youth asserted its right sufficiently to extract from it a certain
flavour of exhilaration. He was at all events coming to grips with the
reality of living. He had been like a boy swimming upon bladders; the
bladders were now removed, and a potent and tremendous sea throbbed
beneath him. Since he could depend no more on artificial aids to life,
it followed that life must needs develop its own latent forces. There
surely must be such forces in himself, an elemental manhood which must
justify itself. There recurred to him a saying of Hilary Vickars.
They had been discussing one night the infinite and elusive question of
wherein lay the wisdom of life, when Vickars had abruptly said,
"Practice is the only teacher. You learn to walk by walking, to swim
by swimming, to live by living. The child has no theory about walking:
he simply walks, at the price of a thousand tears and bruises. In the
same way we must make the experiment of living in order to learn how to
live. It is the same with religion. We make the experiment of God
before we can find God. The particular folly of men to-day is that
they think wisdom comes by talking about wisdom. One honest attempt to
do something, however blunderingly, is worth a lifetime of discussion
about how it should be done."
"Yet Browning held that the great thing planned was better than the
little thing achieved," he had responded.
"Browning also was a talker rather than a doer," Vickars had replied.
"He misleads men by the very robustness of his talk into the notion
that great dreams can take the place of great actions. Don't let him
mislead you. Remember what I say, that the great business of life is
to live, not to criticise life."
He remembered the words now, and they acquired new significance as he
studied the faces of his comrades. There were four men in the carriage
with him, one of them middle-aged, the others mere youths. The
middle-aged man had a good, plain, country face, with a fringe of gray
whisker; two of the youths were clearly country-bred, the third had the
alert look and pallor of the city. The middle-aged man sat in stolid
silence, with his big knotted hands folded on his knees; the two
country youths watched the flying fields with eagerness; the city youth
had produced a zither, on which he was strumming hymn-tunes. "Safe in
the arms of Jesus," was the tune he strummed.
"Thank you, sir," said the middle-aged man. "It kind of cheers one up
a bit to hear that."
"It's the only tune I really know," said the youth apologetically.
"You see, I'm only a beginner."
"My little girl used to sing it. Learned it in a Sunday school at
Newcastle. She's dead now."
The simple words had the effect of dissolving the reticence of these
chance travellers. They began to talk, and very soon each was relating
his history. The two country youths had the least to say. They had
heard there was work in America with good pay; in that statement their
entire history was comprehended. They had not the least idea of the
country they were going to; its very geography was as much a mystery to
them as the binomial theorem; they were, in fact, staking everything
upon a rumour, and Arthur found their very ignorance at once deplorable
and wonderful as an expression of the hopeful courage of the human
heart. The London youth was more garrulous, and slightly better
informed. It seemed he had a relative who had promised him a place in
a small business which he managed near Philadelphia.
"I am a clerk, you know. A man who is a good clerk can always get on
in any commercial centre. Except in London. There everything's
congested, too many people and not enough work to go round. "England," he
pronounced oracularly, "is done. Her day's over."
It seemed the younger men endorsed this verdict with surprising
unanimity. Each was a fugitive from an unequal battle. Men could not
live on the land, because of high rents and exorbitant taxation;
neither could they live in cities, because over-population and
excessive competition had reduced wages to starvation point; "England
was all very well for the rich--let them live in it as they could--but
a poor man couldn't, and that was about the size of it."
"But surely you two could live well enough," said Arthur to the country
youths.
"Oh, live--yes," said one; "but what is there at the end of it all?
Nothing but the workhouse."
"Yes, that's it," said the middle-aged man slowly, "but there's
workhouses in the States, too. Don't you be deceiving of yourselves.
England ain't no worse than other places."
"And why are you leaving it then, I'd like to know?" said the London
youth.
"Because I've had a trouble, young man."
