ARRIVAL FROM PORT NATAL.
Mr. Roland Yorke's emigration to Port Natal cannot be said to have
turned out a success. He had gone off in high spirits, a chief cabin
passenger, Lord Carrick having paid the passage money, forty pounds.
He had carried with him, from the same good-natured source, fifty
pounds, to begin life with when he should land, a small but sufficient
outfit, and a case of merchandize consisting of frying-pans. Seven
years, before, when Roland resolved to emigrate and run away from work
at home, he became imbued with the conviction (whence derived, he
scarcely knew, but it lay on his mind as a positive certainty) that
frying-pans formed the best and most staple article on which to
commence trading at Port Natal, invariably the foundation of a
fortune. Some friend of his, a Mr. Bagshaw, who had previously
emigrated, had imparted this secret to him; at least, Roland was
impressed with the belief that he had; a belief which nothing could
shake. Frying-pans and fortune were associated together in his dreams.
He stood out strongly for the taking out forty dozen, but Lord Carrick
declined to furnish them, allowing only the miserable number of
four-and-twenty. "When ye see for ye'reself out there that there's a
market for them, send me word, and I'll dispatch loads to ye by the
first steamer, me boy," said his lordship sensibly; and Roland was fain
to put up with the advice and with the two dozen accorded. He arrived
at Port Natal, all youth and joy and buoyancy. Seen from the deck of
the vessel, when she anchored in the beautiful harbour, calm as a lake,
Natal looked a very paradise. Ranges of hills on the west of the fair
town were dotted with charming houses and pleasure grounds; and Roland
landed fresh and full of hope as a summer's morning: just as too many
an emigrant from the dear old mother-country does land, at other parts
besides Natal. And he bought experience as they do.
In the first place, Roland began life there as he had been accustomed
to do it in England; that is, as a gentleman. In the second place
there proved to be no especial market for frying-pans. That useful
culinary article might be bought in sufficient abundance, he found,
when inquired for, without bringing into requisition the newly-arrived
supply. The frying-pans being thus left upon his hands, lying like a
dead weight on them, metaphorically speaking, brought the first check
to his hopes; for they had been relied upon (as the world knows) to
inaugurate and establish the great enterprizes, commercial or
otherwise, that had floated in rose-coloured visions through Roland's
brain. He quitted the port town, Durban, and went to Maritzburg, fifty
miles off, and then came back to Durban. Thrown upon his own resources
(through the failure of the frying-pans), Roland had leisure to look
about him, for some other fertile source in which to embark his genius
and energy, and lead him on to speedy fortune. Such resources did not
appear to be going begging; they were coyly shy; or at least came not
flowing in Roland's way; and meanwhile his money melted. Partly in
foolish expenditure on his own account, partly in helping sundry poor
wights, distressed steerage passengers with whom he had made
acquaintance on board (for Roland had brought out his good-nature with
him), the money came to a summary end. One fine morning, Roland woke
up from a dream of idle carelessness, to find himself changing the
last sovereign of all the fifty. It did not dismay him very much: all
he said was, "I must set about money-making in earnest now."
Of course the great problem was--how to do it. You, my reader, may be,
even now, trying to solve it. Thousands of us are, every day. Roland
Yorke made but one more of a very common experience; and he had to
encounter the usual rubs incidental to the process. He came to great
grief and was reduced to a crust; nay, to the not knowing where the
crust could be picked up from. The frying-pans went first, disposed of
in a job lot, almost literally for an old song. Some man who owned a
shed had, for a consideration, housed the case that contained them,
and they were eating their handles off. Roland's wardrobe went next,
piece-meal; and things fell to the pass that Roland was not sure
but he himself would have to go after it. It came to one of two
things--starvation or work. To do Roland justice, he was ready and
willing to work; but he knew no mechanical trade; he had never done an
hour's hard labour, and in that lay the difficulty of getting it. He
would rush about from office to store, hunger giving him earnestness,
from store to workshop, from workshop to bench, and say, Employ me. For
the most part, the answer would be that he was not wanted; the labour
market of all kinds was overstocked; but if the application appeared,
by rare chance, likely to be entertained, and Roland was questioned of
his experience and capabilities, rejection was sure to follow. He was
too honest, too shallow in the matter of tact, to say he had been
accustomed to work when he had not; and the experience in copying
which he acknowledged and put forth, was somehow never required to be
tested. To hear Roland tell of what he had accomplished in this line
at home, must have astonished the natives of Port Natal.
