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.
VII
In the summer-time there were sharks in Myall Creek, but I had never seen them there in the spring. It was, I think, still somewhere short of midnight when I stepped quietly out of the low window of the room I shared with seven other orphans. (The house was all of one storey.) I would have taken boots, but, excepting on visitors' Sundays, these were kept in a locked cupboard in the sisters' building. My outfit consisted of a comparatively whole pair of trousers--not those immortalised in Mr. Rawlence's sketch--a strong, short-sleeved shirt of hard, grey woollen stuff, a dilapidated waistcoat, a belt, my little book of bush flowers and trees, and my one-pound note. Oh, and an ancient grey felt hat with a large hole in the crown of it. That was all; but I dare say notable careers have been started upon less; in cash, if not in clothing.
Beside the punt I hesitated for a few moments, half inclined to cross by that obvious means, and leave Tim to do the swimming by daylight. Finally, however, I slipped off my clothes, tied them in a bundle on my head, and stepped silently into the water, closely and interestedly observed by one of the Orphanage watch-dogs, chained beside the landing-stage. If he had barked, it would have been only from desire to come with me, in which case, to save trouble, I should probably have become guilty of dog-stealing. The dogs were all good friends of mine.