Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
One effect of these long, unhappy months, anyhow, was to emphasize another, and that the principal side, of my nature. The daily effort of forcing myself to do what I hated so intensely, was succeeded by the equal and opposite reaction of enjoying tremendously my free hours of relaxation. When the swing-doors closed behind me, my mind closed too upon all memory of the hated Hub. It was shut out, forgotten, non-existent. I flew instinctively to what comforted and made me happy. Gorged with the reading of poetry and of idealistic, mystical books, an insatiable sense of wonder with a childish love of the marvellous added to it, my disappointing experience of practical realities demanded compensation as a safety-valve, if as nothing more. I found these in Nature, music, and in the companionship of a few people I will presently describe. Out of those prison-like swing-doors I invariably went, either with the fiddle-case in my hand, or with food in my pocket and a light cloak as blanket for sleeping out. Concerts and organ recitals were not enough; more than to listen, I wanted to play myself; and Louis B——— was usually as enthusiastic as I. The music was a deep delight to me, but the sleeping under the stars I enjoyed most.
Those lonely little camp fires have left vivid pictures in the mind. An East-bound tram soon took one beyond the city, where the shores of Lake Ontario stretched their deserted sands for miles. There was always fresh water to be found for boiling tea, lots of driftwood lying about, and the sand made a comfortable bed. Many a night of that sweet Indian summer I saw the moon rise or set over the water, and lay watching the stars until the sunrise came. One spot in particular was a favourite with me, because, just over the high loam cliffs that lined the shore, there was an enormous field of tomatoes, and while Jimmy was helping himself to the Hub cash under Kay's eyes in the city, I helped myself to half a dozen of the farmer's ripe tomatoes. The Hub, however, of set purpose, formed no part of my thoughts, my reveries and dreams being of a very different, and far more interesting, kind....
A night in the woods, though distance made it more difficult, comforted me even more than the Lake expeditions. I kept the woods usually for Saturday night, when the next day left me free as well.
A pine forest beyond Rosedale was my favourite haunt, for it was (in those days) quite deserted and several miles from the nearest farm, and in the heart of it lay a secluded little lake with reedy shores and deep blue water. Here I lay and communed, the world of hotels, insurance, even of Methodists, very far away. The hum of the city could not reach me, though its glare was faintly visible in the sky. There were no signs of men; no sounds of human life; not even a dog's bark--nothing but a sighing wind and lapping water and a sort of earth-murmur under the trees, and I used to think that God, whatever He was, or the great spiritual forces that I believed lay behind all phenomena, and perhaps were the moving life of the elements themselves, must be nearer to one's consciousness in places like this than among the bustling of men in the towns and houses. As the material world faded away among the shadows, I felt dimly the real spiritual world behind shining through ... I meditated on the meaning of these dreams till the veil over outer things seemed very thin; diving down into my inner consciousness as deeply as I could till a stream of tremendous yearning for the realities that lay beyond appearances poured out of me into the night.... The hours passed with magical swiftness, and my dreaming usually ended in sleep, for I often woke in the chilly time just before the dawn, lying sideways on the pine needles, and saw the trees outlined sharply against the Eastern sky, and the lake water still and clear, and heard the dawn-wind just beginning to sing overhead. The laughter of a loon would sound, the call of an owl, the cry of a whip-poor-will; and then--the sun was up.
Thought ran, on these lonely nights, to everything except to present or recent happenings. Life, already half over as, at twenty-one, it then seemed to me, had proved a failure; my few trivial experiences appeared gigantic and oppressive. I felt very old. Present conditions, being unhappy and promising to become more unhappy still, I left aside. I had "accepted" them as Karma, I must go through with them, but there was no need to intensify or prolong unhappiness by dwelling on them. I therefore dismissed them, thought wandering to other things. All was coloured, shaped, directed by those Eastern teachings in which I was then entirely absorbed ... and the chief problem in my mind at the time, was to master the method of accepting, facing, exhausting, whatever life might bring, while being, as the Bhagavad Gita described, "indifferent to results," unaffected, that is, by the "fruits of action." Detachment, yet without shirking, was the nearest equivalent phrase I could find; a state, anyhow, stronger than the Christian "resignation," which woke contempt in me....
