Among the “incidents” that stand out from the dim, miserable smudge of
fifteen months, is one that centres about a strange figure, and a most
lovable fellow, named Angus Hamilton. Various odd fish drifted on to
the paper as reporters, and drifted off again; they form part of an
unimportant kaleidoscope. But Angus Hamilton, with his generosity, his
startling habits, his undoubted ability, his sad and sudden end, stands
out.
My position had improved since the publication of the Boyde story,
chiefly, of course, because of the way the peerage had been dragged
into its details and its headlines. I received no advance in salary,
but I received an advance in respect. Even McCloy was different: “Why
waste your time with us?” he spat at me like a machine-gun with a rapid
smile. “Go home. Collect a lot of umbrellas and turned-up trousers and
letters of introduction. Then come out to ‘visit the States,’ marry
an heiress, and go home and live in comfort!” He was very lenient to
my numerous mistakes. Other papers “got a beat” on me, I “fell down”
times without number, I failed to get an interview with all and sundry
because I could not find “the nerve” to intrude at certain moments into
the lives and griefs of others. But McCloy winked the other eye, even
if he never raised my pay. Other men were sacked out of hand. I stayed
on. “You’ve got a pull with Mac!” said “Whitey.” New men took the
places of the lost. Among these I noticed an Englishman. Cooper noticed
him too. “Better share an umbrella and go arm in arm,” he said in his
good-natured way. “He’s a fellow-Britisher.”
Why he came to New York I never understood. He was a stepson of
Pinero, the playwright, and he received occasional moneys from Daniel
Frohman, by way of allowance, I supposed, though I never knew exactly.
Clever though he was, he was a worse reporter than myself--because he
didn’t care two straws whether he got the news or did not get it. He
had a “pull” of some sort, with Laffan probably, we thought. He came
to our boarding-house in East 19th Street. He had a bad stammer. His
methods of reporting were peculiar to himself. Often enough, when sent
out on a distasteful assignment, he simply went home. He had literary
talent and wrote well when he liked. When Frohman handed out his money,
he spent it in giving a big dinner to various friends, though he never
included Kay, Louis, or myself among his distinguished guests. We had
no dress-suits, for one thing.
Hamilton was perhaps twenty-one at the time, a trifle younger than
myself, at any rate. He came downstairs sometimes to spend the evening
in our room. In spite of his stammer and a certain shyness, he was
always very welcome. He liked, above all, to listen to weird stories I
used to tell, strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost-stories.
When the Black Mass failed to attract, when Louis was uninspired by
absinthe, or when no argument was afoot, such as whether poet or
scientist were the highest type of human being, I discovered this taste
for spinning yarns, usually of a ghostly character, and found, to my
surprise, that my listeners were enthralled. At a moment’s notice, no
theme or idea being in my head, I found that I could invent a tale,
with beginning, middle and climax. Something in me, doubtless, sought a
natural outlet. The stories, at any rate, poured forth endlessly. “May
I write that one?” Hamilton would ask. “It’s a corker!” And he would
bring his written version to read to us a few evenings later. “It ought
to sell,” he said, though I never heard that it did sell actually.
Certainly, it never occurred to me that I might write and sell it
myself. And Angus Hamilton is mentioned here because it was owing to a
chance act of his that I eventually took to writing and so found my
liberty.
This happened some twelve years later, when I was living in a room in
Halsey Street, Chelsea, sweating my life out in the dried milk business
and earning barely enough at the job to make both ends meet. A hansom
stopped suddenly near me in Piccadilly Circus, its occupant shouted my
name, then sprang out--Angus Hamilton.
He came round to my room for a talk over old days; he had done well
for himself as Reuter’s correspondent in the Manchurian War, had
published a book on Korea, and was just off to China, again as Reuter’s
agent. He reminded me of the stories I used to tell in the New York
boarding-house. I had written some of these, a couple of dozen perhaps,
and they lay in a cupboard. Could he see them? Might he take them away
and read them?
