CHAPTER XXVII
Some people, examining the alternate ups and downs of life, have thought to detect a rhythm in it: like every other expression of energy, from heat to history, from sound to civilization, it moves, they think, with a definite wave-length. The down and up, the hollow of the wave and its crest, follow one another in rhythmical sequence. It is an imaginary notion doubtless, though it applied to my life aptly enough at this time apparently: the Toronto misery, the Island happiness; the New York hell, the Backwoods heaven.
I think, when I wrote home the literal truth: "I can't stand this reporting life any longer. I'm off to the goldfields, and McCloy has asked me to write articles for the paper," there lay a vague idea in me that these goldfields would prove somehow to be comic goldfields, and that the expedition would be somewhere farcical. I was so eager, so determined to go, that I camouflaged from myself every unfavourable aspect of the trip. Green, being still my predominant colour, was used freely in this camouflage. It was only afterwards I realized how delightfully I fooled myself. Yet it was true, at the same time, that a deep inner necessity drove irresistibly. The city life was killing something in me, something in the soul: get out or go under, was my feeling. How easy it would have been to go under was a daily thought. Far better men than myself proved it all round me every week. It seemed, indeed, the natural, obvious thing to do for an educated, refined Englishman without character who found himself adrift from home influences in this amazing city—to sink into the general scum of failures and outcasts, to yield to one of the many anæsthetics New York so lavishly provided, to find temporary relief, a brief wild-eyed happiness, oblivion, then, not long afterwards, death.
