WESBLOCK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AUTOMATON

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WESBLOCK The Autobiography of an Automaton By Harry McDonald Walters

LONDON AND TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED 1914

DEDICATED TO MY SONS BY BIRTH, BY ADOPTION, AND BY RIGHTS OF AFFECTION

[Pg vii]

PREFACE

This work is in the form of a book. Outwardly a book, it is not a book in the ordinary sense. It is only an artless yarn. Wesblock is a common type, and he writes himself down as he knows himself or thinks he knows himself. His tale is not thrilling, except in so far as the understanding reader can see that he escaped being one of the great army of the unfit by a very narrow margin. Wesblock has in fact written as much for himself as for you. His story is an attempt to take stock of himself, and to discover whether life as he has experienced it is really worth while. If the book helps one poor soul to find what Wesblock found—that it is really worth while—it will have fulfilled its mission.

What he has said of persons and things only expresses his own opinions. They may not appear true to you; but they were true to him according to his light. He preaches sometimes; but not at you—at himself.

You may know more about Wesblock and his kind than he does, if so you can make a great book from this yarn by adding what you think necessary and rejecting what you know to be incorrect. Whatever impression the story of Wesblock makes upon you is the impression intended to be made.

The great failure of Wesblock’s life was brought about by many causes, the first of them far back in the beginning of things. He learned to think and know[Pg viii] too late to be of much use to himself or his immediate family, and this he tells you in his own way. You may know some of the people to whom he refers, and you may think he is not fair in some of his characterisations. He is, however, just as fair to others as he is to himself. Finally it may be as well to warn the Preface-reader that this is a story without a plot and without a hero.

[Pg 1]

WESBLOCK

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AUTOMATON

CHAPTER I

In a little mean street, which ends at a steep hill running down to the river through the Quebec suburbs of Montreal, stood about fifty years ago a tiny old-fashioned church built entirely of wood after the dog-house style of architecture. So lacking in imagination were the builders of this place of prayer that they went no further than the name of the street for the name of the church. The church was gloomy and cheerless within and looked as if it were partitioned off for cattle. The pews were all very high, plain and closed with doors. A narrow little winding stair led to the pulpit, a high and massive affair overhung by a huge sounding board. A large cushion of faded red rep trimmed with coarse woollen fringe and tassels decorated the reading-desk, which was flanked by two pretentious lamps of hideous design in wrought iron. The place had the odour of a damp cellar, and the air of a religion, stern and unforgiving to the sinner, and not very promising to the saved.

The little street is not to be found now, while the little church is a wreck, and its remains are smothered by[Pg 2] places of business. But in the early sixties it was a power among the plain, severe, hard-mouthed people who worshipped there an unforgiving God of wrath.

Nearly a year before I arrived on earth a marriage took place in this church between a boy and a girl. The boy was a lean, hatchet-faced youth with sharp eager blue eyes, set in a face marked already with experience of the world. He was dressed in decidedly foppish style, with a resplendent waistcoat and a collar of the old-fashioned “choker” type. His dress coat had brass buttons and very long tails, and his tight lavender trousers, matching in shade his kid gloves, were strapped down to the verge of splitting.

The little girl who was marrying the boy was a beautiful sad-eyed thing with rosy cheeks, a sensitive mouth and freckles on her nose. Her hands and feet were small and shapely. Her monstrously ugly clothes and extravagant hoops did not mar her appearance.

It was a very solemn function, this marriage; no music, no flowers, no guests; just a handful of the immediate relatives of the bride and groom. The father of the boy would almost have passed for the elder Weller; being a large, horsey-looking man, who might be otherwise characterised as an old buffer. The old buffer’s wife was a little prim woman dressed in grey.

The father of the bride was a military-looking man, tall and slim, with curly black hair; his wife a hook-nosed woman with a face like one of the old Spanish inquisitors.

The marriage being over, the small solemn crowd of wedding-guests drove away to a small sombre house in a highly respectable street, and made merry without the least appearance of joy.

[Pg 3]

If it is true that we human creatures are much affected by things that happen in the critical months before we come into the world, then the doings of the small house in that small Montreal street ought to be of some account in this chronicle. But since this is a true record, and I have no facts to go upon, I pass on now to the ordinary beginning of a boy’s life.

[Pg 4]

CHAPTER II

I arrived in the city of Montreal long before the time of telephones, electric street cars or automobiles. It was a dark morning in the month of January of the year One—I call it the year One because that is what it was to me.

Man cannot imagine eternity—Time that always was and always will be, without beginning or end. Hence the word Time to indicate the small measure of the infinite duration of eternity that insignificant man can grasp. The year 1913 in which I write means to most of us nothing more than the year following 1912, or so many years since a certain event vital to us. We can say “a thousand years ago” but only a very few are capable of conceiving such a period, and as for “world without end,” we cannot think it. For these reasons I say I arrived in the year One:—a wee, puny, unappreciable atom of a creature, weighing considerably under three pounds. Naked, wailing, hairless, incomplete even to the finger-tips, I was considered by the old women who hover about on these occasions as a distinct failure.