Arthur's heart warmed toward this unwilling exile. The London youth,
with his glib denunciation of England, disgusted him; the two country
youths could by no stretch of charity be accounted interesting; but
this grave, silent man who had "had a trouble" made an instant appeal
to his sympathy. He began to talk with him, and little by little drew
his history from him. It seemed his name was Vyse; he was a riveter by
trade, had worked in the great shipyards of Clydebank, Newcastle, and
Belfast, earning excellent wages, and had acquitted himself with
industry and honour. Here was a man who had done something tangible
and something that endured. Doubtless at that moment the work of his
hands was distributed throughout the world; again and again he had
stood silent as the vast hull upon which he had toiled trembled on the
slips, took the water, and presently disappeared upon the plains of
ocean, there to encounter the strangest diversities of fate, to be
buffeted by the vast seas of the North Atlantic or the Horn, to be
washed with phosphorescent ripples in the heart of the Pacific or among
the coral islands of the South Seas, to fight the ice-floes of the
Arctic, or sleep upon the waters of the Amazon. Here, thought Arthur,
was the very poetry of labour; these disfigured hands held the threads
that bound the world together, and round this plain man lay an horizon
as wide as the farthest seas. Unconsciously the man's trade had
imparted certain elements of largeness to his mind. He spoke of
himself and his prospects with a certain plain dignity and confidence.
He knew his value to the world; east or west, he was a needed man, one
for whom the gate of labour stood wide open.
"I'll find work, never fear," he said. "I'm not like these boys," he
added, with a glance at the two stolid country youths and the London
clerk, who still strummed his one tune upon the zither. "They think
they'll find life easier in America, and that's all they go for. I
would think shame upon myself to emigrate upon such a hope as that. I
don't hold with folk as run down England. It's my belief that them as
runs down their own country won't be of much good in any other country.
I tell you I'm sorry enough to leave England, and I wouldn't do it,
except that I have a trouble."
Presently it came out what his trouble was. His wife was dead, and his
only son had taken to evil ways. The man could have borne the
loneliness of loss, but when the boy robbed and insulted him, proving
finally intractable, he made up his mind to start life afresh in a new
land where his disgrace could not follow him.
"There's years of work in me yet," he said. "But I can't work properly
without a peaceful mind. And there's another thing, I've got to pay
back what Charlie took from other folk. I couldn't lift my head up if
I didn't. That's right, isn't it, sir?"
"Mr. Vyse," said Arthur, "I wish all of us could show as clean a bill
of health as you."
The train was running into Southampton. Beside the landing-stage lay
the great ship, which was to receive within a few minutes so many
histories and destinies. The steerage was already packed with
emigrants, many of them Italians, distinguishable by their gay-coloured
clothing. Arthur found, to his delight, that Vyse was billeted with
him in a four-berth cabin; the two other tenants were an old
horse-dealer from the Western States, and a clergyman's son, going out
upon a remittance. The cabin was deep down in the bowels of the ship,
dark and airless. He hastened from it to the deck, and found himself
in the midst of many farewell groups. Among them was the clergyman's
son, who stood superciliously smoking a cigar, with his face averted
from his father, who pressed upon him final kindnesses and counsels.
"All right, father. It's time for you to go, you know," he said
sullenly. "May God bless you, my boy!" said the old man. "Oh, I
daresay," said the boy indifferently; and it was so they parted. Some
one began to sing "Home, Sweet Home," a singularly inappropriate song
in such an hour. A woman shrieking for her husband and her two
children was put ashore; it seemed the baby in her arms was afflicted
with sarcoma, and was expelled the ship. The brown water showed a
sudden strake of white; a soft pulse throbbed somewhere beneath the
decks; the screw had made the first of those countless revolutions that
would not cease for three thousand miles; and the great vessel glided
out upon the long path toward the setting sun.
