And now he bought and sold for them: their houses, land, timber, fruit, produce, live-stock, and property of every sort and kind, making a larger income than most of them in the doing of it, and accomplishing all this purely by force of his personality. He succeeded where others failed, because so few could help liking him; and if he failed but seldom in anything he undertook, that was probably due in part to the fact that he never thought and never spoke of failure, preferring always as topics more cheerful matters. His wife had become a permanent invalid very shortly after their marriage, yet no person could possibly have made the mistake of thinking George Perkins's marriage a failure. I doubt if a happier married pair could have been found in Australia.
The meal we called tea (though we drank tea at every other meal) was partaken of by Mrs. Gabbitas and myself at half-past five, and by Mr. and Mrs. Perkins at six o'clock. I was given to understand at the outset that no work was expected of me after tea. Once or twice of a summer evening I went out into the garden to perform some trifling task I had overlooked, and upon being seen there by Mr. Perkins was saluted with some such remark as:
'Stealing time, Nickperry, stealing time! You an' me'll fall out, my friend, if you can't manage to keep proper working hours. Applicatiousness is all very well, but stealing time after tea is gluttish and greedular, and must be put down with an iron hand, with an iron hand, Nickperry. Tssp! Howzashorthandgetnon?'
Before expelling the last interrogative omnibus word, he would clench one fat fist and knead the air downward with it, to illustrate the process of putting down greediness with an iron hand.
I saw comparatively little of him, of course, owing to his preoccupation with business, his own and that of Dursley and most of its inhabitants; but we were excellent good friends, and it was rarely that he missed his Sunday morning walk round the whole place with me, when my week's work would be passed in more or less humorous review, and the programme for the next week discussed. After this tour of inspection I generally went to church, and the afternoon I almost invariably spent in my room over the packing-case. That is a period which many people give to letter-writing, and it is queer to recall the fact that, so far as I can remember, I had written only two letters in my life up to this period--one to a Sydney bookseller, whose address I got from Mr. Perkins, and one to Mr. Rawlence, the Sydney artist, to tell him of my present position, and to say that I had made a start upon shorthand. His kindly and encouraging reply was, I think, the first letter I ever received through the post. But I now began to write letters by the score, addressed to imaginary correspondents, and based in style upon my studies of correspondence in various books. These epistles, however, all ended their brief careers under the kindling wood in Mrs. Gabbitas's kitchen grate.
'Applicatious and industrial, with bettermentatious ambitions,' Mr. Perkins had said of me within a few moments of our first meeting, and at this period I think I justified the sense of his comment. My daily work was pleasant enough, of course, healthy and not fatiguing. Still, it was perhaps odd in a youth of my age that I should have had no desire for recreation or amusement. My study of shorthand did not interest me in the faintest degree; but I was greatly interested by my growing mastery of it, because I thought of the mastery of shorthand, as Mr. Rawlence had described it, as a very valuable means to an end, to various ends. I thought of it, in short, as the key which should open Sydney's doors to me; for, happy as my life was in Dursley, I never regarded it in any other light than as a useful preliminary to the next stage of my career. And that again, from all I have since been told, was hardly an attitude proper to my years.
It certainly was not due to any conscious discontent with my life and work in Dursley. I must suppose it was the beginning of that restless temperamental itch which all through life has made me regard everything I did as no more than the necessary prelude to some more or less vague thing I meant presently to do, which should be much better worth doing. A praiseworthy doctrine I have heard it called. It may be. But I would like to be able to warn all and sundry who cultivate or inculcate it in this present century, that the margin between it and the wastefully extravagant body and soul-devouring restlessness which I sometimes think the key-note of our time--the margin is a perilously slender one.
XI
Every day the Sydney Morning Herald was delivered at the Perkins's establishment, and every evening it reached the kitchen at tea-time. Mrs. Gabbitas regarded it as a very useful journal for fire-lighting purposes, but having no other interest in it was quite agreeable to its being out-of-date by one day when it reached her hands. Thus the daily newspaper became my perquisite each evening, to be returned faithfully in the morning with the day's supply of fuel, in order that it might duly fulfil its higher and more serviceable destiny in Mrs. Gabbitas's stove.
For quite a long time I never scanned the news columns of that really admirable newspaper. I might have thought that their perusal would have been helpful to me, especially as I cherished vague ideas of one day earning my living in a newspaper office. But, for the time, my mind was too much occupied with thoughts of another means to an end--shorthand. The longest chunks of unbroken letterpress were the leading articles. For months I never looked beyond them, and never stopped short of copying out at least one column of them, and often more, especially in those misguided early days before I awoke to the stern necessity of reading over every written line of shorthand.