Actually, I dare say the process of one's sophistication was gradual
enough. But looking back now upon my Dursley period, and the four
years spent in Sydney--and, indeed, my stay in the Orphanage, and my
life with my father in Livorno Bay--it appears to me that my growth,
education, development, whatever it may be called, came at intervals,
jerkily, in sudden leaps forward. The truth probably is that the
development was constant and steady, but that its symptoms declared
themselves spasmodically.
It would seem that there ought to have been a phase of smart, clerkly
dandyism; but perhaps Mr. Rawlence's kindly hospitality in Macquarie
Street nipped that in the bud, substituting for it a kind of twopenny
aestheticism, which made me affect floppy neckties and a studied
negligence of dress, combined with some neglect of the barber. In
these things, as in certain other matters, there were some singular
contradictions and inconsistencies in me, and I was distinctly
precocious. The precocity was due, I take it, to the fact that I had
never known family life, and that my companions had always been older
than myself. I fancy that most people I met supposed me to be at least
three or four years older than I was, and were sedulously encouraged
by me in that supposition. I was precocious, too, in another way. I
could have grown a beard and moustache at seventeen. Instead, I
assiduously plied the razor night and morning, and derived
satisfaction from something which irritated me greatly in later
years--the remarkably rapid and sturdy growth of my beard.
As against these extravagances I must record the fact that my
parsimony in monetary matters survived. Mr. John, in Sussex Street,
presently raised my salary to two pounds ten shillings a week; but I
continued to share Mr. Smith's bedroom, and to pay only sixteen
shillings weekly for my board and lodging. What was more to the point,
I was equally careful in most other matters affecting expenditure, and
never added less than a pound each week to my savings bank account; an
achievement by no means always equalled in after years, even when
earnings were ten times larger. I may have, and did indulge in the
most extravagant conceits of the mind. But these never seriously
affected my pocket.
There is perhaps something rather distasteful in the idea of so much
economic prudence in one so young. A certain generous carelessness is
proper to youth. Well, I had none of it, at this time, in money
matters. And, distasteful or not, I am glad of it, since, at all
events, it had this advantage: at a very critical period I was
preserved from the grosser and more perilous indulgences of youth.
When the time did arrive at which I ceased to be very careful in money
spending, I had presumably acquired a little more balance, and was a
little safer than in those adolescent Sydney years.
Here again my qualities were presumably the product of my condition
and circumstances. To be left quite alone in the world while yet a
child, as I had been, does, I apprehend, stimulate a certain worldly
prudence in regard, at all events, to so obvious a matter as the
balance of income and expenditure. I felt that if I were ever stranded
and penniless there would be no one in the whole world to lend me a
helping hand, or to save me from being cut adrift from all that I had
come to hold precious, and flung back into the slough of manual
labour--for that, curiously enough, is how I then regarded it. Not, of
course, that I had found manual work in itself unpleasant in any way;
but that I then considered my escape from it had carried me into a
social and mental atmosphere superior to that which the manual worker
could reach.
Except when he was absent from Sydney, Mr. Rawlence always received
his friends at the Macquarie Street studio on Sundays, and none was
more regular in attendance than myself. It would be very easy, of
course, to be sarcastic at Mr. Rawlence's expense; to poke fun at the
well-to-do gentleman approaching middle age, who clung to the pretence
of being a working artist, and to avoid criticism, or because more
mature workers would not seek his society, liked to surround himself
with neophytes--a Triton among minnows. And indeed, as I found, there
were those--some old enough to know better, and others young enough to
be more generous--who were not above adopting this attitude even
whilst enjoying their victim's hospitality; aye, and enjoying it
greedily.
But neither then nor at any subsequent period was I tempted to
ridicule a man uniformly kind and helpful to me; and this, not at all
because I blinded myself to his weaknesses and imperfections, but
because I found, and still find, these easily outweighed by his good
and genuinely kindly qualities. His may not have been a very dignified
way of life; it was too full of affectations for that; particularly
after he began to be greatly influenced by the rather sickly aesthetic
movement then in vogue in London. But it was, at least, a harmless
life; and, upon the whole, a generous and kindly one.
Its influence upon me, for example, tended, I am sure, to give me a
pronounced distaste for the coarse and vulgar sort of dissipation
which very often engaged the leisure of my office companions, and
other youths of similar occupation in Sydney. It may be that the
causes behind my aloofness from mere vulgar frivolity, and worse, were
pretty mixed: part pride, or even conceit, and part prudence or
parsimony. No matter. The influence was helpful, for the abstention
was real, and the distaste grew always more rooted as time wore on.
Also, the same influence tended to make me more fastidious, more
critical, less crude than I might otherwise have been. It led me to
give more serious attention to pictures, music, and literature of the
less ephemeral sort than I might otherwise have given. It was not that
Mr. Rawlence and his friends advised one to study Shakespeare, or to
attend the better sort of concerts, or to learn something of art and
criticism. But talk that I heard in that studio did make me feel that
it was eminently desirable I should inform myself more fully in these
matters.
Listening to a discussion there of some quite worthless thing more
than once moved me to the investigation of something of real value. I
was still tolerably credulous, and when a man's casual reference
suggested that he and every one else was naturally intimate with this
or that, I would make it my business, so far as might be, really to
obtain some knowledge of the matter. I assumed, often quite
mistakenly, no doubt, that every one else present had this particular
knowledge. Thus the spirit of emulation helped me as it might never
have done but for Mr. Rawlence and his sumptuous studio, so rich in
everything save examples of his own work.
* * * * *
I fancy it must have been fully a year after my arrival in Sydney that
I met Mr. Foster, the editor of the _Chronicle_, as I was walking down
from Sussex Street to Circular Quay one evening.
'Ah, Freydon,' he said; 'what an odd coincidence! I was this moment
thinking of you, and of something you said last Sunday at Rawlence's.
I can't use the article you sent me. It's-- Well, for one thing, it's
rather too much like fiction; like a story, you know. But, tell me,
what do you do for a living?'
'I'm a correspondence clerk, at present, in a Sussex Street business
house.'
'H'm! Yes, I rather thought something of the sort--and very good
practical training, too, I should say. But I gather you are keen on
press work, eh?'