There are few schools in the world where character can be studied at
closer quarters, and certain lessons of life learned more rapidly, than
on ship-board. The mere contiguity of a great variety of human
creatures is itself a lesson in the real values of life. It was, for
instance, an admirable incentive to self-reliance for Arthur to find
himself for the first time in a position where he was despised. This
incentive was administered daily by groups of gentlemen in ulsters and
ladies in elaborate travelling-costumes, who gathered at the rail of
the deck above like spectators in a gallery, and gazed down with
evident commiseration, and sometimes with sarcastic comment, on the
second class passengers. Occasionally these groups would leave their
lofty gallery and make excursions through the inferior quarters, with
the dainty airs of personally-conducted parties investigating slums,
commenting openly as they went upon the manners of the lower deck in a
spirit of condescending and cheerful vulgarity. The London clerk, with
his eternal zither, was much remarked, and appeared proud of the
attention he attracted. On the other hand, men like Vyse received
these visits in stolid silence, not wholly free from resentment and
contempt. "That's what money does," he said bitterly one day, when a
group of these excursionists had retired; and Arthur, reflecting on the
circumstance, came to see that the old workman was right in his
diagnosis, and that it was a diagnosis shameful to human nature. For
it was clear that these people owed their eminence neither to manners
nor accomplishments; in solid worth and dignity of character Vyse would
have been judged their superior in any equitable court; and, taken man
for man, it was merely the better coat and not the better breeding that
distinguished the upper from the lower deck.
When it came to kindness, which is the flower of all gentility, the
virtues of the lower deck were even more strikingly apparent. On the
fourth day out stormy weather was encountered; black, foamless seas
rolled in perpetual assault from the north-west; there was an hour when
the great ship made but five miles; word went round that the lifeboats
were cleared and victualled; and the constant noise of hammers audible
in the pauses of the tempest was significant of some damage in the iron
walls that lay between them and death. It was then that, amid fear and
dreadful discomfort, the virtues of the lower deck displayed
themselves. Vyse nursed a sick child with the tenderness of a woman;
the cattle-dealer spent the day in telling stories, very far from
decorous, it must be admitted, to a group of half-frightened lads, who
forgot their fears in their laughter; even the London clerk shone
conspicuous with his zither and his eternal "Safe in the arms of
Jesus." In the dark and narrow alley-ways, pounded by the threshing
seas, whose fearful detonations seemed to fill the air with thunder,
the clerk found his mission, and trembling voices sang with pathetic
desire of conviction the words that express a faith which lifts the
soul beyond the terrors of destruction.
"That is what money does," Vyse had said, and the reflection was
inevitable that it did very little after all to benefit character, and
not a little to emasculate or degrade it. The people with whom Arthur
travelled had no monopoly of virtue, as he was bound to admit; the
London clerk in his ordinary mood was a creature at once slight and
vain, the horse-dealer was coarse; and so he might have gone through
the whole list of his acquaintances, remarking plentiful defect in
each. But the qualities were more obvious than the defects. There was
a general spirit of helpfulness and kindness; many had grievous
accusations, only too authentic, to make against the land from which
they fled, but these accusations were rarely made in a spirit of
bitterness or envy; all had the cardinal grace of courage, and were
willing to believe that at the end of a long road of failure and defeat
victory awaited them. It was this unquenchable buoyancy of hope in the
crowd of fugitives from an unequal battle which struck Arthur as
entirely wonderful and, indeed, heroic. There was not one of them
unacquainted with failure in some extreme form; not one who had not
heard the bugles of retreat on some disastrous field; yet each, after a
brief inspection of the ruined architecture of his life, was ready to
begin building anew, each believed himself competent for the task, and
each had that rarest form of courage which forgets the past. For one
reared as he had been, it was a revelation to be made aware of such
virtues lying at the base of very ordinary characters, and a revelation
for which he thanked God with devout gratitude. It amounted almost to
a discovery of human nature. He had known hitherto little more than a
human coterie; he had lived in artificial conditions; and he knew the
kind of lives that such conditions bred. Now, for the first time, he
touched the primeval; he had joined the company of those whose sole
defence and worth lay in their authentic manhood, and he dimly saw that
what had seemed a fall in life had been an ascent, for the truly
ignoble lay, not below him, but above him. Thus insensibly he drew
courage from the fortitude of his companions, and caught from them that
spirit of adventure which "street-born" men never know--the spirit
which has flung forth the Anglo-Saxon race into every quarter of the
globe, and has made them the world's great empire-builders.
