Читать книгу My Crowded Solitude - Jack McLaren - Страница 6

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I began the clearing of the site and the building of the house alone, for as the days went by no natives appeared, though far along the beaches smokes from their fires continually trickled up, and from among the inland hills a favouring night-wind brought always sounds as of drums. Often was I tempted to take rifle and revolver and go in search of them. But that would have meant leaving my outfit entirely unguarded--a risk I could not possibly take. So it was that I was compelled to await their spontaneous coming and meanwhile do what I could myself.

I don't think I ever have been so much thrown upon my own resources as I was in the days immediately following. In my vagabonding among the islands there were always natives to do things. There I merely managed and supervised. I performed no heavy manual labour. It was mine only to order the doing of a task and to see that it was done. For, I was a White Man among a multitude of black men, and therefore a Master and a Superior Person.

Here it was very different. Here I was master and labourer too. I not only made the plan, but I executed the plan. And in the executing of the plan I found my resources extremely poor. I found that my status as a Superior Person had been based on dependence on others. My muscles, long out of training, so revolted at the unaccustomed work that a single hour of felling the heavy jungle-trees left me aching all over and made by body crave rest as never it had craved anything before; and all the while I gushed with perspiration; and the smooth handle of the axe lifted the skin from my soft palms; and so inefficient was I that I took twice as long over a task as any labourer would have taken, and made absurd mistakes and used cumbersome methods and no methods whatever. All of which surprised me very considerably and led me to taking stock of myself and my capabilities, to consequent humiliation and chastening of spirit, for I had long been regarded as a Superior Person that I had come to believe I really was one, whereas it was now revealed to me that I was far less competent than the humblest of coolies.

But despite these things the work went forward; and in due course I began on the framework of the house--a framework of exceedingly simple design, yet quite unlike that of an ordinary house, the unlikeness lying in the fact that instead of resting on the ground in the usual manner it had to stand on stout, hard piles a yard in height at least, with between the top of each pile and the supports of the floor a cap of thick flat iron. For white ants were everywhere, and their favourite diet was wood--dead wood for preference, but green if dead was not available, as was evinced by their occasional attacking of growing jungle-tree--and stout hard piles capped with iron was the only device I knew to protect the building against them.

I hated those ants, and saw nothing absurd in the fact that a full-grown man should hate a thing so insignificant as an ant. I feared that despite my protective device they would get at my building and destroy it; and more than once the dreadful thought came to me that when my palms were grown maybe they would attack and devour them as at times they attacked and devoured living trees in the jungle. I derived but little comfort from the knowledge that palm-wood, being shreddy and teeth-entangling, was not at all to their liking, or from the recollection that in the whole of my considerable experience I had never heard of a plantation being destroyed by them.

For it was as though they resented my coming to this place of theirs and were determined to drive me away. If I left a box on the ground for even an hour or two they would be at it, riddling it through. They did their best to ruin various timbers I had cut and dressed ready for erection. They attacked the handles of my tools whenever they found them within reach, and as though destruction of the handles were not enough deposited a corroding acid which ate deeply into the metal. They made onslaughts on the stout supporting piles and despite their hardness injured them--a circumstance which caused me to protect them further by charring their outsides thickly. They even ravaged my clothes where I flung them overnight, and, as though to bring me tumbling down, gnawed at the trees to which my hammock was slung, and also devoured the sacks containing my food-supplies, so that tea and rice and flour became irretrievably mixed. Indeed, so persistent was their onslaught that at times I came nigh to believing that were I to stand for long in one place they would surely attack my person. And all this despite the fact that they were tiny squashy things, slow-moving and sightless; despite the fact also that because of a peculiar aversion from light they travelled only in tubes built along the surface of the ground.

These tubes were about the thickness of a man's finger and were divided into two compartments, one for going and one for coming; and some of them had such directness of line that they surmounted obstacles rather than went around them; and some had a length of a full five hundred yards or more; and such was the persistence of their builders that when I retributively destroyed a portion of one there was neither abandonment of purpose nor even change of direction, but merely a halt in the processional comings and goings while repairs were effected with neatness and dispatch. In the matter of definiteness of purpose these ants had nothing whatever in common with those species of ants which appear to spend most of their time running aimlessly and stupidly around; while in the matter of engineering skill they were the craftsmen of the insect world.

