Is this a peculiar disease, or am I merely noting a characteristic of my own which is also a characteristic of the age in which I have lived? I wonder! It is, at all events, a way of living which involves a rather tragical waste of the good red stuff of life; and, yes, upon the whole it is a form of restless waste and extravagance which I fancy is far from rare among the thinking men and women of my time. They do not travel; they hurry from one place to another. They do not enjoy; they pursue enjoyment. They do not rest; they arrange very elaborately, cleverly, strenuously to catch rest--and miss it. Is it not possible that some of us do not live, but use up all the time at our disposal in sweating, toiling, scheming preparation for the particular sort of life we think would suit us; the kind of life we are aiming at; the end, in fact, in pursuit of which we expend and exhaust our whole share of life as a means?
Though these things strike me now, it is needless to say they formed no part of my mental outlook in Dursley.
As is often the case in Australian homes, the colony of out-buildings upon Mr. Perkins's premises at Dursley was more extensive than the parent building. Between the main house and the stable, with all its attendant minor sheds and lean-to, was a long, low-roofed wooden structure, divided into dairy, wash-house, tool-room, workshop, and, at the end farthest from the dairy, what is called a 'man's room.' This latter apartment was now my private sanctuary, entered by nobody else, unless at my invitation. I grew quite fond of this little room, which measured eight feet by twelve feet, and had a window looking down the ridge and across the creek to Dursley in its valley and the wooded hills beyond.
I had no lamp in my sanctuary, and no fireplace. But the climate of New South Wales is kindly, and, when one is used to it and one's eyes are young, the light of a single candle is surprisingly satisfying. That, at all events, was the light by which I mastered the intricacies of Pitman's system of shorthand, besides reading most of the volumes in Dursley's School of Arts library. The reading I accomplished in bed; the shorthand studies on the top of a packing-case which hailed originally from a match factory in east London, and doubtless had contained the curious little cylindrical cardboard boxes of wax vestas, stamped with a sort of tartan plaid pattern, that are seen so far as I know only in Australia, though made in England.
At first, like others who have trodden the same thorny path, I went ahead swimmingly with my shorthand, confining myself to the writing of it on the packing-case. Being at the end of the current bed-book (it was Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt) I took my latest masterpiece of shorthand to bed with me one night, only to find that I could barely read one word in ten. That was a rather perturbed and unhappy night, and my progress thereafter was a somewhat slower and more laborious process.
The habit of rising with the sun was now fairly engrained in me. At about daybreak then my first duties would take me to the wood-heap, with axe and saw, and subsequently to the scullery with a heaped barrow-load of fuel for the day. Arrived there I polished the household's boots and knives, washed my hands at Mrs. Gabbitas's immaculate sink--a more scrupulously clean housewife I have yet to meet--and proceeded to the feeding and milking of Bella. Then I fed the horse, cleared out the stable, spruced myself up, and so to breakfast with 'The Gabbitular One.' Three meat meals and two snacks--'the eleven o'clock' and 'the four o'clock'--were the order of the day in this establishment. The snacks consisted of tea, which was also served at every meal, including dinner, and scones and butter; the meals included always some sort of flesh food and varying adjuncts. After the lean dietary of St. Peter's this regime seemed almost startling to me at first, a thing which could hardly be expected to last. But I adapted myself to it without difficulty or complaint, and thrived upon it greatly.
During the day my main work was the cultivation of the garden, and the care of the front lawn, in which Mr. Perkins took a very special pride and interest; chiefly, I think, because it was the foreground of his wife's daily outlook. But the routine work of the garden, which always was demanding a little more time than one had to spare for it, was subject, of course, to interruptions. I did the churning twice a week, and Mrs. Gabbitas the 'working' and 'making up' of the butter. And there were other matters, including occasional errands to the town--a message for a storekeeper, or a note for the master at his office.
Over the entrance to this office of Mr. Perkins's hung a huge board on which were boldly painted in red letters on a white ground the name of George Perkins, and the impressive words--'Dursley's Omnigerentual and Omniferacious Agent.' It really was a remarkable notice-board, and residents invariably pointed it out to visitors as one of the sights of the town. Indeed, Dursley was very proud of its Omniferacious Agent, who for three successive years now had been also its mayor.
But I gathered from veteran gossips in the town's one street that this had not always been so. Mr. Perkins had originally arrived in the town but very slightly more burdened with worldly gear than I was. The tools of his craft as a cobbler had left room enough in one bundle for the rest of his property. Dursley did not want a cobbler at that time, I gathered; so in this respect Mr. Perkins had been less fortunate than I was; for when I arrived some one had wanted a handy lad. However, what proved more to the point was the fact that the cobbler did want Dursley. He stayed long enough to teach the townsfolk to appreciate him as a cobbler of boots--and of affairs, of threatened legal proceedings, frayed friendships, and the like. And then, for some months prior to a general election, the cobbler edited the local weekly newspaper, and was largely instrumental in returning the Dursley-born candidate to parliament, in place of an interfering upstart from Kempsey way. It was not at all a question of politics, but of Dursley and its interests.
By this time Mr. Perkins had gone some way towards Omniferacious Agenthood. He had very successfully negotiated sundry sales and purchases for townsmen, who shared that disinclination to call in conventionally recognised professional assistance which I have often noticed in rural Australia. Then he married the daughter of the newspaper proprietor, whose brother was one of Dursley's leading storekeepers. Everybody now liked him, except a few crotchety or petty souls, who, not understanding him, suspected him of ridiculing or exposing them in some way, and in any case mistrusted his jollity, his success, and his popularity. Even in the beginning, before the famous notice-board was thought of, and while Mr. Perkins's work was yet 'awlicular,' I gathered that several old residents had set their faces firmly against this invincibly merry fellow, and done all they could to 'keep him in his place.'