of more than one thousand families. That rather took my breath away.

Then we dived into a tunnel, and emerged a few seconds later, screeching hoa.r.s.ely, right in London. It hit me below the belt. I experienced what they call a 'sinking' feeling in the pit of my stomach. I thought what a fool I was, how puny and insignificant; and, again, what a fool I must be, to come blundering along here into the maw of this vast beast, this London--I and my miserable five-and-twenty pounds! For one wild moment the panic-born thought of hurrying back to my purser and begging re-engagement for the outward trip to Australia scuttled across my mind. And then the train jolted to a standstill, and, with a faint kind of nausea in my throat, I stepped out into London.

I have to admit that it was not at all a glorious or inspiriting home-coming. It was as different from the home-coming of my dreams (when a minor capitalist) as anything well could be. But yet this was indubitably London, my destination; the objective of all my efforts for a long time past. A uniformed boot-black gave me a sudden thought of St. Peter's Orphanage--the connection, if any existed, must have been rather subtle--and that somehow stiffened my spine a little. Here I was, after all, the utterly friendless Orphanage lad who, a dozen thousand miles away, had willed that he should go out into the world, do certain kinds of things, meet certain kinds of people, and journey all across the world to his native England. Well, without much a.s.sistance, I had accomplished these things, and was actually there, in London. There was tingling romance in the thought of it, after all.

No drizzling rain could alter that. Having successfully adventured so far, surely I was not to be daunted by dingy faces, bricks, and mortar, and houses said to accommodate a thousand families!

And so, with tolerably authoritative words to a porter about luggage, I squared my shoulders in response to life's undeniable appeal to the adventurous.

II

When I had been a dozen years or more in London, a man I knew bewailed to me one night the fact that he had to leave Fenchurch Street Station in the small hours of the next morning, and did not know how on earth he would manage it.

'Why not sleep there to-night?' I suggested carelessly.

'Sleep there!' he repeated with a stare. 'But there are no hotels in that part of the world.'

'Oh, bless you, yes!' said I. 'You try the Blue Boar. You will find it almost as handy as sleeping in the booking-office, without nearly so strong a smell of kippers and dirt.'