Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
At the time we met, this friend of mine had been out from Oxford—New College, I think—a year or so, and with a Cambridge man about his own age, had been running a sporting goods shop in King Street. They sold the paraphernalia of cricket, tennis, boxing and the like, but with no marked success. The considerable money invested by the pair of them earned no interest. John Kay was impatient and dissatisfied; the other had leanings towards the brokering trade, as offering better opportunities. Both were ready to cut their losses, realize, and get out. They did so, remaining the best of friends. And it was one day, while these preliminary negotiations were being discussed in the back office, where they muddled away the day between rare sales, that Kay said to me mysteriously: "Look here, I say—I've got a wonderful scheme. Have you got any money left?"
I mentioned the £600.
"I call it a rotten shame," he went on. "Of course, you've been swindled. These people look upon us as their natural prey"—and he proceeded to describe his "scheme"—to buy a small hotel which, owing to its bad name, was going cheap; to work up a respectable business and a valuable goodwill; then to sell out at a top price and retire with a comfortable fortune. Kay was twenty-three, two years my senior; to me, then, he seemed an experienced man of business, almost elderly. The scheme took my breath away. It was very tempting. The failure of the dairy farm had left me despondent; I felt disgraced; the end of life, it seemed, had come. I was ready to grasp at anything that held out hopes of a recovery of fortune. But an hotel! I hesitated.
"I know nothing about running an hotel," I objected.
"Neither do I--yet," was the sanguine answer, "but we can learn. It's only common sense and hard work. We can hire a good manager and engage a first-class cook."
"How many rooms are there?"
"Only thirteen. It's the bar where we shall make the money."
"The bar----!"
"There are two bars, one on the main street and another on the back. Billy Bingham has made the place too hot to hold him. His licence is to be withdrawn. He's got to get out. We can get his licence transferred to us all right, if we promise to make the place respectable. We'll have good food, a first-rate lunch counter for the business men, we can let the big rooms for club dinners and society banquets, and there's a 100 per cent. profit, you know, on liquor. We'll make the Hub the best 'joint' in the town. All the fellows will come. A year will do it. Then we'll sell out...."
I was not listening. The word "liquor"--I had never touched alcohol in my life--made such a noise in my mind that I could hear nothing else.
"My father," I mentioned in a faint voice, "is a public man at home. He's a great temperance reformer. He speaks and writes against drink. He's brought me up that way. It would be a terrible shock to him if his son made money out of a bar." The hotel scheme, indeed, seemed to me an impossibility. A picture of the Temperance meetings held in our country house flashed through my mind. I glanced down at my coat, on whose lapel, until recently, there had been a little strip of blue ribbon, signifying that I was a member of the Band of Hope which included several million avowed teetotallers. "Don't you see, old chap?" I explained further. "It would simply break his heart, and my mother's too."
"He need never know anything about it," came the answer at once. "Why should he? Our names needn't appear at all. We'll call ourselves the 'Hub Wine Company, Limited.'" My head was swimming, my mind buzzing with conflicting voices as we walked down King Street to inspect the premises. I ached to re-establish my position. The prospect of a quick recovery of fortune was as sweet a prize as ever tempted a green youth like myself. My partner, too, this time would be a "gentleman," a fellow my father might have invited to dine and play tennis; it was my appalling ignorance of life that gave to his two years' seniority some imagined quality of being a man much older than myself, and one who knew what he was about.
The character of the proposed enterprise, of course, had no effect at all upon the judgment. To be known as a successful hotel proprietor was a legitimate ambition. My father's stern judgment of philanthropists who preached temperance while owning distilleries or holding brewery shares--I knew it word for word--was quite forgotten. Only the little personal point of view was present: "I've been an ass. I must make good. Here's a chance, a certainty, of getting money. I must take it. It's my Karma."
