Every day the _Sydney Morning Herald_ was delivered at the Perkins's
establishment, and every evening it reached the kitchen at tea-time.
Mrs. Gabbitas regarded it as a very useful journal for fire-lighting
purposes, but having no other interest in it was quite agreeable to
its being out-of-date by one day when it reached her hands. Thus the
daily newspaper became my perquisite each evening, to be returned
faithfully in the morning with the day's supply of fuel, in order that
it might duly fulfil its higher and more serviceable destiny in Mrs.
Gabbitas's stove.
For quite a long time I never scanned the news columns of that really
admirable newspaper. I might have thought that their perusal would
have been helpful to me, especially as I cherished vague ideas of one
day earning my living in a newspaper office. But, for the time, my
mind was too much occupied with thoughts of another means to an
end--shorthand. The longest chunks of unbroken letterpress were the
leading articles. For months I never looked beyond them, and never
stopped short of copying out at least one column of them, and often more,
especially in those misguided early days before I awoke to the stern
necessity of reading over every written line of shorthand.
I am afraid the leader-writers' eloquence and style--real and
ever-present features in this journal's pages--were entirely wasted upon
me. I copied them with slavish lack of thought, intent only on my
shorthand, and most generally upon the physical difficulty of keeping
my eyes open. I invariably fell asleep three or four times before
finishing my allotted task, and only managed to keep awake for the
reading of it by standing erect beside the packing-case and reading
aloud. How it would have astonished those gifted leader-writers if
they could have walked past, overheard me, and recognised in my
halting, drowsy declamation their own well-rounded periods!
As I read the last word my spirits always rose instantly, and my
craving for sleep left me. With keen anticipatory pleasure I would
fold up the newspaper ready for the morning, take one look out from
the doorway to note the weather, shed my clothes, snuff the candle,
and climb luxuriously into bed with the current book, whatever it
might be. No newspaper for me. This was real reading, and while I read
in bed (travel, biography, and fiction) I lived exclusively in the
life my author depicted. Vanished utterly for me were Dursley and its
worthy folk, and Australia too for that matter. Practically all the
books I read carried me to the Old World, and most often to England,
which for me was rapidly becoming a synonym for romance, charm,
interest, culture, and all the good things of which one dreams.
Everything desirable, and not noticeable or recognised as being in my
daily life, I grew gradually to think of as being part and parcel of
English life. I did not as yet long to go to England. One does not
long to visit the moon. But when some well-wrought piece of
atmosphere, some happy turn of speech, some inspiring glimpse of high
and noble motives or tender devotion, caught and held me, in a book, I
would sigh quietly and say to myself:
'Ah, yes; in England!'
Looking back upon it, I am rather pleased with myself for the stubborn
persistence with which I slogged away at the shorthand; because it
never once touched my interest. For me, it was a veritable treadmill.
And, for that reason, I suppose, I was never really good at it. I have
no doubt whatever that it had real value for me as a disciplinary
exercise.
And then my candle would gutter and expire. I have sometimes, by means
of sitting up in bed, holding the book high, and using great
concentration, devoured a whole chapter between the first sputtering
sound of the candle's death-rattle and the moment of its actual
demise. Indeed, I have more than once finished a chapter, when within
half a page of it, by matchlight. But that, of course, was gross
extravagance. Our candles seemed to me abominably short, and I once
tried to seduce Mrs. Gabbitas into allowing me two at a time; but she,
good soul, wisely said that one was more than I had any right to burn
in an evening, and I was too miserly to buy them for myself.
Yes, it seems horribly unnatural in a youth, but I am afraid I was
rather miserly at that time. I wanted passionately to do various
things. Precisely what, I had never so far thought out. But I did not
desire the less ardently for that. I suppose the thing I wanted was to
'better myself,' as the servants say. Was I not a servant? Without
ever reasoning the matter out, I felt strongly that the possession of
some money, a certain store, was very necessary to my well-being; that
in some mysterious way it would add immensely to my chances, to my
strength in the world; that it would put me on a footing superior to
that I had at present. I even thought of it, in my innocence, as
Capital. Many of my musings used to begin with: 'If a fellow has
Capital'--and I believed that if he had not this magic talisman his
position was very different and inferior. I thought of the world's
hewers of wood and drawers of water as being the folk who had no
Capital; the others as the people who had somehow acquired possession
of the talisman. And I suppose I wanted to be of the company of the
others.
Ten shillings a week means twenty-six pounds a year; and I very well
remember that on the first anniversary of my entering Mr. Perkins's
employ, my Government Savings Bank book showed a balance to my credit
of twenty-two pounds three and fourpence. This sum, I decided, might
fairly rank as Capital; it really merited the august name, I felt,
being actually above the sum of twenty pounds. Eighteen pounds was a
respectable nest-egg. Yes, but twenty-three [sic] pounds three and
fourpence--that was Capital; and I now definitely took rank, however
humbly, among the people who possessed the talisman. I realised very
well that I was poor; that this sum of money was not a large one.
