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INTRODUCTORY

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

BOYHOOD--AUSTRALIA

YOUTH--AUSTRALIA

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: SECOND PERIOD

THE LAST STAGE

EDITOR'S NOTE

THE RECORD OF NICHOLAS FREYDON

INTRODUCTORY

Back there in London--how many leagues and aeons distant!--I threw down my pen and fled here to the ends of the earth, in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind. Here I now take up the pen again and return in thought to London: that vast cockpit; still in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind.

That seems wasteful and not very hopeful. But, to be honest--and if this final piece of pen-work be not honest to its core, it certainly will prove the very acme of futility--I must add the expression of opinion that most of the important actions of my life till now have had the self-same goal in view: peace of mind. The surprising thing is that, right up to this present, every one of my efforts has been backed by a substantial if varying amount of solid conviction; of belief that that particular action would bring the long-sought reward. I suppose I thought this in coming here, in fleeing from London. Nay, I know I did.

The latest, and I suppose the last, illusion bids me believe that if, using the literary habit of a lifetime, I can set down in ordered sequence the salient facts and events of that restless, struggling pilgrimage I call my life, there is a likelihood that, seeing the entire fabric in one piece, I may be able truly to understand it, and, understanding it, to rest content before it ends. The ironical habit makes me call it an illusion. In strict truth I listen to the call with some confidence; not, to be sure, with the flaming ardour which in bygone years has set me leaping into action in answer to such a call; yet with real hope.

It is none so easy a task, this exact charting out of so complex a matter as a man's life. And it may be that long practice of the writer's art but serves to heighten its difficulties. For example, since writing the sentence ending on that word 'hope,' I have covered two whole pages with writing which has now been converted into ashes among the logs upon my hearth. For the covering of those pages two volumes had been fingered and referred to, if you please, and my faulty memory drawn upon for yet a third quotation. So much for the habit of literary allusiveness, engrained into one by years of book-making, and yet more surely, I suspect, by labour for hire on the newspaper press.

But, though I have detected and removed these two pages of irrelevance, I foresee that unessential and therefore obscurantic matter will creep in. Well, when I come to weigh the completed record, I must allow for that; and, meanwhile, so far as time and my own limitations as selector permit, I will prune and clear away from the line of vision these weeds of errant fancy. For the record must of all things be honest and comprehensive; rather than shapely, effective, or literary. To be sure the pundits would say that this is to misuse and play with words; to perpetrate a contradiction in terms. Well, we shall see. Whatever the critics might say, your author by profession would understand me well enough when I say: 'Honest, rather than literary.'

How, to begin with, may I label and describe my present self? There, immediately, I am faced with one of the difficulties of this task. One can say of most men that they are this or that; of this class, order, sect, party, or type; and, behold them neatly docketed! But in all honesty I cannot say that I am of any special class, or that I 'belong' anywhere in particular. There is no circle in any community which is indefeasibly my own by right of birth and training. I am still a member of two London clubs, I believe. They were never more than hotels for me. I am probably what most folk call a gentleman; but how much does that signify in the twentieth century? Many simple people would likely call me a person of education, even of learning, belike, seeing a list of books under my name. A schoolman who examined me would be pardoned for calling me an ignoramus of no education whatever. For--and this I never reflected upon until the present moment--I could not for the life of me 'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I know something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; something of three or four languages, but nothing of their grammar. I have met and talked with some of the most notable people of my time, but truly prefer cottage life before that of the greatest houses. And so, in a score of other ways, I feel it difficult informingly and justly to label myself.

But--let me have done with difficulties and definitions. My task shall be the setting forth of facts, out of which definitions must shape themselves. And, for a beginning, I must turn aside from my present self, pass by a number of dead selves, each differing in a thousand ways from every other, and bring my mind to bear for the moment upon that infinitely remote self: the child, Nicholas Freydon. It may be that curious and distant infant will help to explain the man.

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

The things I remember about my earliest infancy are not in the least romantic.

First, I think, come two pictures, both perfectly distinct, and both connected with domestic servants. The one is of a firelit interior, below street level: an immense kitchen, with shining copper vessels in it, an extremely hot and red fire, and a tall screen covered over with pictures. An enormously large woman in a blue and white print gown sits toasting herself before the fire; and a less immense female, in white print with sprays of pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support flaps. These legs formed fascinating walls and boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, caves, and suchlike resorts, among which a small boy could wander at will, when lucky enough to be allowed to visit this warm apartment at all. The whole place was pervaded by an odour indescribably pleasing to my infantile nostrils, and compact of suggestions of heat acting upon clean print gowns, tea-cakes done to a turn, scrubbed wood, and hot soap-suds.

