Gradually, thus, contact with ordinary people and experiences with
certain facets, at least, of practical life had begun to give me what
is called a knowledge of the world. The hot-house upbringing made
this acquisition difficult as well as painful; there still remained a
feeling that I was “peculiar”; ignorance of things that to other youths
of twenty-one were commonplaces still gave me little shocks. Knowledge
that comes at the wrong time is apt to produce exaggerated effects; and
only those who have shared the childlike shelter afforded by a strict
evangelical enclosure in early years can appreciate the absurd want
of proportion which is one of these effects. Knowledge of “natural”
human kinds, withheld at the right moment, and acquired later, has its
dangers....
Two things, moreover, about people astonished me in particular,
I remember; they astonish me even more to-day. Being, in both
cases, merely individual reactions, to the herd, they are easily
understandable, and are mentioned here because, being entirely
personal, they reveal the individual whose adventures are described.
The first--it astonished me daily, hourly--was the indifference of
almost everybody to the great questions Whence, Why, Whither. The few
who asked these questions seemed cranks of one sort or another; the
immense majority of people showed no interest whatever. Creatures of
extraordinary complexity, powers, faculties, set down for a given
period, without being consulted apparently, upon a little planet amid
countless numbers of majestic, terrifying suns ... few showed even the
faintest interest in the purpose, origin and goal of their existence.
Of these few, again, by far the majority were eager to prove that
soul and spirit were chemical reactions, results of some fortuitous
concourse of dead atoms, to rob life, in a word, of all its wonder.
These problems of paramount, if insoluble, interest, were taken as a
matter of course. There was, indeed, no sense of wonder.
It astonished me, doubtless, because in my own case this was the only
kind of knowledge I desired, and desired passionately. To me it was
the only real knowledge, the only thing worth knowing.... And I was
ever getting little shocks on discovering gradually that not only
was such knowledge not wanted, but that to talk of its possibility
constituted one a dreamer, if not a bore. How anybody in possession
of ordinary faculties could look, say, at the night sky of stars,
and not know the wondrous flood of divine curiosity about his own
personal relation to the universe drench his being--this never ceased
to perplex me. Yet with almost everybody, the few exceptions being
usually “odd,” conversation rapidly flattened out as though such things
were of no importance, while stocks and shares, some kind of practical
“market-value,” at any rate, quickly became again the topic of real
value. Not only, however, did this puzzle me; it emphasized at this
time one’s sense of being peculiar; it sketched a growing loneliness
in more definite outline. No one wanted to make some money more than
I did, but these other things--one reason, doubtless, why I never did
make money--came indubitably first.
The second big and daily astonishment of those awakening years, which
also has persisted, if not actually intensified, concerned the blank
irresponsiveness to beauty of almost everybody I had to do with.
Exceptions, again, were either cranks or useless, unpractical people,
failures to a man. Many liked “scenery,” either perceiving it for
themselves, or on having it pointed out to them; but very few, as
with myself, knew their dominant mood of the day influenced--well,
by a gleam of light upon the lake at dawn, a faint sound of music in
the pines, a sudden strip of blue on a day of storm, the great piled
coloured clouds at evening--“such clouds as flit, like splendour-winged
moths about a taper, round the red west when the sun dies in it.”
These things had an effect of intoxication upon me, for it was the
wonder and beauty of Nature that touched me most; something like the
delight of ecstasy swept over me when I read of sunrise in the Indian
Caucasus.... “The point of one white star is quivering still, deep in
the orange light of widening morn beyond the purple mountains ...” and
it was a genuine astonishment to me that so few, so very few, felt the
slightest response, or even noticed, a thousand and one details in sky
and earth that delighted me with haunting joy for hours at a stretch.
With Kay, my late “partner in booze,” as I had heard him called,
there was sufficient response in these two particulars to make him a
sympathetic companion. If these things were not of dominant importance
to him, they were at least important. Humour and courage being likewise
his, he proved a delightful comrade during our five months of lonely
island life. What his view of myself may have been is hard to say;
luckily perhaps, Kay was not a scribbler.... He will agree, I think,
that we were certainly very happy in our fairyland of peace and
loveliness amid the Muskoka Lakes of Northern Ontario.
Our island, one of many in Lake Rosseau, was about ten acres in extent,
irregularly shaped, overgrown with pines, its western end running out
to a sharp ridge we called Sunset Point, its eastern end facing the
dawn in a high rocky bluff. It rose in the centre to perhaps a hundred
feet, it had little secret bays, pools of deep water beneath the rocky
bluff for high diving, sandy nooks, and a sheltered cove where a boat
could ride at anchor in all weathers. Close to the shore, but hidden
by the pines, was a one-roomed hut with two camp-beds, a big table,
a wide balcony, and a tiny kitchen in a shack adjoining. A canoe and
rowing-boat went with the island, a diminutive wharf as well. On the
mainland, a mile and a half to the north, was an English settler named
Woods who had cleared the forest some twenty-five years before, and
turned the wilderness into a more or less productive farm. Milk, eggs
and vegetables we obtained from time to time. To the south and east
and west lay open water for several miles, dotted by similar islands
with summer camps and bungalows on them. The three big lakes--Rosseau,
Muskoka and Joseph--form the letter Y, our island being where the three
strokes joined.