So, fighting against ants and bodily unfitness, the while feeling most tremendously alone, I worked at the building of my home. Then one mid-afternoon I straightened myself from a task--to look straight into the eyes of a man.

He was tall and muscular, smoky black of skin and entirely naked, and he had a lithe erectness of carriage which sometimes I think belongs only to primitive man. My first ordered thought was to spring for my rifle, which lay some yards away. But somehow I could not take my gaze from his face. For his eyes were curiously expressionless, the eyes of a man who looked but cared not whether he looked at all, the eyes of a man absolutely sure of himself and not at all afraid of what I might attempt--an expressionlessness so menacing that it came to me that though his hands were empty he might be dragging between his toes a spear which, by a quick raising of his foot, he could place in his hand, a trick, I had heard, that these people were wont to play. For a full half-minute we stood there, the white and the black; then the native grunted and uttered a word of English he had somewhere picked up, a word which, I learned later, he thought was a greeting: 'Tomorrow!' and at sound of it the spell of his eyes were broken and I looked at his feet and saw that a spear was truly there.

I produced a piece of 'trade' tobacco, and at the same time got my rifle. He took the tobacco, smelt it, broke it in two pieces and placed one behind each ear. Then he made an almost imperceptible sign, and another native, nude and smoky black as the first, stepped from out of the jungle so silently that there was not even the crackling of leaves beneath his feet. I gave him a piece of tobacco also, and he returned to the jungle and a moment later reappeared with a number of spears and throwing-clubs, which he laid in a heap on the ground before me; whereupon the first man came right up to me and held out his hand in the European manner of greeting, save only that it was the left hand instead of the right, and in an English the most mutilated and full of antiphrasis I have ever heard said that he was my friend and that his companion was my friend, and then with engaging frankness asked had I any more tobacco.

When I told them that I had, they produced some tree-bark thin as paper and made cigarettes and lit them with a coal from my cooking-fire and squatting on their haunches smoked them. And as they smoked they told me that this was their main camping-ground, that the name of the spot was Utingu, which meant the Place of Many Big Trees, and that they had been down-coast on a fishing expedition, this being the time of the year when certain fish were numerous in a certain river-mouth. Then they asked the reason of my building a house here, and whether it was to be a trepang station or a place wherein to store pearl-shell, but asking it as though they were only slightly curious about these things, and were more interested in the fact that I possessed a considerable quantity of tobacco.

In an English carefully chosen so as to be as bad as theirs, I told them of my object, adding that I needed labourers for the work and was depending on the natives to supply that need. They shook their heads; they were hunters, they said in effect, not workers--a statement which caused me to deliver a homily on the advantages of working, and having a regular supply of food, over the uncertainties of the chase, which they considered to the extent of agreeing with me and declaring that while they themselves were disinclined for work, no doubt there were some in the tribe who would like it. There were a lot of people in the tribe, said one. More than he had fingers and toes. More than his friend had fingers and toes. Some of them would surely want to work, said the other, adding that the whole of the tribe would be along soon. Meanwhile, they would like some more tobacco.

A little before sundown the first of the tribe appeared along the beach, then the others, mostly one behind the other, each with a head-burden of personal effects and the men their weapons besides, accompanying them an extra-ordinary number of dejected and part-starved dogs. They seemed at first glance exceedingly ill-kempt and uncared for. The women, thin-legged and narrow-chested, wore dresses contrived from scraps of cloth that had come their way, and while some of the men were nude, others were dressed to the extent of a pair of trousers and still others to the extent of a shirt--cast off oddments of pearl- and trepang-fishers and others who travelled the coast. On the dress of one woman was stencilled 'Lily White'--indicating that her garment had been once a flour-bag; and the coat of one man had on it a brass button whose inscription showed that its original wearer had been a member of the Japanese Navy.

And, besides their unkemptness, the expressions of their faces seemed remarkably ferocious. Indeed, they were the savagest-looking savages I had seen. Later, I became so accustomed to this appearance of ferocity as to take no heed of it at all; but this first sight of it disturbed me considerably; and that night and for several following nights I lay much awake watching the flickering of their camp-fires and listening to the murmur of their voices and the half-hearted quarrelling of their dogs, the while disconcertingly recalling the stories I had heard of the barbarity of these selfsame people.