But the full ecstasy of a visit to this place was only attained when I was lifted upon the vast table by the warm and rosy Amelia, and allowed to leap therefrom into her extended arms; she rushing toward me, and both of us emitting either shrill or growling noises as the psychological moment of my leap was reached. At the time I used to think that springing from a trapeze, set in the dome of a great building, into a net beneath, must be the most ravishing of all joys; but I incline now to think that my more homely feat of leaping into Amelia's warm arms was, upon the whole, probably a pleasanter thing.

This memory is of something which I believe happened fairly frequently. My other most distinct recollection of what I imagine to have been the same period in history is of a visit, a Sunday afternoon visit, I think, paid with Amelia. I must have been of tender years, because, though during parts of the journey I travelled on my own two feet, I recollect occasional lapses into a perambulator, as it might be in the case of an elderly or invalid person who walks awhile along a stretch of level sward, and then takes his ease for a time in victoria or bath-chair.

I remember Amelia lifting me out from my carriage in the doorway of what I regarded as a very delightful small house, redolent of strange and exciting odours, some of which I connect with the subsequent gift of a slab of stuff that I ate with gusto as cake. My mature view is that it was cold bread-pudding of a peculiarly villainous clamminess. It is interesting to note that my delight in this fearsome dainty was based upon its most malevolent quality: the chill consistency of the stuff, which made it resemble the kind of leathery jelly that I have seen used to moisten the face of a rubber stamp withal.

In this house--it was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean street--one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen, where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two bedrooms above. A door beside the stairway opened into a tiny scullery, from which light was pretty thoroughly excluded by the high, black wall which dripped and frowned no more than three feet away from its window. I have little doubt that this scullery was a pestilent place. At the time it appealed to my romantic sense as something rather attractive.

The elderly man in the kitchen was Amelia's father. That in itself naturally gave him distinction in my eyes. But, in addition, he was an old sailor, and, with a knife which was attached to a white lanyard, he could carve delightful boats out of ordinary sticks of firewood. It is to be noted, by the way, a thing I never thought of till this moment, that these same sticks and bundles of firewood have a peculiarly distinctive smell of their own. It is the smell of a certain kind of grocer's shop whose proprietor, for some esoteric reason, calls himself an 'Italian warehouse-man.' In later life I occasionally visited such a shop, between Fleet Street and the river, when I had rooms in that locality.

Boat-building figured largely in that visit to Amelia's parents. But the episode immediately preceding our departure is what overshadowed everything else for me that day, and for several subsequent nights. Amelia and the tearful mother took me up the dark little stairway, and introduced me to Death. They showed me Amelia's sister, Jinny, who died on the day before our visit. I still can see the alabaster white face, with its pronounced vein-markings; the straight, thin form, outlined beneath a sheet, in that tiny, low-ceiled, airless garret. What a picture to place before an infant on a sunny Sunday afternoon! It might be supposed that I had asked to see it, for I remember Amelia saying, as one about to give a child a treat:

'Now, mind, Master Nicholas, you're to be a very good boy, and you're not to say a word about it to any one.'

But, no, I do not think I can have desired the experience, for to this day I cherish a lively recollection of the agony of sick horror which swam over me when, in obedience to instructions given, I suffered my lips to touch the marble-like face of the dead girl.

How strange is that unquestioning obedience of childhood! Recognition of it might well give pause to careless instructors of youth. The kiss meant torture to me, in anticipation and in fact. But I was bidden, and never dreamed of refusing to obey. No doubt, there was also at work in me some dim sort of infantile delicacy. This was an occasion upon which a gentleman could have no choice....

Ah, well, I believe Amelia was a dear good soul, and I am sure I hope she married well, and lived happily ever after. I have no recollection whatever of how or when she drifted out of my life. But the visit to Jinny's deathbed, and the exciting leaps from the immeasurably long kitchen table into Amelia's print-clad arms, are things which stand out rather more clearly in my recollection than many of the events of, say, twenty years later.

