E-text prepared by Clare Graham from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)

THE RECORD OF NICHOLAS FREYDON

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

[A novel by Alec John Dawson]

This etext prepared from the first edition published in 1914 by Constable and Company Ltd, London.

EDITOR'S PREFATORY NOTE

It would ill become any writer to adopt an apologetic tone in introducing the work of another pen than his own, and indeed I have no thought of apologia where Nicholas Freydon's writing is concerned. On the contrary, it is out of respect for my friend's quality as a writer that I am moved to a word of explanation here. It is this: there are circumstances, sufficiently indicated I think in the text of the book and my own footnote thereto, which tended to prevent my performance of those offices for my friend's work which are usually expected of one who is said to edit. It would be more fitting, I suppose, if a phrase were borrowed from the theatrical world, and this record of a man's life were said to be 'presented' rather than 'edited,' by me. I am advised to accept the editorial title in this connection, but it is the truth that the book has not been edited at all, in the ordinary acceptance of the term. A few purely verbal emendations have been made in it, but Nicholas Freydon's last piece of writing has never been revised, nor even arranged in deference to accepted canons of book-making. It is given here as it left the author's pen, designed, not for your eye or mine, but for that of its writer, to be weighed and considered by him. But that weighing and consideration it has not received.

So much I feel it incumbent upon me to say, as the avowed sponsor for the book, in order that praise and blame may be rightly apportioned. Touching the inherent value of this document, nothing whatever is due to me. Any criticism of its arrangement, or lack of arrangement, to be just, should be levelled at myself alone.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

BOYHOOD--AUSTRALIA

YOUTH--AUSTRALIA

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: SECOND PERIOD

THE LAST STAGE

EDITOR'S NOTE

THE RECORD OF NICHOLAS FREYDON

INTRODUCTORY

Back there in London--how many leagues and aeons distant!--I threw down my pen and fled here to the ends of the earth, in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind. Here I now take up the pen again and return in thought to London: that vast cockpit; still in pursuit of rest and self-comprehending peace of mind.

That seems wasteful and not very hopeful. But, to be honest--and if this final piece of pen-work be not honest to its core, it certainly will prove the very acme of futility--I must add the expression of opinion that most of the important actions of my life till now have had the self-same goal in view: peace of mind. The surprising thing is that, right up to this present, every one of my efforts has been backed by a substantial if varying amount of solid conviction; of belief that that particular action would bring the long-sought reward. I suppose I thought this in coming here, in fleeing from London. Nay, I know I did.

The latest, and I suppose the last, illusion bids me believe that if, using the literary habit of a lifetime, I can set down in ordered sequence the salient facts and events of that restless, struggling pilgrimage I call my life, there is a likelihood that, seeing the entire fabric in one piece, I may be able truly to understand it, and, understanding it, to rest content before it ends. The ironical habit makes me call it an illusion. In strict truth I listen to the call with some confidence; not, to be sure, with the flaming ardour which in bygone years has set me leaping into action in answer to such a call; yet with real hope.

It is none so easy a task, this exact charting out of so complex a matter as a man's life. And it may be that long practice of the writer's art but serves to heighten its difficulties. For example, since writing the sentence ending on that word 'hope,' I have covered two whole pages with writing which has now been converted into ashes among the logs upon my hearth. For the covering of those pages two volumes had been fingered and referred to, if you please, and my faulty memory drawn upon for yet a third quotation. So much for the habit of literary allusiveness, engrained into one by years of book-making, and yet more surely, I suspect, by labour for hire on the newspaper press.

But, though I have detected and removed these two pages of irrelevance, I foresee that unessential and therefore obscurantic matter will creep in. Well, when I come to weigh the completed record, I must allow for that; and, meanwhile, so far as time and my own limitations as selector permit, I will prune and clear away from the line of vision these weeds of errant fancy. For the record must of all things be honest and comprehensive; rather than shapely, effective, or literary. To be sure the pundits would say that this is to misuse and play with words; to perpetrate a contradiction in terms. Well, we shall see. Whatever the critics might say, your author by profession would understand me well enough when I say: 'Honest, rather than literary.'

How, to begin with, may I label and describe my present self? There, immediately, I am faced with one of the difficulties of this task. One can say of most men that they are this or that; of this class, order, sect, party, or type; and, behold them neatly docketed! But in all honesty I cannot say that I am of any special class, or that I 'belong' anywhere in particular. There is no circle in any community which is indefeasibly my own by right of birth and training. I am still a member of two London clubs, I believe. They were never more than hotels for me. I am probably what most folk call a gentleman; but how much does that signify in the twentieth century? Many simple people would likely call me a person of education, even of learning, belike, seeing a list of books under my name. A schoolman who examined me would be pardoned (by me, at all events) for calling me an ignoramus of no education whatever. For--and this I never reflected upon until the present moment--I could not for the life of me 'analyse' the simplest sentence, in the rather odd scholastic sense of that word. Inherited instinct and long practice make me aware, I believe, of an error in syntax, when I chance upon one. But I could only tell you that it was wrong, and never how or why. I know something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; something of three or four languages, but nothing of their grammar. I have met and talked with some of the most notable people of my time, but truly prefer cottage life before that of the greatest houses. And so, in a score of other ways, I feel it difficult informingly and justly to label myself.

But--let me have done with difficulties and definitions. My task shall be the setting forth of facts, out of which definitions must shape themselves. And, for a beginning, I must turn aside from my present self, pass by a number of dead selves, each differing in a thousand ways from every other, and bring my mind to bear for the moment upon that infinitely remote self: the child, Nicholas Freydon. It may be that curious and distant infant will help to explain the man.

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

The things I remember about my earliest infancy are not in the least romantic.

First, I think, come two pictures, both perfectly distinct, and both connected with domestic servants. The one is of a firelit interior, below street level: an immense kitchen, with shining copper vessels in it, an extremely hot and red fire, and a tall screen covered over with pictures. An enormously large woman in a blue and white print gown sits toasting herself before the fire; and a less immense female, in white print with sprays of pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support flaps. (To put a measuring-tape over that table nowadays, or over other things in the kitchen, for that matter, might bring disappointment, I suppose.) These legs formed fascinating walls and boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, caves, and suchlike resorts, among which a small boy could wander at will, when lucky enough to be allowed to visit this warm apartment at all. The whole place was pervaded by an odour indescribably pleasing to my infantile nostrils, and compact of suggestions of heat acting upon clean print gowns, tea-cakes done to a turn, scrubbed wood, and hot soap-suds.

But the full ecstasy of a visit to this place was only attained when I was lifted upon the vast table by the warm and rosy Amelia, and allowed to leap therefrom into her extended arms; she rushing toward me, and both of us emitting either shrill or growling noises as the psychological moment of my leap was reached. At the time I used to think that springing from a trapeze, set in the dome of a great building, into a net beneath, must be the most ravishing of all joys; but I incline now to think that my more homely feat of leaping into Amelia's warm arms was, upon the whole, probably a pleasanter thing.