“But you’ve done a great deal for me as it is,” I added. “I couldn’t
ask for more.” Somewhat disconnectedly I continued, “I think you’re the
pluckiest girl I ever saw not to have been afraid of me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t pluck. I saw at once that you wouldn’t do me any harm.”
“How?”
“In general. I was surprised. I was excited. In a way I was overcome.
But I wasn’t afraid of you. If you’d been a tramp or a colored man or
anything like that it would have been different. But one isn’t afraid of
a—of a gentleman.”
“But I’m not a—”
“Well then, a man who has a gentleman’s traditions. You’d better go now,”
she whispered, suddenly. “If you want to come back as I’ve suggested—any
time to-morrow forenoon—I’d speak to my father—”
“Not about this?” I whispered, hurriedly.
“No, not about this. This had better be just between ourselves. I shall
never say anything to any one about it, and I advise you to do the same.”
I had made a low bow, preparatory to getting out, when she held up the
scrap of paper she had crumpled in her hand. “Why did you write this?”
But I got out of the room without giving a reply.
I was descending the back stairs when I heard a door open on the third
floor and Elsie’s voice call out, “Regina, are you talking to anybody
down there?”
There was a tremor in the mezzo as it replied: “N-no. I’m just—I’m just
moving about.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake go to bed! It’s after two o’clock. I never was
in a house like this in all my life before. It seems to be full of people
crawling round everywhere. I think I’ll come down to your mother’s bed,
after all.”
“Do,” was the only word I heard as I stole into the servants’
dining-room, then into the closet with shelves, where I shut the door
softly. A few seconds later I was out on the cool ground, in the dark,
behind the shrub.
I lay there almost breathlessly, not because I was unable to get up, but
because I couldn’t drag myself away. I wanted to go over the happenings
of the last hour and seal them in my memory. They were both terrible to
me and beautiful.
I had been there some fifteen minutes when I heard the open window above
me closed gently and the fastening snapped. I knew that again she was
near me, though, as before, she didn’t suspect my presence. I wondered if
the chances of life would ever bring us so close to each other again.
Above me, where the shrub detached itself a little from the wall of the
house, I could see the stars. Lying on my back, with my head pillowed
on the crook of my arm, I watched them till it seemed to me they began
to pale. At the same time I caught a thinning in the texture of the
darkness. I got up with the silence in which I had lain down. Crossing
the brick-paved yard and striding over the low wall, I was again in the
vacant lot.
It was not yet dawn, but it was the dark-gray hour which tells that dawn
is coming. I was obliged to take more accurate precautions than before,
as, crushing the tangle of nettle, burdock, fireweed, and blue succory, I
crept along in the shadow of the house wall to regain the empty street.
_CHAPTER III_
The city was beginning to wake. Mysterious carts and wagons rumbled along
the neighboring avenues. From a parallel street came the buzz and clang
of a lonely early-morning electric car. Running footsteps would have
startled one if they had not been followed by the clinking of peaceful
milk-bottles in back yards. Clanking off into the distance one heard the
tread of solitary pedestrians bent on errands that stirred the curiosity.
Here and there the lurid flames of torches lit up companies of gnomelike
men digging in the roadways.
Going toward Greeley’s Slip, I skirted the Park, though it made the walk
longer. Under the dark trees men were lying on benches and on the grass,
but for reasons I couldn’t yet analyze I refused to thrust myself among
them. A few hours earlier I would have done this without thinking, as
without fear; but something had happened to me that now made any such
course impossible.
My immediate need was to get back to poor old Lovey and lie down by
his side. That again was beyond my power to analyze. I suppose it was
something like a homing instinct, and Lovey was all there was to welcome
me.
“Is that you, sonny?” he asked, sleepily, as I stooped to creep into the
cubby-hole which a chance arrangement of planks made in a pile of lumber.
“Yes, Lovey.”
“Glad ye’ve come.”
When I had stretched myself out I felt him snuggle a little nearer me.
“You don’t mind, sonny, do you?”
“No, Lovey. It’s all right. Go to sleep again.”
For myself, I could do nothing but lie and watch the coming of the
dawn. I could see it beating itself into the darkness long before there
was anything to which one could give the name of light. It was like a
succession of great cosmic throbs, after each of which the veil was a
little more translucent.
