Australian Lassie Page 10

  CHAPTER X

  RICHES OR RAGS

  Captain Carew and John Brown--big John Brown in Betty's parlance--sat atdinner together.

  Although not an elegant dinner table it was very far removed from beinga poor one. The linen, silver and glass were all of the best, the verybest; the man-servant was decorous and swift of eye, foot and hand, andthe menu was beyond any that had entered into John Brown's knowledge,before he came to Dene Hall. Yet he was out of love with it all.

  Captain Carew had his glass of clear saffron-coloured wine at his righthand. His silver fork was making easy journeyings from a slice of coldturkey on his plate, to his mouth, and his eyes were now and againrunning over a long type-written letter that lay before him.

  He was well pleased, well fed, and interested, and he had no reason tosuppose John Brown was in any other humour than himself.

  He had heard that the thoughts of youth were of vast length, and perhapshe believed it. But he did not think John's had reached quite as far aswishing to be a cobbler in a country village.

  And it must be confessed that few, seeing the appetite the boy broughtto his plate of cold turkey and "snowed" potato, would have suspectedhim of longing for a "crust of bread and a drink of cold water."

  The truth was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's libraryand had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreignlands and pirates and deep sea treasure--what interested him more thanall, a volume of biographies of self-made men.

  He had lingered longingly over their boyhoods; their brief school times(when such times were lacking altogether he liked both man and storybetter); their privations, struggles, self-reliance and success. Thesuccess interested him the least. That came, of course, he decided, toall who tried hard enough. But the privations! The struggle! Theself-reliance! How his eyes shone and his heart beat at it!

  There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. _He_was never at school in his life--never forced to do ridiculous sums, tospell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said thatthe only education he ever received he gave himself--that he was fiftyyears of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve hishand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over suchthings. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when heset up in business for himself he occupied an underground cellar and putup his sign--"Come to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny."This caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber'sprices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered his sign to "A cleanshave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, andfrom that to machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filledwith patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at last _Success_!"Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose tosuch estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of thecounty, and shortly afterwards George III conferred upon him the honourof knighthood." So said the book.

  Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; SirCloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a cobbler's son; Stephenson was anengine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.

  Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranksand gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came toregard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimatesuccess. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; wereall brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past everyobstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the_best of that sphere of life into which they were born_.

  He had quite decided to be a self-made man. That was simple enough. Thequestion that troubled him was what sort of a self-made man to be! ANewton? A Shakespeare? A Stephenson? A Turner? An Arkwright?

  The wide choice worried and perplexed him. It was pitiful to histhinking that he could, try and strive as he might, only be _one_.

  He had put himself through several examinations. He had lain under apear tree and watched the leaves fall; he felt another man had themonopoly of apple trees. And he had decided that the leaves fell becausethey had become unfastened from the branches, and that they did not fallstraight because the wind blew them sideways. And there was an end ofthe leaves.

  He had studied kitchen furnishings and their ways, avoiding only thekettle, since some one else had risen on its steam.

  He had tried himself with a pencil and paper, but he had composednothing even reminiscent of Shakespeare. In fact, he had composednothing at all.

  And at last he became convinced it was the circumstances of his lifethat were at fault, not he himself. _If_ he had only been a cobbler'sson, a tailor's, a barber's!

  But alas! he was well-dressed, well-fed, well-housed; sent to a goodschool. He had a pony of his own and a man to groom him; a bicycle; awatch; every equipment for cricket and football; a dog; pigeons and mostof the possessions dear to the heart of a boy.

  He had almost finished his dinner to-day when he put a question to theCaptain sitting there smiling over his letter.

  "Grandfather," he asked, "are you rich?"

  His grandfather sat straight immediately, which is to speak of hisfeatures as well as his figure.

  "Well, what do you think, lad?" he asked.

  John shook his head dolefully.

  "_I_ think you are," he said, "but _are_ you?"

  "That depends on how riches are counted," said the old man cautiously,"and who does the counting. King Solomon, now, might consider me but anold pauper."

  John went on with his dinner thoughtfully.

  "Are you wondering what I am going to do with my money?" asked the oldman, watching him closely.

  John looked him straight in the face.

  "I expect you're going to leave it to me," he said.

  "Ah!" said his grandfather. "And who has been talking to you now? Whotold you that?"

  "Oh, Johnson and Roberts and Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. Wilkins says you'll giveit me in a will," said John carelessly.

  "Who the dickens is Mrs. Wilkins?"

  John opened his eyes widely. Not to know Mrs. Wilkins was indeed toargue oneself unknown.

  "Why the lady at the store next our school," he said. "She sellspea-nuts and chewing gum and everything."

  "And she says I'll leave all my money to you, eh? Hum. Well, how'd youlike it if I do?"

  "I don't want it," said John with blunt force. He went on sturdily withhis blanc-mange, arranging his strawberry jam carefully, that he shouldhave an excess of that for the last spoonful.

  Captain Carew stared surprisedly at him.

  "Eh? What's that?" he asked.

  "When you were as old as me," said John, lifting his carefully trimmedspoon to his mouth, "were you as rich as now?"

  The question stirred the old man immediately. His eyes brightened, heput down his letter, pushed his glasses up high on his forehead andstruck the table with one hand.

  "I should think not," he said excitedly, "I should rather think not. Asrich as now--God bless my life!"

  "I thought you weren't," said John calmly.

  "I can't remember my father and mother," said Captain Carew, speaking alittle more quietly as his thoughts began to run backwards. "I livedwith my uncle in London; he kept a ham and beef shop, and had thirteenor fourteen youngsters of his own to bring up. He was going to put me tothe butchering, but I settled all that myself. I ran away."

  "You ran away?" asked John breathlessly, and regarding the old man withmore interest than he had ever given him yet.

  "Ay! When I was no older than you. Half a crown I had in my pocket, Iremember. It was all the start in life _I_ ever got."

  John put down his spoon and stared at his grandfather earnestly,eagerly, admiringly.

  "You're a self-made man!" he said. And old as the Captain was, and youngas was his admirer, he warmed pleasantly at the words.

  "Ay!" he said exultingly, "I'm a self-made man right enough. Every bitof me! I started life as an errand boy i
n the London slums, and itseemed for a time as if I was going to die an errand boy in the Londonslums. At least, it might have seemed so to most people. _I'd_ made upmy mind how it was to be, how it had got to be."

  "What did you do?" asked John eagerly.

  "Do--well, I had about a year at errand running and then I got a chanceto go to sea, and I took it. I went first to China. By gad, how well Iremember that trip!"

  And forthwith he launched into a sea-story more enthralling by far tothe boy than any in that library so stocked with sea-stories.

  At dinner again, at night, the talk was the same. The usually silentruminative old man was positively loquacious, and John gave him a raptattention.

  When nine o'clock struck a dim remembrance come to the boy that he wasstill a pupil of Wygate School and had home tasks to prepare for themorrow.

  But he had slipped too far out of his groove to go back again thatnight.

  He began to wander in and out of the lower floor rooms; out of the frontdoor, round the verandah, and in by the French windows to thedining-room.

  "I'll chuck school," he said. "Catch any of those self-made men going toschool when they were thirteen. I'll have to struggle and screw and putmyself to a night-school. That's what they did. A self-made man is goodenough for me."