Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
We arrived in New York towards the end of October, coming straight from five months in the Canadian backwoods. Before that, to mention myself first, there had been a year in Canada, where, even before the age of twenty-one, I had made a living of sorts by teaching the violin, French, German, and shorthand. Showing no special talent for any profession in particular, and having no tastes that could be held to indicate a definite career, I had come to Canada three years before for a few weeks' trip. My father, in an official capacity, had passes from Liverpool to Vancouver, and we crossed in the Etruria, a Cunarder which my mother had launched. He was much fêted and banqueted, and the C.P.R. bigwigs, from Lord Strathcona and Sir William van Horne downwards, showed him all attention, placing an observation car at his disposal. General James, the New York postmaster, gave a dinner in his honour at the Union League Club, where I made my first and last speech—consisting of nine words of horrified thanks for coupling "a chip of the old block," as the proposer called me, with the "Chief of the British Postal Service."
A ludicrous wound to vanity helps it to stick in the mind—my father wore no braces, and I copied him, but—well, in his case no belt was necessary, whereas I was slim. It suddenly dawned on me, as I spluttered my brief words, that a line of white was showing between my waistcoat and the top of my trousers. The close of my speech was hurried, my bow was cautious; I was extremely relieved to sit down again.
In the lovely autumn weather, we saw Canada at its best, and the trip decided my future. My father welcomed it as a happy solution. I came, therefore, to Toronto at the age of twenty, with £100 a year allowance, and a small capital to follow when I should have found some safe and profitable chance of starting life. With me came--in the order of their importance--a fiddle, the "Bhagavad Gita," Shelley, "Sartor Resartus," Berkeley's "Dialogues," Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms," de Quincey's "Confessions," and--a unique ignorance of life.... I served my first literary apprenticeship on the Methodist Magazine, a monthly periodical published in Toronto, and before that licked stamps in the back office of the Temperance and General Life Assurance Company, at nothing a week, but with the idea of learning the business, so that later I might bring out some English insurance company to Canada.
The first taught me that, just as I had no ambition to write, so, likewise, I possessed no talent; the second merely made articulate the dislike I felt for anything to do with Business. It was the three months in the insurance office that caused me to accept eagerly the job on the Methodist Magazine at four dollars a week, and the reaction helped to make the work congenial if not stimulating.
The allowance of ten dollars a week was difficult to live on, and I had been looking everywhere for employment. It was through a daughter of Sir Thomas Galt, a friend of my father's on our previous trip to Canada, that I obtained this job--sixteen shillings a week, hours ten to four.
Dr. Withrow, editor of the leading Methodist magazine, and of various Christian Endeavour periodicals for children and young people, was a pleasant old gentleman, who went about in a frock coat and slippers, had a real sense of humour and a nice wife and daughter. His editorial den was in his own little house, and my duties were to write an article every month for the magazine, which was illustrated, and also to write a few descriptive lines of letterpress to accompany the full-page illustrations for the numerous Christian Endeavour and Methodist periodicals for young people and children. He taught me the typewriter, and with my shorthand I took most of his letters at dictation, and certainly earned my money. My monthly articles in the magazine were on such subjects as Christmas in England, Life at a Moravian School, The Black Forest, Travel in the Alps--anything that my limited experience enabled me to describe at first-hand, and on the whole the old gentleman seemed satisfied. The description of the children's pictures, however, always made him chuckle, though he never said why, and I wrote dozens of these a day, describing the picture of "King Canute and the Sea," "Elijah in a Chariot of Fire," "A Child Blowing Bubbles," "The Wood-boring Beetle," etc. etc.
He would dictate some of his articles of travel to me, and I would take them down in shorthand, and he often made such grotesque mistakes in facts that I quietly corrected these as I wrote, and when I read out the sentence to him he would notice the alteration and look at me over his spectacles and say:
"Thank you. Yes, I was wrong there. The fact is, I have so many articles to write that I compose two at a time in my mind, and they get muddled up. An editor should always be accurate, and Methodist readers are cranky and hard to please." He was a Methodist parson himself, which did not prevent him saying exactly what he thought. He lunched off dates and bananas, which he kept in a bag beside his desk, and that same desk was in such disorder that he never could find what he wanted, and I was not surprised to learn that, before I came, the printers got the wrong papers, and that many of the children's pictures got descriptions underneath that did not belong to them--for instance, a boy blowing a bubble was published over a few lines describing the habits of snakes, "as seen in our illustration," and so forth.
I got on so well with the little Methodist that he wanted to come to the evening French classes I was giving at fifty cents a lesson to some of the clerks in the insurance office, and to bring his daughter with him. He said a little more knowledge of French would be very good for him when he took his conducted tours of Canadian Methodists to Switzerland; but I did not rise to this, and persuaded him to wait till I could get a more select class to meet, perhaps, at his own house, where a girl could more suitably attend. For, to tell the truth, some of my pupils had a habit of coming slightly drunk--or, as they called it, "with a jag on." He, however, would not wait, so I lost two good pupils!... Dr. Withrow, patient little man of kindly disposition! His faded black frock-coat, his spectacles high on his puckered forehead, his carpet slippers, his tobacco-stained white beard, his sincere beliefs and his striped trousers of a pattern I have always since labelled mentally as "Methodist trousers"--it is a gentle little memory tucked away among unkinder ones, and I still hear him giving me my first and only lesson how to write. His paraphrase of "fatal facility" stays with me: "Fluency means dullness, unless the mind is packed with thought." It stays with me because the conversation led to my asking if I might write an article for the monthly on the subject of Buddhism. Behind it lay an ever keener desire to write something on Hegel, whose philosophy I felt certain was based on some personal experience of genuine mystical kind.
"From what point of view?" he asked, his forehead puckering with amazement.
"That of belief," I said, my mind bursting with an eager desire to impart information, if not also to convert.
He passed his hand across his forehead, knocking the spectacles off. Then, catching them with a fumbling motion which betrayed his perturbation, he inquired: "But, of course, Mr. Blackwood, not your own?"
The voice, the eyes, the whole attitude of the body made me realize he was prepared to be shocked, if not already shocked.
"Yes," I replied truthfully, "my own. I've been a Buddhist for a long time."
He stared for some time at me without a word, then smiled a kindly, indulgent, rather sceptical smile. "It would be hardly suitable," he mentioned, as I felt his whole being draw away from me as from something dangerous and unclean. Possibly, of course, he did not believe me; I am sure he prayed for me. Our relations seemed less cordial after that; he read most carefully every word I wrote in his magazine and children's pages, but he never referred to the matter again.
My Methodist job, none the less, was a happy one; this first regular wage I had yet received in life gave me the pleasant sensation that I was launched. My connexion with Methodism ceased, not because I was dismissed or had failed to give satisfaction (indeed, the editor had just told me my salary was to be raised!), but because all the capital I should ever have was sent to me about that time from England—about £2,000—and I went into partnership with a farmer outside Toronto and bought some forty head of pedigree Jersey cattle.