McCloy took me back on the _Evening Sun_, according to his promise,
about mid-January, and about the same time Mrs. Bernstein sold her
house and moved to another lower down the street, almost opposite to
the doctor’s. There were no insects, all our things were out of pawn,
we had overcoats again, but we had to find a new Ikey, for the old
Ikey, of course, would have nothing more to do with our trousers,
gladstone bag, top hat and tennis cups.
The East 19th Street chapter was closed when Boyde went to Blackwell
Island; another in the same street had begun: Mrs. Bernstein begged
us to move with her: we owed her big arrears of rent; also, for some
odd reason, she really liked us. In her odd way she even tried to
mother me, as though her interest, somewhere perhaps her pity too,
were touched. “You haf had drouble in England, I subbose?” she hinted
sympathetically. She had read the newspapers carefully, and could not
understand why I should be exiled in poverty in this way unless I had
done something shady at home. It followed that I had been sent out
to America for my country’s good. She shared, that is, the view most
people took of my position in New York.
Only three months had passed since we arrived, but it seemed years. I
had never lived anywhere else. The sheltered English life, the Canadian
adventures, above all the months upon our happy island, lay far away
down the wrong end of a telescope, small, distant patches, brightly
coloured, lit by a radiant sun, remote, incredible. It was not myself
but another person I watched moving across these miniature maps of
memory. Those happy days, states, places, those careless, sanguine
moods, those former points of view so bright with hope, seemed gone for
ever. I now lived in a world where I belonged. I should never climb
out again.
The intensity of emotion at the time is difficult to realize now, and
quite impossible to recapture. I only know that my feelings burned
like fire, all the fiercer, of course, for being inarticulate. The
exaggeration was natural enough; everything was out of proportion in
me: Boyde had destroyed my faith in people. I believed in no one. The
doctor had said that to lose belief in others made life insupportable.
I found that statement true. There was a deep bitterness in my heart
that for a time was more than I could manage, and this distrust and
bitterness led me into an act of cruelty that shames me to this day.
Into the roar and thunder of that frenzied newspaper office stole a
hesitating figure one afternoon, a shy youth with rosy cheeks and
curly hair, dressed in shabby but well-cut clothes, and obviously an
Englishman. He wore gloves and carried a “cane”; these marked him
as a “Britisher” at once. He was asking for someone; fingers were
pointed at me; he was faintly familiar; I had seen the face before--but
where? He came over and introduced himself as Calder, son of a Midland
coach-builder; we had met at some place or other--outside a studio
door, I think--and he knew Kay. I forget what he was doing in New
York---idling, I think, or travelling. He had outlived his cash, at any
rate. He was in difficulties. I distrusted him instantly. He was, of
course, another Boyde. I gave him the curtest possible greeting. He, in
turn, found the greatest possible difficulty in telling me his story.
I was sitting at the reporters’ table in shirt-sleeves (owing to the
suffocating temperature of the over-heated office), scribbling at
top speed the details of some lurid “story,” while Calder told me
his tale. He wanted to whisper, but the noise forced him to shout,
and this disconcerted him. No one listened, however; he had merely
brought a “story” in. He had--but it was his own story. I have quite
forgotten what it was, or what had happened to him; only the main point
I remember: he had nowhere to sleep. Of his story I did not believe
a single word, though I did believe that he had no bed. “Can I bunk
with you to-night?” he came finally to the point. I told him he most
certainly could not. He refused to believe me. I assured him I meant
it. I was his last hope, he said, with a nervous grin. I told him to
try a doss-house. He grinned and giggled and flushed--then thanked me!
It would only be for a night or two, he urged. “You can’t possibly
let me walk the streets all night!” I replied that one Boyde had been
enough for me. I had learnt my lesson, he could walk the streets for
the rest of his life for all I cared. He giggled, still refusing to
believe I meant it. His father was sending money. He would repay me.
He went on pleading. I again repeated that I could not take him in. He
left, still thanking me and blushing.
