Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 32
CHAPTER XXXII
Six weeks later, when the torrid summer heat was waning and September breezes had begun to cool the streets, the nights, at any rate, I found myself a reporter on the staff of the New York Times. My salary of $35 a week seemed incredible. It was like coming into a fortune, and its first effect was to make a miser of me. I had learned the value of the single cent; I found myself fearful of spending even that cent. I understood why people who pass suddenly from want to affluence become stingy, complaining always of being hard-up. I determined to save. I opened an account in a Savings Bank against another rainy day. This trait, acquired in my unhappy New York period, remains in me still, I notice. Never have I known from that time to this what it means to be comfortably off, free from financial anxiety for more than a month or two ahead, yet each time an extra bit of money comes in, I am aware of the instinct to be extremely, unnecessarily careful of each penny. The less I have, the more reckless I feel about spending it, and vice versa.
Those six weeks, however, before Muldoon sent for me, proved the most painful and unhappy of all my New York days. There was something desperate about them; I reached bottom. It was the darkest period before the dawn, though I had no certainty that the dawn was breaking. My income from the eau de Cologne business was ended, my free-lance work struck a bad streak, the artists were still out of town, the studios consequently empty; my violin pupil had gone to Boston. It was during this August that I slept in Central Park, and passed the night—for there was not much sleep about it—beneath the Bronx Park trees as well, though I had to walk all the long weary way to get there. It was, also, par excellence, the height of the dried-apple season. With the exception of Old Louis, occasionally Mullins too, I had no companionship. Brodie, who by the way received no money from the insurance companies, but equally, escaped a worse disaster, I never saw again. The post on the Times, meanwhile, seemed far away, highly problematical too. My comforts were Bronx Park, occasionally open-air music, Louis, and my own dreams, speculations and, chief of all, the Bhagavad Gita.... Hours I spent in the free libraries. Never, before or since, did I read so many books in so short a time. This free reading, of course, never stopped for a moment all the years I lived in New York, but during these six weeks it reached a maximum.
From the 'vantage ground of easier days I have often looked back and wondered why I made no real effort to better myself, to get out of the hated city, to go west, for a railway pass was always more or less within my power, and other fellows, similarly in difficulties, were always changing occupations and localities. It was due, I think, to a kind of resignation, though rather a fierce resignation, a kind of obstinate spirit of acceptance in me. "Take it all, whatever comes," said this spirit. "Dodge, shirk, avoid nothing. You have deserved it. Exhaust it then. Suck the orange dry." And, as if life were not severe and difficult enough, as it was, I would even practise certain austerities I invented on my own account. Already I felt myself immeasurably old; life seemed nearly ended; external events, anyhow, did not really matter....
A rolling-stone sees life, of course, but collects little, if any, fruit; though I made no determined efforts to escape my conditions at this time, a new adventure ever had attractions for me. Having once tasted the essence of a particular experience, I found myself weary of it and longing for a new one. This vagabondage in the blood has strengthened with the years. A fixed job means prison, a new one sends my spirits up. Routine is hell. To take a room, a flat, a job by the year, means insupportable detestation of any of them soon afterwards. It is a view of life that hardly goes to make good citizenship, but, on the other hand, it tends to keep the heart young, to prevent too early hardening of the mental arteries, while it certainly militates against the dread disease of boredom. Une vie mouvementée has its vagabond values. To a certain side of my nature Old Louis's wiser epitaph ("Sorry I spoke; sorry they spoke") made less appeal than some anonymous verses I came across in Scribner's Magazine with the title "A Vagrant's Epitaph"—verses I knew by heart after a first reading:
Love could not hold him; Duty forged no chain.
The wide seas and the mountains called him,
And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain.
Revel might hold him for a little space;
But, turning past the laughter and the lamps,
His eyes must ever catch the luring Face.
Rare lips a-quiver, silently implore;
But he must ever turn his furtive head,
And hear that other summons at the door.
The dark firs knew his whistle up the trail.
