uncle who had a station, Mannerim, behind Geelong. The house had been built in the old days of slabs with a bark roof, very inflammable material. I loved the place then because it spoke of the strenuous old days of the Colony. I love the memory of it now for old times' sake, and because there happened the first really exciting incident in my life.
It was a January morning, the sky overcast with smoke and a furious hot wind blowing from the north. The men of the household looked out anxiously, but I sat and read a story-book. It was the tale of a boy named Carlo who was wrecked on the coast of West Africa—nice vague location; he climbed a cocoa-nut tree—I can see him now with a rope round his waist and his legs dangling in an impossible attitude—and he was taken by savages. His further adventures I do not know, because a man came riding in shouting that the calf paddock was on fire and everyone must turn out. Everyone did turn out except my aunt who stayed behind to prepare cool drinks, and those drinks my little sister and I, as being useless for beating out the flames, were sent to carry to the workers in jugs and “billies.”
“Now little girls,” said my aunt who was tenderness and kindness itself, “remember you are not to get tired.”
It was the first lesson I really remember in the stern realities of life. We had hailed the bushfire as something new and exciting; now we were to be taught that much excitement brings its strenuous hard labour. The fire did not reach the house, and the men and women got their drink, but it was two very weary, dirty, smoke-grimed and triumphant little girls who bathed and went to bed that night. I never finished the story of Carlo. Where he went to I can't imagine, but I can't think the savages ate him else his story would never have been written; and from that moment dated my deep interest in West Africa.
We grew up and the boys of the family went a-roving to other lands. One was a soldier, two were sailors, and the two youngest were going to be lawyers, whereby they might make money and go to the other ends of the world if they liked. When we were young we generally regarded money as a means of locomotion. We have hardly got over the habit yet. Only for us two girls was there no prospect. Our world was bounded by our father's lawns and the young men who came to see us and made up picnic parties to the wildest bush round Ballarat for our amusement. It was not bad. Even now I acknowledge to something of delight to be found in a box-seat of a four-in-hand, a glorious moonlight night, and four horses going at full speed; something delightful in scrambles over the ranges and a luncheon in the shade by a waterhole, with romantic stories for a seasoning, and the right man with a certain admiration in his eyes to listen. It was not bad, but it was not as good a life as the boys of the family were having, and it was giving me no chance of visiting the land Carlo had gone to that had been in my mind at intervals ever since the days of my childish bushfire.
There was really nothing for a woman but to marry, and accordingly we both married and I forgot in my entrance into that world, which is so old and yet always so new, my vague longings after savage lands.
I wonder sometimes would I have been contented to lead the ordinary woman's life, the life of the woman who looks after her husband and children. I think so, because it grew to be the life I ardently yearned for. The wander desire was just pushed a little into the back-ground and was to come off twenty years hence when we had made our fortune. And twenty years looked such a long long while then. It even looks a long time now, for it has not passed, and I seem to have lived a hundred years and many lives since the days in the little Victorian town of Warrnambool when my handsome young husband and I planned out our future life. But I was nearer to Carlo's land than I thought even then, and if I could have peeped into the future I would only have shrunk with unspeakable dread from the path I must walk, the path that was to lead me to the consummation of my childish hopes. In a very few years the home life I had entered into with such gladness was over, my husband was dead, and I was penniless, homeless, and alone. Of course I might have gone back to my father's house, my parents would have welcomed me, but can any woman go back and take a subordinate position when she has ruled? I think not; besides it would only have been putting off the evil day. When my father died, and in the course of nature he must die before me, there would be but a pittance, and I should have to start out once more handicapped with the added years. Again, and I think this thought was latent beneath all the misery and hopelessness that made me say I did not care what became of me, was I not free, free to wander where I pleased, to seek those adventures that had held such a glamour for me in my girlhood. True, I had not much money with which to seek them. When everything was settled up I found if I stayed quietly in Australia I had exactly thirty pounds a year to call my own. Thirty pounds a year, and I reckoned I could make perhaps fifty pounds by my pen. My mother pointed out to me that if I lived with my parents it would not be so bad. But it was not to be thought of for a moment. The chance had come, through seas of trouble, but still it had come, and I would go and see the great world for myself. I thought I had lived my life, that no sorrow or gladness could ever touch me keenly again; but I knew, it was in my blood, that I should like to see strange places and visit unknown lands. But on thirty pounds a year one can do nothing, so I took a hundred pounds out of my capital and came to London determined to make money by my pen in the heart of the world.
Oh, the hopes of the aspirant for literary fame, and oh, the dreariness and the weariness of life for a woman poor and unknown in London! I lodged in two rooms in a dull and stony street. I had no one to speak to from morning to night, and I wrote and wrote and wrote stories that all came back to me, and I am bound to say the editors who sent them back were quite right. They were poor stuff, but how could anyone do good work who was sick and miserable, cold and lonely, with all the life crushed out of her by the grey skies and the drizzling rain? I found London a terrible place in those days; I longed with all my heart for my own country, my own little home in Warrnambool where the sun shone always, the roses yellow and pink climbed over the wall, the white pittosporum blossoms filled the air with their fragrance, and the great trees stood up tall and straight against the dark-blue sky. I did not go back to my father, because my pride would not allow me to own myself a failure and because all the traditions of my family were against giving in. But I was very near it, very near it indeed.
Then after six months of hopelessness there came to see me from Liverpool a friend of one of my sailor brothers, and she, good Samaritan, suggested I should spend my Christmas with her.
I went. She and her daughters were rich people and the husband and father had been an African trader. So here it was again presented to me, the land to which I had resolved to go when I was a little child, and everything in the house spoke to me of it. In the garden under a cedar tree was the great figurehead of an old sailing ship; in the corridor upstairs was the model of a factory, trees, boats, people, houses all complete; in the rooms were pictures of the rivers and swamps and the hulks where trade was carried on. To their owners these possessions were familiar as household words that meant nothing; to me they reopened a new world of desire or rather an old desire in a new setting—the vague was taking concrete form. I determined quite definitely that I would go to West Africa. The thing that amazed me was that everybody with money in their pockets was not equally desirous of going there.
About this time, too, I discovered that it was simply hopeless for me to think of writing stories about English life. The regular, conventional life did not appeal to me; I could only write adventure stories, and the scene of adventure stories was best laid in savage lands. West Africa was not at all a bad place in which to set them. Its savagery called me. There and then I started to write stories about it. Looking back, I smile when I think of the difficulties that lay in my path. Even after I had carefully read every book of travel I could lay my hands on, I was still in deepest ignorance, because every traveller left so much undescribed and told nothing of the thousand and one little trifles that make ignorant eyes see the life that is so different from that in a civilised land. But if you will only look for a thing it is astonishing how you will find it often in the most unlikely places; if you set your heart on something it is astonishing how often you will get your heart's desire. I sought for information about West Africa and I found it, not easily; every story I wrote cost me a world of trouble and research and anxiety, and I fear me the friends I was beginning to make a world of trouble too. But they were kind and long-suffering; this man gave me a little information here, that one there, and I can laugh now when I think of the scenes that had to be written and rewritten before a hammock could be taken a couple of miles, before