It had been my habit and delight to spend my evenings composing yarns
on my typewriter, finding more pleasure in this than in any dinner
engagement, theatre or concert. Why this suddenly began I cannot say,
but I guess at a venture that the accumulated horror of the years in
New York was seeking expression. Wandering in Richmond Park at night
was the only rival entertainment that could tempt me from the joy
of typing out some tale or other in solitude. “Jimbo” I had already
written twice, several of the “John Silence” tales as well, and
numerous other queer ghostly stories of one sort or another. From among
these last Hamilton took a dozen or so away with him, but forgot to
send them back as he had promised. He had gone to China, I supposed,
and the matter had slipped his mind. It didn’t matter much--I went on
writing others; the stories were no good to anybody, the important
thing being the relief and keen pleasure I found in their expression.
But some weeks later a letter came from a publisher: “I have read your
book.... My reader tells me ...” this and that “about your stories....
I shall be glad to publish them for you ...,” and then a few words
about a title and a request that I would call for an interview.
It was some little time before I realized what the publisher was
talking about. Hamilton, without asking permission, had sent my
stories to him. Eveleigh Nash was the publisher, and his reader at
that time was Maude Ffoulkes, who later wrote Lady Cardigan’s Memoirs,
numerous other biographies, also “My Own Past,” and to whom I owe
an immense debt for unfailing guidance, help and encouragement from
that day to this. I never forget my shrinking fear at the idea of
appearing in print, my desire to use another name, my feeling that it
was all a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book of
my own published being too absurd to accept as true. My relief when,
eventually, the papers gave it briefest possible mention, a few words
of not unkindly praise or blame, I remember too, and my astonishment,
some weeks later, to find a column in the _Spectator_, followed not
long afterwards by an interesting article in the Literary Page of the
_Morning Post_ on the genus “ghost story,” based on my book--by Hilaire
Belloc, as he told me years later. All of which prompted me to try
another book ... and after the third, “John Silence,” had appeared, to
renounce a problematical fortune in dried milk, and with typewriter
and kit-bag, to take my precious new liberty out to the Jura Mountains
where, at frs. 4.50 a day, I lived in reasonable comfort and wrote more
books. I was then thirty-six.
Whether I should be grateful to my fellow-reporter on the _Evening Sun_
is another matter. Liberty is priced above money, at any rate. I have
written some twenty books, but the cash received for these, though it
has paid for rent, for food, for clothing, separately, has never been
enough to pay for all three together, even on the most modest scale of
living, and my returns, both from America and England, remain still
microscopic. Angus Hamilton I never saw again. A year or so later,
while on a lecture tour in New York, things apparently went wrong with
him. Life drove against him in some way. He put a sudden end to himself.
It seems strange to me now that so few incidents, and those such
trivial ones, stand out from the long months of newspaper work in New
York. Harrowing and dreadful stories, appalling in their evidence
of human degradation, or poignant beyond words in their revelation
of misery, temptation, failure, were my daily experience week after
week, month after month. I might now have bulky scrap-books packed
with thrilling plots of every kind, all taken from life. My affair
with Boyde, moreover, had taught me how much of curious psychological
interest lay behind the most ordinary arrest for a commonplace crime.
Yet, of all these thousands of cases, I remember hardly a single one,
while of uninteresting assignments Cooper gave me several still live
vividly in my memory. Social reporting, in particular, both amused and
distressed me, for which reasons probably it has not faded. Sitting in
the lobby at Sherry’s or Delmonico’s when a ball or society function
was in progress and taking the names of the guests as they entered,
taking the snubs and rudeness of these gay, careless folk as well, was
not calculated to add much to my self-respect. The lavish evidence
of money, the excess, often the atrocious taste, even stirred red
socialism in me, although this lasted only till I was out in the street
again. Various connexions, distant or otherwise, of my family often,
too, visited New York, while more than one had married an American
girl of prominent name. It was odd to see Lord Ava, Dufferin’s eldest
son, walk up the steps, and odder still to jot down his name upon the
list of “those present.” There was an American woman, too, who bore
my mother’s name.... To see any of these people was the last thing on
earth I wished, much less to speak to them or be recognized; they were
in another world to mine; none the less, I had odd sensations when I
saw them.... A ball of deaf-mutes, too, remains very clear, only the
shuffling sound of boots, and of the big drum whose heavy vibrations
through their feet enabled them to keep time, breaking the strange hush
of the dancing throng, for ever gesticulating with busy fingers.
