Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI
Among the "incidents" that stand out from the dim, miserable smudge of fifteen months, is one that centres about a strange figure, and a most lovable fellow, named Angus Hamilton. Various odd fish drifted on to the paper as reporters, and drifted off again; they form part of an unimportant kaleidoscope. But Angus Hamilton, with his generosity, his startling habits, his undoubted ability, his sad and sudden end, stands out.
My position had improved since the publication of the Boyde story, chiefly, of course, because of the way the peerage had been dragged into its details and its headlines. I received no advance in salary, but I received an advance in respect. Even McCloy was different: "Why waste your time with us?" he spat at me like a machine-gun with a rapid smile. "Go home. Collect a lot of umbrellas and turned-up trousers and letters of introduction. Then come out to 'visit the States,' marry an heiress, and go home and live in comfort!" He was very lenient to my numerous mistakes. Other papers "got a beat" on me, I "fell down" times without number, I failed to get an interview with all and sundry because I could not find "the nerve" to intrude at certain moments into the lives and griefs of others. But McCloy winked the other eye, even if he never raised my pay. Other men were sacked out of hand. I stayed on. "You've got a pull with Mac!" said "Whitey." New men took the places of the lost. Among these I noticed an Englishman. Cooper noticed him too. "Better share an umbrella and go arm in arm," he said in his good-natured way. "He's a fellow-Britisher."
Why he came to New York I never understood. He was a stepson of Pinero, the playwright, and he received occasional moneys from Daniel Frohman, by way of allowance, I supposed, though I never knew exactly. Clever though he was, he was a worse reporter than myself--because he didn't care two straws whether he got the news or did not get it. He had a "pull" of some sort, with Laffan probably, we thought. He came to our boarding-house in East 19th Street. He had a bad stammer. His methods of reporting were peculiar to himself. Often enough, when sent out on a distasteful assignment, he simply went home. He had literary talent and wrote well when he liked. When Frohman handed out his money, he spent it in giving a big dinner to various friends, though he never included Kay, Louis, or myself among his distinguished guests. We had no dress-suits, for one thing.
Hamilton was perhaps twenty-one at the time, a trifle younger than myself, at any rate. He came downstairs sometimes to spend the evening in our room. In spite of his stammer and a certain shyness, he was always very welcome. He liked, above all, to listen to weird stories I used to tell, strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost-stories. When the Black Mass failed to attract, when Louis was uninspired by absinthe, or when no argument was afoot, such as whether poet or scientist were the highest type of human being, I discovered this taste for spinning yarns, usually of a ghostly character, and found, to my surprise, that my listeners were enthralled. At a moment's notice, no theme or idea being in my head, I found that I could invent a tale, with beginning, middle and climax. Something in me, doubtless, sought a natural outlet. The stories, at any rate, poured forth endlessly. "May I write that one?" Hamilton would ask. "It's a corker!" And he would bring his written version to read to us a few evenings later. "It ought to sell," he said, though I never heard that it did sell actually. Certainly, it never occurred to me that I might write and sell it myself. And Angus Hamilton is mentioned here because it was owing to a chance act of his that I eventually took to writing and so found my liberty.
This happened some twelve years later, when I was living in a room in Halsey Street, Chelsea, sweating my life out in the dried milk business and earning barely enough at the job to make both ends meet. A hansom stopped suddenly near me in Piccadilly Circus, its occupant shouted my name, then sprang out--Angus Hamilton.
He came round to my room for a talk over old days; he had done well for himself as Reuter's correspondent in the Manchurian War, had published a book on Korea, and was just off to China, again as Reuter's agent. He reminded me of the stories I used to tell in the New York boarding-house. I had written some of these, a couple of dozen perhaps, and they lay in a cupboard. Could he see them? Might he take them away and read them?
