Episodes Before Thirty

for not only was the room a small one, the cheapest Episodes Before Thirty in a cheap house, but it was occupied by three of us— three English men “on their uppers,” three big Eng- by Algernon Blackwood lishmen 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 CHAPTER I sleeping two in the bed, and one on the mattress we pulled off and kept hidden in the cupboard during A STRONG emotion, especially if experienced for the day. Mrs. Bernstein, denying her blood, won our the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene affection by charging eight dollars only, the price for where it occurred. I see a room in a New York board- two, morning coffee included; and Mrs. Bernstein's ing-house. I can touch the wooden bed, the two gas- face, fat, kindly, perspiring, dirty, is more vivid in my brackets beside the looking-glass, the white door of memory after all these years than that of the lady last the cupboard, the iron “register” in the wall that let in night who so generously mistook me for De Vere heated air, the broken sofa. The view from the dirty Stacpoole. Her voice even rings clear, with its Jewish windows towards the high roof of Tony Pastor’s lisp, its guttural German, its nasal twang thrown in: music hall in 14th Street, with a side glimpse of the “I ask my hospand. Berhaps he let you stay trees in Irving Place, show clearly. The rattle of the anozzer week.” Broadway cable cars, the clang of their bells, still What the husband said we never knew. He was come to me through that stifling August air, when usually too drunk to say anything coherent. What the shade thermometer stood at a hundred, with mattered to us was that we were not turned out at humidity somewhere about 95 per cent. Thoughts of the moment, and that, in the long run, the good- the sea and mountains, vainly indulged within those hearted woman received her money. Myalls, are easily remembered too. Certain objects in that room retain exceptional The room I am writing in now seems less actual clarity in my mind. If thought-pictures could be pho- than the one in the East 19th Street boarding-house, tographed, a perfect print of the bed and gas-bracket kept by Mrs. Bernstein, a German Jewess, whose hus- could be printed from my memory. With the former band conducted his own orchestra in a Second especially I associate the vermin, the hunger, and the Avenue restaurant. Though thirty years ago, it is rather tawdry criminal. more clearly defined for me than Lady X’s dining- I could describe that bed down to the smallest room where I dined last night, and where the lady I detail; I could draw it accurately, even to the carving; took in said graciously, “I simply loved your Blue were I a carpenter I could make it. All that I suffered Lagoon,’’ which, naturally, I was able to praise unre- in it, of physical and mental anguish, the vain long- servedly, while leaving her with the illusion as long as ings and despair, the hopes and fears, the loneliness, possible that she had made friends with its gifted the feverish dreams—the entire dread panorama still author. And this detailed clarity is due, I am sure, to hangs in the air between its stained brown foot and the fact that in that New York room I had my first the broken sofa, as though of yesterday. I can see a experience of three new emotions, each of which, tall man pass the end of it, one eye on me and separately, held horror. another on the door, opening a razor slowly as he Horror draws its lines deep; its pictures stand out went. I see the blue eyes narrowing in his white face, in high relief. In my case the horrors were, perhaps the treachery of the coward twisting his lip into a minor ones, but at the age of twenty-one—an excep- smirk. I can see him sleeping like a child beside me, tionally inexperienced twenty-one—they seemed touching me. Moving stealthily about the room in the important; and the fact that they were combined darkness too, as, thinking me asleep, he stole on bare entitles them to be considered major. They were feet to recover the confession of forgery I had forced three in number: the horror of loathsome vermin him to sign, I can still see his dim outline, and even running over my body night after night, the horror of hear his tread—a petty scoundrel unwittingly on his hunger, and the horror of living at close quarters with way to gaol. a criminal and degraded mind. The bed, thus, is vividly present in my memory. By All, as I said, came together; all were entirely new contrast with it, not quite so sharp, perhaps, and a sensations. “Close quarters,” too, is used advisedly, pleasanter feeling associated with it, another New EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY — 1 of 118 York sleeping-place rises in the mind—a bench in proved more filling that way, the false repletion las- Central Park. ted longer, the sense of bulk was more satisfying, the Here, however, the humour of adventure softens gnawing ceased, and the results, if temporary, at least the picture, though at the time it did not soften the made it possible to fall asleep. transverse iron arms which made it impossible to There are other details of that sordid New York stretch out in comfort. Nor is there any touch of hor- room which still retain their first disagreeable vivid- ror in it. Precise and detailed recollection fades. The ness, each with the ghost—a very sturdy ghost—of hoboes who shared it with me were companions, the emotion that printed it indelibly in the mind. even comrades of a sort, and one did not feel them These details are best mentioned, however, in their necessarily criminal or degraded. proper place and sequence. It should first be told They were “on their uppers” much as I was, and how we came to be there. 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 CHAPTER II no means of knowing, but I credited them with flit- ting backwards to a clean room somewhere and a soft WE arrived in New York towards the end of Octo- white bed, possibly to that ridiculous figure of ber, coming straight from five months in the Cana- immense authority, a nurse, just as my own flashed dian backwoods. Before that, to mention myself first, back to a night nursery in the Manor House, Cray- there had been a year in Canada, where, even before ford, Kent. That the seats I favoured were near the the age of twenty-one, I had made a living of sorts by Swings lent possibly another touch to the childhood’s teaching the violin, French, German, and shorthand. picture. Showing no special talent for any profession in par- The memory, anyhow, is a sweeter one than that o ticular, and having no tastes that could be held to the bed in East 19th Street, if less sharply defined. The indicate a definite career, I had come to Canada three cool fresh air, the dew, the stars, the smell of earth years before for a few weeks’ trip. My father, in an and leaves, were all of them clean, and no price asked official capacity, had passes from Liverpool to Van- at dawn. Yet the two—the bed and the bench—are couver, and we crossed in the Etruria, a Cunarder somehow linked together in my mind, the one invari- which my mother had launched. He was much feted ably calling up the other; and, thanks to them prob- and banqueted, and the C.P.R. Bigwigs, from Lord ably, no bed bothers me now, lumpy or sloping Strathcona and Sir William van Home downwards, though it be, in train, hotel, or lodging. I have slept in showed him all attention, placing an observation car strange places since—high in the Caucasus, on the at his disposal. General James, the New York post- shores of the Black Sea, on the Egyptian desert, on master, gave a dinner in his honour at the Union the banks of the Danube, in the Black Forest and League Club, where I made my first and last speech— Hungary—but each time the effort to get comfortable consisting of nine words of horrified thanks for coup- brought back the bed and the bench, and sleep soon ling “a chip of the old block,” as the proposer called followed to smother both. me, with the “Chief of the British Postal Service.” The gas-brackets, similarly, rise vividly before my A ludicrous wound to vanity helps it to stick in the eyes, associated with the pain, the weariness of hun- mind—my father wore no braces, and I copied him, ger; not of true starvation, but of weeks and months but—well, in his case no belt was necessary, whereas of undernourishment, caused by one meal a day. The I was slim. It suddenly dawned on me, as I spluttered relation between hunger and gas-brackets may seem my brief words, that a line of white was showing remote.

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