We strode down King Street together, past the corner of Yonge Street, below the windows of the hated Temperance and General Life Assurance Company where I had licked stamps, and on towards the Hub Hotel. The Toronto air was fresh and sweet, the lake lay blue beyond, the sunlight sparkled. Something exhilarating and optimistic in the atmosphere gave thought a happy and sanguine twist. It was a day of Indian summer, a faint perfume of far-distant forest fires adding a pleasant touch to the familiar smell of the cedar-wood sidewalks. A mood of freedom, liberty, great spaces, fine big enterprises in a free country where everything was possible, of opportunities seized and waves of fortune taken on their crest--I remember this mood as sharply still, and the scent of a wood-fire or a cedar pencil recalls it as vividly still, as though I had experienced it last week. I glanced at my companion. I liked him, trusted him. There was a happy light in his frank blue eyes. He was a good heavy-weight boxer too. The very man, I felt, for a bold enterprise of this sort. He talked the whole way. He was describing how we might increase the fortune we should draw out of our successful venture in a year's time, when we passed Tim Sullivan, standing at the door of his, a rival, saloon, and exchanged a nod with him. The Irishman had a shadow on his face. "He's heard about it," whispered Kay, with a chuckle. "He'll look glummer still when he sees all his customers coming across the way to us!"
Turning down a narrow side street, the Hub blocked the way, a three-story building with a little tower, clean windows, and two big swinging doors. It ran through to a back street where there was another entrance.
"Here it is," said Kay, in the eager, happy voice of a man who has just inherited a family mansion and come to inspect it. "This is the Hub where we shall make our fortune."
It seemed to me I had entered an entirely new world. Everything was spotless. The rows of bottles and glasses, the cash-register and brass taps glittered in the sunlight that fell through coloured windows. The perfume of stale liquor was not as disagreeable as it sounds. In one sense the whole place looked as harmless as the aisle of some deserted church. I stood just inside those swing-doors, which had closed behind me, with a strange feeling of gazing at some den of vice reconstructed in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. Empty and innocent as the bar might appear, however, there was a thrill of adventure, even of danger, about it that reached my mind, with a definite shock of dread.
"Nice, airy premises, with plenty of room," Kay's cheery voice came to me from a distance. "This is the principal bar. Twenty men could line up easily. It'll want four bar-tenders.... There's another bar at the end. There'll be a few fights there before we've done. The dining-room lies through that archway just between the two."
He walked away, passing along the length of the room and down three steps into a narrower, darker bar beyond, where the shadows hid him. But his voice still reached me: "It's on the back street, this bar," he called. "This is for the hoi polloi. We shall want a chucker out.... Here's the private door leading to the upstairs dining-room we'll let out for banquets. We'll have our own bedrooms and sitting-room on the first floor too...."
His voice roared on; I heard, but did not answer; I had not moved an inch from my place against the swing-doors. He had not, of course, the faintest idea what was passing through my mind at the moment; and, had I told him, he would only have laughed good-naturedly and talked of the money we should make. The fact was, however, that the whole of my early up-bringing just then came at me with a concentrated driving-force which made the venture seem absolutely impossible.
"We'll call this one the House of Commons," he bawled delightedly; "and that one--the front bar--the House of Lords. We shall take 250 dollars a day easily!"
The shock, the contrast, the exaggerated effect of entering a saloon for the first time in my life, especially with the added possibility of shortly becoming its proprietor, were natural enough. My unworldliness, even at twenty-one, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre; a race-course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card. I did not know one card from another. Any game that might involve betting or gambling was anathema. In other ways, too, I had been sheltered to the point of ignorance. I had never even danced. To hold a young woman round the waist was not alone immodest but worse than immodest.
This peculiarly sheltered up-bringing, this protected hot-house of boyhood and early youth to which a drinking bar was the vestibule of hell, and a music-hall an invention of a personal devil, are necessary to understand the reaction produced in me as I stood in Billy Bingham's "joint." I stood, literally, on the brink of "the downward path." I heard my father's voice, I saw my mother's eyes.... In very definite form I now faced "worldly temptation" they had so often warned me against. Accompanying an almost audible memory of "Get thee behind me, Satan," drove a crowded kaleidoscope of vivid pictures from those sheltered years.