A much-coveted annual assignment once came my way, through the
kindness of McCloy, I think--the visit to the winter quarters of Barnum
and Bailey’s Circus. Every newspaper was invited; the animals were
inspected; an article was written; and the circus opened its yearly
tour with immense advertisements. In the evening there was a--banquet!
I came home in the early hours with my pockets stuffed for Kay and
Louis--cigars, fruit, rolls, and all imaginable edibles that might bear
the transport. But the occasion is clear for another reason--elephants
and rats. The keeper told us that the elephants were terrified of rats
because they feared the little beasts would run up their trunks. We
doubted his story. He offered to prove it. In the huge barn where some
twenty-five monsters stood, chained by the feet against the walls,
he emptied a sackful of live rats. The stampede, the trumpeting of
those frightened elephants is not easily forgotten. In the centre of
the great barn stood masses of hay cut into huge square blocks, and
the sight of us climbing for safety to the top of these slippery,
precariously balanced piles of hay is not easily forgotten either.
The raid at dawn upon a quasi lunatic asylum, kept by an unqualified
man, should have left sharper impressions than is the case, for it was
certainly dramatic and sinister enough. Word came to the office that a
quack “doctor” was keeping a private Home for Lunatics at Amityville,
L.I., and that sane people, whom interested parties wished out of the
way, were incarcerated among the inmates. The Health Department were
going to raid it at dawn. It was to be a “scoop” for the _Evening Sun_,
and the assignment was given to me.
I started while it was still dark, crossing the deserted ferry long
before the sun was up, but when I reached the lonely house, surrounded
by fields and a few scattered trees, I found that every newspaper in
the city was represented. Even the flimsy men were there, all cursing
their fate in the chilly air of early morning. No lights showed in
the building. The eastern sky began to flush. With the first glimmer
of dawn I saw the sheriff’s men at their various posts, hiding behind
trees and hedges, some crouching under the garden shrubberies, some
concealed even on the veranda of the house. After a long and weary
wait, the house began to stir; shutters were taken down; a window, then
a door, were thrown open; figures became visible moving inside from
room to room; and presently someone came out on to the veranda. He was
instantly seized and taken away. After several men and women had been
arrested in this way, a general raid of the whole house took place. A
dozen of the sheriff’s men rushed in. The nurses, male and female, the
“doctor”-proprietor, his assistants, and every single inmate, sane or
crazy, were all caught and brought out under arrest, before they had
tasted breakfast.
It was broad daylight by this time. The whole party, of at least
thirty, were assembled in a barn where a magistrate, brought down
specially for the purpose, held an impromptu court. If some of the
inmates were insane at the time and had been so before incarceration,
others certainly had been deliberately made insane by the harsh and
cruel treatment to which they had purposely been subjected. There
were painful episodes, while the testimony was hurriedly listened to
in that improvised court of inquiry. Yet it has all, all vanished
from my memory. I forget even what the sequel was, or what sentence
the infamous proprietor received later on from a properly-constituted
court. Many a sane man or woman had been rendered crazy by the
treatment, I remember, and the quack had taken heavy payments from
interested relatives for this purpose. But all details have vanished
from my mind. What chiefly remains is the wonder of that breaking dawn,
the light stealing over the sky, the sweet smell of the country and the
tang of the salt sea. These, with the singing of the early birds, and
the great yearnings they stirred in me, left deep impressions.
One reason, I am sure, why such painful and dramatic incidents have
left so little trace, is that I had a way of shielding myself from the
unpleasantness of them, so that their horror or nastiness, as the case
might be, never really got into me deeply. By a method of “detachment,”
as mentioned earlier, I protected my sensitive inner self from being
too much wounded. I would depute just sufficient intelligence and
observation to attend to the immediate work in hand, while the rest of
me, the major portion, lay inactive, uninvolved, certainly inoperative.