Visions of another Boyde were in my mind. At the time, moreover, our
poverty was worse than it ever had been. Boyde, I found, had sold six
of my French stories to McCloy at $5 each, and had pocketed the money.
My salary was now being docked five dollars each week till this $30
was paid off. We had, therefore, only ten dollars a week between the
two of us. Everything was in pawn again, and times were extra hard. To
have Calder living on us was out of the question, for once he got in we
should never get him out. I was tired of criminal parasites.
It was my head that argued thus; in my heart I knew perfectly well that
Calder was guileless, innocent as milk, an honest, feckless, stupid
fellow who was in genuine difficulty for the moment, but who would
never sponge on us, and certainly do nothing mean. Conscience pricked
me--for half an hour perhaps; in the stress and excitement of the day
I then forgot him. That evening Acton Davis, the dramatic critic, gave
me a theatre seat, on condition that I wrote the notice for him. It was
after eleven when I reached home. Curled up in my bed, sound asleep,
his clothes neatly folded on the chair, lay Calder.
It was February and freezing cold. Kay was away for the week, trying
a new play at Mount Vernon, where he slept. There was no reason why I
should not have let Calder spend at least one warm night in the room.
But, apart from the shock of annoyance at finding him asleep in my
own bed, and apart from a moment’s anger at his cool impudence, the
startling parallel with Boyde was vividly unpleasant. It was Boyde No.
2 I saw sleeping in my bed. If I let him stay one night I should never
get rid of him at all. $10 a week among three! Calder must take up his
bed and walk.
I woke him and told him to dress and leave the room. I watched him
dress, heard him plead, heard him describe the freezing weather,
describe his walking the streets all night without a cent in his
pockets. He blushed and giggled all the time. It was some minutes
before he believed I was in earnest, before he crawled out of bed; it
was much longer before he was dressed and ready to go.... I saw him
down the stairs and through the front door and out into the bitter
street. I gave him a dollar, which represented two days’ meals for
me, and would pay a bed in a doss-house for him. When he was gone I
spent a wretched night, ashamed of myself through and through. It
really was Boyde who turned him out, but the excuse had no comfort in
it. The little incident remains unkindly vivid; I still see it; it
happens over again; the foolish, good-natured face, the blushes and
shyness, the implicit belief in my own kindness, the red cheeks and
curly hair--going through the front door into the bitter streets. It
all stands out. Shame and remorse go up and down in me while I write it
now, a belated confession.... I never saw Calder again.
Another thing that still shames me is our treatment of old greasy
Mother Bernstein. Though a little thing, this likewise keeps vividly
alive. A “little” thing! The big things, invariably with extenuating
circumstances that furnish modifying excuses and comforting
explanations, are less stinging in the memory. It is the little things
that pierce and burn and prick for years to come. In my treatment of
Mrs. Bernstein, at any rate, lay an alleviating touch of comedy. In
the end, too, the debt was paid. Twelve months later--it seemed a
period of years--Kay got suddenly from a brother £100--an enormous sum;
while I had twice received from my brother, God bless him! post-office
orders for £10. This was a long time ahead yet, but Mrs. Bernstein
eventually received her due with our sincerest thanks. She had moved to
another house in Lafayette Place by then. We paid up and left her, Kay
going to one boarding-house, I to another.
The payment in full, at any rate, relieved my conscience, for the way
we bullied that poor old Jewess was inexcusable. The excuse I found
seemed adequate at the time, however--we must frighten her or be turned
out. Each time she pressed for payment, out came my heavy artillery;
imaginary insects, threats of newspaper articles, bluster, bluff and
bullying of every description, often reducing her to tears, and a final
indignant volley to the effect that “If you don’t trust us, we had
better go; in fact, if this occurs again, we _shall_ go!” More than
once we pretended to pack up; more than once I announced that we had
found other rooms; “Next Monday I shall pay you the few dollars we owe,
and leave your house, and you will read an account of your conduct in
the _Evening Sun_, Mrs. Bernstein.” She invariably came to heel. “I ask
my hospand” had no sequel. By frightening and bullying her, I stayed
on and on and on, owing months’ and months’ rent and breakfast; our
ascendancy over her was complete. It was, none the less, a shameful
business, for at the time it seemed doubtful if we should ever be in a
position to pay the kind old woman anything at all....