Why tarries he to-day? . . . And yesternight
Adventure lit her stars without avail.
The plague of possessions, at any rate, has never troubled me, either actually or in desire, while the instinct to reduce life to its simplest terms has strengthened. The homeless feeling of living in my trunks is happiness, the idea of domesticity appals, and the comforts of rich friends wake no echo in me, assuredly no envy. A home, as a settled place one owns and expects to live in for years, perhaps for ever, is abhorrent to every instinct in me, and when acquaintances show off with pride their cottage, their flat, their furniture, their "collections," even their "not a bad little garden, is it?" my heart confesses to a vague depression which makes it difficult to sympathise and give them my blessing. Life, at its longest, is absurdly brief before health and energy begin to slip downhill; it is mapped with a cunning network of ruts and grooves from which, once in, it is difficult to escape; only the lucky ones are never caught, although the "caught" are lucky perhaps in another way--they do not realize it. Yet even to-day, when times are bad and the horizon not too clear for some time ahead, the old dread of starvation rises in me; I never see apple rings in a grocer's window without getting their taste and feeling them rise and swell within me like some troublesome emotion....
To my year and a-half on the New York Times I look back with nothing but pleasure; the slogan, "All the news that's fit to print," was practised; and the men I worked with were a good company of decent fellows. Muldoon, a fighting Irishman with a grim fierce manner and a warm heart, had a sense of humour and a gift for encouraging his reporters that made them love him. C. W. Miller was editor in chief, and Carey, manager. Who owned the paper I have forgotten, but it was not Colonel Jones who was present at the Union League Club dinner to my father, when I made my maiden speech some nine years before. Hours of work were from noon until the night assignment was turned in, which meant any time from ten o'clock onwards; though, as emergency man, in case of something happening late, I often had to stay in the office till after one in the morning. Proper food, a new suit, comradeship with a better class of men, came, perhaps, just in time for me. I remember the pleasure of writing home about my new post. I had a dress-suit again. I saved $15 a week.
Reporting for a New York newspaper can never be uneventful, but the painful incidents of life make deeper impressions than the pleasant ones. To meet the former means usually to call upon one's reserves, and memory hence retains sharper pictures of them corresponding to the greater effort. On the Times I was happy.
Two incidents stand out still in the mind, one creditable pleasing to vanity; the other, exactly the reverse. The latter, though it annoyed Muldoon keenly at the moment, fortunately for me appealed to his sense of humour too. He had given me an evening off--that is, all I had to do was to write a brief report of a Students' Concert in which his little niece was performing.
"Without straining veracity," he mentioned with a grin, "ye might perhaps say something kind and pretty about her!" He winked, whispering her name in my ear. "Have ye got it?" he asked fiercely. I nodded. Was I thinking of something else at the moment? Was my mind in the woods that lovely evening in spring?
At the concert I picked out the name I remembered and wrote later a sturdy eulogistic notice of an atrocious performer, saying the very prettiest and nicest things I could think of, then went home to a coveted early bed. But Muldoon's grim smile next day, as I reported at his desk for an assignment, gave me warning that something was wrong. He did not keep me in suspense. I had selected for my praise, not only the crudest performer of the concert--that I already knew--but one whom all the other pupils disliked intensely, and whose name they particularly hoped would be omitted altogether. The niece I had not even mentioned.
The other incident that stands out after all these years was more creditable. Dr. Lyman Abbott, Editor of the Outlook, which once Henry Ward Beecher edited as the Church Union, was preaching in Beecher's Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, a series of sermons on "The Theology of an Evolutionist," and Muldoon had persuaded the editor-in-chief that a full report on the front page every Monday would be a credit to the paper. His proposal was agreed to, apparently without too much enthusiasm. The Irishman was determined to justify it. "I want ye to take it on," said Muldoon to me. "Ye can write shorthand. Make it 150." A column was 100. To have a column and a-half on the front page, if I could do it well, would be a feather in my cap. But my shorthand was poor, I was out of practice too, bad notes are impossible to read for transcription, and mistakes would mean angry letters of correction from Dr. Abbott, probably.