Well, time went on; it does not stand still for any one; and Roland
went on with it, down and down and down. Years went on; and one rainy
day, when about four winters had gone by from the date of his
departure, Roland returned to England. He landed in St. Katharine's
Docks, his coat out at elbows and ninepence in his pocket: as an old
friend of his, Mr. Galloway, had once prophesied he would land, if he
lived to get back at all.
Mr. Roland Yorke had sailed for Port Natal in style, a first-class
cabin passenger; he came home in the steerage, paying twelve pounds
for the passage, and working out part of that. From thence he made his
way to Lord Carrick in Ireland, very much like a bale of returned
goods.
The best account he gave of his travels to Lord Carrick, perhaps the
best account he could give, was that he had been "knocking about."
Luck had not been with him, he said; and there really did seem to have
been a good deal in that. To hear him tell of his adventures was
something rich; not consecutively as a history, he never did that: but
these chance recollections were so frequent and diffuse, that a
history of his career at Natal might have been compiled from them. The
Earl would hold his sides, laughing at Roland's lamentations for the
failure and sacrifice of his frying-pans, and at the reminiscences in
general. A life of adventure one week, a life of starvation the next.
Roland said he had tried all kinds of things. He had served in stores;
at bars where liquor was dispensed; he had been a hired waiter at half
the hotels in Natal; he had worked on the shore with the half-naked
Zulu Kaffirs at lading and unlading boats; once, for a whole week,
when he was very hard up, or perhaps very low _down_, he had cried hot
potatoes in the streets. He had been a farmer's labourer and driven a
waggon, pigs, and cattle. He had been sub-editor in a newspaper
office, _The Natal Mercury_, and one unlucky day sent the journal out
with its letters printed upside down. He had hired himself out as
chemist's assistant, and half ruined his master by his hopeless
inability to distinguish between senna and tincture of laudanum, so
that the antidotes obliged to be supplied to the hapless customers who
came rushing for them, quite outweighed the profits. Occasionally he
met with friends who assisted him, and then Roland was at ease--for
his propensity to live as a gentleman was for ever cropping up. Up and
down; down and up; now fortune smiling a little, but for the most part
showing herself very grim, and frowning terribly. Roland had gone (as
he called it) up the country, and amidst other agreeable incidents
came to a fight with the Kaffirs. He took out a licence, the cost
thirty shillings, and opened a retail store for pickled pork, candles,
and native leeches, the only articles he could get supplied him on
trust. His fine personal appearance, ready address, evident
scholarship, and hearty frank manners, obtained for him a clerkship in
the Commercial and Agricultural Bank, recently opened, and he got into
so hopeless a maze with the books and cash by the week's end, that he
was turned off without pay. Architecture was tried next. Roland sent
in a graphic plan as competitor for the erection of a public building;
and the drawing--which he had copied from a model, just as he used to
copy cribs in the college school at Helstonleigh--looked so well upon
paper that the arbitrators were struck with admiration at the
constructive talent displayed, until one of them made the abrupt
discovery that there were no staircases and no room left to build any.
So, that hope was abandoned for a less exalted one; and Roland was
glad to become young man at a general store, where the work was light:
alternating between dispensing herrings and treacle (called there
golden syrup) to customers over the counter, and taking out parcels in
a wheelbarrow.
But there was good in Roland. And a great deal of it too, in spite of
his ill-luck and his careless improvidence. The very fact of his
remaining away four years, striving manfully with this unsatisfactory
life of toil and semi-starvation, proved it. The brown bread and
pea-soup Mr. Galloway had foreseen he would be reduced to live on, was
often hungered for by Roland in vain. He put up with it all; and not
until every chance seemed to have failed, would he go home to tax his
uncle's pocket, and to disappoint his mother. A sense of shame, of
keen, stinging mortification, no doubt lay at the bottom of this
feeling against return. He had been so sanguine, as some of my readers
may remember; and as he, sitting one day on a roadside stone in the
sand, towards the close of his stay in Natal, recalled; so full of
hopeful, glowing visions in the old home, that his mother, the Lady
Augusta Yorke, had caught their reflection. Roland's castles in the
air cannot have slipped yet out of people's memory. He had represented
to his mother; aye, and believed it too; that Port Natal was a kind of
Spanish El Dorado, where energetic young men might line their pockets
in a short while, and come home millionaires for life. He had indulged
large visions and made magnificent promises on the strength of them,
beginning with a case of diamonds to his mother, and ending--nobody
but Roland could have any conception where. Old debts were to be paid,
friends benefited, enemies made to eat humble-pie. Mr. Galloway was to
be passed in the street by Mr. Roland Yorke, the millionaire; the
Reverend William Yorke to have the cold shoulder turned upon him.