It had been my habit and delight to spend my evenings composing yarns on my typewriter, finding more pleasure in this than in any dinner engagement, theatre or concert. Why this suddenly began I cannot say, but I guess at a venture that the accumulated horror of the years in New York was seeking expression. Wandering in Richmond Park at night was the only rival entertainment that could tempt me from the joy of typing out some tale or other in solitude. "Jimbo" I had already written twice, several of the "John Silence" tales as well, and numerous other queer ghostly stories of one sort or another. From among these last Hamilton took a dozen or so away with him, but forgot to send them back as he had promised. He had gone to China, I supposed, and the matter had slipped his mind. It didn't matter much--I went on writing others; the stories were no good to anybody, the important thing being the relief and keen pleasure I found in their expression. But some weeks later a letter came from a publisher: "I have read your book.... My reader tells me ..." this and that "about your stories.... I shall be glad to publish them for you ...," and then a few words about a title and a request that I would call for an interview. It was some little time before I realized what the publisher was talking about. Hamilton, without asking permission, had sent my stories to him. Eveleigh Nash was the publisher, and his reader at that time was Maude ffoulkes, who later wrote Lady Cardigan's Memoirs, numerous other biographies, also "My Own Past," and to whom I owe an immense debt for unfailing guidance, help and encouragement from that day to this. I never forget my shrinking fear at the idea of appearing in print, my desire to use another name, my feeling that it was all a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book of my own published being too absurd to accept as true. My relief when, eventually, the papers gave it briefest possible mention, a few words of not unkindly praise or blame, I remember too, and my astonishment, some weeks later, to find a column in the Spectator, followed not long afterwards by an interesting article in the Literary Page of the Morning Post on the genus "ghost story," based on my book--by Hilaire Belloc, as he told me years later. All of which prompted me to try another book ... and after the third, "John Silence," had appeared, to renounce a problematical fortune in dried milk, and with typewriter and kit-bag, to take my precious new liberty out to the Jura Mountains where, at frs. 4.50 a day, I lived in reasonable comfort and wrote more books. I was then thirty-six.
Whether I should be grateful to my fellow-reporter on the Evening Sun is another matter. Liberty is priced above money, at any rate. I have written some twenty books, but the cash received for these, though it has paid for rent, for food, for clothing, separately, has never been enough to pay for all three together, even on the most modest scale of living, and my returns, both from America and England, remain still microscopic. Angus Hamilton I never saw again. A year or so later, while on a lecture tour in New York, things apparently went wrong with him. Life drove against him in some way. He put a sudden end to himself.
It seems strange to me now that so few incidents, and those such trivial ones, stand out from the long months of newspaper work in New York. Harrowing and dreadful stories, appalling in their evidence of human degradation, or poignant beyond words in their revelation of misery, temptation, failure, were my daily experience week after week, month after month. I might now have bulky scrap-books packed with thrilling plots of every kind, all taken from life. My affair with Boyde, moreover, had taught me how much of curious psychological interest lay behind the most ordinary arrest for a commonplace crime. Yet, of all these thousands of cases, I remember hardly a single one, while of uninteresting assignments Cooper gave me several still live vividly in my memory. Social reporting, in particular, both amused and distressed me, for which reasons probably it has not faded. Sitting in the lobby at Sherry's or Delmonico's when a ball or society function was in progress and taking the names of the guests as they entered, taking the snubs and rudeness of these gay, careless folk as well, was not calculated to add much to my self-respect. The lavish evidence of money, the excess, often the atrocious taste, even stirred red socialism in me, although this lasted only till I was out in the street again. Various connexions, distant or otherwise, of my family often, too, visited New York, while more than one had married an American girl of prominent name. It was odd to see Lord Ava, Dufferin's eldest son, walk up the steps, and odder still to jot down his name upon the list of "those present." There was an American woman, too, who bore my mother's name.... To see any of these people was the last thing on earth I wished, much less to speak to them or be recognized; they were in another world to mine; none the less, I had odd sensations when I saw them.... A ball of deaf-mutes, too, remains very clear, only the shuffling sound of boots, and of the big drum whose heavy vibrations through their feet enabled them to keep time, breaking the strange hush of the dancing throng, for ever gesticulating with busy fingers.