Unhappiness, though it may seem trivial now, both as to cause and quality, was very deep in me at the time. It had wakened an understanding of certain things I had read--as in the stolen "Patanjali" years before--without then grasping what they meant. These things I now was beginning to reach by an inner experience of them, rather than by an intellectual comprehension merely.... And, as thought ran backwards, escaping the unpleasant Hub and Dairy, to earlier days in the Black Forest School, to the Jura Mountains village, to family holidays among the Alps or on the west coast of Scotland, it reached in due course the year spent at Edinburgh University just before I left for Canada, and so to individuals there who had strongly influenced me:
I recalled Dr. H---- who used hypnotism in his practice, taught me various methods of using it, and often admitted me to private experiments in his study. He explained many a text-book for me. He had urged me to give up the idea of farming in Canada, and to read for medicine and become a doctor. "Specialize," he said (in 1883). "By the time you are qualified Suggestion will be a recognized therapeutic agent, accepted by all, and accomplishing marvellous results. Become a mental specialist."
I lay under my pine trees, wondering if it were still too late ... but speculating, further and chiefly, about those other states of consciousness, since called "subliminal," which his experiments had convinced me were of untold importance, both to the individual and to the race. Any lawful method of extending the field of consciousness, of increasing its scope, of developing latent faculties, with its corollary of greater knowledge and greater powers, excited and interested me more than the immediate prospect of making a million....
This doctor's family were sincere and convinced spiritualists. He let them be, paying no attention to them, yet pointing out to me privately the "secondary" state into which his wife, as the medium, could throw herself at will. His son had an Amati violin; we played together; I was invited to many séances. The power of reading a "sitter's" mind I often witnessed, my own unuttered thoughts often being announced as the communication from some "guide" or "spirit friend." But for the doctor's private exposition, I might doubtless have been otherwise persuaded and shared my hostess's convictions.
Some of the "communications" came back in memory, none the less, as I lay beside the little lake and watched the firelight reflected with the stars: "There is an Indian here; he says he comes for you. He is a medicine man. He says you are one, too. You have great healing power. He keeps repeating the word 'scratch.'" The dubious word meant "write"; I was to become a writer, a prophesy that woke no interest in me at all.... Another communication delved into the past: "You have been an Indian in a recent life, and you will go back to their country to work off certain painful Karma. You were Aztec, Inca, Egyptian, and, before that again, Atlantean. With the world to-day you have nothing in common, for none of the souls you knew have come back with you. Nature means more to you than human beings. Beware!" The last word alarmed me a good deal until the doctor's humorous exposition killed any malefic suggestion. The horoscope his wife cast and read for me, however, he refused to be bothered with; he could not, therefore, comfort me by explaining away a disturbing sentence: "All your planets are beneficent, but were just below the horizon at the hour of your birth. This means that you will come very near to success in all you undertake, yet never quite achieve it."
These memories slipped in their series across my mind, as the embers of my fire faded and the night drew on. Swiftly they came and passed, each leaving its little trail of dust, its faint emotion, yet leading always to a stronger ghost whose memory still bulked largely in my mind--the ghost of a Hindu student. He was a fourth-year man, about to become a qualified doctor, and I met him first in the dissecting room, where occasionally I played at studying anatomy. We first became intimate friends over the dissection of a leg. It was he who explained "Patanjali" to me. He was a very gifted and unusual being. He showed me strange methods of breathing, of concentration, of meditation. He made clear a thousand half-conscious dreams and memories in me. He was mysterious but sincere, living his theories in practice. We went for great walks along the Forth, watching the Forth Bridge then being built; down the coast to St. Abb's Head and Coldingham; deep into the recesses of the Pentlands, where, more than once, we slept in the open. We made curious and interesting experiments together.... Years later--he is still alive--I drew upon a fraction of his personality in two books, "John Silence" and "Julius Le Vallon."...
Much that he explained and taught me, much that he believed and practised, came back vividly during these nightly vigils in the woods, while I listened to the weird laughter of the loons like the voices of women far away, and watched the Northern Lights flash in their strange majesty from the horizon to mid-heaven. Unhappiness was making my real life sink deeper. No boy, I am sure, sought for what he believed would prove the realities with more passionate intensity than I did. It is curious now to look back upon those grave experiments first taught me by my Hindu friend, who assured me that the way to rob emotions of their power was to refuse to identify one's "self" with them, this real "self" merely looking on as a spectator, apart, detached; and that the outer events of life had small importance, what mattered being solely one's inner attitude to them, one's interpretation of them....
From these hours spent alone with Nature, as also from the hours of music with Louis B---- I returned, at any rate, refreshed and invigorated to my loathsome bars. Personal troubles seemed less important, less oppressive; they were, after all, but brief episodes in a single life; as Karma, they had to be faced, gone through with; they had something to teach, and I must learn the lesson, or else miss one of the objects of my being. Watching the starry heavens through hours of imaginative reflection brought a bigger perspective in which individual worries found reduced proportion. My thoughts introduced a yet vaster perspective still. The difficulty was to keep the point of view when the mood that encouraged it was gone. After a few hours in the House of Lords perspective was apt to dwindle again....