On the seventh day out the Atlantic storm-belt, with its miserable
monotony of vexed and gloomy seas, was left behind. For a wonder there
was no fog upon the Banks; the seas were of an indescribable hue of
limpid turquoise, the ship seemed to glide across a far-glimmering
floor, and the wind had a tonic sweetness and renewing potency. The
blood sang in the veins, the eye took a deeper colour, and among all
the fugitives of the lower deck there was not one who did not move with
a brisker step. Laughter ran along the deck; a child beating a tin cup
with a spoon was the object of general admiration; languid faces
smiled, and among the women a fresh ribbon on the hair or a glance of
innocent coquettishness in the eye marked the advent of a new zest in
life.
Arthur stood against a bulk-head, watching with delighted eyes the
bright elusive colours of the sea, varying from the clearest
bottle-green where the ship's bulk clove the waters to the deepest
purple where a cloud drove its shadow like a chariot across the liquid
plain. Vyse stood beside him, his rugged face reddened by the fresh
wind.
"Looks cheerful, doesn't it?" he remarked. "The sea somehow makes a
man think better of himself."
"Yes," said Arthur. "I feel that too. Life seems larger."
"That reminds me of something I wish to say to you," said Vyse. "You
and me's been good friends upon the voyage, and if you won't be
offended, I'd like to ask you a question."
"You won't offend me. What is it?"
"I've wondered what you might be going to do when you reached New York."
"Well, to tell you the truth, Vyse, I don't know. I have to begin a
new life, but I don't in the least know how."
"I guessed something of the sort. Well, what I wanted to say was this.
Men as is Englishmen and has travelled together like you and me should
stick together, shouldn't they? Now, I'm only a plain man, and you're
a gentleman, but maybe I might help you a bit. I'd like to give you my
address. A pal of mine gave it me. And if ever you don't know where
to go, come to me, and you'll be kindly welcome."
"I believe I shall," said Arthur simply. "And I thank you from my
heart."
The kindness of Vyse touched him more deeply than he could say. It was
another evidence of that fine courtesy which exists in all simple
natures, and he took it as a fresh assurance of that worth of human
nature itself which he had discovered on the voyage.
Two days later Fire Island was passed, the long flat shore of Long
Island lay like a yellow line drawn across the water, and in the
afternoon the screw ceased from its long labour, and the ship lay at
rest off Sandy Hook. The harbour with its green bluffs, studded with
lawns and white verandahed houses, opened up; the tremendous
battlements of New York bulked against the distant skyline; and in the
foreground, like a colossal watcher of the gate, strode the Statue of
Liberty.
"Look," said Vyse, nudging Arthur's arm and pointing to the bows, where
a multitude of emigrants stood at gaze.
And in truth it was a scene not easily forgotten. Yellow-haired
Scandinavians, with something of the old Viking stature and clear
resoluteness of eye, watched the unfolding scene; Hungarians in
embroidered jackets gathered in a separate group; Danes, Germans, and
Russians were there, all silent with an emotion which might have been
apprehension or anticipation; but in the foreground, the unconscious
centre of all eyes, knelt a group of Italian men and women. They were
crossing themselves devoutly, their ecstatic eyes raised to the
gigantic figure of Liberty with her lamp.
"What are they doing?" said Arthur, and he found himself whispering as
though he waited in some dim cathedral for the elevation of the Host.
"They call that there Statue of Liberty the American Madonna, so they
tell me," said Vyse.
The reply thrilled him as the whisper of the oracle might have thrilled
the worshippers long since beneath the oaks of Dodona. The American
Madonna, the calm-faced Mother standing at the gates of empire with
impartial welcome, her uplifted torch lighting her new-found children
to the path of novel destinies--there was a sacramental virtue in the
thought, and it shone through his mind like a heavenly omen.
"Ave Madonna!" cried the kneeling group, each with eyes fixed upon that
lofty brow of bronze, as if they expected instantly the face to quicken
with a human tenderness, the head to stoop in condescending grace.
Perhaps it did. In that clear and sunny air the face appeared to
smile, and from the outstretched hand there came to each humble
suppliant the veritable grace of hope.
And then the moment passed; the ship moved on; from a Titanic
structure, pierced with many windows, a babel of voices clashed upon
the still air, and in another half hour the ship, her long voyage done,
swung slowly to her berth.