Arthur Channing was to be honoured; Jenkins, the hard-working clerk,
who had thought nothing of doing Roland's work as well as his own, to
be largely patronised; within three months after his arrival in Port
Natal, funds were to be dispatched home to settle claims that might be
standing against Roland in Helstonleigh. That there could be the
slightest doubt he should come back "worth millions," Roland never
supposed; he had talked of it everywhere--and talked faithfully. Poor
Jenkins had long gone where worldly patronage and gifts could not
follow him, but others had not. Roland remembered how his confident
anticipations had so won upon his mother, that she went to bed and
dreamt of driving about a charming city, whose streets were paved with
Malachite marble.
And so, recalling these visions and promises, Roland, for very
disappointment and shame, was not in a hurry to go back, but rather
lingered on in Port Natal, struggling manfully with his ill-luck, as
he called it. Pride and good-feeling alike prevented him. To appear
before Lady Augusta, poor, starving, hatless, and bootless, would be
undoubtedly a worse blow to her than that other alternative which he
(forgetting his height and weight) had laid before her view: the one,
he said, might happen if he did _not_ get to Port Natal--the riding as
a jockey on Helstonleigh race-course, in a pink silk jacket and yellow
breeches.
No. He did try heartily with all his might and main; tried at it for
four mortal years. Beyond a scrap of writing he now and again sent
home, in which he always said he was "well, and happy, and keeping
straight, and getting on," but which never contained a request for
home news, or an address to which it might be sent, Lady Augusta heard
nothing. Nobody else heard. One letter, indeed, reached a bosom friend
of his, Arthur Channing, which was burnt when read, as requested, and
Arthur looked grieved for a month after. He had told Arthur the truth;
that he was not getting on; but under an injunction of secrecy, and
giving no details. Beyond that, no news reached home of Roland.
His fourth year of trial at Port Natal was drawing to a close when
illness seized hold of him, and for the first time Roland felt as if
he were losing heart. It was not serious illness, only such as is apt
to attack visitors to the country, and from which Roland's strength of
frame, sound constitution, and good habits--for he had no bad ones,
unless a great appetite might be called such--had hitherto preserved
him. But, what with the wear and tear of his chequered life, its
uncertain food, a plentiful dinner today, bread and beans tomorrow,
nothing the following one, and its harassing and continuous
disappointments, Roland felt the illness as a depressing calamity; and
he began to say he could not make head against the tide any longer,
and must get away from it. He might have to eat humble-pie on landing
in England; but humble-pie seems tolerable or nauseous according to
the existing state of mind; and it is never utterly poisonous to one
of the elastic temperament of Roland Yorke. In a fit of impulse he
went down to the ships and made the best bargain for getting home that
circumstances allowed. He had been away more than four years, and
never once, during that time, had he written home for money.
And so, behold him, out at pocket (except for ninepence) and out at
elbows, but wonderfully improved in tone and physique, arriving in
London early one rainy morning from Port Natal, and landing in the
docks.
The first thing he did was to divide the ninepence with one who was
poorer than he; the second was to get a cup of coffee and a slice of
bread at a street coffee-stall; the third was to hasten to Lord
Carrick's tailor--and a tremendous walk it was, but that was nothing
to Roland--and get rigged out in any second-hand suit of clothes
returned on hand that might be decent. There ill news awaited him; it
was the time of year when Lord Carrick might, as a rule, be found in
London; but he had not come; he was, the tailor believed, in Ireland.
Roland at once knew, as sure as though it had been told him, that his
uncle was in some kind of pecuniary hot water. Borrowing the very
smallest amount of money that would take him to Ireland, he went off
down the Thames in a return cattleboat that very day.