I rose earlier than usual next morning. I expected a day of great busyness, a day of engaging labourers, informing them of the wages and rations they would receive, appointing and explaining tasks, and so forth. But the hours went by without a native appearing. In the camp along the beach was no hint of life. There was nothing to indicate that I was no longer alone in this place of mine. I wondered at this quiet. It was so unlike the behaviour of the natives to whom I was accustomed; had this been a beach in, say, New Guinea, I would have been surrounded long since by a chattering, excited crowd pouring out questions with an impatience which allowed no pausing for replies. I feared there was something wrong; and about ten o'clock I went to the camp to discover what it was.

There was nothing wrong. It was merely that the tribe had not yet risen; they were asleep, the whole of them--asleep with such thoroughness that the sprawling of them about the Wet of the trees and under various crude bark shelters they had built was as the sprawling of a community of mostly-naked dead. But the dogs were awake; and at my coming they set up such a snarling and barking that presently a girl stirred and sat up, and a youth near her opened his eyes and stared at me dully, and an elderly man muttered what was patently a petulant rebuking of the dogs, and others moved uneasily and gradually and reluctantly awoke, and a child or two wailed loudly; and soon the whole tribe were more or less stretching wide their arms and yawning extravagantly, their manner the while indicating that they thought it most inconsiderate of me that I should disturb them so early.

I approached a man who appeared to be a chief or leader of some kind, he being easily the tallest and broadest of them all, besides much the savagest of expression, and by gestures and by words I hoped he would understand, but feared greatly that he wouldn't, explained my purpose and intentions, saying that I would make of this place of jungles a beautiful and extensive garden so filled with foods that there would be abundance for everyone, and that I needed men to help with the work and would give them all manner of things from my stores in payment--tobacco and cloth and sheathknives and tomahawks and many other things, all of which I had in plenty, as anyone could see for himself if he liked to come to my tent.

He made no answer, neither did the one or two others who had casually approached, and, thinking maybe I had not been understood, I repeated the whole medley of words and gestures, changing their order here and there and adding a few new ones, thinking all the time that the employing of these people was not to be the easy matter I had thought in Thursday Island, and fearing acutely for the success of the venture; without the assistance of these savages the making of the plantation was impossible.

But the interview turned out quite satisfactorily, for presently, when I had given him a piece of tobacco--which in the most casual fashion he placed behind his ear--my listener gave me to understand that the thing did not rest with him, but with the individual members of the tribe: that they could please themselves in the matter; whereupon the others, who had stood listening in silence, informed me that they would be willing to accept the things I spoke of in return for a little work; and with that they wandered away and returned with a number of others, who addressed me in similar terms, though quite without eagerness or delight, but almost as though they were merely obliging me, as though they didn't like to see me stranded, so to speak. This appearance of indifference, however, was but expression of the philosophy of the nomad. As befitted members of the most casual race of people in the world, casualness was one of their outstanding characteristics.

I was soon to discover that they were perfectly willing to work, anxious even, for when I selected a dozen or so of the strongest and seemingly most intelligent and took them to my tent for a ration of flour preparatory to beginning their labourings, they were followed by a long procession of old men and young men, grand-mothers and girls, children of all sizes, each of whom held out to me a broad piece of bark, or an old jam-tin or other receptacle they had found washed up on the beach, and asked for flour, and intimated that he, or she, was going to work for me too. I wanted people to work--well, here they were, the whole tribe, said one. They would all like some of the tomahawks and knives I had spoken about, said another; and a woman put out a finger and touched one of my bales of red cloth to discover whether the colour would come off, and smiled when she found it wouldn't.

They took for granted I would employ them, and regarded me suspiciously when I gave flour only to the men I had engaged. One man made remarks and gestures to the effect that he couldn't understand why this was so. Why had I given flour to the others and not to him? he asked. Had I not said I would give flour to those who worked for me? He pushed a jam-tin insistently at me and towards the opened bag of flour. Another--the large and savage-looking gentleman whom I had first addressed on the subject of obtaining labourers--pointed out in a mildly complaining fashion that a man could not work without food, as he spoke shaking his head with the satisfied air of one uttering a new truth of great wisdom and profundity.