Monday was my day off. I went to Plymouth Church with a new notebook and three soft lead pencils, duly sharpened at both ends. In the brief interval before Sunday I practised hard. The church was packed to the roof, as I sneaked up the aisle--an unfamiliar place, I felt it!--to a little table placed immediately beneath the pulpit. I came in after the service, but just in time for the sermon. There were no other reporters present. It thrilled me to see Dr. Abbott, who, as a young man of twenty-three, had heard Lincoln speak on slavery.
The "Theology of an Evolutionist" was an arduous assignment that strained every faculty I possessed, but indifferent shorthand lay at the root of the strain. Dr. Abbott's delivery was sure and steady, more rapid than it sounded. He never hesitated for a word, he never coughed, or cleared his throat, or even sneezed. There were none of those slight pauses which help a poor shorthand-writer to pick up valuable seconds. The stream of words poured on relentlessly, and the rate, I should judge, was 250 a minute. Verbatim reporting was impossible to me. I had to condense as I went along, and to condense without losing sense and coherence was not easy. My pencil was always eight or ten words behind the words I actually listened to, and the Pitman outlines for the words I wrote down had to be recalled, while, at the same time, memory had to retain those being actually uttered at the moment. Being out of practice I often hesitated over an outline, losing fractions of a second each time I did so. These outlines come automatically, of course, to a good writer. Then there was the sense, the proportion, the relative values of argument and evidence to be considered--matters that could not be adjusted in the office afterwards, when there was barely time, in any case, to transcribe my notes before going to Press. The interest I felt in the subject, moreover, delayed my mind time and time again. Occasionally a pencil-point would break as well, and turning it round in my hand meant important delay in a process where each fraction of a second counts. In the office afterwards, each page transcribed was whipped away by a printer's devil before it could be reconsidered and re-read. I invariably went to bed after these evenings in church with a splitting headache; but the 150 appeared duly on the front page every Monday morning, though whether good or bad I had no inkling. My impression, due to Muldoon's silence, was that my reports were hardly a success.
When the last of the long series came my opening report was confused and inaccurate owing to an announcement from the pulpit which embarrassed me absurdly. Dr. Abbott mentioned briefly that numerous requests to print the sermons had reached him, but that he did not propose to do so. He referred those interested, instead, to the reports in the Times which, he took pleasure in saying, were excellent, accurate and as satisfactory as anything he could do himself. Being the only reporter present, I felt conspicuous at my little table under the pulpit in the immense building. But I remember the pleasure too. It was an announcement I could use, was bound to use, indeed, in my own report next day. Muldoon would be pleased. On the Tuesday morning, when I appeared at his desk, he looked at me with such a fierce expression that I thought I was about to be dismissed. "Have ye been to your locker?" was all he said. In the locker, however, I found a letter from Dr. Abbott to the editor-in-chief, thanking him for the reports of the sermons, reports, he wrote, "whose brevity, accuracy, and intelligence furnish a synopsis I could not have improved upon myself." He added, too, another important sentence: "by your reporter whom I do not know." It was not favouritism therefore. A brief chit to be handed to the cashier was in my locker too. My salary was raised to $40 a week. The headaches had proved worth while.