Painful and vivid impressions were, none the less, received, of course,
only I refused to admit or recognize them. They emerged, years later,
in stories perhaps, these suppressed hieroglyphics, but at the actual
time I could so protect myself that I did not consciously record them.
And hence, I think, my faint recollection now of a thousand horrible
experiences during these New York reporting days.
This “detachment,” in the ignorant way I used it, was, perhaps, nothing
less than shirking of the unpleasant. At twenty-three I had not yet
discovered that better method which consists in facing the unpleasant
without reservation or evasion, while raising the energy thus released
into a higher channel, “transmuting” it, as the jargon of 1922
describes it. “Detachment,” however, even in its earliest stages, and
provided it does not remain merely where it starts, is an acquisition
not without value; it can lead, at any rate, to interesting and curious
experiments. It deputes the surface-consciousness, or sufficient of
it, to deal with some disagreeable little matter in hand, while the
subconscious or major portion of the self--for those who are aware of
possessing it--may travel and go free. It is, I think, Bligh Bond, in
his “Gate of Remembrance,” who mentions that the automatic writer whose
revelations are there given, read a book aloud while his hand with the
pencil wrote. Many a literary man, whose inspiration depends upon the
stirrings of this mysterious subconscious region, knows that to read a
dull book, or talk to a dull person, engages just enough of his surface
consciousness to set the other portion free. Reading verse--though not
poetry, of course--has this effect; for some, a cinema performance,
with the soothing dimness, the music, the ever-shifting yet not too
arresting pictures, works the magic; for others, light music; for
others, again, looking out of a train window. There are as many ways
as individuals. To listen to Mrs. de Montmorency Smith telling her
tedious dream, while you hear just enough to comment intelligently upon
her endless details, even using some of these details to feed your own
more valuable dream, is an admirable method--I am told; and my own
childish habit of squeezing “through the crack between yesterday and
to-morrow” in that horrible bed of East 19th Street, merely happened to
be my own little personal adaptation of the principle....
Incidents that had held a touch of comedy remain more clearly in the
memory than those that held ugliness and horror only. A member of
the Reichstag Central Party, for instance, Rector Ahlwardt by name,
came out to conduct a campaign against the Jews. He was violently
anti-semitic. I was sent to meet his steamer at Quarantine because I
could speak German, and my instructions were to warn him that America
was a free country, that the Jews were honourable and respected
citizens, and that abuse would not be tolerated for a moment. These
instructions I carried out, while we drank white wine in the steamer’s
smoking-room. Freytag, I noticed with amusement, himself a Jew, was
there for the _Staatszeitung_.
Ahlwardt, however, was impervious to advice or warnings. At his first
big meeting in the Cooper Union Hall, arriving late, I noticed at once
two things: the seats were packed with Jews, while almost as many
policemen stood about waiting; and the reporters’ tables underneath
the platform showed several open umbrellas. Both, I knew, were ominous
signs. Ahlwardt himself, fat, beaming, in full evening dress, was
already haranguing the huge audience. At first he was suave and gentle,
even mealy-mouthed, but before long his prejudices mastered him and
his language changed. Up rose a member of the audience and advised him
angrily to go back to Germany. The police ejected the interrupter.
Others took his place. Then suddenly the fusillade began--and up went
the reporters’ umbrellas! A flying egg caught the speaker full on
his white shirt-front, another yellowed his dazzling white waistcoat,
a third smashed over his fat face. Pandemonium reigned, during which
the German melted out of the landscape and disappeared from his first
and last anti-semite meeting in Noo York City. He attempted a little
propaganda from the safe distance of Hoboken, N.J., but the Press
campaign against him was so violent and covered him with such ridicule,
that he very soon took steamer back to his Berlin. Every little detail
of this incident, were it worth the telling, I could give accurately.
There was no reason to be “detached,” unless the protection of the
_World_ man’s umbrella comes under that description.