A much-coveted annual assignment once came my way, through the kindness of McCloy, I think--the visit to the winter quarters of Barnum and Bailey's Circus. Every newspaper was invited; the animals were inspected; an article was written; and the circus opened its yearly tour with immense advertisements. In the evening there was a--banquet! I came home in the early hours with my pockets stuffed for Kay and Louis--cigars, fruit, rolls, and all imaginable edibles that might bear the transport. But the occasion is clear for another reason--elephants and rats. The keeper told us that the elephants were terrified of rats because they feared the little beasts would run up their trunks. We doubted his story. He offered to prove it. In the huge barn where some twenty-five monsters stood, chained by the feet against the walls, he emptied a sackful of live rats. The stampede, the trumpeting of those frightened elephants is not easily forgotten. In the centre of the great barn stood masses of hay cut into huge square blocks, and the sight of us climbing for safety to the top of these slippery, precariously balanced piles of hay is not easily forgotten either.
The raid at dawn upon a quasi lunatic asylum, kept by an unqualified man, should have left sharper impressions than is the case, for it was certainly dramatic and sinister enough. Word came to the office that a quack "doctor" was keeping a private Home for Lunatics at Amityville, L.I., and that sane people, whom interested parties wished out of the way, were incarcerated among the inmates. The Health Department were going to raid it at dawn. It was to be a "scoop" for the Evening Sun, and the assignment was given to me.
I started while it was still dark, crossing the deserted ferry long before the sun was up, but when I reached the lonely house, surrounded by fields and a few scattered trees, I found that every newspaper in the city was represented. Even the flimsy men were there, all cursing their fate in the chilly air of early morning. No lights showed in the building. The eastern sky began to flush. With the first glimmer of dawn I saw the sheriff's men at their various posts, hiding behind trees and hedges, some crouching under the garden shrubberies, some concealed even on the veranda of the house. After a long and weary wait, the house began to stir; shutters were taken down; a window, then a door, were thrown open; figures became visible moving inside from room to room; and presently someone came out on to the veranda. He was instantly seized and taken away. After several men and women had been arrested in this way, a general raid of the whole house took place. A dozen of the sheriff's men rushed in. The nurses, male and female, the "doctor"-proprietor, his assistants, and every single inmate, sane or crazy, were all caught and brought out under arrest, before they had tasted breakfast.
It was broad daylight by this time. The whole party, of at least thirty, were assembled in a barn where a magistrate, brought down specially for the purpose, held an impromptu court. If some of the inmates were insane at the time and had been so before incarceration, others certainly had been deliberately made insane by the harsh and cruel treatment to which they had purposely been subjected. There were painful episodes, while the testimony was hurriedly listened to in that improvised court of inquiry. Yet it has all, all vanished from my memory. I forget even what the sequel was, or what sentence the infamous proprietor received later on from a properly-constituted court. Many a sane man or woman had been rendered crazy by the treatment, I remember, and the quack had taken heavy payments from interested relatives for this purpose. But all details have vanished from my mind. What chiefly remains is the wonder of that breaking dawn, the light stealing over the sky, the sweet smell of the country and the tang of the salt sea. These, with the singing of the early birds, and the great yearnings they stirred in me, left deep impressions.
One reason, I am sure, why such painful and dramatic incidents have left so little trace, is that I had a way of shielding myself from the unpleasantness of them, so that their horror or nastiness, as the case might be, never really got into me deeply. By a method of "detachment," as mentioned earlier, I protected my sensitive inner self from being too much wounded. I would depute just sufficient intelligence and observation to attend to the immediate work in hand, while the rest of me, the major portion, lay inactive, uninvolved, certainly inoperative. Painful and vivid impressions were, none the less, received, of course, only I refused to admit or recognize them. They emerged, years later, in stories perhaps, these suppressed hieroglyphics, but at the actual time I could so protect myself that I did not consciously record them. And hence, I think, my faint recollection now of a thousand horrible experiences during these New York reporting days.