I explained as best I could that I had not meant to employ them all--that I couldn't employ them all, pointing to the flour-bags in illustration of the fact that I had not sufficient to feed a number such as this for more than a few days. I said also I hadn't work for so many, and added that perhaps later I would be able to engage them. I don't think these arguments impressed them at all. They had no idea whatever of how many rations there were in a bag of flour, while as for my statement that I hadn't work for so many they dearly thought that the more people there were to do it the easier would be the work. But they made no really serious complaint; and when I gave them each a piece of tobacco and to one or two a ration of flour, they lapsed into their old casualness and straggled back to the camp perfectly content.

And now I encountered my first real difficulty, a difficulty indeed which in all the years I was there I never wholly succeeded in overcoming. It was that of teaching the natives the use of European tools. As people accustomed to the implements of the Stone Age in which they lived, implements such as a saw, chisel, hammer, and auger were completely beyond them. Though they were quick to grasp the purposes of these tools, they were exceedingly slow to learn to use them effectively and without damage. Even the most intelligent was liable to buckle a saw within two minutes, the repairing of which would cost me, maybe, a full two hours' work. In fact, half my time was occupied in repairing damage caused by my well-intentioned Palaeolithic carpenters.

And after the house was completed and the felling of the jungle in the making of the plantation was begun it was the same. Axe-handles were broken with exasperating frequency and the edges chipped. Sometimes half the labourers would be idle while I put in new handles--a task I had always to undertake myself, for to delegate it to one of the natives meant damage to the repairing tools. It was a heart-breaking business, and as a means of remedying it I tried the infliction of penalties--reducing a man's tobacco-ration, making him work longer hours, and so forth--but all to no purpose, and I had at last to remove the penalties, for the natives began to murmur at being punished for accidents, and it was highly desirable that I avoided letting them think I was a harsh and unjust man, for primitive though they were they were profoundly aware that blame should be attached to intention rather than to effect.

Another difficulty was in inducing them to rise early in the morning. Each night it was the custom of the whole tribe to sit round the camp-fires, chatting desultorily and now and then droning fragments of dance-tunes, till midnight or later, with the result that in the morning they were exceedingly loath to rise. Further, they were accustomed to huge quantities of sleep. In their wild roaming of the bush they slept whenever inclined. A man successful in the chase, more or less cooked his capture, ate it and then went to sleep. If when he awoke he was hungry, he went out on the chase once more; if not, he turned over and went to sleep again.

Also, they slept with such soundness that to awaken a man was quite an achievement. The native way of doing it was to squat beside the sleeper and in a low monotone continually repeat his name. Once when I remarked that this seemed a slow process and made to shake the sleeper awake, I was told in an alarmed tone that that would not do at all.

The waking of a sleeper, it was explained, was a serious matter. When a man slept, his spirit left his body and went roaming; a spirit after being enclosed in a body for several hours, I was told, became restless and liable to do its owner a mischief; and the awaking was done slowly in order to give the spirit time to return, a body without a spirit being a most dreadful phenomenon.

Instances were related to me of sleepers being awakened before their spirits returned; and while most were of the mythical, out-of-place and out-of-time order and devoid of significant details, there was one with detail in plenty, and was besides a tale of Love and Tragedy.

It was told to me by one of the Old Men of the tribe as he sat on the verandah of the house one evening, with before us the darkling spread of the sea and on either hand the tall black wall which was the face of the jungle. The Old Man was very old, with a body so thin that the bones of his shoulders showed pale through the dull blackness of his skin; and he told the story with a sincerity and impressiveness I have seldom seen excelled, despite the fact that his exceedingly limited knowledge of English caused him to halt frequently in search of a word, which more often than not he would so utterly fail to find that he would resort to gestures and fragments of native speech, some of which I by this time knew.

The chief actor in the affair, it appeared, was the Old Man's brother, at the time a tall and strapping youth much skilled with the spear and a warrior of such renown that in all the camps along the beaches songs were made of him and his prowess. The Old Man remembered some of these songs, though it was all so long ago; and in a quavering, guttural voice he sang a little of one, the while swaying his thin body to the simple rhythm of the tune. It was a great song, that one, he said at the end, and had it been made about himself he would have been a proud man indeed. But he had not been a great spearman and warrior like his brother.. .

Then his brother took to wife a girl of a neighbouring tribe--a handsome girl, straight of body and long of leg, with breasts firm and round--a girl who had never had a man before, though many had sought her, among them another warrior, a youth, who on the day of the marriage fought her lover for her, only to be badly beaten. As this happened in the presence of the whole tribe, the warrior-youth's humiliation was great, and he resolved to be avenged; and that night, spear in hand, he crept to where lay the newly married pair. The bridegroom was asleep, but not so the girl; and she saw the other's black form loom up clear against the sky, saw him stop a pace from the sleeping man and raise his arm, the spear quivering like a living thing. For a moment she lay there nerveless with fright; then with a great cry she sprang up and over her husband, and diverted the point of the descending spear.

