The memory, anyhow, is a sweeter one than that o the bed in East 19th Street, if less sharply defined. The cool fresh air, the dew, the stars, the smell of earth and leaves, were all of them clean, and no price asked at dawn. Yet the two—the bed and the bench—are somehow linked together in my mind, the one invariably calling up the other; and, thanks to them probably, no bed bothers me now, lumpy or sloping though it be, in train, hotel, or lodging. I have slept in strange places since—high in the Caucasus, on the shores of the Black Sea, on the Egyptian desert, on the banks of the Danube, in the Black Forest and Hungary—but each time the effort to get comfortable brought back the bed and the bench, and sleep soon followed to smother both.
The gas-brackets, similarly, rise vividly before my eyes, associated with the pain, the weariness of hunger; not of true starvation, but of weeks and months of under-nourishment, caused by one meal a day. The relation between hunger and gas-brackets may seem remote. It was on the latter, however, that we learned to fix the metal top which made the flame spread in a circle round a light tin cooking-pot. We boiled water for milkless tea in this way, cooked porridge, and when porridge was not to be had we heated water with dried apples in it. I remember the day we discovered that it was more economical to eat the strips of dried apple first, then drink the hot water that made them swell so comfortingly inside us. They proved more filling that way, the false repletion lasted longer, the sense of bulk was more satisfying, the gnawing ceased, and the results, if temporary, at least made it possible to fall asleep.
There are other details of that sordid New York room which still retain their first disagreeable vividness, each with the ghost—a very sturdy ghost—of the emotion that printed it indelibly in the mind. These details are best mentioned, however, in their proper place and sequence. It should first be told how we came to be there.