The fifteen months I now spent reporting for the _Evening Sun_ at
fifteen dollars a week lie in the mind like a smudged blur of dreary
wretchedness, a few incidents only standing out.... The desire for
the drug was conquered, the old doctor was dead, Kay had obtained
a position with a firm in Exchange Place, where he made a small,
uncertain income in a business that was an absolute mystery to me, the
buying and selling of exchange between banks. Louis B---- had meanwhile
arrived, without a cent to his name. It was a long and bitter period,
three of us in a small room again, but at least an honest three.
Louis’s French temperament ran to absinthe--when he could get it. He
used the mattress on the floor, while Kay and I shared the bed between
us. Our clothes were useless to the short, rotund little Frenchman;
as the weeks passed he looked more and more like a pantomime figure
in the streets, and when he went to give his rare French and Spanish
lessons he never dared to take off his overcoat (which he had managed
to keep) even in the hottest room, nor during the most torrid of summer
days. Often he dared not unbutton the collar he turned up about his
neck, affirming with much affected coughing that he had a “dreadful
throat.” He was, by nature and habit, an inveterate cigarette smoker;
a cigarette, indeed, meant more to him than a meal, and I can still
see him crawling about the floor of the room on all fours in the early
morning, “hunting snipe,” as he called it--in other words, looking for
fag-ends. He was either extremely sanguine or extremely depressed; in
the former mood he planned the most alluring and marvellous schemes, in
the latter he talked of suicide. His wife, whom he dearly loved, had a
baby soon after his arrival. He suffered a good deal....
He was a great addition to our party, if at the same time a great
drain on our purse. His keen, materialistic French mind was very
eager, logical, well-informed, and critical in a destructive sense, an
iconoclast if ever there was one. All forms of belief were idols it
was his great delight to destroy; faith was superstition; cosmogonies
were inventions of men whose natural feebleness forced them to seek
something bigger and more wonderful than themselves; creeds, from
primitive animism to Buddhism and Christianity, were, similarly,
man-made, with a dose of pretentious ethics thrown in; while soul,
spirit, survival after death, were creations of human vanity and
egoism, and had not a single atom of evidence to support them from the
beginning of the world to date. Naturally, he disbelieved everything
that I believed, and, naturally, too, our arguments left us both
precisely where we started. But they helped the evenings, often hungry
evenings, to pass without monotony; and when, as sometimes though but
rarely happened, Louis had come by a drop of absinthe, monotony was
entirely forgotten. He would sit crossed-legged on his mattress, his
brown eyes sparkling in the round little face, his thick curly black
hair looking like stiff wire, his podgy hands gesticulating, his
language voluble in French and English mixed, his infectious laughter
ringing and bubbling out from time to time--and the evening would pass
like magic. He was charged with poetry and music too. On absinthe
evenings, indeed, it was difficult to get any sleep at all ... and
the first thing in the morning he would be hunting for “snipe” on all
fours, cursing life and fate, in a black depression which made him
think of suicide, and looking like a yellow Chinese God of Luck that
had come to life.
Hunger was agony to him, but, oddly enough, he never grew less rotund.