And with that, said the Old Man tremulously, his brother awakened and others of the tribe came running; and then commenced a great wailing and beating of hands on foreheads, for though the bridegroom was awake his eyes had no brightness in them, and his tongue hung out as though it had no strength, and when he spoke there was no meaning in his words. And from then on his wife went with him always, tending his every want; and because of the great grief that was hers the straightness of her body soon left her and her breasts lost their firmness and roundness and drooped like those of an old, old woman; and once at the full of the moon and once at the new she would cover her body with ashes and with clay and go the place of her bridal night and moan of her foolishness in so suddenly awakening her man, though the touch of her foot on his body as she sprang, and her great cry, had been engendered only by desire to protect him. And in the pathetic hope that the roaming and homeless spirit might chance upon its owner, she took her husband to sleep in a different place each night.

But the spirit never returned, said the Old Man sadly, adding that no doubt it still wandered homeless through the jungle, moaning perhaps as that young bride had moaned. After which he for a time sat silent, staring at the tall black wall of the trees, with his thin head a little sidewise, as though listening. Then he rose stiffly and after begging a piece of tobacco went down the steps and towards the camp, the while singing gutturally to himself the song the tribes had made of his brother's remarkable prowess.

As the time went on, the difficulties of my task increased. It was, for instance, no easy matter to persuade the natives to work on succeeding days. We worked yesterday and are tired and would rest, they would say, adding pointedly that in their habitual mode of life they worked not at all, and hunted only when need for food was on them. Whereupon I would point out that in their wild life they had no tobacco, or flour, or coloured cloth, or tinned meats or tinned fish, or any other of the luxuries they coveted, and that the only way to obtain them was by working all day and every day; and it would be only after further and more elaborate argument of the kind that they would take up again the hated tools of labour.

Then, they took an exceedingly long time over their meals. Even when they rose early in the morning, they so dawdled over breakfast as to be late for work. They ate with remarkable slowness, consuming the food in small pieces, and masticating it most thoroughly--this application of the principles of Fletcherism being due, no doubt, to the need in their wanderings in parts where food was scarce to make the most of whatever edibles they found. The midday meal was an even lengthier affair, it being the principal meal of the day, and after it, it was their wont immediately to go to sleep--and sleep away the whole afternoon had I not gone to the camp and awakened them. A lunchtime visit to the camp was one of my daily duties--and a most irksome one, there being few things I disliked more than the lengthy and provoking business of awakening sleeping natives. It was such a dreadfully thankless task.

Again, their labours were often interrupted by the fact that it was their age-old habit never to pass by food. Should a man in the course of his cutting away the undergrowth come across the thin trailing vine of a wild yam, he would at once abandon his attack on the undergrowth in favour of digging the tuber, a matter which might occupy an hour or more. Should a tree when it was felled prove to have in it a wild bees' nest, the men who found it would do no more felling till the nest was cut out. Should they disturb a wallaby or other animal, all hands would immediately set off in pursuit, abandoning their axes for the spears they kept always by them, streaming off through the timber, calling directions one to another regarding flanking the quarry and heading it off, and returning not for an hour, or several hours maybe. To my remonstrances concerning these interruptions they paid little heed, save to remark that the wasting of food was not their fashion, and that because they worked for me was no reason why they should no longer dig yams, dig out bees or hunt wallabies.

Further, those of the labourers who were married were in the habit of going off to the camp every now and then to see that all was well with their wives. These people had a most absolute distrust of their women. They believed no woman should be out of her husband's sight for long. There was always some other man who desired her, I was told, and as often as not the woman desired the man. It was quite an easy matter to lose a woman, and the only thing for a husband to do was to keep alert. There was one labourer who was missing several times a day for this reason; but why he should have worried I do not know, for his wife was by far the most unattractive woman in the camp and somewhat elderly besides, in fact I suspected his anxiety was merely a ruse to gain respite from his labouring--till one afternoon I came across him spying the camp from behind a conveniently concealing tree. I don't know, however, whether he was afraid or merely hopeful.