The year and a-half with the Times was a happy period, though long before it ended I had begun to feel my customary weariness of the job, and a yearning for something new. The newspaper experience, which began with the Evening Sun, was exhausted for me. The pleasant and unpleasant sides of it I knew by heart. Though I took no action, my mind began to cast about for other fields. I had saved a little cash. My thoughts turned westwards, California, the Pacific Coast, the bright sunshine and blue waters of the southern seas even. I was past twenty-seven. To be a New York reporter all my life did not appeal. Nor was it yet time to go back to England. No trace of literary faculty, nor any desire to write, much less a consciousness that I could write perhaps, had declared themselves. My summer holidays of two weeks I spent again in the backwoods, with a view to some woodland life which was to include, this time, Old Louis, too. Obstacles everywhere made me feel, however, that it was not to be, for though they were obstacles I could have overcome, I took them as an indication that fate had other views for my future. When a thing was meant to be, it invariably came of itself, I found. My temperament, at any rate, noted and obeyed these hints. Old Louis, too, who was to collect his poems in our woodland home, to write new ones as well, met all practical suggestions with, "Let us consider, Figlio, a little longer first." He was to write also a political history of the United States and "I must collect more data before I am ready to go." The dread of being fixed and settled, a captive in a place I could not leave at a moment's notice, did not operate where Nature was concerned. The idea of living in the forests had no fear of prison in it.
Events, moreover, which brought big changes into my life had always come, I noticed, from outside, rather than as a result of definite action on my own part. A chance meeting in a hotel-bar set me reporting, a chance meeting with Mullins landed me on the Times, a chance meeting with Angus Hamilton in Piccadilly Circus led to my writing books, a chance meeting with William E. Dodge now suddenly heaved me up another rung of life into the position of private secretary to a millionaire banker.
To me it has always seemed that some outside power, but an intelligent power, pulled a string each time, and up I popped into an entirely new set of circumstances. This power pushed a button, and off I shot in a direction at right angles to the one I had been moving in before. This intelligent supervision I attributed in those days to Karma. In the mind, though perhaps with less decision there, it operated too. A book, a casual sentence of some friend, an effect of scenery, of music, and an express-lift mounts rapidly from the cellar of my being to an upper story, giving a new extended view over a far, a new horizon. Much that puzzles in the obscurity of the basement outlook becomes clear and simple. The individual who announces the sudden change is unaware probably how vital a rôle he plays in another's life. He is but an instrument, after all.
When, by chance, I found Mr. Dodge next me in a Broadway cable car, my first instinct was to slip out on to the outside platform before he had seen me, with, simultaneously, a hope that if he had seen me, he would not recognize me. He was a friend of my father's. We had dined at his house on our first visit to New York, and once or twice since then our paths had crossed for a moment or two. He was a man of great influence, and of tireless philanthropy, a fine, just, high-minded personality. He stared hard at me. Before I could move, he had spoken to me by name. "How was I getting along?" he inquired kindly, and did I "like New York?" What was I "doing at the moment?"
I seized the opportunity and told him of my longing to get out of newspaper work. He listened attentively; he examined me, I was aware, more than attentively. In the end he asked me to come and see him for a personal chat--not in his office, but in his house. He named a day and hour. An invitation to his office I should have disregarded. It was the kindness of "my house" that won me. But the interview was disappointing, rather embarrassing as well to me. He asked many personal questions about my life and habits, it was all very business-like and chilling. In the end he mentioned vaguely that James Speyer, of Speyer Bros., was thinking, he believed, of engaging a secretary, and that possibly--he could not say for certain--he might, when he next saw him, suggest my name for the post. "Of course," he added, still more cautiously, "you will understand I must make inquiries about you at the Times." He promised to let me know if anything further came of it. For many weeks I heard no word. Then I wrote. The reply asked me to call at his office. He was kindness and sympathy personified. "The Times gives you an excellent character," he informed me, "and say they will be very sorry to lose you. I am sorry there has been this delay." He handed me a personal letter to James Speyer. He invited me to dinner in his house the following evening. Before brushing up my dress-suit for the occasion--my first dinner in a decent house for many years--I had seen Mr. Speyer and had been engaged at a salary of $2,000 a year for a morning job, from 8 till 2 o'clock daily, with a general supervision during the day of his town and country houses, horses, servants, charities, and numerous other interests.