To me it was paradise, the nearest approach to a dream come true I had
yet known. The climate was dry, sunny and bracing, the air clear as
crystal, the nights cool. In moonlight the islands seemed to float upon
the water, and when there was no moon the reflection of the stars had
an effect of phosphorescence in some southern sea. Dawns and sunsets,
too, were a constant delight, and before we left in late September
we had watched through half the night the strange spectacle of the
Northern Lights in all their rather awful splendour.
The day we arrived--May 24th--a Scotch mist veiled all distant views,
the island had a lonely and deserted air, a touch of melancholy about
its sombre pines; and when the small steamer had deposited us with our
luggage on the slippery wharf and vanished into the mist, I remember
Kay’s disconsolate expression as he remarked gravely: “We shan’t stay
_here_ long!” Our first supper deepened his conviction, for, though
there were lamps, we had forgotten to bring oil, and we devoured bread
and porridge quickly before night set in. It was certainly a contrast
to the brilliantly lit corner of the Hub dining-room where we had eaten
our last dinner.... But the following morning at six o’clock, after a
bathe in the cool blue water, while a dazzling sun shone in a cloudless
sky, he had already changed his mind. Our immediate past seemed hardly
credible now. Jimmy Martin, the “Duke,” the Methodist woodcuts, the
life insurance offices, to say nothing of the sporting goods emporium,
red-bearded bailiffs, Alfred Cooper, and a furious half-intoxicated
Irish cook--all faded into the atmosphere of some half-forgotten, ugly
dream.
We at once set our house in order. We had saved a small sum in cash
from the general wreck; a little went a long way; pickerel were to
be caught for the trouble of trolling a spoon-bait round the coast,
and we soon discovered where the black bass hid under rocky ledges of
certain pools. In a few weeks, too, we had learned to manage a canoe
to the point of upsetting it far from shore, shaking it half-empty
while treading water, then climbing in again--the point where safety,
according to the Canadians, is attained. Even in these big lakes, it
was rare that the water was too rough for going out, once the craft was
mastered; a “Rice Lake” or “Peterborough,” as they were called, could
face anything; a turn of the wrist could “lift” them; they answered the
paddle like a living thing; a chief secret of control being that the
kneeling occupant should feel himself actually a part of his canoe.
This trifling knowledge, gained during our idle holiday, came in useful
years later when taking a canoe down the Danube, from its source in the
Black Forest, to Budapest.
Time certainly never hung heavy on our hands. Before July, when the
Canadians came up to their summer camps, we had explored every bay and
inlet of the lakes, had camped out on many an enchanted island, and had
made longer expeditions of several days at a time into the great region
of backwoods that began due north. These trips, westward to Georgian
Bay with its thousand islands, on Lake Huron, or northward beyond
French River, where the primeval backwoods begin their unbroken stretch
to James Bay and the Arctic, were a source of keen joy. Our cooking
was perhaps primitive, but we kept well on it. With books, a fiddle,
expeditions, to say nothing of laundry and commissariat work, the days
passed rapidly. Kay was very busy, too, “preparing for the stage,” as
he called it, and Shakespeare was always in his hand or pocket. The
eastern end of the island was reserved for these rehearsals, while
the Sunset Point end was my especial part, and while I was practising
the fiddle or deep in my Eastern books, Kay, at the other point of
the island, high on his rocky bluff, could be heard sometimes booming
“The world is out of joint. Oh cursed fate that I was born to set it
right,” and I was convinced that he wore his Irving wig, no matter what
lines he spouted. In the evenings, as we lay after supper at Sunset
Point, watching the colours fade and the stars appear, it was the
exception if he did not murmur to himself “... the stars came out, over
that summer sea,” and then declaim in his great voice the whole of “The
_Revenge_” which ends “I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!”--his tall figure
silhouetted against the sunset, his voice echoing among the pines
behind him.
Considerations for the future were deliberately shelved; we lived
in the present, as wise men should; New York, we knew, lay waiting
for us, but we agreed to let it wait. My father’s suggestion--“your
right course is to return to Toronto, find work, and live down your
past”--was a counsel of perfection I disregarded. New York, the busy,
strenuous, go-ahead United States, offered the irresistible lure of
a promised land, and we both meant to try our fortunes there. How
we should reach it, or what we should do when we did reach it, were
problems whose solution was postponed.