It was somewhere about this time, too, that another trivial incident
occurred, refusing to be forgotten. It, again, increased the respect
shown to me by the staff of the paper--Americans being truly
democratic!--though it did not increase my salary. A belted earl left
his card on me. Coming in breathless from some assignment, I saw
McCloy staring at me. “Is this for _you_?” he asked sarcastically,
handing me a visiting-card. A brother-in-law, “His Excellency” into
the bargain, “Governor of an Australian Province” to which he was then
on his way, had climbed those narrow spiral stairs and asked for me.
The letters after his name alone were enough to produce a commotion
in that democratic atmosphere.... He was staying at the Brevoort
House, and he certainly behaved “like a man,” thought Kay and I, as
we enjoyed more than one good dinner at his expense in the hotel.
Proud of me he had certainly no cause to be, but if he felt ashamed,
equally, he gave no sign of it. He even spoke on my behalf to Paul
Dana, the editor-proprietor’s son, who assured him that I was “a bright
fellow”--a description the staff managed to get hold of somehow and
applied to me ever afterwards. His brief visit, both because of its
kindness and its general good effect, stand out, at any rate, in the
“bright fellow’s” memory. Like Dufferin in the Hub, he fired a shot for
me.
The months dragged by in their dreary, hated length, while numerous
chances of getting more congenial work were tried in vain. Torrid
summer heat, with its all-dissolving humidity, replaced the bitter
winter. The deep, baked streets that never cooled, the stifling nights,
the heat-waves when the temperature stood between 90 and 100 in the
shade, and we toiled about the blazing pavements in shirt-sleeves
carrying a palm-leaf fan, and when the moisture in the air made the
very “copy-paper” stick to the hand that wrote upon it--those four
months of New York summer were a misery. We had only our winter clothes
to wear; a white collar was dirty pulp before nine in the morning;
the dazzling electric-light sign flashed nightly in the air above
23rd Street with its tempting legend “Manhattan Beach Swept by Ocean
Breezes,” while the ice-carts in the streets were the nearest approach
to comfort we could find. Many a time I followed one at close quarters
to taste a whiff of cooler air. Life became unendurable, yet day
followed day, night followed night, week followed week, till one’s last
breath of energy seemed exhausted by the steaming furnace of the city
air.
The respectable quarters of the town were, of course, deserted, but the
East Side, and the poorer parts, became a gigantic ant-heap, thousands
of families sleeping on the balconies of the packed tenement houses,
as though a whole underground-world had risen suddenly to the surface.
Children died by the hundred; there were heat strokes by the score. It
was too hot to eat. Reporting in such weather was a trying business....
A reporter was entitled to a fortnight’s holiday in the year, and
though none was due to me, McCloy let me go about the middle of
October. I procured a railway pass and went off to Haliburton, Ontario,
to spend my precious twelve days with a settler in the backwoods. He
was a Scotsman I had met during our island days, and Haliburton was
not far from our own delightful lake.... On my way back the cable came
telling of my father’s death while being brought home from Ems. I was
spending the night with an old friend of his, in Hamilton, Ont., where
he had a church. Originally in the navy, the evangelical movement had
“converted” him, and he had taken to it with such zeal that a church
and parish became a necessity of life. He was sincere and sympathetic,
and the bad news could have come to me in no better place.
The next day I returned to New York and resumed my life of reporting on
the paper.... The elections had been fought, and Tammany was beaten,
a wave of Republicanism sweeping both State and City. A Committee of
Investigation, under Senator Lexow, was appointed to examine into
the methods of Tammany Hall, and for weeks I sat in court while the
testimony was taken, and the most amazing stories of crime, corruption,
wickedness and horror I ever heard were told by one “protected” witness
after another. It brought to light a veritable Reign of Terror. John
Goff was prosecuting counsel; he became Recorder, in place of Judge
Smythe, as his reward. Boss Croker, head of Tammany, was conveniently
in England and could not be subpœnaed. Other leaders, similarly, were
well out of reach. Tammany, it was proved up to the hilt, had extorted
an annual income of fifteen million dollars in illegal contributions
from vice. The court was a daily theatre in which incredible melodrama
and tragedy were played. With this thrilling exception, the work I had
to do remained the same as before ... a second Christmas came round
... another spring began to melt the gloomy skies. Conditions, it is
true, were a little easier, for Louis had left us and Kay was earning
ten or fifteen dollars a week in Exchange Place, but by March or April,
the eighteen months of underfeeding and trying work had brought me,
personally, to the breaking point....