This "detachment," in the ignorant way I used it, was, perhaps, nothing less than shirking of the unpleasant. At twenty-three I had not yet discovered that better method which consists in facing the unpleasant without reservation or evasion, while raising the energy thus released into a higher channel, "transmuting" it, as the jargon of 1922 describes it. "Detachment," however, even in its earliest stages, and provided it does not remain merely where it starts, is an acquisition not without value; it can lead, at any rate, to interesting and curious experiments. It deputes the surface-consciousness, or sufficient of it, to deal with some disagreeable little matter in hand, while the subconscious or major portion of the self--for those who are aware of possessing it--may travel and go free. It is, I think, Bligh Bond, in his "Gate of Remembrance," who mentions that the automatic writer whose revelations are there given, read a book aloud while his hand with the pencil wrote. Many a literary man, whose inspiration depends upon the stirrings of this mysterious subconscious region, knows that to read a dull book, or talk to a dull person, engages just enough of his surface consciousness to set the other portion free. Reading verse--though not poetry, of course--has this effect; for some, a cinema performance, with the soothing dimness, the music, the ever-shifting yet not too arresting pictures, works the magic; for others, light music; for others, again, looking out of a train window. There are as many ways as individuals. To listen to Mrs. de Montmorency Smith telling her tedious dream, while you hear just enough to comment intelligently upon her endless details, even using some of these details to feed your own more valuable dream, is an admirable method--I am told; and my own childish habit of squeezing "through the crack between yesterday and to-morrow" in that horrible bed of East 19th Street, merely happened to be my own little personal adaptation of the principle....
Incidents that had held a touch of comedy remain more clearly in the memory than those that held ugliness and horror only. A member of the Reichstag Central Party, for instance, Rector Ahlwardt by name, came out to conduct a campaign against the Jews. He was violently anti-semitic. I was sent to meet his steamer at Quarantine because I could speak German, and my instructions were to warn him that America was a free country, that the Jews were honourable and respected citizens, and that abuse would not be tolerated for a moment. These instructions I carried out, while we drank white wine in the steamer's smoking-room. Freytag, I noticed with amusement, himself a Jew, was there for the Staatszeitung.
Ahlwardt, however, was impervious to advice or warnings. At his first big meeting in the Cooper Union Hall, arriving late, I noticed at once two things: the seats were packed with Jews, while almost as many policemen stood about waiting; and the reporters' tables underneath the platform showed several open umbrellas. Both, I knew, were ominous signs. Ahlwardt himself, fat, beaming, in full evening dress, was already haranguing the huge audience. At first he was suave and gentle, even mealy-mouthed, but before long his prejudices mastered him and his language changed. Up rose a member of the audience and advised him angrily to go back to Germany. The police ejected the interrupter. Others took his place. Then suddenly the fusillade began--and up went the reporters' umbrellas! A flying egg caught the speaker full on his white shirt-front, another yellowed his dazzling white waistcoat, a third smashed over his fat face. Pandemonium reigned, during which the German melted out of the landscape and disappeared from his first and last anti-semite meeting in Noo York City. He attempted a little propaganda from the safe distance of Hoboken, N.J., but the Press campaign against him was so violent and covered him with such ridicule, that he very soon took steamer back to his Berlin. Every little detail of this incident, were it worth the telling, I could give accurately. There was no reason to be "detached," unless the protection of the World man's umbrella comes under that description.