Then, too, the heat distressed them--a circumstance which surprised me. Cape York being so close to the Equator, the heat was, of course, considerable; but I did not expect that the natives would suffer from it. The trouble was that in their ordinary way of life they stayed always in the shade when the sun was hottest, doing their hunting and travelling only in the cool of the morning and evening, while their duties at the plantation involved their being in the sun all day, and, further, working in it--and till now they had never performed work so hard as this. They gushed perspiration even more freely than I had gushed it what time I worked at the building of the house alone. They became quickly exhausted and had frequently to seek rest and time for the gaining of breath. In ordinary circumstances sustained effort of any kind was much to their distaste; but sustained effort with an axe in the full blaze of midday was beyond their powers. After a week or two I lengthened the midday interval from one to three hours--an arrangement which shortened the working-day accordingly, for it was quite useless to attempt getting them to rise earlier in the morning and therefore start work earlier, and the briefness of the tropical twilight made it impossible that labours should be continued after sunset.

There was also need for constant supervision while they worked, for if I left them at any time they would immediately sit down and smoke or go to sleep--if they didn't chase wallabies or go spying on their wives. They had an astonishing facility for going to sleep at an instant's notice at any time or in any place. Often in those early days did I return from a brief absence to find the whole of the labourers stretched like black shadows on the ground. I tried upbraiding them. It was no use. I tried ridiculing them--saying scornfully that they worked like women or children, that they had neither strength nor endurance. That was no use either; they had none of that acute sense of shame I had noted among the Papuans and Solomon Islanders and others. There were, in fact, no means by which I could persuade them into sudden acceptance of a daily routine of toil; and at last I saw that my only chance lay in gradually accustoming them to it.

For a time the task appalled me. Never, I thought, would I succeed in teaching regular habits to these nomadic creatures of impulse. I was attempting the impossible. I was attempting to alter and fashion to my liking the characters and habits of a people whose characters and habits were as different from mine as the many thousand years between our periods could possibly make them. The thing seemed ridiculous--so much so that, despairing, I concluded there was much wisdom in the warning of the wife of the trepang-vessel's captain and in the sandalwood-cutter's adjectival declaration that I was a fool; at these times I considered abandoning the whole venture as it stood, that phrase of business advice, 'Let the first loss be the last,' repeating itself to me with an insistence which would not be denied.

But matters began to improve, and I took heart again and felt I could not go. The place was growing on me. It was a most beautiful spot. Straight in front, across two miles of smooth blue sea, was an island, a large island with a backbone of gentle-sloped hills which to each rising and setting of the sun were tipped with gold with fire in it, and a white beach which at this distance was as a thread of cotton tying the land to the sea. Beside it was another island, a smaller one, but higher, with a row of brown serrated peaks, and its nearest side a towering cliff which cast wide shadows on the blueness of the sea. And in between and all about were various other islands, some of them treeless dots of sand and coral, and sand-banks that showed only at lowest tides, and reefs that showed not at all save in a thin amorphous greening of the sea.

Then there was the beach, three miles or more of it, a broad and sloping beach most generously curved and for the whole of its length a pure french-grey, with at one end a rocky point, which gleamed whitely with shells, and at the other the mangrove-fringed mouth of a stream, which made across the greyness of the sand a thread of silver. And back from the beach in one place were hills that invited one to drink from cool streams about their feet and then ascend their easy slopes and rest on the softness of their grass; and in another place was a serpentine lagoon, five or more acres in extent, edged wholly by thickly foliaged vines with scarlet berries bunched about the greenness of their leaves, and all of it covered by water-lilies like great blue plates, with upright in the centre of each a small white flower shaped perfectly in the manner of an egg-cup and as delicately translucent as finest china.

And added to all this there was the thought that while it would be a fine thing indeed if I succeeded in making of this black man's jungle a white man's garden, it would be a finer thing still if I succeeded in turning a whole people from wandering idleness to habits of industry. With my taking of heart, it seemed to me that it might possibly be done after all. It did not occur to me that the natives were happier as they were. It did not occur to me that the creating in them of needs and desires hitherto utterly foreign would also create in them the necessity for satisfying those needs and desires, to the consequent destruction of the more or less complacent ease of their existence.

Nor did it occur to me there was anything incongruous in the fact that I who had for so long been a wandering idler should set such a store on industriousness.