So small a specimen being difficult to adapt to the usual swaddling clothes, I was simply wrapped in cotton wool and put to bed in a cardboard box near the fire, without much hope or expectation on the part of my parents that I would survive.

At the time of my birth my father and mother were a most unsophisticated couple of very tender years,[Pg 5] my mother being seventeen and my father nineteen. It is not clear to me even now how far my insignificant start in life under their charge was destined to affect my later career. But as I look back, it seems of a part with the whole course of petty circumstances that made me into an automaton.

Before I learnt to speak and began to think, I grew very much as other children do. From a comparatively formless lump of human clay, I developed into a sturdy, well-shaped chubby urchin. At four years of age I was considered worthy of having my photograph taken, and one of my first recollections is of that remarkable incident and the Scotch cap with silver buckle which I donned for the occasion. This brings me to the childish litany of “Why?” and “How?” so often heard during these early days. By this time I had already become dimly conscious that being alive was a great mystery. The “Why” and the “How” of it gave me indeed much thought. I had questions to put on the subject every day; but received very unsatisfactory answers from my parents. Other children, moreover, did not help me much; for they did not understand me.

The fact of my being born in the middle of winter may account for my loving that season beyond all others as a small boy. Winter was so different then from what it is now. The snow was not cleared away as soon as it fell but was allowed to accumulate till spring. It lay upon the sidewalks or was shovelled into the street until it was sometimes six or seven feet high. Huge mounds of it bordered every street, with passages cut in steps through the frozen barriers, here and there, to allow of the coming and going of the townsfolk. When walking on one side of the street[Pg 6] you could not see the people on the other side, and the sleighs were on a road as high as a man’s head above the walk. The street cars were built on runners, and passed along any convenient street that offered a clear road. They were drawn by horses, an extra pair being stationed at the foot of every hill to help the car up the grade. The floors of these vehicles were carpeted with straw, and after dark they were lighted by small smoky oil-lamps.

The streets themselves were lighted by gas-lamps, and at dusk men with ladders could be seen running from one lamp-post to another, and climbing up to kindle a dim flame which only made the darkness less black. But to return to the snow-mountains, for so they seemed to me, children would dig wonderful houses and castles out of their dirty-white heaps. For other reasons I learnt to love the snow. I discovered that by climbing on top of a broad bank of it, where I could lie on my back and look at the sky, it was possible in that attitude to think wonderful things. One day, while sprawling in bliss on top of such a bank, and chewing a hole in one of the beautiful red mits knitted by my mother, I was surprised by a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind who had spied me and climbed up after me.

“What are you doing there, my little man?” he asked.

“I’m dreaming,” I replied.

“Dreaming, about what?” he inquired.

“About being alive,” I answered. The man laughed.

“You can’t be dreaming about being alive,” he said; “you are alive.”

“Yes,” I said, “but why?”

“Good gracious child,” he exclaimed, reaching into[Pg 7] his trouser pocket, “here is a penny for you, go and buy candy. No one can answer that question.”

At another time, after a dream on the snow, I ran into my mother and told her I had seen God. She was shocked, and even inclined to be angry. She threatened to whip me for telling her such a lie, but could not in reason do so, for my questions were too much for her.

“How do you know I did not see God?” I asked.

“Because no one can see Him,” she answered.

“Did any one ever see Him?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“How do you know?”

“We are told so in the Bible.”

“Who put it in the Bible?”

“Good men.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, Jack, you are too young to understand. Go away and don’t tell lies; go and play!”

But I wanted sorely to understand this great matter. Whether I really believed that I had seen God, it would be hard to say. Either I deluded myself, as many imaginative and emotional children do, or half in innocence, half in childish slyness, laid a scheme to surprise my mother. For the mystery of my being continually teased me.

The question whence I had come was not to be set aside; and I cross-examined my mother about it frequently without getting much information. The only reply I got was that God had made me, which I understood as well then as I do now.

This question of mine, “How do you know?” became a byword in the family. Father thought it very amusing, and used it very much as an actor uses a bit[Pg 8] of gag. It is a very disconcerting question when put earnestly.

Our family, I may explain, taken in all its branches, was a very large one, and of the common sort that would be called middle class in England. My father, who was the only son of my grandmother’s third husband, was a King to all the tribes,—to the grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, the various great aunts, and the one great-uncle and the one great-grandfather—who lived during my childhood. They all bowed down to him, and he dominated them, although by calling he was only a book-keeper in a wholesale grocery firm. My mother, let me add, was the eldest daughter of a Civil servant in the Montreal Post Office.