The dinner in Mr. Dodge's Fifth Avenue palace was a veritable banquet to me. Immediately opposite, across the avenue, was the other palace occupied by James Speyer. It was all rather bewildering, a new world with a vengeance. Years among the outcast of the city had not precisely polished my manners, nor could I feel at my ease thus suddenly among decent folk again. I remember being absurdly tongue-tied, shy and awkward, until M. de Chaillu, who was present, began to talk about books, stars, natural history, and other splendid things, and took me with him into some unimaginable seventh heaven. I had moments of terror too, but the strongest emotion I remember is the deep gratitude I felt towards Mr. Dodge. A further tiny detail clings as well, when I was invited for a week-end to the Dodge country house on the Hudson, and was bathing with the son. He was, like myself, six feet three inches, well built, but well covered too, his age perhaps close on forty. As we stood on the spring-board waiting for our second dive, he looked at me. "You certainly haven't got a tummy," he remarked with admiring envy. "I wish I were as thin!" And the casual words made a queer impression on me. I realized abruptly how little of certain real values such people knew ... how little these protected people ever could know. I still see his admiring, good-humoured, kindly expression, as he said the empty words....
James Speyer, brother of Edgar, who later became a baronet and member of the Privy Council, was what we called in New York a "white man." I hardly think I proved an ideal private secretary. His patience and kindness began at the first trial interview I had with him, when my shorthand--he dictated a newspaper financial paragraph full of unfamiliar terms--was not at its best, "not very grand," were the actual words he used. As for bookkeeping, I told him frankly that "figures were my idea of hell," whereupon, after a moment's puzzled stare, he laughed and said that keeping accounts need not be among my principal duties. A clerk from the office could come up and balance the books every month. The phrase about hell, the grave expression of my face, he told me long afterwards, touched his sense of humour. The huge book in which I kept his personal accounts proved, none the less, a daily nightmare, with its nine columns for different kinds of expenditure--Charities, Housekeeping, Presents, Loans, Personal, and the rest. It locked with a key. I spent hours over it. No total ever came out twice alike. Yet Mr. Hopf, the bright-eyed, diminutive German from the office, ran his tiny fingers up and down those columns like some twinkling insect, chatting with me while he added, and making the totals right in a few minutes. Max Hopf, with his slight, twisty body, looked like an agile figure of 3 himself. In his spare time, I felt sure, he played with figures. He was a juggler in my eyes.
The first week in my new job was a nervous one, though Mr. Speyer's tact and kindly feeling soon put me at my ease. My desk at first was in a corner of an unused board room in the bank, where I sat like a king answering countless letters on a typewriter. The shorthand was discarded; I composed the replies from verbal hints and general indications. Clerks treated me with respect; language was decent; surroundings were sumptuous; it was some time before I "found" myself. The second morning a caller was shown in, somebody to see Mr. Speyer. He took a chair beside my desk, stared fixedly at me, opened his mouth and called me by my Christian name--it was the Exchange Place banker who used to stay in my father's house and who had last seen me in bed at East 19th Street. He congratulated me. I found out, incidentally, then, how much my swindling friend of those days had "touched" him for on my behalf ... and repaid it.
James Speyer proved a good friend during the two years or so I spent with him; he treated me as friend, too, rather than as secretary. My office was transferred to his palatial residence in Madison Avenue, a new house he had just built for himself, and it was part of my job to run this house for him, his country house at Irvington on the Hudson as well. These establishments, for a millionaire bachelor, were on a simple scale, though the amount of money necessary for one man's comforts staggered me at first. A married French couple were his chief servants, the woman as cook, the man as butler; they had been with him for a long time; they eyed the new secretary with disfavour; they were feathering their nests very comfortably, I soon discovered. My hotel experience in Toronto stood me in good stead here. But Mr. Speyer was a generous, live-and-let-live type of man who did not want a spirit of haggling over trifles in his home. I gradually adjusted matters by introducing a reasonable scale. The French couple and I became good friends. I enjoyed the work, which included every imaginable duty under the sun, had ample time for exercise and reading, and my employer's zest in the University Settlement Movement I found particularly interesting.
