'If it's to be done at all, why not now? There's nothing to be gained
by waiting. I'm only wasting time.'
Phrases of this sort formed the burden of all my thoughts for a number
of weeks after my memorable 'day out' (as the servants say) with the
Sydney artist. I no longer debated with myself at all the question as
to whether or not I should leave the Orphanage. It would have seemed
treachery to my new self, and in a way to Mr. Rawlence (my source of
inspiration) to debate the point. It was quite certain then that I
should take my fate into my own hands, leave St. Peter's, and make an
attempt to win my way in the world alone.
Having no belongings, no friends to consult, no possessions of any
sort or kind (save Ted's one-pound note, and a neatly bound manuscript
volume of bush botany, which latter treasure had been in my pocket on
the day of my father's death, and so had remained mine), there really
were no preparations for me to make. And so, as I said to myself a
score of times a day: 'There's nothing to be gained by waiting.'
Still, I waited, some underlying vein of prudence in me, or of
cowardice, offering no reason--no reason against the move, no
objection, but just negation, the inertia of that which is still. But,
yes, I was most certainly going, and soon. That was my last waking
thought every night when I dug my head into my straw pillow, and my
first waking thought when I swung my feet down to the floor. I was
going out into the world to make my own way.
I was too closely engaged by the material aspect of my position to
spare thoughts for its abstract quality. But, looking back from the
cool greyness of later life, one sees a wistful pathos, and, too, a
certain stirring fineness in the situation. And if that is so, how
infinitely the pathos and the fineness are enhanced by this thought:
Every day in the year, in every country in the world, some lad,
somewhere, is gazing out toward life's horizon, just as I was, and
telling himself, even as I did, that he must start out upon his
individual journey; for him the most important of all the voyages ever
undertaken since Adam and Eve set forth from their garden. I suppose
it is rarely that a long distance train enters a London terminal but
what one such lad steps forth from it, bent upon conquest, and, in how
many cases, bound for defeat! Even of Sydney the same thing was and is
true, on a numerically smaller scale.
In all lands and in all times the outsetting is essentially the same:
the same high hopes and brave determinations; the same profound
conviction of uniqueness; the same perfectly true and justifiable
inner knowledge that, for the individual, this journey is the most
important in all history. In many cases, of course, there are a
mother's tears, a father's blessing, and suchlike substitutes for the
stirrup-cup. And, withal, in every single case, how absolutely alone
the young voyager really is, and must be! For our scientists have not
as yet discovered any means of precipitating the experience gleaned in
one generation (or a thousand) into the hearts and minds of another
generation. Circumstances differ vastly, of course; but the central
facts are the same in every case; the traveller must always be alone.
The adventure upon which he sets out, be he prince or pauper,
university graduate or 'inmate' of St. Peter's, is one which cannot be
delegated by him, or taken from him, for it is his own life; his and
his alone, to make or to mar, to perfect or to botch, to cherish or to
waste, to convert into a fruitful garden, or to relinquish, when his
time comes, a sour and derelict plot of barrenness.
And this tremendous undertaking, with all its infinite potentialities
of good and evil, joy and agony, pride and despair, is in every
country approached by somebody, by some one of our own kind, every
single morning, and has been down through the ages since time began,
and will be while time lasts. And there are folk who call modern life
prosaic, dull, devoid of romance. Romance! Why, in the older lands
there is hardly a foot of road space that has not been trodden at one
time or another by youth or maid, in the crucial moment of setting out
upon this amazing adventure. There are men and women who drum their
fingers on a window-pane after breakfast of a morning, and yawn out
their disgust at the empty dullness of life, the vacant boredom of
another day. And within a mile of them, as like as not, some one is
setting forth--lips compressed, brow knit--upon the great adventure.
And, too, some one else is face to face with the other great
adventure--the laying down of life. Somewhere close to us every single
morning brings one or other, or both of these two incomparably
romantic happenings.
Truly, to confess ennui, or make complaint of the dullness of life, is
to confess to a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind. To be weary is
comprehensible enough. Yes, God knows I can understand the existence
of weariness or exhaustion. To be bored even is natural enough, if one
is bored by, say, forced inaction, or obligatory action of a futile,
meaningless kind. But negative boredom; to be uninterested, not
because adverse circumstances confine you to this or that barren and
uncongenial milieu, but because you see nothing of interest in life as
a whole; because life seems to you a dull, empty, or prosaic
business--that argues a kind of blindness, a poverty of imagination,
which amounts to disease, and, surely, to disease of a most humiliating
sort.
But this is digression of a sort I have not hitherto permitted myself
in this record. To be precise, I should say, it is digression of a
sort which up till now has, when detected, been religiously
expunged--sent to feed my fire. Well, one has always pencils; the fire is
generally at hand; we shall see. After all, a great deal of one's life
is made up of digressions.