When the winter months made sleeping out impossible, and Louis B---- was not available, my precious hours of freedom would be spent with a young agnostic doctor dying of consumption; with the Professor of History in Toronto University--a sterling, sympathetic man, a true Christian of intellectual type, and a big, genuine soul who never thought of himself in the real help he gave me unfailingly with both hands; or, lastly, with an enthusiast who shared my quest for what we called "the Realities." With all three I had made close friends during the first prosperous days of the Dairy; the Professor's family had been customers for milk and eggs; the young doctor, living in my boarding-house, had been a pupil in my French and German class.
The third was a Scotsman, fairly well educated, about thirty years of age, who, while fully in sympathy with my line of thinking, had succeeded in reducing his dreams to some sort of order so that they did not interfere with his ordinary, practical career and yet were the guiding rule of his life.
He was in the cement business, and his clothes, even on Sunday, were always covered with a fine white dust, for he was unmarried and lived alone in a single room. He made a bare living at his work, but was thoroughly conscientious and devoted to the interests of his employer, and all he asked was steady work and fair remuneration for the rest of his life. He was a real mystic by temperament, though he belonged to no particular tradition. The world for him was but a show of false appearances that the senses gathered; the realities behind were spiritual. He believed that his soul had existed for ever and would never cease to exist, and that his ego would continue to expand and develop according to the life he led, and shaped by his thoughts and acts (but especially by his thoughts) to all eternity. This world for him was a schoolroom, a place of difficult discipline and learning, and the lessons he was learning were determined logically and justly by his previous living and previous mistakes. Talents or disabilities, equally, were the results of former action....
But to the ordinary man he appeared simply as a rather dull everyday worker, without any worldly ambition, absolutely honest and trustworthy, and always occupying a subordinate position in practical affairs.
In the "old country" he had belonged to some sort of society that kept alive traditions of teaching methods of spiritual development, and he told me much concerning their theories that immense latent powers lay in the depths of one's being and could be educed by suitable living, and the period in the "schoolroom of this world," as he called it, could be shortened and the progress of one's real development hastened. It all lay, with him, in learning how to concentrate the faculties on this inner life, without neglecting the duties of the position one held to family or employer, and thus reducing the life of the body and the senses to the minimum that was consistent with health and ordinary duty. In this way he believed new forces would awaken to life, and new parts of one's being be stimulated into activity, and in due course one would become conscious of a new spiritual region with the spiritual senses adapted to it. It amounted, of course, to an expansion of consciousness.
All this, naturally, interested me very much indeed, and I spent hours talking with this cement maker, and many more hours reading the books he lent me and thinking about them. My friend helped in this extension. Carl du Prel's "Philosophy of Mysticism" was a book to injure no one.
He had published one or two volumes of minor poetry, and his verse, though poor in form, caught all through it the elusive quality of genuine mystical poetry, unearthly, touching the stars, and wakening in the reader the note of yearning for the highest things. I took him with me several times to my little private grove, and he would recite these verses to me in a way that made them sound very different from my own reading of them. And as he lay beside the lake and I heard his reedy voice mingling with the wind in the trees, and watched his watery blue eyes shine across the smoke of our fire, I realized that the value of his poems lay in the fact that they were a perfectly true expression of his self--of his small, mystical, unselfish and oddly elemental soul searching after the God that should finally absorb him up into something greater. I do not wish to criticize him, but only to picture what I saw. His attenuated body, and long thin fingers, his shabby clothes covered with white dust lying by my side under the stars, his eyes looking beyond the world, and the sound of his thin voice that lost half its words some- where in the wind--the picture is complete in every detail in my mind to this day. His reasoning powers were slight, for like all true mystics he believed in the intuitive perception of truth; but, coming into my life just at this time, he came with influence and a good deal of stimulus too. From the "House of Commons" to his dream-laden atmosphere provided a contrast that brought relief, at any rate.