XII
MR. WILBUR MEREDITH LEGION
Were a man never so lonely, there is something in a first introduction
to a strange city which communicates a spirit of elation. The mere
strangeness of what he sees, the novel aspect of things, the touch of
the original and unexpected in the buildings, the conformation of the
streets, the faces of the hurrying throngs--this new note of life,
everywhere audible, is itself so surprising and absorbing that the mind
is insensibly withdrawn from the contemplation of private griefs and
memories. A more exact examination may reveal the depressing fact that
a new world is new alone in name; that men carry their conventions with
them wheresoever they travel, and may reproduce upon the loneliest rock
of the Pacific or in the heart of the Sahara the complete social
counterpart of those narrower forms of civilisation which they might be
supposed to have renounced for ever. But even so, it still remains
true that the thing which seems new is really new to us, for we live by
our sensations as much as by our knowledge. He who cannot yield
himself to this illusion of the senses will certainly deny himself the
finer pleasures of existence; he will march across the world with the
stiff air of the pedant, who sacrifices poetry to precision, declining
more and more into a bloomless frugality of life, until at last not
alone the outer world but the inner places of his own heart will become
arid as a desert.
Arthur was much too young to reject the illusion of the senses, and too
essentially a poet to desire to do so. He had his own private griefs,
and they were by no means a negligible burden. In the noisy darkness
of the long nights at sea, when the clanging of the piston kept him
wakeful, he had again and again reviewed these griefs with a
self-torturing persistence. Would he ever see his mother again?--and
sometimes out of the heart of the black night a voice told him he would
not. Would that exquisite but slender bond that held him to Elizabeth
withstand the strain of a dateless separation? Would he find the
things he sought, have strength to build the life he had had the vision
to design, justify himself before the world? These and many cognate
thoughts oppressed him; they wrote their abrupt interrogations on the
curtain of the night, until he hid his face from them, and could have
wept for weakness. But in spite of these oppressions, his spirit had
gained both in hope and fortitude upon the voyage. He had begun to
find himself blunderingly, as all men must at first, yet with some
sincerity and real truth of vision. Two things he had discovered in
himself which appeared to him a sufficient base for life, at once a
programme and a creed--the one was the fixed determination to be
content only with the best kind of life, the other was a faith in the
Guiding Hand. From this creed he drew both his inspiration and his
courage, and the more he dwelt upon it the more his heart leaped to
meet the future, and the less did he regret the dissolution of the past.
And so that first vision of the New World thrilled him with a vague but
joyous wonder. New York impressed him as the most superb of all
examples of man's will to live. Here, upon a narrow strip of rock, the
most ill-fitted spot in all the world for a city metropolitan, man had
compelled nature to his purpose; he had disregarded her intention and
had triumphed over it; he had bridged the very seas with ropes of
steel, carried his means of locomotion into the upper air, and, unable
wholly to escape the limitation of the jealous earth, had invaded the
sky with his monstrous fortresses of steel and masonry. The very
absence of grace, suavity, dignity in all he saw was itself impressive.
Brutal as it was, yet was it not also the assertion of a strength which
made for its object with a kind of elemental directness, not only
scorning obstacles, but defying in its course the most august
conventions of the centuries? The will to live--that was the legend
flaunted by invisible banners on each sky-daring tower; the city hummed
and sang with its crude music; it was written on every face he met in
lines of grim endeavour. And it was a needed lesson for such as he.
It struck him like a buffet from a strong hand, roused him like a
challenge. To the perpetual oncoming hosts of invaders from an older
world, New York spoke its iron gospel, "Man is unconquerable, if he
have the will to conquer." And the oncoming host received that stern
gospel with acclamation as indeed good news--not the highest gospel,
nor the sweetest, but assuredly a needed gospel.
Certainly his situation called for both fortitude and hopefulness, for
it was highly precarious. He had left London in such haste that he had
had no time to make any plans for the future; he had simply acted on an
imperative instinct of the soul to assert its rights, to seize upon
immediate freedom. A voice within him had whispered, "Now or never,"
and in a sudden access of resolution he had broken his bonds. He did
not regret its precipitation, but he had begun to perceive its
consequences.