CHAPTER I

A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred. I see a room in a New York boarding-house. I can touch the wooden bed, the two gas-brackets beside the looking-glass, the white door of the cupboard, the iron “register” in the wall that let in heated air, the broken sofa. The view from the dirty windows towards the high roof of Tony Pastor’s music hall in 14th Street, with a side glimpse of the trees in Irving Place, show clearly. The rattle of the Broadway cable cars, the clang of their bells, still come to me through that stifling August air, when the shade thermometer stood at a hundred, with humidity somewhere about 95 per cent. Thoughts of the sea and mountains, vainly indulged within those walls, are easily remembered too.

The room I am writing in now seems less actual than the one in the East 19th Street boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Bernstein, a German Jewess, whose husband conducted his own orchestra in a Second Avenue restaurant. Though thirty years ago, it is more clearly defined for me than Lady X’s dining-room where I dined last night, and where the lady I took in said graciously, “I simply loved your Blue Lagoon,” which, naturally, I was able to praise unreservedly, while leaving her with the illusion as long as possible that she had made friends with its gifted author. And this detailed clarity is due, I am sure, to the fact that in that New York room I had my first experience of three new emotions, each of which, separately, held horror.

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Horror draws its lines deep; its pictures stand out in high relief. In my case the horrors were, perhaps minor ones, but at the age of twenty-one—an exceptionally inexperienced twenty-one—they seemed important; and the fact that they were combined entitles them to be considered major. They were three in number: the horror of loathsome vermin running over my body night after night, the horror of hunger, and the horror of living at close quarters with a criminal and degraded mind.

All, as I said, came together; all were entirely new sensations. “Close quarters,” too, is used advisedly, for not only was the room a small one, the cheapest in a cheap house, but it was occupied by three of us—three Englishmen “on their uppers,” three big Englishmen into the bargain, two of us standing 6 feet 2 inches, the other 6 feet 3 inches in his socks. We shared that room for many weeks, taking our turn at sleeping two in the bed, and one on the mattress we pulled off and kept hidden in the cupboard during the day. Mrs. Bernstein, denying her blood, won our affection by charging eight dollars only, the price for two, morning coffee included; and Mrs. Bernstein’s face, fat, kindly, perspiring, dirty, is more vivid in my memory after all these years than that of the lady last night who so generously mistook me for De Vere Stacpoole. Her voice even rings clear, with its Jewish lisp, its guttural German, its nasal twang thrown in:

“I ask my hospand. Berhaps he let you stay anozzer week.”

What the husband said we never knew. He was usually too drunk to say anything coherent. What mattered to us was that we were not turned out at the moment, and that, in the long run, the good-hearted woman received her money.

Certain objects in that room retain exceptional clarity in my mind. If thought-pictures could be photographed, a perfect print of the bed and gas-bracket could be printed from my memory. With the former especially I associate the vermin, the hunger, and the rather tawdry criminal. [3] I could describe that bed down to the smallest detail; I could draw it accurately, even to the carving; were I a carpenter I could make it. All that I suffered in it, of physical and mental anguish, the vain longings and despair, the hopes and fears, the loneliness, the feverish dreams—the entire dread panorama still hangs in the air between its stained brown foot and the broken sofa, as though of yesterday. I can see a tall man pass the end of it, one eye on me and another on the door, opening a razor slowly as he went. I see the blue eyes narrowing in his white face, the treachery of the coward twisting his lip into a smirk. I can see him sleeping like a child beside me, touching me. Moving stealthily about the room in the darkness too, as, thinking me asleep, he stole on

bare feet to recover the confession of forgery I had forced him to sign, I can still see his dim outline, and even hear his tread—a petty scoundrel unwittingly on his way to gaol.

The bed, thus, is vividly present in my memory. By contrast with it, not quite so sharp, perhaps, and a pleasanter feeling associated with it, another New York sleeping-place rises in the mind—a bench in Central Park. Here, however, the humour of adventure softens the picture, though at the time it did not soften the transverse iron arms which made it impossible to stretch out in comfort. Nor is there any touch of horror in it. Precise and detailed recollection fades. The hoboes who shared it with me were companions, even comrades of a sort, and one did not feel them necessarily criminal or degraded. They were “on their uppers” much as I was, and far quicker than I was at the trick of suddenly sitting upright when the night policeman’s tread was coming our way. What thoughts they indulged in I had no means of knowing, but I credited them with flitting backwards to a clean room somewhere and a soft white bed, possibly to that ridiculous figure of immense authority, a nurse, just as my own flashed back to a night nursery in the

Manor House, Crayford, Kent. That the seats I favoured were near the Swings lent possibly another touch to the childhood’s picture.

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The memory, anyhow, is a sweeter one than that of 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.