This mystical minor poet in the cement business had several friends like himself, but no one of them possessed his value, because no one of them practised their beliefs. They talked well and were sincere up to a point, but not to the point of making sacrifices for their faith. It was always with them a future hope. One, however, must be excepted--a woman. She was over sixty and always dressed in black, with crêpe scattered all over her, and a large white face, and shining eyes, and great bags under them. She had been a vegetarian for years. In spite of her size she looked so ethereal that a puff of wind might have blown her across the street. All her friends and relations had "passed over," and her thoughts were evidently centred in the beyond, so far as she herself was concerned. She had means of her own, but spent most of them in helping others. There was no humbug about her. She claimed to have what she called "continuous consciousness," and at night, when her body lay down and the brain slept, she focused her Self in some spiritual region of her being, and never lost consciousness. She saw her body lying there, and knew the brain was asleep, but she meanwhile became active elsewhere, for she declared a spirit could never sleep, and it was only the body that became too weary at the end of the day to answer to the spirit's requirements. In sleep the body, left empty by the spirit, slept, and memory, being in the brain, became inactive. But as soon as one had learned to realize one's spirit, sleep involved no loss of consciousness and memory was continuous.
Her accounts of her experiences in the night thrilled me.... While she talked her face grew so white that it almost shone. It was a beaming, good, loving face, and the woman was honest, even if deluded. She radiated kindness and sympathy from her person. She had a way of screwing up her eyes when speaking, stepping back a few paces, and then coming suddenly forward again as though she meant to jump across the room, her voice ringing, and her eyes opened so wide that I thought the bags underneath them must burst with a pop.
The young doctor living in the boarding-house also interested me, reviving indeed my desire to follow his own profession myself. He was about twenty-six years old and very poor; the exact antithesis of myself, being clear-minded, practical, cynical and a thorough sceptic on the existence of a soul and God and immortality. He was well-read and had the true scientific temperament, spending hours with his microscope and books. The fact of his being at the opposite pole to myself attracted me to him, and we had long talks in his consulting-room on the ground floor back--where everything was prepared for the reception of patients, but where no patient ever came. Our worlds were so far apart, and it was so hard to establish a mutual coinage of words that our talks were somewhat futile. He was logical, absorbed in his dream of original research; he used words in their exact meaning and jumped to no conclusions rashly, and never allowed his judgment to be influenced by his emotions; whereas I talked, no doubt, like a child, building vast erections upon inadequate premises, indulging in my religious dreams about God and the soul, speculative and visionary. He argued me out of my boots every time, and towards the end of our talks grew impatient and almost angry with my vague mind and "transcendental tommy-rot," as he called it; but at the same time he liked me, and was always glad to talk and discuss with me.
Nothing he said, though much of it was cogent and unanswerable, ever influenced my opinions in the least degree, because I felt he was fundamentally wrong, and was trying to find by scalpel and microscope the things of the spirit. I felt a profound pity for him, and he felt a contemptuous pity for me. But one night my pity almost changed to love, and after this particular conversation, in the course of which he made me deep confidences of his early privations in order that he might study for his profession, and of his unquenchable desire for knowledge for its own sake, I felt so tenderly towards him, that I never tried to argue again, but only urged him to believe in a soul and in a future life. For he told me that he was already so far gone in consumption that at most he had but a year or two to live, and he knew that in the time at his disposal he could not accomplish the very smallest part of his great dream. I then understood why his eyes were so burning bright and why he had always glowing red spots in his cheeks, and looked so terribly thin and emaciated.
The hours spent with him did not refresh or invigorate me as the woods and music did; I re-entered the swing doors of my prison--as I came to regard the Hub--with no new stimulus. His example impressed me, but his atmosphere and outlook both depressed. Only my admiration for his courage, strong will, and consistent attitude remained, while I drank "tea" with my unpleasant customers, or listened to complaints from the staff. Before the swing-doors closed for the last time, however, the thin, keen-faced doctor with the hectic flush and the bright burning eyes had succumbed to his terrible malady. His end made a great impression on me. For several months he went about like a living skeleton. His cough was ghastly. He had less and less money, and I seemed to be the only friend he turned to, or indeed possessed at all, for I was the only person he allowed to help him, and the little help I could give was barely enough to prevent the landlady turning him out for rent and board unpaid.
To the last his will burned in him like a flame. He talked and studied, and dreamed his long dream of scientific achievement even when he knew his time was measured by weeks, and he was utterly scornful of death and a Deity that could devise such a poor scheme of existence, so full of failure, pain, and abortive effort. But I was full of admiration for the way he kept going full speed to the very end, starting new books and fresh experiments even when he knew he would not have time to get half-way through with them, and discussing high schemes just as though he expected years in which to carry them out—instead of days.
Here was a man absolutely without faith, or any belief in God or future life, who walked straight up to a miserable death under full steam, with nothing to console or buoy him up, and without friends to sympathize, and who never for a single instant flinched or whimpered. There burned in his heart the fire of a really strong will. It was the first time I had realized at close quarters what this meant, and when I went to his funeral I felt full of real sorrow, and have never forgotten the scene at his death-bed when the keen set face relaxed nothing of its decision to the very last.