EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY
EPISODES BEFORE
THIRTY
By
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1923
_Printed in Great Britain_
To
ALFRED H. LOUIS
EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY
CHAPTER I
A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves
a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred. I see a room in a New
York boarding-house. I can touch the wooden bed, the two gas-brackets
beside the looking-glass, the white door of the cupboard, the iron
“register” in the wall that let in heated air, the broken sofa. The
view from the dirty windows towards the high roof of Tony Pastor’s
music hall in 14th Street, with a side glimpse of the trees in Irving
Place, show clearly. The rattle of the Broadway cable cars, the clang
of their bells, still come to me through that stifling August air, when
the shade thermometer stood at a hundred, with humidity somewhere about
95 per cent. Thoughts of the sea and mountains, vainly indulged within
those walls, are easily remembered too.
The room I am writing in now seems less actual than the one in the
East 19th Street boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Bernstein, a German
Jewess, whose husband conducted his own orchestra in a Second Avenue
restaurant. Though thirty years ago, it is more clearly defined for
me than Lady X’s dining-room where I dined last night, and where the
lady I took in said graciously, “I simply loved your _Blue Lagoon_,”
which, naturally, I was able to praise unreservedly, while leaving her
with the illusion as long as possible that she had made friends with
its gifted author. And this detailed clarity is due, I am sure, to the
fact that in that New York room I had my first experience of three new
emotions, each of which, separately, held horror.
Horror draws its lines deep; its pictures stand out in high relief.
In my case the horrors were, perhaps minor ones, but at the age of
twenty-one--an exceptionally inexperienced twenty-one--they seemed
important; and the fact that they were combined entitles them to be
considered major. They were three in number: the horror of loathsome
vermin running over my body night after night, the horror of hunger,
and the horror of living at close quarters with a criminal and degraded
mind.
All, as I said, came together; all were entirely new sensations. “Close
quarters,” too, is used advisedly, for not only was the room a small
one, the cheapest in a cheap house, but it was occupied by three of
us--three Englishmen “on their uppers,” three big Englishmen into the
bargain, two of us standing 6 feet 2 inches, the other 6 feet 3 inches
in his socks. We shared that room for many weeks, taking our turn at
sleeping two in the bed, and one on the mattress we pulled off and kept
hidden in the cupboard during the day. Mrs. Bernstein, denying her
blood, won our affection by charging eight dollars only, the price for
two, morning coffee included; and Mrs. Bernstein’s face, fat, kindly,
perspiring, dirty, is more vivid in my memory after all these years
than that of the lady last night who so generously mistook me for De
Vere Stacpoole. Her voice even rings clear, with its Jewish lisp, its
guttural German, its nasal twang thrown in:
“I ask my hospand. Berhaps he let you stay anozzer week.”
What the husband said we never knew. He was usually too drunk to say
anything coherent. What mattered to us was that we were not turned
out at the moment, and that, in the long run, the good-hearted woman
received her money.
Certain objects in that room retain exceptional clarity in my mind. If
thought-pictures could be photographed, a perfect print of the bed and
gas-bracket could be printed from my memory. With the former especially
I associate the vermin, the hunger, and the rather tawdry criminal. I
could describe that bed down to the smallest detail; I could draw it
accurately, even to the carving; were I a carpenter I could make it.
All that I suffered in it, of physical and mental anguish, the vain
longings and despair, the hopes and fears, the loneliness, the feverish
dreams--the entire dread panorama still hangs in the air between its
stained brown foot and the broken sofa, as though of yesterday. I can
see a tall man pass the end of it, one eye on me and another on the
door, opening a razor slowly as he went. I see the blue eyes narrowing
in his white face, the treachery of the coward twisting his lip into
a smirk. I can see him sleeping like a child beside me, touching me.
Moving stealthily about the room in the darkness too, as, thinking me
asleep, he stole on bare feet to recover the confession of forgery I
had forced him to sign, I can still see his dim outline, and even hear
his tread--a petty scoundrel unwittingly on his way to gaol.
The bed, thus, is vividly present in my memory. By contrast with it,
not quite so sharp, perhaps, and a pleasanter feeling associated
with it, another New York sleeping-place rises in the mind--a bench
in Central Park. Here, however, the humour of adventure softens the
picture, though at the time it did not soften the transverse iron arms
which made it impossible to stretch out in comfort. Nor is there any
touch of horror in it. Precise and detailed recollection fades. The
hoboes who shared it with me were companions, even comrades of a sort,
and one did not feel them necessarily criminal or degraded. They were
“on their uppers” much as I was, and far quicker than I was at the
trick of suddenly sitting upright when the night policeman’s tread
was coming our way. What thoughts they indulged in I had no means of
knowing, but I credited them with flitting backwards to a clean room
somewhere and a soft white bed, possibly to that ridiculous figure of
immense authority, a nurse, just as my own flashed back to a night
nursery in the Manor House, Crayford, Kent. That the seats I favoured
were near the Swings lent possibly another touch to the childhood’s
picture.
The memory, anyhow, is a sweeter one than that of the bed in East 19th
Street, if less sharply defined. The cool fresh air, the dew, the
stars, the smell of earth and leaves, were all of them clean, and no
price asked at dawn. Yet the two--the bed and the bench--are somehow
linked together in my mind, the one invariably calling up the other;
and, thanks to them probably, no bed bothers me now, lumpy or sloping
though it be, in train, hotel, or lodging. I have slept in strange
places since--high in the Caucasus, on the shores of the Black Sea, on
the Egyptian desert, on the banks of the Danube, in the Black Forest
and Hungary--but each time the effort to get comfortable brought back
the bed and the bench, and sleep soon followed to smother both.
The gas-brackets, similarly, rise vividly before my eyes, associated
with the pain, the weariness of hunger; not of true starvation, but
of weeks and months of under-nourishment, caused by one meal a day.
The relation between hunger and gas-brackets may seem remote. It was
on the latter, however, that we learned to fix the metal top which
made the flame spread in a circle round a light tin cooking-pot. We
boiled water for milkless tea in this way, cooked porridge, and when
porridge was not to be had we heated water with dried apples in it. I
remember the day we discovered that it was more economical to eat the
strips of dried apple first, then drink the hot water that made them
swell so comfortingly inside us. They proved more filling that way, the
false repletion lasted longer, the sense of bulk was more satisfying,
the gnawing ceased, and the results, if temporary, at least made it
possible to fall asleep.
There are other details of that sordid New York room which still
retain their first disagreeable vividness, each with the ghost--a very
sturdy ghost--of the emotion that printed it indelibly in the mind.
These details are best mentioned, however, in their proper place and
sequence. It should first be told how we came to be there.