Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
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]
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]
"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]
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.