He particularly enjoyed singing what he called _la messe noire_ with
astonishing variations in his high falsetto. This “mass” was performed
by all three of us to a plaster-cast faun an artist had given me in
Toronto. It had come in the packing-case with our other things, this
Donatello, and we set it on the mantelpiece, filled a saucer with
melted candle stolen from a boarder’s room, lit the piece of string
which served for wick, and turned the gas out. In the darkened room
the faunish face leered and moved, as the flickering light from below
set the shadows shifting about its features; the fiddle, Louis’s thin
falsetto, Kay’s bass, badly out of tune, and my own voice thrown in as
well, produced a volume of sound the other boarders strongly objected
to--at one o’clock in the morning. Yet the only time Mrs. Bernstein
came to complain, she got no farther than the door: Louis had a blanket
over his head and shoulders, Kay was in his night-shirt, which was a
day-shirt really, the old Irving wig lying crooked on his head, and I
was but half dressed, fiddling for all I was worth. The darkened room,
the three figures passing to and fro and chanting, the strange weird
face of the faun, it by the flickering flame from below, startled her
so that she stood stock-still on the threshold without a word. The
next second she was gone.... What eventually happened to Louis I never
knew. Months later he moved to a room up-town. We lost track of one
another, and I have no idea how fate behaved to him in after-life. He
was thirty-five when he sang the _messe noire_, hunted snipe, and gave
occasional lessons in French and Spanish.
These trivial little memories remain vivid for some reason. To my
precious Sundays in Bronx Park, or farther afield when the days grew
longer, he came too, and Kay came with him. We shared the teapot and
tin mug I still kept hidden behind a boulder, we shared the fire I
always made--neither of my companions shared my mood of happiness....
I was glad when they both refused to get up and start at eight,
preferring to spend the morning in bed. For months and months I never
missed a single Sunday, wet or fine, for these outings were life to me,
and I made a rough lean-to that kept the rain off in bad weather....
The car-fare was only 30 cents, both ways; bread and a lump of cheese
provided two meals; there were few Sundays when I did not get at least
seven or eight hours of intense happiness among the trees and wild
stretches of what was to me a veritable Eden of delight.... Nothing
experienced in later life, tender or grandiose, neither the splendour
of the Alps, the majesty of the Caucasus, the mystery of the desert,
the magic of spring in Italy or the grim wonder of the real backwoods
which I tasted later too--none of these produced the strange and subtle
ecstasy of happiness I found on those Sundays in the wastes of scrubby
Bronx Park, a few miles from “Noo York City.” ... It was, of course,
but the raw material, so to speak, of beauty, which indeed is true
always of “scenery” as a whole, but it was possible to find detail
which, grouped together, made unforgettable pictures by the score.
Though deprived of technique, I could _see_ the pictures I need never
think of painting. The selection of significant detail in scenery is
the secret of enjoyment, for such selection can be almost endless....
The hours passed too quickly always, but they provided the energy to
face what, to me, was the unadulterated misery of the week to follow.
A book was in my pocket and Shelley was in my memory. From the tram
to the trees was half a mile, perhaps, but with the first sight of
these, with the first scent of leaves and earth, the first touch of the
wind of open spaces on my tongue, my joy rose like a great sea-wave,
and the city life, with all its hideousness, was utterly forgotten.
What occupied my mind during those seven or eight hours it would be
tedious to describe.... I was, besides, hopelessly inarticulate in
those early days; conclusions I arrived at were reached by feeling, not
by thinking; one, in particular, about which I felt so positive that
I _knew_ it was true, I could no more have expressed in words than I
could have flown or made a million. This particular conclusion that the
Sundays in Bronx Park gave me has, naturally, been expressed by others
far better than I could ever express it, but the first time I came
across the passage, perhaps a dozen years later in London, my thought
instantly flashed back to the teapot, the tin mug, and the boulder in
Bronx Park when the same conviction had burned into my own untaught
mind:
“One conclusion was forced upon my mind ... and my impression of
its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal
waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but
_one special type_ of consciousness, whilst all about us, parted
from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of
consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without
suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at
a touch they are there in all their completeness; definite types of
mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application
and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can
be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our
accounts with reality. The whole drift of my education goes to
persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is _only
one_ out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that these
other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our
life also.... [The insight in these other states] has a keynote
invariably of reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the
world, whose contradictions and conflict make all our difficulties
and troubles, were melting into unity.”[1]
[1] “Varieties of Religious Experience.” William James.