My seventh year is a very distinct memory, as a period of my life associated in my mind with very momentous happenings. Up to the age of seven I prospered in my health although I was never what is called robust. It was very nearly my last year, for fate, not satisfied with bringing a weakling into the world before its time, now visited me with scarlet fever and all the dreadful complications known to that disease. I lay for months in bed, part of the time delirious, and was reduced to a mere skeleton. I remember the sufferings of convalescence, but have no very distinct recollection of the actual illness, beyond the delirium it brought on, which left a curious impression on my mind. During its course I seemed to be two personalities, distinct but attached, one capable of observing the other. I strove and argued continually with myself, and again the great question of where I had come from haunted and worried me. Clearly I must have come from somewhere, and must also have had existence prior to my arrival; but where[Pg 9] had I been? Nearly my whole delirium turned upon

this question. “God made you,” I would say to myself; then I would scream aloud, “How do you know, how do you know?” repeating it over and over again consciously, but unable to stop and rest. I had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and remembered that Topsy had wisely remarked, in reply to a similar question, “I specks I growed.” But the suspicion that I had grown was not satisfactory to me; I wanted to know. And here I may pause a moment to reflect that among my memories is none of learning to read. It seems to me that I always knew how. No doubt my mother taught me while I was still very young, using the newspaper as text-book. Before I was seven I had read many books, or mother had read them to me, for she was a very good reader and loved an understanding listener.

Scarlet fever was a very much more dreadful disease when I was a child than it is now-a-days. Not only have methods of treatment improved greatly, but the disease itself is not so deadly, or perhaps man’s resisting powers have increased. It is a pity that diseases like everything else do not grow old and weak and lose their power to destroy.

After I had been ill for several weeks a consultation of the doctors was held, and they declared solemnly that my recovery was impossible, since with every organ diseased or weakened I could not live. In any case it hardly seemed worth while to live, for I was both deaf and dumb. However there must have been within me some great vital power of resistance that the doctors did not know about, seeing that I finally made a kind of recovery, and persisted on my precarious way.

Trained nurses were not common in those days. I[Pg 10] probably should have died if they had been. Only the great love of a mother can give the nursing that I received. Surely many times she must have wished that death would end the horrible struggle, but still she fought for me and hoped.

I was naturally of a tender, clinging and dependent character, and my illness certainly intensified those unfortunate characteristics. As I recovered, mother taught me things. I could not hear or speak; but I could see and use my hands, and she taught me to knit and tat and crotchet. These small and much despised things, I believe, helped to save my life. If I had been forced to lie idle amidst the great silence of deafness, unable to speak, I surely would have died of mental inanition. Using my hands renewed my interest in life. Speech at last came slowly back, hearing to some extent, and for the second time in my life I learned to walk.

I can see myself now as I struggled up on my poor shaky pins. How I sweated and trembled. How proud I was! I was exultant because I could stand up. I felt as though I were some wild and blood-thirsty barbarian who had slain a powerful enemy by a great feat of strength. I stood up on my own legs, every nerve atingle, every muscle trying to do its office. I held on to chairs and tables while the moisture fairly trickled down my face, and even the backs of my hands were wet. “Ah ha!” I said to myself, “I knew I could do it.”

I made an effort to walk from one chair to another, only a couple of steps, and fell prone upon my face. It was a disaster, a great failure. I was heart-broken and burst into a violent fit of crying, refusing to be comforted. This little scene broke my mother down. I[Pg 11] had never seen her weep when I was fighting the scarlet fever. Now we wept together.

My mother at this time was twenty-four years of age. She was very beautiful. Her hair, which she wore severely plain, was black as jet. Her cheeks were pink, and soft and velvety to the touch; on one of them she had a mole. Her eyes were dark and deep set, with dark shadows under them. Her expression was sad, sweet and full of love; her smile pleasant but wistful. She had a great heart, but not much mind of her own, being completely dominated by my father, whom she worshipped with a foolish worship.

There was a kind of tacit conspiracy between my mother and me against my father. He expected to have his own way in all things; but in a great many cases he only thought he had it.

When I recovered from the scarlet fever, our fortunes took a turn for the better. Father became a partner in the firm for whom he had worked since his thirteenth year. We moved from our middle-class environment into a new house that he had bought in a better neighbourhood. We kept a horse, too, which afforded mother and me a great deal of pleasure.

My father’s name was John H. Wesblock. He came, as I have already hinted, of a long, unillustrious line; and while his name and many of his peculiarities became mine, I have added no lustre to the commonplace stock from which we both sprang.

The personality of my father was peculiar. He was a curious mixture of good and evil. As he was an Englishman, of course he thought there was only one person in the house of any consequence, and that person the head of the family—himself. He had wonderful powers in some directions, and was very weak in others.[Pg 12] He was very self-opinionated, and had an uncertain temper which broke out on slight provocation. I can hardly say that I remember him at that time with great affection. I feared him without respecting him. His vanity was abnormal. His dress was showy and extravagant and he loved display of a kind that did not cause him any great effort or trouble. He always looked so well dressed that he appeared altogether too new. He wore a low-cut dress waistcoat showing a vast expanse of white shirt front, a frock-coat with ample skirt, light trousers, generally lavender or pale tan, and white gaiters over exceptional shoes. His feet and hands were very small.

He was a prosperous self-made business man with great ambition, but love of luxury sapped his energy and he never arrived. Both he and mother were very religious in the old early Victorian way which I always thought did not tend to make our home happy and cheerful, in fact I have seldom seen an extremely religious home which was a happy one.