How is it that my earliest recollections should centre about folk no nearer or dearer to me than domestic servants? I know that my mother died within three months of my birth. There had to be, and was, another woman in my life before Amelia; but I have no memories of her. She was an aunt, an unmarried sister of my mother's; but I believe my father quarrelled with her before I began to 'take notice' very much; and then came Amelia.

The large underground kitchen really was fairly big. I had a look at it no more than a dozen years ago. The house, too, was and is a not unpleasing one, situated within a stone's throw of Russell Square, Bloomsbury. Its spaces are ample, its fittings solidly good, and its area less subterranean than many. Near by is a select livery stable and mews of sub-rural aspect, with Virginia creeper climbing over a horse's head in stucco. Amelia shared with me a night nursery and a nursery-living room in this house, the latter overlooking the mews, through the curving iron rails of a tiny balcony. Below us my father occupied a small bedroom and a large sitting-room, the latter being the 'first floor front.'

But the memory of my father as he was in this early period is curiously vague. It would seem that he produced no very clear impression on my mind then. Our meetings were not very frequent, I think. As I chiefly recall them, they occurred in the wide but rather dark entrance hall, and were accompanied by conversation confined to Amelia and my father. At such times he would be engaged in polishing his hat, sometimes with a velvet pad, and sometimes on his coat-sleeve. I used to hear from him remarks like these:

'Well, keep him out of doors as much as possible, so long as it doesn't rain. Eh? Oh, well, you'd better buy another. How much will it be? I will send up word if I am back before the boy's bed-time.'

And then he might turn to me, after putting on his hat, and absently pull one of my ears, or stroke my nose or forehead. His hands were very slender, warm, and pleasantly odorous of soap and tobacco. 'Be a good man,' he would say. And there the interview ended. He never said: 'Be a good child'; always 'a good man'; and sometimes he would repeat it, in a gravely preoccupied way.

Once, and, so far as I remember, only once, we met him out-of-doors; in the park, it was, and he took us both to the Zoological Gardens, and gave us tea there. The meeting was purely accidental, I believe.

It must have been in about my ninth year, I fancy, that I began really to know something of my father, as a man, rather than as a sort of supernatural, hat-polishing, He-who-must-be-obeyed. We had a small house of our own then, in Putney; and the occasion of our first coming together as fellow-humans was a shared walk across Wimbledon Common, and into Richmond Park by the Robin Hood Gate. The period was the 'sixties of last century, and I had just begun my attendance each day at a local 'Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen.' To us, in the Academy, my father descended as from Olympus, while the afternoon was yet young, and carried me off before the envious eyes of my fellow sufferers and what I felt to be the grudging gaze of the usher, who had already twice since dinner-time severely pulled my ears, because of some confusion that existed in my mind between Alfred and his burnt cakes and Canute and his wet feet.

In my devious childish fashion, I presently gathered that there had been momentous doings in London town that day, and that in the upshot my father had terminated his connection with the famous newspaper from which the bulk of his earnings had been drawn for some years. For a little while I fancied this must be almost as delightful for him as my own unexpected escape from the Academy that afternoon had been for me. But, gradually, my embryo intelligence rejected this theory, and I became possessed of a sense of grave happenings, almost, it might be, of catastrophe. Quite certainly, my father had never before talked to me as he did that summer afternoon in Richmond Park. His vein was, for him, somewhat declamatory, and his unusual gestures impressed me hugely. It is likely that at times he forgot my presence, or ceased, at all events, to remember that his companion was his child. His massive, silver-headed malacca cane did great execution among the bracken, I remember.

That he was occasionally conscious of me his monologue proved, for it included such swift, jerky sentences as:

'Remember that, my son. Have nothing to do with this accursed trade of ink-spilling. Literary work! God save the mark!' 'The purse-proud wretches think they buy your soul with their starveling cheques. Ten years' use of my brain; ten years wasted in slavish pot-boiling for them; and then--then, this!'

'This,' I imagine, was dismissal; accepted resignation, say. I gathered that my father had been free to do his work where he chose; that he had used the newspaper office only as a place in which to consult with his editor before writing; and that now some new broom in the office was changing all that; that my father had been bidden to attend a certain desk during stated hours to perform routine work each day; that he had protested, refused, and closed his connection with the journal, after a heated interview with some managerial bashaw.