It was late in April I read that gold had been found in the Rainy
River district which lay in the far north-western corner of Ontario,
the river of that name being the frontier between Minnesota State and
Canada. The paragraph stating the fact was in a Sunday paper I read on
my way to Bronx Park, and the instant I saw it my mind was made up. It
was spring, the primitive instinct to strike camp and move on was in
the blood, a nostalgia for the woods was in it too, and the prospect of
another torrid, moist summer in the city at $15 a week was more than
I could face. That scrap of news, at any rate, decided me. And, truth
to tell, it was not so much the lure of gold that called me, as the
lure of the wilderness. I longed to see the big trees again, to smell
the old naked earth, to hear water falling and feel the great winds
blow.... It was an irresistible call.
My one terror, as when I decided to buy the dairy two years before, was
that someone would tell me there was no gold, that it was not worth
going, or would prevent me in some other way. I deliberately hid from
myself all unfavourable information, while I collected all possible
items that might justify my intention. That same night I showed the
paragraph to Kay. “I’ll go,” he said at once, “but let’s get a third,
a fourth too, if we can.” He mentioned Paxton, an engineer, aged 35,
who had just lost all his worldly possessions in speculation. Paxton
said he would come with us. The fourth was R.M., son of the clergyman
in Hamilton. R.M., whose father was brother to a belted earl, was an
insurance agent, and making a good living at his job. He was my own
age, also my own height. He was, besides, a heavy-weight amateur boxer
of considerable prowess, and his favourite time for holding bouts in
the ring was Sunday evenings, to which fact a rival clergyman had
recently taken occasion to refer slightingly in his own pulpit. R.M.,
resenting the slur both upon himself and his father, had waited outside
the church door one Sunday after the evening service, and when the
clergyman emerged had asked for an apology--a public one in the pulpit.
On being met with an indignant refusal, R.M. invited the other to “put
’em up.” The thrashing that followed produced a great scandal in the
little town, and R.M. found the place too hot to hold him. He therefore
jumped at the idea of the goldfields.
The arrangements were made, of course, by letter, and took some little
time; but on a given morning in early May R.M. was to join our train as
it passed through Hamilton. I had been able to procure passes for the
lot of us as far as Duluth, some fifteen hundred miles distant, on Lake
Superior, and from there we should have to travel another hundred and
fifty miles by canoe down the Vermilion River to Rainy Lake City, for
the foundations of which the forest, I read, had already been partially
cleared. Several further articles had appeared in the papers; it was
a gorgeous country, men were flocking in, and the Bank of Montreal
had established a branch in a temporary shack. Moreover, as mentioned
before, it was spring.
That a man of Paxton’s age and experience should have made this long
expedition without first satisfying himself that it was likely to be
worth while, has always puzzled me. He was an easy-going, good-natured
man, whose full figure proclaimed that he liked the good things of
life. But he was in grave difficulties, graver perhaps than I ever
knew, and I think he was not sorry to contemplate a trip across the
border. His attitude, at any rate, was that he “didn’t care a rap so
long as I get out of here.” That Kay and myself and R.M. should take
the adventure was natural enough, for none of us had anything to lose,
and, whatever happened, we should “get along somehow,” and even out of
the frying-pan into the fire was better than the summer furnace of the
city. R.M. wrote that he had a hundred dollars, Paxton produced fifty,
I supplied the railway passes and added my last salary, together with
some eight dollars that Ikey No. 2 was persuaded to hand over.
“Send some stuff along,” fired McCloy, opening his eyes a little wider
than usual when I told him. “Any hot stuff you get I’ll use.”
It has already been told how Kay missed the train by a few minutes, and
how Whitey, waving his parting present of a bottle of Bourbon whisky,
was the final picture Paxton and I had of New York City as the evening
train pulled out.