I suppose the successive servant maids who chiefly controlled my early childhood must have been more ignorant than any member of their class in post-Board School days. Yet it seems beyond question clear to me that such beginnings of a mind as I possessed at the age of ten, such mental tendencies as I was beginning to show, were at all events more hopeful, more rational, better worth having, than those I have been able to discern in the twentieth-century London office boy, fresh from his palatial County Council School. I may be quite wrong, of course, but that is how it appears to me--despite all the uplifting influences of halfpenny newspapers, and picture theatres, and the forward march of democracy.
Then there is that notable point, the question of speech; the vehicle of mental expression and thought transference. Between the ages of one year and nine years, society for me was confined almost exclusively to servant girls. From their lips it was that I acquired the faculty of speech. Yet I am certain that the boy who walked in Richmond Park with my father in the 'sixties spoke in his dialect, and not in that of Cockney nursemaids. Why was that? If my father ever corrected my speech it was upon very rare occasions. I remember them perfectly. They were not such corrections as would very materially affect a lad's accent or choice of words.
Having read a good deal more than I had conversed, I was mentally familiar with certain words which I never had happened to have heard pronounced. One instance I recall. (It was toward the end of my Academy period.) I had occasion to read aloud some passage to my father, and it included the word 'inevitable,' which in my innocence I pronounced with the accent on the third syllable. Up went my father's eyebrows. 'Inevitable,' he mimicked, with playful scorn. And that was all. He offered no correction. I recall that I was covered in rosy confusion, and, guessing rightly, by some happy chance (or unconscious recollection) hit upon the conventional pronunciation, never to forget it. But, judged by any scholastic standard I ever heard expounded, there is no doubt about it, I was, and for that matter am, a veritable ignoramus.
During all the year which followed the beginning of intimacy between us, my impression is that my father was increasingly worried and depressed. Children have a shrewder consciousness of these things than many of their elders suppose; and I was well aware that things were not going well with my father. I saw more of him, and missed no opportunities of obtaining his companionship. He, for his part, saw a good deal less of other people, I fancy, and lost no opportunity of avoiding intercourse with his contemporaries. He brooded a great deal; and was very fitful in his reading, writing, and correspondence. I began to hear upon his lips significant if vague expressions of his desire to 'Get away from all this'; to 'Get out of this wretched scramble'; to 'Find a way out of it all.'
And then with bewildering suddenness came the first big event of my career; the event which, I suppose, was chiefly responsible also for its latest episode.
IV
No doubt one reason why our migration to Australia seemed so surprisingly sudden a step to me was that the preliminaries were arranged without my knowledge. Apart from this, I believe the step was swiftly taken.
My father had no wife or family to consider. I do not think there was a single relative left, beside myself, with whom he had maintained intercourse of any kind. Our household effects were all sold as they stood in the house, to a singularly urbane and gentlemanly old dealer in such things, a Mr. Fennel, whose stock phrase: 'Pray don't put yourself about on my account, sir, I beg,' seemed to me to form his reply to every remark of my father's. And thus, momentous though the hegira might be, and was, to us, I suppose it did not call for any very serious amount of detailed preparation, once my father had made his decision.
Looking back upon it now, in the light of some knowledge of the subject, and of old lands and new, it seems to me open to question whether, in all the moving story of British oversea adventuring, there is an instance of any migration more curious than ours, or of any person emigrating who was less suited for the venture than my father. In the matter of our baggage and personal effects, now, the one thing to which my father devoted serious care was something which probably would not figure at all in any official list of articles required for an emigrant's kit: his books.
His library consisted of some three thousand volumes, the gleanings of a quarter of a century when books were neither so numerous nor so cheap as they are to-day. From these he set himself the maddening task of selecting one hundred volumes to be taken with us. The rest were to be sold. The whole of our preparations are dominated in the retrospect for me, by my father's absorption in the task of sifting and re-sifting his books. Acting under his instructions, I myself handled each one of the three thousand and odd volumes a good many times. Eventually, we took six hundred and seventy-three volumes with us, of which more than fifty were repurchased, at a notable advance, of course, upon the price he paid for them, from the dealer who bought the remainder.