The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 32

'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 pa.s.sage 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 appet.i.te, 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 bra.s.s 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 Wess.e.x, 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.surance 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.

II

There was something strange, a dream-like want of reality, about my final departure from England, after five-and-twenty years of working life in London. I am not likely to forget any incident of it; but yet the whole experience, both at the time and now, seemed (and seems) to be shrouded in a kind of mist, a by no means disagreeable haze of unreality, which in a measure numbed all my senses. More than ever before I seemed to be, not so much living through an experience, as observing it from a detached standpoint.

Investigation of my resources showed that I had acc.u.mulated some means during the past dozen years of simple living and incessant work, not ill-paid. I had just upon two thousand pounds invested, and between one and two hundred pounds lying to my credit at call, I told myself that living alone and simply in the bush, a hundred pounds in the year would easily cover all my expenses. That I had anything like twenty years of life before me was a supposition which I could not entertain for one moment. And, therefore, I told myself again and again, with curious insistence, there really was no reason why I need ever again work for money, or waste one moment over petty anxiety regarding ways and means. That was a very great boon, I told myself; the greatest of all boons, and better fortune than in recent years I had dared to hope would be mine. And, puzzled by the coldness with which my inner mind responded to these a.s.surances, I would reiterate them, watching my mind the while, and almost angered by the absence of elation and enthusiasm which I observed there.

'You have not properly realised as yet what it means, my friend,' I murmured to myself as I walked slowly through city alley-ways, after booking my pa.s.sage to Sydney in a steam ship of perhaps seven times the tonnage of the old _Ariadne_ of my boyhood's journey to Australia.

'But it is the biggest thing you have ever known. You will begin to realise it presently. You are free. Do you hear? An absolutely free man. You need never write another line unless you wish it, and then you may write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are going right away from this howling c.o.c.kpit, and never need set foot in it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free--free! Do you hear, you tired hack? Too tired to p.r.i.c.k your ears, eh? Ah, well, wait till you've been a week or two at sea!'

Very quietly I addressed my sluggish and jaded self in this wise. Yet more than one hurried walker in the city ways looked curiously at me, as I pa.s.sed along, with a wondering scrutiny which amused me a good deal. 'Too tired to p.r.i.c.k your ears.' The suggestion came from the contemptuously self-commiserating thought that I was rather like a worn-out 'bus horse, to whom some benevolent minor Providence was offering the freedom of a fine grazing paddock. 'You're too much galled and spavined, you poor devil, to be moved by verbal a.s.surances.

Wait till you scent the breezy upland, and your feet feel the turf.

You'll know better what it all means then.'

I had entertained vague notions of a little farewell feast which I would give to Heron, and, possibly, to one or two other friends. But from the reality of such convivial enterprise I shrank, when the time came, preferring to adopt, even to Heron, the att.i.tude of a traveller who would presently return. And when, as the event proved, I found myself the guest of honour at a dinner presided over by Arncliffe, my embarra.s.sment pierced through all sense of unreality and caused me acute discomfort.

It is odd that I, who always have been foolishly sensitive to blame (from professed critics and others), should shrink so painfully from spoken praise or formal tribute of any kind. It makes my skin hot even to recall the one or two such episodes I have faced. The wretched inability to think where to dispose of one's hands and gaze during the genial delivery of after-dinner encomiums; the distressing difficulty of replying! Upon the whole, I think I was better at receiving punishment. But it is true, the latter one received in privacy, and was under no obligation to answer; since replying to printed criticisms was never a folly I indulged.

On the eve of my departure from London I did a curious and perhaps foolish thing, on the spur of a moment's impulse. I hailed a cab, and drove to Cynthia's house in Sloane Street. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Barthrop were at home, and alone, the servant told me; and in another few moments I was shaking hands with them. Naturally, they called my visit an unexpected pleasure. It was, in fact, not a very pleasurable quarter of an hour for either one of us. For years I had known nothing of their interests, or they of mine. Our talk was necessarily shallow, and I dare say Cynthia, no less than her husband, was glad when I rose to take my leave. The sweet, clear candour of her face had given place, I thought, to something not wholly unlike querulousness. But, I had one glance from her eyes, as she took my hand, which seemed to me to say:

'G.o.d speed! I understand.'

It may have meant nothing, but I like to think it meant understanding.

From Cynthia's house I went on to Heron's lodging, for I had a horror of being 'seen off,' and wished to bid my friend good-bye in his own rooms. Our talk was constrained, I remember. The stress of my uprooting affected me far more than I knew at the time. Heron regarded my going with grave disapproval as a crazy step. He regretted it, too; and such feelings always tended to exaggerate his tendency to taciturnity, or to a harsh, sardonic vein in speech.

As his way was in such a matter, Heron calmly ignored my stipulation about being 'seen off,' and he was standing beside the curb when I stepped out of my cab at Fenchurch Street Station next morning. There was nearly half an hour to spare, we found, before the boat train started.

'The correct thing would be a stirrup-cup,' growled Heron.

'The very thing,' I said; conversation in such a place, and in such circ.u.mstances, proving quite impossible for me. By an odd chance I recalled my first experiences upon arrival at this same mean and dolorous station, more than twenty years previously. 'We will go to the house in which the "genelmun orduder bawth,"' I said, and led Heron across into the Blue Boar.

