Part 2 (1/2)
Flour 4 5 0 Groceries, lighting, &c. 40 0 0 Sundries 12 0 0 -------- Total 56 5 0
And the irreducible minimum has yet to be reached. For many years my exacting personal needs demanded the luxury of coffee. Pure and unadulterated, I quaffed it freely, and (being no politician) neither did it enhance my wisdom nor enable me to see through anything with half-shut eyes. Yet did it make me too glad. Under such vibrant, emphatic fingers my frail nerves tw.a.n.ged all too shrilly, and of necessity coffee was abandoned--not without pa.s.sing pangs--in favour of a beverage direct from Nature and untinctured by any of the vital principles of vegetables.
Thus is economy evolved, not as a foppish fad but as due obedience to the polite but imperious decrees of Nature.
And having confessed--far too literally, I fear--to so much on the expenditure side of the simple life in tropical Queensland, it might be antic.i.p.ated that the items of income would be stated to the completion of the story. The affairs of the busy world were discarded, not upon the strength of large acc.u.mulated savings or the possession of means by inheritance or by the success of investments or by mere luck, but upon merely imperative, theoretic antic.i.p.ations upon the cost of living the secluded life. We had little in reserve, how little it would be unbecoming to say. Our theories proved delusive, though not bewildering.
Some of the things abandoned with unphilosophic ease at the outset proved under the test of experience to be essential. Others deemed to be needful to desperation were forsaken unconsciously. Under the light of experience forecasts as to actual requirements were quite as vain as our preconceptions contrariwise. No single item which was not subjected to regulation. Without imposing any more impatient figures, be it said, then, that, though all preliminary estimates of ways and means underwent summary evolution, the financial end was close upon that on which we had calculated. Compulsion had all to do with the result. During each of the years of Island life our total income has never exceeded 100 and has generally fallen considerably below that amount. From the beginning we felt--and the foregoing lines have failed of their purpose if this acknowledgment has not been forestalled
”To be thus is nothing, But to be safely thus”;
and to draw again from the unplumbed depths of Shakespeare:
”What's sweet to do, to do will aptly find.”
CHAPTER III
”MUCH RICHES IN A LITTLE ROOM”
”Go and argue with the flies of summer that there is a power divine yet greater than the sun in the heavens, but never dare hope to convince the people of the South that there is any other G.o.d than Gold.”--KINGLAKE.
No ”saint-seducing gold” has been permitted to ruffle this placidity.
Gold! Our ears were tickled by the tale that good folks had actually thrilled when we slunk away to our Island. Rumour wagged her tongue, abusing G.o.d's great gift of speech, until scared Truth fled. She said--how cheap is notoriety!--that secret knowledge of hidden wealth which good luck had revealed during our holiday camp had induced us to surrept.i.tiously secure the land, that in our own good time we might selfishly gloat over untold gold! Some came frankly to prospect our hills and gullies, others shamefacedly, when our backs were turned; for had it not been foretold that gold was certain to be found on the Island, and were not the invincible truths of geology verified by our covert ways?
Had not one of the natives told of a lump so weighty that no man might lift it and on which hungry generation after hungry generation had pounded nuts? Had not another used a nugget as a plummet for his fis.h.i.+ng-line? It mattered not that the sordidly battered lump proved to be an ingot of crude copper--probably portion of the ballast from some ancient wrecks--and that Truth was sulking down some very remote well when the fable of the golden sinker was invented. Ordinary men--men of the type whom Kinglake designated ”Poor Mr. Reasonable Man”--men with common sense, in fact, the very commonest of sense--were not to be beguiled by the plain statement that apparently sane individuals wilfully ventured into solitude for the mere privilege of living. Gold must be the real attraction--all else fict.i.tious, said they. ”They have” [Rumour is speaking] ”the option of an unwitnessed reef, sensationally, romantically rich, or know of a piratically and solemnly secreted h.o.a.rd.” Indeed, we did think to enjoy our option, but over something more precious than gold.
But one visitor was so confidentially certain about the gold that he boldly made a proposition to share it. A fair exchange it was to be. He would, then and there, lead to a shaft 60 feet deep, and deep in the jungle, too, at a spot so artfully concealed that no mortal man could ever unguided hope to find it, where was to be revealed a reef--a rich reef blasted by the mere refractoriness of the ore, a disadvantage which would vanish like smoke before a man of means. To this sure and certain source of fortune he would provide safe and speedy conduct if on our part we would with like frankness confide in him our secret.