Since that period, hard upon three years, he had been almost equally
"knocking about," and experienced nearly as many ups and downs in
Ireland as at Port Natal. Sometimes living in clover with Lord
Carrick, at others thrown on his own resources and getting on somehow.
Lord Carrick's will was good to help him, but not always his ability;
now and again it had happened that his lordship (who was really more
improvident than his nephew, and had to take flights to the Continent
on abrupt emergencies and without a day's warning) was lost to society
for a time, even to Roland. Roland hired himself out as a kind of
overlooker to some absentee's estate, but he could not get paid for
it. This part of his career need not be traced; on the whole, he did
still strive to do something for himself as strenuously as he had at
Port Natal, and not to be a burthen to anybody, even to Lord Carrick.
To this end he came over to London, and presented himself one day to
his late father's brother, Sir Richard Yorke, and boldly asked him if
he could not "put him into something." The request caused Sir Richard
(an old gentleman with a fat face) to stare immensely; he was very
poor and very selfish, and had persistently held himself aloof from
his late brother's needy family, keeping them always at arm's length.
His son and heir had been content to do the same: in truth, the
cousins did not know each other by sight. Sir Richard's estate was
worth four thousand a-year, all told; and as he was wont to live at
the rate of six, it will be understood that he was never in funds.
Neither had he patronage or influence in anyway. To be thus summarily
applied to by a stalwart young man, who announced himself as his
nephew, took the baronet aback; and if he did not exactly turn Roland
out of the house, his behaviour was equivalent to it "I'll be shot if
I ever go near him again," cried Roland. "I'd rather cry hot pies in
Poplar streets."
A day or two previously, in sauntering about parts of London least
frequented by men of the higher class--for when we are very much down
in the world we don't exactly choose the region of St. James's for our
promenades, or the sunny side of Regent Street--Roland had
accidentally met one of the steerage passengers with whom he had
voyaged home from Port Natal. Ever open-hearted, he had frankly avowed
the reason of being unable to treat his friend; namely, empty pockets:
he was not sure, he added, but he must take to crossing-sweeping for a
living; he heard folks made fortunes at it. Upon this the gentleman,
who wore no coat and very indifferent pantaloons, confided to him the
intelligence that there was a first-rate opening in the perambulating
hot-pie trade, down in Poplar, for an energetic young man with a
sonorous voice. Roland, being great in the latter gift, thought he
might entertain it.
Things were at a low ebb just then with Roland. Lord Carrick, as
usual, was totally destitute of ready money; and Roland, desperately
anxious though he was to get along of his own accord, was fain to
write to his mother for a little temporary help. One cannot live upon
air in London, however that desirable state of things may be
accomplished at Port Natal. But the application was made at an
inopportune moment. Every individual boy Lady Augusta possessed was
then tugging at her purse-strings; and she returned a sharp answer to
Roland, telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself not to be
helping her, now that he was the eldest, instead of wanting her to
keep him. George, the eldest son, had died in India, which brought
Roland first.
"It's true," said Roland, in a reflective mood, "I ought to be helping
her. I wonder if Carrick could put me into anything, as old Dick
won't. Once let me get a start, I'm bound to go on, and the mother
should be the first to benefit by it."
A short while after this, and when Roland was far more at his wits'
end for a shilling than he had ever been at Port Natal--for there he
had no appearance to keep up, and here he had; there he could encamp
out in the sand, here he couldn't--Lord Carrick arrived suddenly in
London, in a little trouble as usual. Some warm-hearted friend had
induced his good-natured lordship to accept a short bill, and
afterwards treacherously left him to meet it. So Lord Carrick was
again en route for the Continent, until his men of business, Greatorex
and Greatorex, could arrange the affair for him by finding the
necessary money. Halting in London a couple of days, to confer with
them on that and other matters--for Lord Carrick's affairs altogether
were complicated and could not be touched upon in an hour--Roland
seized on the opportunity to prefer the application. And this brings
us to the present time.
When under a cloud, and not quite certain that the streets were safe,
the Earl was wont to eschew his hotel at the west end, and put up at a
private one in a more obscure part. Roland, having had notice of his
arrival, clattered in to breakfast with him on the morning of the
second day, and entered on his petition forthwith--to be put into
something.
