Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
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 today. 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.