[5]

CHAPTER II

We arrived in New York towards the end of October, coming straight from five months in the Canadian backwoods. Before that, to mention myself first, there had been a year in Canada, where, even before the age of twenty-one, I had made a living of sorts by teaching the violin, French, German, and shorthand. Showing no special talent for any profession in particular, and having no tastes that could be held to indicate a definite career, I had come to Canada three years before for a few weeks’ trip. My father, in an official capacity, had passes from Liverpool to Vancouver, and we crossed in the Etruria, a Cunarder which my mother had launched. He was much fêted and banqueted, and the C.P.R. bigwigs, from Lord Strathcona and Sir William van Horne downwards, showed him all attention, placing an observation car at his disposal. General James, the New York postmaster, gave a dinner in his honour at the Union League Club, where I made my first and last speech—consisting of nine words of horrified thanks for coupling “a chip of

the old block,” as the proposer called me, with the “Chief of the British Postal Service.”

A ludicrous wound to vanity helps it to stick in the mind—my father wore no braces, and I copied him, but—well, in his case no belt was necessary, whereas I was slim. It suddenly dawned on me, as I spluttered my brief words, that a line of white was showing between my waistcoat and the top of my trousers. The close of my speech was hurried, my bow was cautious; I was extremely relieved to sit down again.

In the lovely autumn weather, we saw Canada at its best, and the trip decided my future. My father welcomed it as a happy solution. I came, therefore, to Toronto at the age of twenty, with £100 a year allowance, [6] and a small capital to follow when I should have found some safe and profitable chance of starting life. With me came—in the order of their importance—a fiddle, the “Bhagavad Gita,” Shelley, “Sartor Resartus,” Berkeley’s “Dialogues,” Patanjali’s “Yoga Aphorisms,” de Quincey’s “Confessions,” and—a unique ignorance of life.... I served my first literary apprenticeship on the Methodist Magazine, a monthly periodical published in Toronto, and before that licked stamps in the back office of the Temperance and General Life Assurance Company, at nothing a week, but with the idea of learning the business, so that later I might bring out some English insurance company to Canada.

The first taught me that, just as I had no ambition to write, so, likewise, I possessed no talent; the second merely made articulate the dislike I felt for anything to do with Business. It was the three months in the insurance office that caused me to accept eagerly the job on the Methodist Magazine at four dollars a week, and the reaction helped to make the work congenial if not stimulating.

The allowance of ten dollars a week was difficult to live on, and I had been looking everywhere for employment. It was through a daughter of Sir Thomas Galt, a friend of my father’s on our previous trip to Canada, that I obtained this job—sixteen shillings a week, hours ten to four.

Dr. Withrow, editor of the leading Methodist magazine, and of various Christian Endeavour periodicals for children and young people, was a pleasant old gentleman, who went about in a frock coat and slippers, had a real sense of humour and a nice wife and daughter. His editorial den was in his own little house, and my duties were to write an article every month for the magazine, which was illustrated, and also to write a few descriptive lines of letterpress to accompany the full-page illustrations for the numerous Christian Endeavour and Methodist periodicals for young people and children. He taught me the typewriter, and with my shorthand I took [7] most of his letters at dictation, and certainly earned my money. My monthly articles in the magazine were on such subjects as Christmas in England, Life at a Moravian School, The Black Forest, Travel in the Alps—anything that my limited experience enabled me to describe at first-hand, and on the whole the old gentleman seemed satisfied. The description of the children’s pictures, however, always made him chuckle, though he

never said why, and I wrote dozens of these a day, describing the picture of “King Canute and the Sea,” “Elijah in a Chariot of Fire,” “A Child Blowing Bubbles,” “The Wood-boring Beetle,” etc. etc.

He would dictate some of his articles of travel to me, and I would take them down in shorthand, and he often made such grotesque mistakes in facts that I quietly corrected these as I wrote, and when I read out the sentence to him he would notice the alteration and look at me over his spectacles and say:

“Thank you. Yes, I was wrong there. The fact is, I have so many articles to write that I compose two at a time in my mind, and they get muddled up. An editor should always be accurate, and Methodist readers are cranky and hard to please.” He was a Methodist parson himself, which did not prevent him saying exactly what he thought. He lunched off dates and bananas, which he kept in a bag beside his desk, and that same desk was in such disorder that he never could find what he wanted, and I was not surprised to learn that, before I came, the printers got the wrong papers, and that many of the children’s pictures got descriptions underneath that did not belong to them—for instance, a boy blowing a bubble was published over a few lines describing the habits of snakes, “as seen in our illustration,” and so forth.