Still, it was Capital, and, as such, it gave me a deal of
satisfaction, and more of confidence than I could have had without it.
I am certain of that. What a pity it is that one cannot always, later
in life, obtain the same secure and confident feeling by virtue of
possessing twenty pounds!
This meant that I had spent less than four pounds in the year. But no;
Mr. Perkins gave me ten shillings, and Mrs. Perkins five shillings, at
Christmas time. Also, I won ten shillings as a prize in a competition
arranged by the _Dursley Chronicle_. It was for the best five hundred
word description of an Australian scene, and I described Livorno Bay
and its derelict; and, as I thought at the time--quite mistakenly, I
am sure--described them rather well. Apart from a book or two I had
bought practically nothing, save boots and socks and a Sunday suit of
clothes. Mrs. Perkins had kindly supplied quite a stock of shirts for
me, by means of operations performed upon old shirts of her husband's.
My Sunday suit of clothes had occupied me greatly for some weeks. I
had never before bought clothing of any kind. After two or three
visits to the store, and many talks at mealtimes with Mrs. Gabbitas, I
finally decided upon blue serge.
'It do show the dust, but it don't show the wear so much as the rest
of 'em,' was the Gabbitular verdict which finally settled this
momentous business. A tie to match was given in with the suit, a
concession which I owed entirely to Mrs. Gabbitas's determined
enterprise. The tie was of satin, and, taken in conjunction with a
neatly arranged wad of silk handkerchief, extraordinarily variegated
in colour (Mrs. Gabbitas's present), protruding from the breast-pocket
of the new coat, it produced on the first Sunday after its purchase an
effect which I found at once arresting and sedately rich. My
looking-glass was not more than six inches square, but, by propping it up
on a chair, and receding from it gradually, I was able to obtain a very
fair view of my trousers; while, by replacing it on the wall, and
observing my reflection carefully from different angles, I was able to
judge of most parts of the coat and waistcoat.
After a good deal of thought, I decided that the best effect was
obtained by fastening the top button of the coat, turning back one
lower corner with careful negligence, and keeping it there by holding
one hand in my trouser pocket. In that order, then, I interviewed Mrs.
Gabbitas in the scullery, to receive her congratulations before
proceeding to church. Altogether, it was a day of pleasing excitement;
but, greatly though it intrigued me, the purchase left me as much a
miser as ever, my only other extravagance for a long time being a
cream-coloured parasol--my present to Mrs. Gabbitas; and---I may as
well confess it--I could not have brought myself to buy that, but for
the fact that it was called 'slightly shop-soiled,' and had been
'marked down' from 8s. 11d. to 4s. 10 1/2d.
Yes, for a youth of sixteen years, I fear it must be admitted that I
was unnaturally parsimonious, and a good deal of what schoolboys used
to call a smug and a swatter. It really was curious, because I do not
recall that I had any ambition to be actually rich. Mr. Smiles and his
_Self Help_ would have left me cold if I had read that classic. I
indulged no Whittingtonian dreams of knighthood, mayoral chains, vast
commercial or financial operations, or anything of that sort. The
things that interested me were largely unreal. I was immensely
appealed to, I remember, by a phase in the career of Charles Reade's
_Griffith Gaunt_, in which that gentleman lived incognito for awhile
in a remote rural inn, and wooed (if he did not actually marry) the
buxom daughter of the house, while his real wife was being accused of
having murdered him. I think that was the way of it. I know the
sojourn in that isolated inn--I pictured its lichen-grown walls; a
place that would be approached quite nearly in the stilly night by
wild woodland creatures--appealed to me as a wholly delightful
episode.
I never had a dream of commercial triumphs. I did not think of fame.
For what was I striving? And why did I so assiduously save? It is not
easy to answer these questions. I find the thing puzzles me a good
deal. There was my means-to-an-end attitude; but what was the precise
end in view? If one comes to that I have been striving all my life
long, and to what end? I know this, that in the midst of my physical
content as a handy lad in a comfortable home, I had at least thought
definitely of my future up to a certain point. I had told myself that
there were two kinds of people in the world: the hewers of wood and
drawers of water, earning a mere living, as I was earning mine, by the
labour of their hands; and the others. I knew very little of what the
others did, and had no very definite plan or desire to follow, myself,
any of their occupations. But I did know that I wished to live in
their division of the community. I wished to be one of those others. I
should be unworthy of my father if I did not presently take my place
among those others. And, I suppose, the only practical steps in that
direction which I knew of and could take were the saving of my wages
and the study of shorthand. I think that was about the way of it. And
if my diligence with regard to these two matters may be taken as the
measure of my desire to join the ranks of the others, it is safe to
say I must have desired it very much indeed.