It was somewhere about this time, too, that another trivial incident occurred, refusing to be forgotten. It, again, increased the respect shown to me by the staff of the paper--Americans being truly democratic!--though it did not increase my salary. A belted earl left his card on me. Coming in breathless from some assignment, I saw McCloy staring at me. "Is this for you?" he asked sarcastically, handing me a visiting-card. A brother-in-law, "His Excellency" into the bargain, "Governor of an Australian Province" to which he was then on his way, had climbed those narrow spiral stairs and asked for me. The letters after his name alone were enough to produce a commotion in that democratic atmosphere.... He was staying at the Brevoort House, and he certainly behaved "like a man," thought Kay and I, as we enjoyed more than one good dinner at his expense in the hotel. Proud of me he had certainly no cause to be, but if he felt ashamed, equally, he gave no sign of it. He even spoke on my behalf to Paul Dana, the editor-proprietor's son, who assured him that I was "a bright fellow"--a description the staff managed to get hold of somehow and applied to me ever afterwards. His brief visit, both because of its kindness and its general good effect, stand out, at any rate, in the "bright fellow's" memory. Like Dufferin in the Hub, he fired a shot for me. The months dragged by in their dreary, hated length, while numerous chances of getting more congenial work were tried in vain. Torrid summer heat, with its all-dissolving humidity, replaced the bitter winter. The deep, baked streets that never cooled, the stifling nights, the heat-waves when the temperature stood between 90 and 100 in the shade, and we toiled about the blazing pavements in shirt-sleeves carrying a palm-leaf fan, and when the moisture in the air made the very "copy-paper" stick to the hand that wrote upon it--those four months of New York summer were a misery. We had only our winter clothes to wear; a white collar was dirty pulp before nine in the morning; the dazzling electric-light sign flashed nightly in the air above 23rd Street with its tempting legend "Manhattan Beach Swept by Ocean Breezes," while the ice-carts in the streets were the nearest approach to comfort we could find. Many a time I followed one at close quarters to taste a whiff of cooler air. Life became unendurable, yet day followed day, night followed night, week followed week, till one's last breath of energy seemed exhausted by the steaming furnace of the city air.
The respectable quarters of the town were, of course, deserted, but the East Side, and the poorer parts, became a gigantic ant-heap, thousands of families sleeping on the balconies of the packed tenement houses, as though a whole underground-world had risen suddenly to the surface. Children died by the hundred; there were heat strokes by the score. It was too hot to eat. Reporting in such weather was a trying business.... A reporter was entitled to a fortnight's holiday in the year, and though none was due to me, McCloy let me go about the middle of October. I procured a railway pass and went off to Haliburton, Ontario, to spend my precious twelve days with a settler in the backwoods. He was a Scotsman I had met during our island days, and Haliburton was not far from our own delightful lake.... On my way back the cable came telling of my father's death while being brought home from Ems. I was spending the night with an old friend of his, in Hamilton, Ont., where he had a church. Originally in the navy, the evangelical movement had "converted" him, and he had taken to it with such zeal that a church and parish became a necessity of life. He was sincere and sympathetic, and the bad news could have come to me in no better place.
The next day I returned to New York and resumed my life of reporting on the paper.... The elections had been fought, and Tammany was beaten, a wave of Republicanism sweeping both State and City. A Committee of Investigation, under Senator Lexow, was appointed to examine into the methods of Tammany Hall, and for weeks I sat in court while the testimony was taken, and the most amazing stories of crime, corruption, wickedness and horror I ever heard were told by one "protected" witness after another. It brought to light a veritable Reign of Terror. John Goff was prosecuting counsel; he became Recorder, in place of Judge Smythe, as his reward. Boss Croker, head of Tammany, was conveniently in England and could not be subpœnaed. Other leaders, similarly, were well out of reach. Tammany, it was proved up to the hilt, had extorted an annual income of fifteen million dollars in illegal contributions from vice. The court was a daily theatre in which incredible melodrama and tragedy were played. With this thrilling exception, the work I had to do remained the same as before ... a second Christmas came round ... another spring began to melt the gloomy skies. Conditions, it is true, were a little easier, for Louis had left us and Kay was earning ten or fifteen dollars a week in Exchange Place, but by March or April, the eighteen months of underfeeding and trying work had brought me, personally, to the breaking point....