James Speyer was more than a rich philanthropist: he had a heart. The column for Charities and Presents in the book Mr. Hopf juggled with once a month was a big one, while that for Personal Expenditure was relatively small. When I dined alone with him in the luxurious panelled room I realized that life had indeed changed for me. His house, too, was filled with beautiful things. He had rare taste. His brother Edgar, whose English career had not yet begun, stayed with him on his periodical visits from Frankfurt. There was music then, big dinner-parties too, to which I was sometimes invited. Social amenities were not always quite easy, for the position of a Jew in New York Society was delicate, but I never once knew James Speyer's taste or judgment at fault. His intelligence showed itself not only in finance; he was intelligent all over; imaginatively thoughtful for all connected with him, and his philanthropy sprang from a genuine desire to help the unfortunate.
For Jews I have always had a quick feeling of sympathy, of admiration. I adore their intelligence, subtlety, keen love of beauty, their understanding, their wisdom. In the best of them lies some intuitive grip of ancient values, some artistic discernment, that fascinates me. I found myself comparing Alfred Louis with James Speyer; their reaction, respectively, upon myself showed clearly again the standard of what, to me, was important: the one, alone among his unchangeable, imperishable "Eternities," unaware of comfort as of fame, unrecognized, unadvertised, lonely and derelict, yet equally as proud of his heritage as the other who, in a noisier market sought the less permanent splendours of success and worldly honour. One filled his modern palace with olden beauty fashioned by many men, the other had stocked his mind with a loveliness that money could not buy. One financed a gigantic railway enterprise, the other wrote the "Night Song." All the one said blessed and ornamented the mind, all the other said advised it. One parted with a poem as though he sold a pound of his own living flesh, the other was pleased, yet a trifle nervous, when Muldoon--thinking to help me in my job--wrote a panegyric of easy philanthropies in the Brooklyn Eagle, to which his fierce activities had now been transferred from the Times. Both taught me much. From one, singing amid his dirt in an attic, I learned about a world that, hiding behind ephemeral appearances, lies deathlessly serene and unalterably lovely; from the other, about a world which far from deathless and certainly less serene, flaunts its rewards upon a more obviously remunerative scale. Of both poet and financier, at any rate, I kept vivid, grateful, pleasant memories.
Between the unsavoury world I had lived in so long and the new one I had now entered, the Old Man of Visions, himself at home in all and every kind of world, always seemed a bridge. His personality spread imaginatively, as it were, over all grades and through all strata of humanity. In my slow upward climb he seemed to hand me on, and in return for his unfailing guidance it was possible to make his own conditions a trifle more comfortable: possible, but not easy, because there was no help he needed and did not positively scorn. He watched my welfare with unfailing interest, but nothing would induce him to buy a new hat, a new frock-coat, an umbrella or a pair of gloves. "Our memories, at any given moment," says Bergson, "form a solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action." On that "point" old Louis still drives through my mind and wields an influence to-day....
The happier period with James Speyer was, of course, an episode, like my other experiences. It was wonderful to draw a good salary regularly for pleasant work; to have long holidays in the Adirondacks, or moose-shooting in the woods north of the Canadian Pacific Railway; wonderful, too, when my employer went to Europe for three months, to know myself in charge of such big interests, with a power of attorney to sign all cheques. But the usual restlessness was soon on me again, desire for a change stirred in my blood. The Spanish-American War, I remember, made me think of joining Roosevelt's Rough Riders, a scheme both Speyer and Louis strongly disapproved, and that an attack of typhoid fever rendered impossible in any case. It was during convalescence that it occurred to me I was nearing thirty, and that if I meant to live in America all my life, it was time to become naturalized. And this thought caused me to reflect on the question of going home. My sister, with her children, passed through New York about this time, returning from South Australia, where her husband was Governor, and it was at dinner in my employer's house, where he had invited them, that the longing to return to England suddenly declared itself. To find myself among relatives who called me by the unfamiliar childhood name, woke English memories, English values, and brought back the English atmosphere once more. My mother was still alive.... I remember that dinner well. My sister brought a tame little Mexican monkey with her. A man, also, called to ask Mr. Speyer for help, and when I went to interview him in the hall, his long story included a reference to something Mr. Dodge, he declared, had done for him. "Mr. Dodge gave me this," he said, and promptly scooped one eye out of its socket and showed it to me lying in the palm of his hand. The glass eye, the monkey, remain associated in my mind still with the rather poignant memories of forgotten English days my sister's visit stirred to life, and with my own emotions as I reflected upon the idea of going home at last. A chance meeting, again, worked its spell.