In my nostrils was the sweet, penetrating smell of lumber, subtly laden
with the memories of the days when I was a boy. The Canadian differs from
the American largely, I think, in the closeness of his forest-and-farm
associations. Not that the American hasn’t the farm and the forest, too,
but he has moved farther away from them. The mill, the factory, and the
office have supplanted them—in imagination when not in fact, and in fact
when not in imagination. If the woods call him he has to go to them—for a
week, or two, or three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life
in which the woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life.
The primeval still enters into his cities and his thoughts. Some day it
may be different; but as yet he is the son of rivers, lakes, and forests.
There is always in him a strain of the _voyageur_. The true Canadian
never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild
shores.
It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed me as the
river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of paddle-wheels,
followed by a bellow like the call of some sea monster to its mate.
Right below me and close to the slip I heard the measured dip of oars.
Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or from deck to dock, had a weird,
watchful sound, as though the darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen.
Lights glided up and down the river—which itself remained unseen—mostly
gold lights, but now and then a colored one. Chains of lights fringed the
New Jersey shore, where, far away, sleepless factories threw up dim red
flares. A rising southeast wind not only hid the stars under banks of
clouds, but went whistling eerily round the corners of the lumber-piles.
The scent of pine, and all the pungent, nameless odors of the riverside,
began to be infused with the smell—if it is a smell—of coming rain.
I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and
present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no period
when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me in pity and
amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch me still. In their
light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw myself as a boy
again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of lumber carried me
back to our old summer home on the banks of the Ottawa, where I had had
my dreams of what I should do when I was big. All boys being patriotic,
they were dreams not merely of myself, but of my country. It worried me
that it was not sufficiently on the great world map, that apart from its
lakes and prairies and cataracts it had no wonders to show mankind. As we
were a traveling family, I was accustomed to wonders in other countries,
and easily annoyed when one set of cousins in New York and another in
England took it for granted that we lived in an Ultima Thule of snow. I
meant to show them the contrary.
From the beginning my ardors and indignations translated themselves into
stone. I had seen St. Peter’s in one country, St. Paul’s in another, and
Chartres and châteaux in a third. I had seen New York transforming itself
under my very eyes—the change began when I was in my teens—into a town of
prodigious towers which in themselves were symbolical. Then I would go
home to a red-gray city, marvelously placed between river and mountain,
where any departure from its original French austerity was likely to be
in the direction of the exuberant, the unchastened, the fantastic. All
new buildings in Canada, as in most of the States, lacked “school.”
“School” was, more or less in secret, the preoccupation of my
youth—“school” with some such variation from traditional classic lines as
would create or stimulate the indigenous. I had not yet learned what New
York was to teach me later—that necessity was the mother of art, and that
pure new styles were formed not by any one’s ingenuity or by the caprice
of changing taste, but because human needs demanded them. Rejecting the
art nouveau, which later made its permanent home in Germany, I combined
all the lines in which great buildings had ever been designed, from the
Doric to the Georgian, in the hope of evolving a type which the world
would recognize as distinctively Canadian, and to which I should give my
name. In imagination I built castles, cathedrals and theaters, homes,
hotels and offices. They were in the style to be known as Melburyesque,
and would draw students from all parts of the architectural earth to
Montreal.
It was not an unworthy dream, and even if I could never have worked it
out I might have made of it something of which not wholly to be ashamed.
But as early as before I went to the Beaux Arts the curse of Canada—the
curse, more or less, of all northern peoples—began to be laid upon me. In
Paris I had some respite from it, but almost as soon as I had hung out my
shingle at home I was suffering again from its cravings. I will not say
that I put up no fight, but I put up no fight commensurate with the evil
I had to face. The result was what I have told you, and for which I now
had to suffer in my soul the most scorching form of recompense.
The point I found it difficult to decide was as to whether or not I ever
wanted to see Regina Barry again—or whether I had it in me to go back and
show myself to her in the state from which I had fallen more than three
years before. In the end it was that possibility alone which enabled me
to endure the real coming of the dawn.
For it came—this new day which out of darkness might be bringing me a new
life.
As I lay with my face turned toward the west I got none of its first
glories. Even on a cloudy morning, with a spattering of rain, I knew
there must be splendors in the east, if no more than gray and lusterless
splendors. Light to a gray world is as magical as hope to a gray heart;
and as I watched the lamps on the New Jersey heights grow wan, while the
river unbared its bosom to the day, that thing came to me which makes
disgrace and shame and humiliation and every other ingredient of remorse
a remedy rather than a poison.