Our lack of secret, was it not boldly writ on our faces? But it was fair to a.s.sume an air of mystery. ”Our secret,” said we, ”is more desirable than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Yours, at the best, is but dross!”
The very worst that could happen would be the discovery on this spot of anything more precious than an orchid. Gold, which would transform the Isle into a desert, is therefore selfishly concealed, and the reason for the concealment remains an incomprehensible enigma. Was it not the pinnacle of folly to retire to an Island where gold was not to be gotten either by the grace of G.o.d or by barter or strife with man? So bold a foolishness was incredible. Yet we get more out of the life of incredible folly than the wise who think of gold and little else but gold.
The singular perfection of our undertaking--”the rarity to run mad without a cause, without the least constraint or necessity,” the exercise of that ”refined and exquisite pa.s.sion”--stamped me a disciple of Don Quixote, and such I remain.
Some ancient said that the more folly a man puts into life the more he lives--a precept in which I steadfastly believe, provided the folly is of the wholesome kind and on a sufficient and calculated scale.
For several years prior to our descent no blacks had been resident on the Island. After the blotting out of the great mult.i.tude, the visits of its descendants had been irregular and brief. Therefore--and the a.s.surance is almost superfluous--most of the evidences of the characteristics of the race had, in the course of nature, been obliterated. A few frescoes adorning remote rock shelters, a few pearl sh.e.l.l fish-hooks, stone axes and, hammers, a rude mortar or two (merely granite rocks in which shallow depressions had been worn by the pounding of nuts), sh.e.l.ls on the sites of camps, scars of stone axes on a few trees--these were the only relics of the departed race.
Has a decade of occupation by wilful white folks wrought any permanent change in the stamp of Nature? None, save the exotic plants, that time, fire, and ”white ants” might not consume. My kitchen midden is less conspicuous than those of the blacks, and, decently interred, gla.s.s and china shards the only lasting evidence thereof, for the few fragments of iron speedily corrode to nothingness in this damp and saline air.
Unwittingly the blacks handed down specimens of their handicraft--the pearl sh.e.l.l fish-hooks, a thousand times more durable in this climate than hooks of steel. Geologists tell us that sh.e.l.ls with iridescent colours are found in clays of such ancient date that if stated in centuries an indefinite number of millions would have to be a.s.signed to them. It is not strange, then, that some of my pearl sh.e.l.l hooks are as l.u.s.trous and sharp to-day as when the careless maker mislaid them in the sand for me to find half a century later. We leave no records on the land itself which would betray us after the lapse of half a dozen years. Is it not humiliating to find that the white man as the black records his most durable domestic history in rubbish, easily expungible by clean-fingered time?
Is humanity ever free from worries? What it has not it invents. Remote though we are from the disturbance of other folk's troublous cries, the ocean does not afford complete exemption from the sight of the shocking insecurity of the street.
One memorable day, casually glancing at the mainland, I saw on the beach something moving at astonis.h.i.+ng speed. Whereupon the telescope was brought to bear, and to my dismay revealed, actually and without fiction, a practical spring cart, drawn by a real horse at a trot, which horse was driven (as far as the telescope was credible) by a man! Over four years have elapsed since I saw any wheeled vehicle other than my own barrow--the speed of which is sedate (for I am a sedate and determined man, and refuse to be flurried by my own barrow). Nervousness and excitement began to play. Thank the propitious stars, two miles and more of mighty ocean separated me from the furious car. Otherwise, who may say? I might in my confusion have been unable to avoid disaster. This place is becoming thrilling. Let me move farther from the rush and bewilderment of traffic. Let me flee to some more secluded scene, where my sight, unsoiled hitherto by motor-car, may for ever preserve most excellent virginity. I have since made inquiries, and have been a.s.sured that the nerve-shocking juggernaut of the opposite beach is palsied--liable, indeed, to dissolution at any moment. When the collapse occurs I propose to venture across to inspect the remains and renew youthful memories of the species of conveyance to which it belonged.