The forced jocularity of these occasions is apt to be a pitifully wooden business, and I suppose it was a relief to us both when my train began slowly to move.

'By the way--I had forgotten,' said Heron, very gruffly. 'Take this trifle with you-- May be of some use. Good-bye! Look me up as soon as you get back. I give you a year--or nearly.'

He waved his hand jerkily, and was gone. He had given me the silver cigarette-case which he had used for all the years of our acquaintance. It bore his initials in one corner, and under these I now saw engraved: 'To N. F., 1890-1910.' I do not recall any small incident that impressed me more than this.

I still moved through a mist. The voices of my travelling companions seemed oddly small and remote. I felt as though encased and insulated, in some curious way, from the everyday life about me. And this mood possessed me all through that day. Through all the customary bustle of an ocean liner's departure, I moved slowly, silently, aloofly, as a somnambulist. It was a singular outsetting, this start upon my 'way out.'

III

In ordinary times my thrifty instinct might have led me to travel in the second cla.s.s division of the great steamer. But it had happened that the sum I set aside to cover my travelling expenses proved more than ample. Several small unreckoned additions had been made to it during my last month in England; and the upshot was that I decided to travel by first saloon, and even to indulge myself in the added luxury of a single-berth, upper-deck cabin. For me privacy had for long been one of the few luxuries I really did value. Heron had mildly satirised my sybaritic plans as representing an ingenious preparation for hut life in the Australian bush, but I had claimed that comfort and privacy on the pa.s.sage would give me a deserved holiday, and help put me into good form for my fresh start oversea. I am not sure which view was the more correct.

At all events I certainly was very comfortably placed on board the _Oronta_. My books I had deliberately packed in boxes marked 'Not wanted on voyage.' There was not so much as a sheet of ma.n.u.script paper among my cabin luggage. Beyond an odd letter or two for postage at ports of call, and any casual browsing in the ship's library to which I might feel impelled in my idleness, I was prepared to give no thought to reading or writing for the present; since for five-and-twenty years I had been giving practically all my days and half my nights to these pursuits as a working man of letters.

I had amused myself of late with elaborate antic.i.p.ations of the delights of idleness during this pa.s.sage to Australia. My ideas of sea travel were really culled from recollections of life on a full rigged clipper ship--not a steamboat. (The homeward pa.s.sage from Australia had hardly been sea-travel in the ordinary sense for me, but rather six weeks of clerking in an office.) In my antic.i.p.ations of the present journey, the dominant impressions had been based upon memories of the spotless cleanliness, endless leisure, and primitive simplicity of the old time sailing ship life. I do not mean that I had thought I should trot about the decks of the _Oronta_ bare-footed, as I and my childish companions had done aboard the _Ariadne_; but I do mean that the atmosphere of the _Ariadne_ life had coloured all my thoughts of what the present trip would be for me.

And that, of course, was a mistake. The smoothly ordered life of the _Oronta's_ saloon pa.s.sengers was very much that of a first-cla.s.s seaside hotel, say in Bournemouth. So far from sprawling upon the snowy deck of a forecastle-head, to watch the phosph.o.r.escent lights in the water under our ship's bow, saloon pa.s.sengers on board the _Oronta_ were not expected ever to intrude upon the forward deck--the ship had no forecastle-head--which was reserved for the uses of the crew. Also, in the conventional black and white of society's evening uniform for men, I suppose one does not exactly sprawl on decks, even where these are spotless, as they never are on board a steamship.

The pleasant race of sailor men, of sh.e.l.l-backs, such as those who swung the yards and tallied on to the halliards of the _Ariadne_, may or may not have become extinct, and given place to a breed of sea-going mechanics, who protect their feet by means of rubber boots when washing decks down in the morning. In any case, I met none of the old salted variety among the _Oronta's_ mult.i.tudinous crew. For me there was here no sitting on painted spars, or tarry hatch-covers, or rusty anchor-stocks, and listening to long, rambling 'yarns,' or 'cuffers,'

in idle dog-watches or restful night-watches, when the southern Trades blew steadily, and the braces hung untouched upon their pins for a week on end. No, in the second dog-watch here, one took a solemn const.i.tutional preparatory to dressing for dinner; and in the first night-watch one smoked and listened w.i.l.l.y-nilly to polite small talk, and (from the ship's orchestra) the latest and most criminal products of New York's musical genius. I never heard or saw the process of relieving wheel or look-out aboard the _Oronta_, and long before the beginning of the middle watch I had usually switched off for the night the electric reading-lamp over my pillow.

The fact is, of course, that I had never had any kind of training for such a life as that in which I now found myself. I will not pretend to regret that, for, to be frank, it is a vapid, foolish, empty life enough. But there it was; one could not well evade it, and I had had no previous experience of anything at all like it. The most popular breakfast-hour was something after nine. Beef-tea, ices, and suchlike aids to indigestion were partaken of a couple of hours later. Luncheon was a substantial dinner. The four o'clock tea was quite a meal for most pa.s.sengers. Caviare and anchovy sandwiches were the rule in the half hour preceding dinner, which was, of course, a serious function.

But ours was a valiant company, and supper was a seventh meal achieved by many. The orchestra seemed never far away; games were numerous (here again I had hopelessly neglected my education), and at night there were concerts, impromptu dances, and b.a.l.l.s that were far from being impromptu.