I myself was hardly aware of the fact till Lovey and I had crept out of
our cubby-hole, because all round us men were going to work. Sleepers in
the open generally rise with daylight, but we had kept longer than usual
to our refuge because we didn’t want to fare forth into the rain. As
sooner or later it would come to a choice between going out and being
kicked out, we decided to move of our own accord.
I must leave to your imagination the curious sensation of the down and
out in having nothing to do but to get up, shake themselves, and walk
away. On waking after each of these homeless nights it had seemed to me
that the necessity for undressing to go to bed and dressing when one got
up in the morning was the primary distinction between being a man and
being a mere animal. Not to have to undress just to dress again reduced
one to the level of the horse. Stray dogs got up and went off to their
vague leisure just as Lovey and I were doing. Not to wash, not to go
to breakfast, not to have a duty when washing and breakfasting were
done—knocked out from under one all the props that civilization had built
up and deprived one of the right to call oneself a man.
I think it was this last consideration that had most weight with me as
Lovey and I stood gazing at the multifarious activities of the scene.
There were men in sight, busy with all kinds of occupations. They were
like ants; they were like bees. They came and went and pulled and hauled
and hammered and climbed and dug, and every man’s eyes seemed bent on his
task as if it were the only one in the world.
“It means two or three dollars a day to ’em if they ain’t,” Lovey
grunted, when I had pointed this fact out to him. “Don’t suppose they’d
work if they didn’t ’ave to, do ye?”
“I dare say they wouldn’t. But my point is that they do work. It’s
Emerson who says that every man is as lazy as he dares to be, isn’t it?”
“Oh, anybody could say that.”
“And in spite of the fact that they’d rather be lazy, they’re all doing
something. Look at them. Look at them in every direction to which your
eyes can turn—droves of them, swarms of them, armies of them—every one
bent on something into which he is putting a piece of himself!”
“Well, they’ve got ’omes or boardin’-’ouses. It’s easy enough to git a
job when ye can give an address. But when ye carn’t—”
We were to test that within a minute or two. Fifteen or twenty brownies
were digging in a ditch. Of all the forms of work in sight it seemed that
which demanded the least in the way of special training.
Approaching a fiercely mustachioed man of clearly defined nationality, I
said, “Say, boss, could you give my buddy and me a job?”
Rolling toward me a pair of eyes that would have done credit to a bandit
in an opera, he emitted sounds which I can best transcribe as, “Where
d’live?”
“That’s the trouble,” I answered, truthfully. “We don’t live anywhere and
we should like to.”
He looked us over. “Beat it,” he commanded, nodding toward the central
quarters of the city.
“But, boss,” I pleaded, “my buddy and I haven’t got a quarter between us.”
He pointed with his thumb over his left shoulder. “Getta out.”
“We haven’t got a nickel,” I insisted; “we haven’t got a cent.”
“Cristoforo, ca’ da cop.”
As Cristoforo sprang from the ditch to look for a policeman, Lovey and I
shuffled off again into the rain.
We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid avenues
where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women, and children
of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and fro, each bent on
an errand. It was the fact that life provided an errand for each of them
that suddenly struck me as the most wonderful thing in creation. There
was no one so young or so old, no one so ignorant or so alien, that he
was not going from point to point with a special purpose in view. Among
the thousands and the tens of thousands who would in the course of the
morning pass the spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one
who hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily
contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever since did
I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity. There was
no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to which it didn’t
go down. No one was left out but the absolute wastrel like myself, who
couldn’t be taken in.
Though it was not a cold day, the steadiness of the drizzle chilled me.
The dampness of the pavements got through the worn soles of my boots,
and I suppose it did the same with Lovey’s. The lack of food made the
old man white, and that of drink set him to trembling. The fact that he
hadn’t shaved for the past day or two gave his sodden face a grisly look
that was truly appalling. Though the pale-blue eyes were extinct, as if
the spirit in them had been quenched, they were turned toward me with the
piteous appeal I had sometimes seen in those of a blind dog.
It was for me to take the lead, and yet I couldn’t wholly see in what
direction to take it. While I was pondering, Lovey made a variety of
suggestions.
“There doesn’t seem to be nothink for it, sonny, but to go and repent
for a day or two. I ’ate to do it; kind o’ deceivin’ like, it is; but
they’ll let us dry ourselves and give us a feed if we ’ave a sense of
sin.”