The immortal may mingle with certain moods, perhaps, especially when
violent contrast underlies the transition, and when deep yearnings,
suppressed equally with violence, find their sudden radiant outlet.
Since those Bronx Park days, when Nature caught me with such profound,
uplifting magic, yet when thought was dumb and inarticulate, I am for
ever coming across neat expressions by better minds than mine of what I
then felt, and even believed I _knew_, in some unimagined way. Nature
drew me, perhaps, away from life, while at the same time there glowed
in my heart strange unrealizable desires to help life, to assist at her
Utopian development, to work myself to the bone for the improvement
of humanity. The contradiction, silly and high-flown though it now
sounds, was then true. Inextinguishable fires to this end blazed in
me, both mind and heart were literally on fire. My failure with Boyde,
my meanness with Calder, to mention no graver lapses, both bit deep,
but the intense longing to lose my Self in some Utopian cause was as
strong as the other longing to be lost in the heart of some unstained
and splendid wilderness of natural beauty. And the conflict puzzled me.
Being inarticulate, I could not even find relief in words, though, as
mentioned, I have often since discovered my feelings of those distant
days expressed neatly enough by others. Only a few days ago I came
across an instance:
“If Nature catches the soul young it is lost to humanity,” groans
Leroy, in a truly significant book of 1922.[2]
[2] “The Interpreters,” by A. E. The characters “interpret” the
“relation of the politics of Time to the politics of Eternity.”
“No, no,” replies the poet. “The earth spirit does not draw us aside
from life. How could that which is father and mother of us all lead us
to err from the law of our being?”
And, again, as I sat puzzling about the amazing horror of what was
called the Civilization of the New World, and doubtless making the
commonplace mistake of thinking that New York City was America:--
“Every great civilization, I think, has a Deity behind it, or
a divine shepherd who guided it on some plan in the cosmic
imagination. ‘Behold,’ said an ancient Oracle, ‘how the Heavens
glitter with intellectual sections.’... These are archetypal images
we follow dimly in our evolution.”
“How do you conceive of these powers as affecting civilization?”
“I believe they are incarnate in the race; more in the group than
in the individual; and they tend to bring about an orchestration of
the genius of the race, to make manifest in time their portion of
eternal beauty....”[3]
[3] _Ibid._
My conception of the universe, at any rate, in these early days
was imaginative entirely; the critical function, which comes with
greater knowledge, with reason, with fuller experience, lay wholly
dormant. I communed with both gods and devils. New York stoked the
furnace--provided the contrasts. Experience, very slowly, furnished the
files and sand-paper which lay bare what may be real beneath by rubbing
away the pretty gilt. Certain convictions of those far days, however,
stood the test, whatever that test may be worth, and have justified
themselves to me with later years as assuredly _not_ gilt. That unity
of life is true, and that our normal human consciousness is but one
type, and a somewhat insignificant type at that, hold unalterably
real for me to-day. My other conviction, born in Bronx Park in 1892
by the teapot, tin mug, and familiar boulder which concealed these
indispensable utensils during the week, is that the Mystical Experience
known to many throughout the ages with invariable similarity is _not_ a
pathogenic experience, but is due to a desirable, genuine and valuable
expansion of consciousness which furnishes knowledge normally ahead
of the race; but, since language can only describe the experience of
the race, that it is incommunicable because no words exist, and that
only those who have experienced it can comprehend it. The best equipped
modern “intellectual” (above all the “intellectual” perhaps), the most
advanced scientist, as, on the other hand, the drayman, the coster, the
city clerk, must remain not only dumb before its revelation, stupid,
hopelessly at sea, angry probably, but contemptuous and certainly
mystified: they must also appear, if they be honest, entirely and
unalterably _sceptical_. Such scepticism is their penalty; it is,
equally, their judge and their confession.