I got on so well with the little Methodist that he wanted to come to the evening French classes I was giving at fifty cents a lesson to some of the clerks in the insurance office, and to bring his daughter with him. He said a little more knowledge of French would be very [8] good for him when he took his conducted tours of Canadian Methodists to Switzerland; but I did not rise to this, and persuaded him to wait till I could get a more select class to meet, perhaps, at his own house, where a girl could more suitably attend. For, to tell the truth, some of my pupils had a habit of coming slightly drunk—or, as they called it, “with a jag on.” He, however, would not wait, so I lost two good pupils!... Dr. Withrow, patient little man of kindly disposition! His faded black frock-coat, his spectacles high on his puckered forehead, his carpet slippers, his tobacco-stained white beard, his sincere beliefs and his striped trousers of a pattern I have always since labelled mentally as “Methodist trousers”—it is a gentle little memory tucked away among unkinder

ones, and I still hear him giving me my first and only lesson how to write. His paraphrase of “fatal facility” stays with me: “Fluency means dullness, unless the mind is packed with thought.” It stays with me because the conversation led to my asking if I might write an article for the monthly on the subject of Buddhism. Behind it lay an ever keener desire to write something on Hegel, whose philosophy I felt certain was based on some personal experience of genuine mystical kind.

“From what point of view?” he asked, his forehead puckering with amazement.

“That of belief,” I said, my mind bursting with an eager desire to impart information, if not also to convert.

He passed his hand across his forehead, knocking the spectacles off. Then, catching them with a fumbling motion which betrayed his perturbation, he inquired: “But, of course, Mr. Blackwood, not your own?”

The voice, the eyes, the whole attitude of the body made me realize he was prepared to be shocked, if not already shocked.

“Yes,” I replied truthfully, “my own. I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time.”

He stared for some time at me without a word, then smiled a kindly, indulgent, rather sceptical smile. “It would be hardly suitable,” he mentioned, as I felt his [9] whole being draw away from me as from something dangerous and unclean. Possibly, of course, he did not believe me; I am sure he prayed for me. Our relations seemed less cordial after that; he read most carefully every word I wrote in his magazine and children’s pages, but he never referred to the matter again.

My Methodist job, none the less, was a happy one; this first regular wage I had yet received in life gave me the pleasant sensation that I was launched. My connexion with Methodism ceased, not because I was dismissed or had failed to give satisfaction (indeed, the editor had just told me my salary was to be raised!), but because all the capital I should ever have was sent to me about that time from England—about £2,000—and I went into partnership with a farmer outside Toronto and bought some forty head of pedigree Jersey cattle.

[10]

CHAPTER III

The Islington Jersey Dairy, Messrs. Cooper and Blackwood, started business with a retail office in College Street, a number of milk carts bearing our names in black lettering upon a yellow background, and the supply farm at Islington, a lovely little hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, some six miles west of the city. We sold rich Jersey milk, we sold eggs and butter too. I gave picnics at our pretty little farm for customers I knew socially. The upper floors of the building in College Street we furnished, letting bedrooms at a dollar a week to young Englishmen, clerks in offices, and others. I engaged an old, motherly Englishwoman, Mrs. ’Iggins, with a face like a rosy apple, to “do” for us—she made the beds and cooked the breakfast—while her pretty daughter, in cap and apron, was our dairymaid. The plan did not work smoothly—the dairymaid was too pretty, perhaps; Mrs. Higgins too voluble. Complaints came from all sides; the lodgers, wildish young fellows in a free and easy country, made more promises than payments. One wanted a stove, another a carpet in his

bedroom, another complained about his bed. I had my first experience of drink and immorality going on under my very eyes.... Trouble—though mercifully of another kind—spread then to the customers. The milk began to go sour; it was too rich; it wouldn’t keep; the telephone rang all day long. Cooper, an experienced dairy-farmer, was at his wits’ end; every device for scouring the bottles, for cooling the milk before bringing it twice a day to the city, failed. At dinner parties my hostess would draw me tactfully aside. “The milk, I’m afraid, Mr. Blackwood,” she would murmur softly, “was sour again this morning. Will you speak about it?”

I spoke about it—daily—but Alfred Cooper’s only comment [11] was, “Say, have you got a bit more capital? That’s what we really want.”

That sour milk became a veritable nightmare that never left me. I had enough of milk. Yet, later in life, I found myself “in milk” again, but that time it was dried milk, a profitable business to the owners, though it brought me nothing. I worked six years at it for a bare living wage. But, at any rate, it couldn’t turn sour. It was a powder.

Alfred Cooper was a delightful fellow. I think some detail of how our partnership came to be may bear the telling. It points a moral if it does not adorn a tale. It may, again, prove useful to other young Englishmen in Canada similarly waiting with money to invest; but on the other hand it may not, since there can be few, I imagine, as green as I was then, owing to a strange upbringing, or as ignorant of even the simplest worldly practices. Of the evangelical training responsible for this criminal ignorance I will speak later.

Cooper, then, was a delightful fellow, fitting my ideal of a type I had read about—the fearless, iron-muscled colonial white man who fought Indians. The way we met was quite simply calculated—by a clerk in the bank where my English allowance of £100 a year was paid by my father. The clerk and I made friends—naturally; and one day—also naturally—he suggested a Sunday walk to Islington, some six miles down the lake shore. We could get tea at a farm he knew. We did. The praises of the Cooper family, who owned it, had already been sung. I was enchanted. So, doubtless, was the clerk.