On looking back I can only marvel at the patience with which neither
tired of the other. Perhaps it was perfect health that made squabbles
so impossible. Nor was there any hint of monotony, strange to say. We
had many an escape, upsetting in wild weather, losing our way in the
trackless forests of the mainland, climbing or felling trees, but some
Pan-like deity looked after us.... The spirit of Shelley, of course,
haunted me day and night; “Prometheus Unbound,” pages of which I knew
by heart, lit earth and sky, peopled the forests, turned stream and
lake alive, and made every glade and sandy bay a floor for dancing
silvery feet: “Oh, follow, follow, through the caverns hollow; As the
song floats thou pursue, Where the wild bee never flew....” I still
hear Kay’s heavy voice, a little out of tune, singing to my fiddle the
melody I made for it. And how he used to laugh! Always at himself, but
also at and with most other things, an infectious, jolly wholesome
laughter, inspired by details of our care-free island life, from his
beard and Shakespeare rehearsals to my own whiskers and uncut hair, my
Shelley moods and my intense Yoga experiments....
Much of the charm of our lonely life vanished when, with high summer,
the people came up to their camps and houses on the other islands. The
solitude was then disturbed by canoes, sailing-boats, steam-launches;
singing and shouting broke the deep silences; camp-fires in a dozen
directions blazed at night. Many of these people we had known well in
Toronto, but no one called on us. Sometimes we would paddle to some
distant camp-fire, lying on the water just outside the circle of light,
and recognizing acquaintances, even former customers of Hub and Dairy
and the Sporting Goods Emporium, but never letting ourselves be seen.
Everybody knew we were living on the island; yet avoidance was mutual.
We were in disgrace, it seemed, and chiefly because of the Hub--not
because of our conduct with regard to it, but, apparently, because we
had left the town suddenly without saying good-bye to all and sundry.
This abrupt disappearance had argued something wrong, something we
were ashamed of. All manner of wild tales reached us, most of them
astonishingly remote from the truth.
This capacity for invention and imaginative detail of most ingenious
sort, using the tiniest insignificant item of truth as starting point,
suggests that even the dullest people must have high artistic faculties
tucked away somewhere in them. Many of these tales we traced to
their source--usually a person the world considered devoid of fancy,
even dull. Here, evidently, possessing genuine creative power, were
unpublished novelists with distinct gifts of romance and fantasy who
had missed their real vocation. The truth about us was, indeed, far
from glorious, but these wild tales made us feel almost supermen. Many
years later I met other instances of this power that dull, even stupid
people could keep carefully hidden till the right opportunity for
production offers--I was credited, to name the best, with superhuman
powers of Black Magic, whatever that may be, and of sorcery. It was
soon after a book of mine, “John Silence,” had appeared. A story
reached my ears, the name of its author boldly given, to the effect
that, for the purposes of this Black Magic, I had stolen the vases from
the communion altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral and used their consecrated
content in some terrible orgy called the Black Mass. Young children,
too, were somehow involved in this ceremony of sacrilegious sorcery,
and I was going to be arrested. The author of this novelette was well
known to me, connected even by blood ties, a person I had always
conceived to be without the faintest of imaginative gifts, though a
credulous reader, evidently, of the mediæval tales concerning the
monstrous Gilles de Rais. Absurd as it sounds, a solicitor’s letter
was necessary finally to limit the author’s prolific output, although
pirated editions continued to sell for a considerable time. There is a
poet hidden, as Stevenson observed, in most of us!
Meanwhile, summer began to wane; we considered plans for attacking
New York; hope rose strongly in us both; disappointments and failures
were forgotten. In so big a city we were certain to find work. We
had a hundred dollars laid aside for the journey and to tide us over
the first few days until employment came. We could not hide for ever
in fairyland. Life called to us.... Late in September, just when the
lakes were beginning to recover their first solitude again, we packed
up to leave. Though the sun was still hot at midday, the mornings and
evenings were chill, and cold winds had begun to blow. The famous fall
colouring had set fire to the woods; the sumach blazed a gorgeous red,
the maples were crimson and gold, half of the mainland seemed in flame.
Sorrowfully, yet with eager anticipation in our hearts, we poured water
on our camp-fire that had served us for five months without relighting,
locked the door of the shanty, handed over to Woods the canoe and boat,
and caught the little steamer on one of its last trips to Gravenhurst
where the train would take us, _via_ Toronto, to New York.
It had been a delightful experience; I had seen and known at last the
primeval woods; I had even seen Red Indians by the dozen in their
pathetic Reservations, and if they did not, like the spirit of the
Medicine Man in Edinburgh, advise me to “scratch,” they certainly made
up for the omission by constantly scratching themselves. It seems
curious to me now that, during those months of happy leisure, the
desire to write never once declared itself. It never occurred to me
to write even a description of our picturesque way of living, much
less to attempt an essay or a story. Nor did plans for finding work in
New York--we discussed them by the score--include in their wonderful
variety any suggestion of a pen and paper. At the age of twenty-two,
literary ambition did not exist at all.
The Muskoka interlude remained for me a sparkling, radiant memory,
alight with the sunshine of unclouded skies, with the gleam of stars
in a blue-black heaven, swept by forest winds, and set against a
background of primeval forests that stretched without a break for six
hundred miles of lonely and untrodden beauty.