"Anything for a start, Uncle Carrick," he urged. "No matter how low I
begin: I'll soon go along swimmingly, once I get the start. I can't go
about here, you know, with my toes out, as I have over yonder. It's
awful work getting a dinner only once a week. I've had thoughts of
crying hot pies in Poplar."
To judge by the breakfast Roland was eating, he had been a week
without that meal as well as dinner. Lord Carrick, looking at the
appetite with admiration, sat pulling his white whiskers in
perplexity; for the grey hair of seven years ago had become white now.
His heart was good to give Roland the post of Prime Minister, or any
other trifling office, but he did not see his way clear to accomplish
it.
"Me boy, there's only one thing I can do for ye just now," he said
after silently turning the matter about in all its bearings, and
hearing the explanation of the Poplar project. "Ye know I must be off
tomorrow by the early French steamer, and I can't go about looking
after places today, even if I knew where they could be picked up,
which I don't. I must leave ye to Greatorex and Greatorex."
"What will they do?" asked Roland.
"You can come along with me there, and see."
Accordingly, when the Earl of Carrick went forth to his appointed
interview that day with Mr. Greatorex, he presented Roland; and simply
told the old lawyer that he must put him in a way of getting along,
until he, Lord Carrick, was in funds again. Candid and open as ever
Roland could be, the Earl made no secret whatever of that gentleman's
penniless state, enlarging on the fact that to go dinnerless, as a
rule, could not be good for him, and that he should not exactly like
to see him set up as a hot-pie man in Poplar. Mr. Greatorex, perhaps
nearly as much taken to as Sir Richard Yorke had been on a similar
occasion, glanced at his son Bede who was present, and hesitated. He
did not refuse point blank--as he might have done by almost anybody
else. Lord Carrick was a valuable client, his business yearly bringing
in a good share of feathers to the Greatorex nest, and old Mr.
Greatorex was sensible of the fact. Still, he did not see what he
could do for one who, like Roland, was in the somewhat anomalous
position of being nephew to an earl and a baronet, but reduced to
contemplate the embarking in the hot-pie trade.
"We might give him a stool in our office, Lord Carrick, for it happens
that we are a clerk short: and pay him--pay him--twenty shillings a
week. As a temporary thing, of course."
To one who had not had a dinner for days, twenty shillings a week
seems an ample fortune; and Roland started up and grasped the elder
lawyer's hand.
"I'll earn it," he said, his tone and eyes alike beaming with
gratitude. "I'll work for you till I drop."
Mr. Greatorex smiled. "The work will not be difficult, Mr. Yorke;
writing, and going on errands occasionally. If you do come," he
pointedly added, "you must be ready to perform anything you may be
directed to do, just as a regular clerk does."
"Ready and willing too," responded Roland.
"We have room for a certain number of clerks only," proceeded Mr.
Greatorex, who was desirous that there should be no misunderstanding
in the bargain; "each one has his appointed work and must get through
it. Can you copy deeds?"
"_Can't_ I," unceremoniously replied Roland. "I was nearly worked to
death with old Galloway, of Helstonleigh."
"Were you ever with him?" cried Mr. Greatorex in surprise to whom Mr.
Galloway was known.
"Yes, for years; and part of the time had all the care of the office
on my shoulders," was Roland's ready answer. "There was only Galloway
then, beside myself, and _he_ was not good for much. Why! the amount
of copying I had to do was so great, I thought I should have dropped
into my grave. Lord Carrick knows it."
Lord Carrick did, in so far as that he had heard Roland repeatedly
assert it, and nodded assent. Mr. Greatorex thought the services of so
experienced a clerk must be invaluable to any house, and felt charmed
to have secured them.
And that is how it arose that Roland Yorke, as you have seen, was
entering the office of Greatorex and Greatorex. He was to be a clerk
there to all intents and purposes; just as he had been in the old days
at Mr. Galloway's; and yet, when he came in that morning, after his
summerset out of the hansom cab, with a five-pound note in his pocket
that Lord Carrick had contrived to spare for him, and an order for
unlimited credit at his lordship's tailor's, hatter's, and
bootmaker's, Roland's buoyant heart and fate were alike radiant, as if
he had suddenly come into a fortune.