Much that my father said that afternoon would probably have a ridiculous seeming in this twentieth century. Compulsory education and the aesthetic movement, not to mention the Labour Party, Tory Democrats, and the Halfpenny Press, were as yet undiscovered delights when my father talked to me in Richmond Park. A young man of to-day, reading or listening to such words, would almost certainly be misled by them regarding the character and position of the speaker. My father was no scion of a noble house, but the only son of a decayed merchant. His attitude of mind and disposition, however, were naturally somewhat aristocratic, I think. Also, as I have said, our talk was in the 'sixties. He was sensitive, very proud, inclined, perhaps, to scornfulness, certainly to fastidiousness, and one who seldom suffered fools either gladly or with much show of tolerance. It was a somewhat unfortunate temperament, probably, for a man situated as he was, possessed of no private means and dependent entirely upon his earnings. In my mother, I believe he had married a lady of somewhat higher social standing than his own, who never was reconciled to the comparatively narrow and straitened circumstances of her brief wifehood.

'The people who have to do with newspapers are the serfs and the prostitutes of literature. It was not always so, but I've felt it coming for some time now. It is the growing dominion of the City, of commerce, of their boasted democracy. The People's Will! Disgusting rubbish! How the deuce should these office-bred hucksters know what is best? But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' 'But yet--there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are--And, of course--H'm!' 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a salary is humiliating--unworthy of one's manhood. Good heavens! why was I born, not one of them, and yet dependent on the caprices of such people?'

It may be filial partiality, but something makes me feel genuinely sorry for my father, as I look back upon that outpouring of his in Richmond Park. And that was in the 'sixties. I wonder how the twentieth-century journalism would have struck him. The later subtleties of unadmitted advertising, the headline, the skittishly impressionistic descriptive masterpieces of 'our special representative,' and the halfpenny newspapers, were all unthought-of boons, then. And as for the advancing democracy of his prophecies, why, there were quite real sumptuary laws of a sort still holding sway in the 'sixties, and well on into the 'eighties, for that matter!

We walked home from the Roehampton Gate, and in some respects I was no longer quite a child when I climbed into bed that night.

In my eyes, at all events, there was a kind of a partnership between my father and myself from this time onward. Before, there had been three groups in my scheme of things: upon the one hand, Amelia and myself, with, latterly, some of the people of the Putney Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen; in another and quite separate compartment, my father; and, finally, the rest of the world. Gradually, now, I came to see things rather in this wise: upon the one hand, my father and myself, with, perhaps, a few other folk as satellites; and, on the other hand, the rest of the world.

And at this early stage I began to regard the world--every one outside our own small camp--in an antagonistic light, as a hostile force, as the enemy. Life was a battle in which the odds were fearfully uneven; for it was my father and myself against the world. Needless to say, I did not put the matter to myself in those words; but at this precise period I am well assured that I acquired this attitude of mind. It dated from the admittance into partnership with my father, which was signalised by the walk and talk among the bracken in Richmond Park.

I ought to say that I had always had a great admiration for my father. He seemed to me clearly superior in a thousand ways to other men. But never before the Richmond episode had there been personal sympathy, nor yet any loyal feeling of fellowship, mingled with this admiration.

I remember very distinctly the pride I felt in my father's personal appearance. He was not a dandy, I think; but there was a certain quiet nicety and delicacy about his dress and manner which impressed me greatly. The hair about his ears and temples was silvery grey; one of the marks of his superiority, in my eyes. He always raised his hat in leaving a shop in which a woman served; his manner of accepting or tendering an apology among strangers was very grand indeed. In saluting men in the street, he had a spacious way of raising his malacca stick which, to this day, would charm me, were it possible to see such a gesture in these rushing times. The photograph before me as I write proves that my father was a handsome man, but it does not show the air of distinction which I am assured was his. And, let me record here the fact that, whatever might be thought of the wisdom or otherwise of his views or actions, I never once knew him to be guilty of an act of vulgar discourtesy, nor of anything remotely resembling meanness.

In these days it is safe to say that the very poorest toiler's child has more of schooling than I had, and, doubtless, a superior sort of schooling. I spent rather less than a year and a half at the Putney Academy, and that was the beginning and the end of my schooling. Before being introduced to the Academy, I was a fairly keen reader; and that remained. At the Academy I was obliged to write in a copy-book, and to commit to memory sundry valueless dates. There may have been other acquisitions , but I have no recollection of them; and, to this day, the simplest exercises of everyday figuring baffle me the moment I take a pencil in my hand. If I cannot arrive at solution 'in my head' I am done, and many a minor monetary loss have I suffered in consequence.

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