My parents were both people of marked character, with intense convictions; my mother, especially, being a woman of great individuality, of iron restraint, grim humour, yet with a love and tenderness, and a spirit of uncommon sacrifice, that never touched weakness. She possessed powers of mind and judgment, at the same time, of which my father, a public servant--financial secretary to the Post Office--availed himself to the full. She had great personal beauty. A young widow, her first husband having been the 6th Duke of Manchester, also of the evangelical persuasion, she met my father at Kimbolton soon after his return from the Crimean War, where he had undergone that religious change of heart known to the movement as "conversion." From a man of fashion, a leader in the social life to which he was born, he changed with sudden completeness to a leader in the evangelical movement, then approaching its height. He renounced the world, the flesh, the devil and all their works. The case of "Beauty Blackwood," to use the nickname his unusual handsomeness gained for him, was, in its way, notorious. He became a teetotaller and non-*smoker, wrote devotional books, spoke in public, and held drawing-room prayer meetings, the Bible always in his pocket, communion with God always in his heart. His religion was genuine, unfaltering, consistent and sincere. He carried the war into his own late world of fashion. He never once looked back. He knew a vivid joy, a wondrous peace, his pain being for others only, for those who were not "saved." The natural, instinctive type he was, asserted its claim. He became a genuine saint. Also, to the very end, he remained that other delightful thing, possible only to simple hearts, a boy.
Both my parents, thus, believed in Jesus, with a faith of that simple, unshakable order that could feel no doubts. Their lives were consistent and, as must always be the case when fine characters are possessed of a perfectly sincere faith, they stood out in the world of men and women as something strong and beautiful. Edmund Gosse, in "Father and Son," has described the mental attitude of the type; William James might, equally, have included my father's case as a typical "conversion" in his "Varieties of Religious Experience."
The effect upon the children--there were five of us--followed naturally. My father, apart from incurring much public odium owing to his official position, found himself, and us with him, cut off from the amenities of the social life to which we were otherwise born. Ordinary people, "worldly" as he called them, left us alone. A house where no wine was served at dinner, where morning and evening prayers were de rigueur, a guest even being asked to "lead in prayer" perhaps, and where at any suitable moment you might be drawn aside and asked "Have you given your soul to Jesus?" was not an attractive house to stay in. We were ostracized. The effect of such disabilities upon us in later life was not considered, for it was hoped each and all of us would consecrate ourselves to God. We were, thus, kept out of the "world" in every possible sense and brought up, though with lavish love and kindness, yet in the narrowest imaginable evangelical path which scents danger in knowledge of any kind not positively helpful to the soul. I, personally, at that time, regarded the temptations of the world with a remote pity, and with a certainty that I should never have the least difficulty in resisting them. Men who smoked and drank and were immoral, who gambled, went to theatres and music-halls and race-meetings, belonged to the submerged and unworthy portion of mankind. I, in this respect at least, was of the elect, quite sure that the weakness of their world could never stain me personally.
Yet I never shared the beliefs of my parents with anything like genuine pleasure. I was afraid they were true, not glad.
Without wholeheartedly sharing my father's faith, however, his religious and emotional temperament, with its imperious need of believing something, he certainly bequeathed to me.... The evangelical and revivalist movement, at any rate, was the dominant influence in my boyhood's years. People were sharply divided into souls that were saved and those that were--not saved. Moody and Sankey, the American Revivalists, stayed in our house.
I was particularly influenced in this direction by a group of young 'Varsity men who worked with Moody, and who were manly fellows, good cricketers, like the Studd brothers, or Stanley Smith and Montague Beauchamp, men who had rowed in their University boats, and who were far removed from anything effeminate. Of course I thought that what these men did could not be otherwise than fine and worth copying, and I lost no time in attacking everyone I met and asking the most impertinent questions about their souls and fallen natures. By some lucky chance no one kicked me to death--probably because most of my evangelizing work was done at home!