It was late in April I read that gold had been found in the Rainy River district which lay in the far north-*western corner of Ontario, the river of that name being the frontier between Minnesota State and Canada. The paragraph stating the fact was in a Sunday paper I read on my way to Bronx Park, and the instant I saw it my mind was made up. It was spring, the primitive instinct to strike camp and move on was in the blood, a nostalgia for the woods was in it too, and the prospect of another torrid, moist summer in the city at $15 a week was more than I could face. That scrap of news, at any rate, decided me. And, truth to tell, it was not so much the lure of gold that called me, as the lure of the wilderness. I longed to see the big trees again, to smell the old naked earth, to hear water falling and feel the great winds blow.... It was an irresistible call.
My one terror, as when I decided to buy the dairy two years before, was that someone would tell me there was no gold, that it was not worth going, or would prevent me in some other way. I deliberately hid from myself all unfavourable information, while I collected all possible items that might justify my intention. That same night I showed the paragraph to Kay. "I'll go," he said at once, "but let's get a third, a fourth too, if we can." He mentioned Paxton, an engineer, aged 35, who had just lost all his worldly possessions in speculation. Paxton said he would come with us. The fourth was R.M., son of the clergyman in Hamilton. R.M., whose father was brother to a belted earl, was an insurance agent, and making a good living at his job. He was my own age, also my own height. He was, besides, a heavy-weight amateur boxer of considerable prowess, and his favourite time for holding bouts in the ring was Sunday evenings, to which fact a rival clergyman had recently taken occasion to refer slightingly in his own pulpit. R.M., resenting the slur both upon himself and his father, had waited outside the church door one Sunday after the evening service, and when the clergyman emerged had asked for an apology--a public one in the pulpit. On being met with an indignant refusal, R.M. invited the other to "put 'em up." The thrashing that followed produced a great scandal in the little town, and R.M. found the place too hot to hold him. He therefore jumped at the idea of the goldfields.
The arrangements were made, of course, by letter, and took some little time; but on a given morning in early May R.M. was to join our train as it passed through Hamilton. I had been able to procure passes for the lot of us as far as Duluth, some fifteen hundred miles distant, on Lake Superior, and from there we should have to travel another hundred and fifty miles by canoe down the Vermilion River to Rainy Lake City, for the foundations of which the forest, I read, had already been partially cleared. Several further articles had appeared in the papers; it was a gorgeous country, men were flocking in, and the Bank of Montreal had established a branch in a temporary shack. Moreover, as mentioned before, it was spring.
That a man of Paxton's age and experience should have made this long expedition without first satisfying himself that it was likely to be worth while, has always puzzled me. He was an easy-going, good-natured man, whose full figure proclaimed that he liked the good things of life. But he was in grave difficulties, graver perhaps than I ever knew, and I think he was not sorry to contemplate a trip across the border. His attitude, at any rate, was that he "didn't care a rap so long as I get out of here." That Kay and myself and R.M. should take the adventure was natural enough, for none of us had anything to lose, and, whatever happened, we should "get along somehow," and even out of the frying-pan into the fire was better than the summer furnace of the city. R.M. wrote that he had a hundred dollars, Paxton produced fifty, I supplied the railway passes and added my last salary, together with some eight dollars that Ikey No. 2 was persuaded to hand over.
"Send some stuff along," fired McCloy, opening his eyes a little wider than usual when I told him. "Any hot stuff you get I'll use."
It has already been told how Kay missed the train by a few minutes, and how Whitey, waving his parting present of a bottle of Bourbon whisky, was the final picture Paxton and I had of New York City as the evening train pulled out.