I had felt that half a universe separated me from the world in which my relatives lived, but after they had gone I began to realize various things I had not appreciated before. New York, I saw, could furnish no true abiding city for my soul which, though vagabond, yet sought something more than its appalling efficiency could ever give. What did I miss? I could name it now, but I hardly named it then perhaps. I was always hungry there, but with a hunger not of the body merely. The hunger, however, was real, often it was devastating. With such a lop-sided development as mine had been, my immaturity, no doubt, was still glaring. The sense of failure, I know, at any rate, was very strong. My relatives had been travelling, and they reflected a colour of other lands that called to me. Thought and longing now turned to an older world. There were ancient wonders, soft with age, mature with a beauty and tenderness only timelessness can give, that caught me on the raw with a power no Yosemites, Niagaras, or Grand Canyons could hope to imitate. Size has its magic, but size bludgeons the imagination, rather than feeds it. My heart turned suddenly across the sea. I loved the big woods, but behind, beyond the woods, great Egypt lay ablaze....
I talked things over with the Old Man of Visions; he advised me to go home. "See your mother before she dies," he urged. "I cannot come with you, but I may follow you." He added: "I shall miss you," then dropped into poetry, as he always did when he was moved....
It was these talks with Old Louis about England, the atmosphere of England as well, that my sister somehow left behind her, my own yearnings now suddenly reawakened too, that decided me. My detestation of the city both cleared and deepened. I began to understand more vividly, more objectively, the reasons for my feeling alien in it. I missed tradition, background, depth. There was a glittering smartness everywhere. The great ideal was to be sharper, smarter than your neighbour, above all things sharp and smart and furiously rapid, above all things--win the game. To be in a furious rush was to be intelligent, to do things slowly was to be derided. The noise and speed suggested rapids; the deep, quiet pools were in the older lands. Display, advertisement, absence of all privacy I had long been aware of, naturally; I now realized how little I desired this speed and glittering brilliance, this frantic rush to be at all costs sharper, quicker, smarter than one's neighbour, to win the game at any price. I realized why my years in the city had brought no friendships, and why they had been starved as well as lonely....
Some months passed before I booked a passage, however. I was sorry to leave James Speyer. Then one day he spoke to me about--marriage. For a year or more I had noticed his friendship with Mrs. Lowry, a Christian, well-known figure in the social world; and, being the confidant of both parties, I had done all I could to encourage a marriage that promised happiness and success. In due course, Bishop Potter, of New York, officiated. The ceremony was performed in the drawing-room, and just before it began, James Speyer came up to me, took the beautiful links out of his cuffs, and handed them to me. "I should like you to have these," he said, "as a little memento." I have them still.
A few months later, just before I was thirty, I found myself in a second-class cabin in a Cunarder, with my savings in my pocket. Old Louis, who followed me a year or two later, came down to see me off. I was glad when the Statue of Liberty lay finally below the sea's horizon, but I shall never forget the thrill of strange emotion I experienced when I first saw the blue rim of Ireland rise above the horizon a few days later. A shutter dropped behind me. I entered a totally new world. Life continued to be mouvementée, indeed, one adventure succeeding another, and ever with the feeling that a chance letter, a chance meeting might open any morning a new chapter of quite a novel kind; but my American episodes were finished.
Of mystical, psychic, or so-called "occult" experiences, I have purposely said nothing, since these notes have sought to recapture surface adventures only.