From the medical standpoint there were no complications whatever in my
case; it was just as simple as a cut finger. Regarded from this point
of view, a broken head is a small matter indeed, in a youth of
abstemious habits and healthy life. Well, he was a very thoroughly
chastened youth who accepted the cheery physician's congratulations
upon his early discharge from hospital.
'Nuisance about the money,' admitted the doctor genially, as he
twiddled his massive gold watch-chain. 'But it might have been a deal
worse, you know; a very great deal worse. After all, health's the
thing, the only thing that really matters.'
The remark strikes me now as reasonable enough. At the time I thought
it pretty vapid twaddle. Four quiet days I spent at my North Shore
lodging, and then (by Mr. Foster's freely and most kindly given
permission) back to the _Chronicle_ office again, just as before, save
for one detail--I no longer had a banking account. But was it really,
'just as before,' in any single sense? No, I think not; I think not.
Often in the years that have passed since that morning chat with the
cheerful physician in Sydney Hospital, I have heard folk speak lightly
of money losses--other people's losses, as a rule--and talk of the
comparative unimportance of these as against various other kinds of
loss. Never, I think, at all events, since those Sydney days of mine,
could any one justly charge me with overestimating the importance of
money. And yet, even now, and despite the theories of the
philosophers, I incline to the opinion that few more desolating and
heart-breaking disasters can befall men and women than the loss of
their savings. I would not instance such a case as mine. But I have
known cases of both men and women who, in the later years, have lost
the thrifty savings of a working life, savings accumulated very
deliberately--and at what a cost of patient, long-sustained
self-denial!--for a specific purpose: the purchase of their freedom in
the closing years; their manumission from wage-earning toil. And I say
that, in a world constituted as our world is, life knows few tragedies
more starkly fell.
As for my little loss I now think it likely that in certain ways I
derived benefits from it; and, too, in other ways, permanent hurt. I
was still standing in the doorway of my manhood; all my life and
energy as a man before me. But it did not seem so at the time. At the
time I thought of this handful of money as being the sole outcome and
reward for six years of pretty strenuous working effort. (What a lot I
overlooked!) I was far from telling myself that a lad of one-and-twenty
had his career still to begin. On the contrary, it seemed my
career had had for its culminating point the great adventure of going
to England, to attain which long years of toilsome work had been
necessary. These years had passed, the work was done, the culmination
at hand; and now it was undone, the career was broken, all was lost.
Oh, it was a dourly tragical young man who shared Mr. Smith's bedroom
during the next few months.
One odd apparent outcome of my catastrophe in a teacup has often
struck me since. No doubt, if the truth were known quite other causes
had been at work; but it is a curious fact that never, at any period
of my life since the morning on which I so gaily closed that savings
bank account, have I ever taken the smallest zest, interest, or
pleasure in the saving of money. This seems to me rather odd and
noteworthy. It is, I believe, strictly true.
For a few weeks after resuming my working routine I plodded along in a
rather dazed fashion, and without any definite purpose. And then,
during a wakeful hour in bed (while Mr. Smith snored quite gently and
inoffensively on the far side of our little room), I came to a
definite decision. The brutal episode of the crowbar--the weapon which
had felled me was found beside me, by the way; a heavy bar used for
opening packing-cases, which the thief had evidently picked up as he
came after me through Hunt and Carton's yard--should not be allowed to
divert me from my course. Diversion at this stage was what I could not
and would not tolerate. I would go to England just the same, and soon.
I would put by a few pounds, and then work my passage home. I was
perfectly clear about it, and fell asleep now, quite content.
On the next day I began making inquiries. At first I thought I could
manage it as a journalist, by writing eloquent descriptions of the
passage. A little talk at the shipping-office served to disabuse my
mind of this notion. Then I would go as a deck-hand. I was gently
apprised of the fact that my services as a deck-hand might not greatly
commend themselves to the average ship-master. My decision was not in
the least affected by the little things I learned.
Finally, I secured a personal introduction to the manager of the
shipping-office in which my twenty pounds deposit was still held, and
induced this gentleman to promise that he would, sooner or later,
secure for me a chance to work my passage home. He would advise me, he
said, when the chance arrived.
With this I was satisfied, and returned in a comparatively cheerful
mood to my plodding. I have a shrewd suspicion that my chief, Mr.
Foster, used his good offices on my behalf with the shipping company's
manager.
Three months went slowly by. And then one morning a laconic note
reached me from the shipping-office.
'Could you do a bit of clerking in a purser's office? If so, please
see me to-day.'
It appeared that the assistant purser of one of the mail-boats had
died while on the passage between Melbourne and Sydney. The company
preferred to fill such vacancies in England, and so a temporary
clerical assistant for the purser would be shipped. Would I care to
undertake it for a five-pound note and my passage?
Forty-eight hours later I had said good-bye to Sydney friends, and was
installed at a desk in the purser's office on board the _Orimba_. I
had twenty-two pounds and ten shillings in my trunk, and the promise
of a five-pound note when the steamer should reach London. It was a
kind of outsetting upon my great adventure quite different from that
which I had planned. But it was an outsetting, and a better one than I
had expected, for I had been prepared to work my passage as a deck-hand
or steward.
And so it fell out that when I did actually leave Australia I was too
busy at my clerking, and at inventing soporific answers to the mostly
irrelevant inquiries of more or less distracted passengers, to catch a
glimpse of the land disappearing below the horizon--the land in which
I had spent the most formative years of my life--or to spare a thought
for any such matter as sea-sickness.