My old nurse I implored to yield herself up to the Saviour, and I felt my results were very poor in her case because I only got affectionate caresses and smiles, and even observations about the holes in my clothes, in return. The fat butler (I assured him) was going headlong down the kitchen stairs to everlasting fire because he showed no symptoms of ecstasy when he met my pleadings with "O, I'm sure 'E died for me all right, Master Algie. I don't feel a bit afraid!"
But all this was genuine so far as I was concerned, and it lasted a considerable time, to my father's great joy, though not so much, I think, to my mother's. She read far deeper into things....
In a short time I came to look upon the whole phenomena of "conversion," so far as my type of mind and character was concerned, with distrust and weariness. Only the very topmost layer of my personality was affected; evidently, there was no peace or happiness for me that way!
None the less, I had one or two terrible moments; one (I was reading with a private tutor in Somerset for Edinburgh University) when I woke in the very early morning with a choking sensation in my throat, and thought I was going to die. It must have been merely acute indigestion, but I was convinced my last moment had come, and fell into a sweating agony of fear and weakness. I prayed as hard as ever I could, swearing to consecrate myself to God if He would pull me through. I even vowed I would become a missionary and work among the heathen, than which, I was always told, there was no higher type of manhood. But the pain and choking did not pass, and in despair I got up and swallowed half a bottle of pilules of aconite which my mother, an ardent homœopathist, always advised me to take after sneezing or cold shivers. They were sweet and very nice, and the pain certainly began to pass away, but only to leave me with a remorse that I had allowed a mere human medicine to accomplish naturally what God wished to accomplish by His grace. He had been so slow about it, however, that I felt also a kind of anger that He could torture me so long, and as it was the aconite that cured me, and not His grace, I was certainly released from my promise to become a missionary and work among the heathen. And for this small mercy I was duly thankful, though the escape had been a rather narrow one.
A year and a half in a school of the Moravian Brotherhood in the Black Forest, though it showed me another aspect of the same general line of belief, did not wholly obliterate my fear of hell, with its correlated desire for salvation. The poetry of the semi-religious life in that remote village set among ancient haunted forests, gave to natural idealistic tendencies another turn. The masters, whom we termed Brother, were strenuous, devoted, self-sacrificing men, all later to go forth as Missionaries to Labrador. Humbug, comfort, personal ambition played no part in their lives. The Liebesmahl in their little wooden church, for all its odd simplicity, was a genuine and impressive ceremony that touched something in me no church service at home, with Sankey's hymns on a bad harmonium, had ever reached. At this Communion Service, or Love Feast, sweet, weak tea in big white thick cups, followed by a clothes-basket filled with rolls, were handed round, first to the women, who sat on one side of the building, and then to the men and boys on the other side. There was a collective reality about the little ceremony that touched its sincerity with beauty. Similarly was Easter morning beautiful, when we marched in the early twilight towards the little cemetery among the larch trees and stood with our hats off round an open grave, waiting in silence for the sunrise. The air was cool and scented, our mood devotional and solemn. There was a sense of wonder among us. Then, as the sun slipped up above the leagues of forest, the Eight Brothers, singing in parts, led the ninety boys in the great German hymn, "Christus ist auferstanden. . . . "
The surroundings, too, of the school influenced me greatly. Those leagues of Black Forest rolling over distant mountains, velvet-coloured, leaping to the sky in grey cliffs, or passing quietly like the sea in immense waves, always singing in the winds, haunted by elves and dwarfs and peopled by charming legends—those forest glades, deep in moss and covered in springtime with wild lily-of-the-valley; those tumbling streams that ran for miles unseen, then emerged to serve the peasants by splashing noisily over the clumsy water-wheel of a brown old sawmill before they again lost themselves among the mossy pine roots; those pools where water-pixies dwelt, and those little red and brown villages where we slept in our long walks—the whole setting of this Moravian school was so beautifully simple that it lent just the proper atmosphere for lives consecrated without flourish of trumpets to God. It all left upon me an impression of grandeur, of loftiness, and of real religion . . . and of a Deity not specially active on Sundays only.