1
IN GREEN GROVE, my relation to Ralph was closer than to the others. It was the relation of pupil to tutor or of disciple to teacher, rather than of friend to friend, though Ralph emphasized the friendship and our democracy and equality. He of all the theologues felt the greatest responsibility toward Chungpa Han, the poor boy from the Orient there on a charity scholarship. And I knew Ralph better than the rest. I spent all my vacations with him. Ralph was a missionary par excellence, although I do not know if he has ever gone to foreign fields. In fact, he felt his work to be laid out in Canada. Already when I knew him he had a small congregation among the backwoods French. I went there for the Christmas holidays, where Ralph had preceded me by several weeks.
I received many other invitations. Among them, one from Horace Thompson, the most brilliant and scholarly of the theologues, who invited me to his own home with the offer of railway fare. My friends had a meeting about it, and decided my railway fare ought not to fall on Thompson alone, and they took up a collection. They had naturally put off the problem of my holiday until the last moment, and did not know that I had already made plans to join Ralph and profit by his tutoring over the vacation. In fact, I had already bought my ticket, as per agreement between Ralph and me. They said the collection was mine anyway. But somehow I left without it. I needed only to travel for twenty hours. And with room and meals secure when I should reach my destination, I was resigned to a state of pennilessness in between. (The ticket took all of my money.)
My train left before daylight. Seated alone in an inconspicuous corner of the coach, book in hand, I had the feeling of adventure and escape again. Nobody paid any attention to me. There were other students from Maritime on the same train, some even from my own dormitory, but the responsibilities of the school year now were left behind, and one sensed the only tie that bound us was no more.
All must change trains at Moncton. Here I saw the last of my fellow students. When I boarded my train for the interior of Canada, I found the coach filled up with French boys from St. Francis Xavier of Antigonish. I was surprised at their lively interest, for at once they gathered around me, vivacious, jolly, easily laughing, their curiosity keen in their faces. We had no language contact. My school French was not good. Neither was their school English. Yet one after another they drew me into their group, asking questions, exclaiming and nudging each other eagerly. As the night progressed, we gathered into one end of the cold car and sang French songs in unison. I lost my feeling of alienness experienced earlier in the day. I was caught back again into a common humanity. As I ate one of their apples and laughed with them, I thought, “In the morning, I rode with people from the same university—people I knew by name. Some were even from the same dormitory. I had eaten beside them many times. But we seemed to be strangers. Tonight I am having a good time with these boys I have never seen before, who have no reason to be kind to me because we go to the same school.”
The French boys got off, a few at a time, calling back Christmas greetings, “Adieu,” “Au revoir.” And all that night, the train progressed into the interior of Canada, until only a few travelers were left. I wrapped up in my overcoat as closely as I could, and drew around my neck the white silk scarf newly sent me by George Jum. Outside it was snowing heavily and the wind was strong. So much snow out there, the night seemed whitish instead of dark. The long rolling empty fields, the snow-covered forests, all showed like shadowy chalk instead of black. At widely separated stations, the train hissed out white steam. Travelers were met by natives, their hats piled high with snow.
At four o’clock in the morning I dismounted from the train, glad that the long journey was about over. Soon I would be eating breakfast with Ralph, I thought, my first meal in over twenty-four hours. I had left before breakfast on the previous day. The town I had come to was evidently very small. No automobiles were to be seen. Only one or two sleighs drawn by horses, with sleighbells that tinkled in a savage wind which whirled wildly around the little board station. The drivers were wearing hotel caps. No sleigh I saw held more than a single customer. At last even these were gone, jingle-jangling into the snowy waste. Still no Ralph. I had been there over half an hour, alone.
I concluded that Ralph had not received my letter telling of the hour of my arrival. But I had his address. I consulted it under the solitary lamp on the station platform. The stationmaster appeared to be French. I was tired of practising my French. I did not attempt to speak to him, but showed him the address, and he pointed out the direction to me, explaining with a gesture about a long hill. Snow was still falling and massing in huge drifts. In the sharp and biting wind I was almost blinded by the snow, but I did not think of the weather. Food had become an acute necessity. Since I was carrying no money, I must reach Ralph. I came to the foot of the hill the stationmaster had pointed out. I could not make out any road, so I just ploughed up the hill through the deep snow, guided by the lonely house on top—Ralph’s house. I reached the porch. All around the house the snow was high, blown in by the winds. The house was dark inside . . . of course, who would not be asleep at such an hour? But the number was the same as that given on Ralph’s address. I rang the bell. I hammered on the door. At last I heard vague sounds. That must be Ralph getting up. I grinned to think of his face when he saw me, for I was sure he was not expecting me by now. But it was not Ralph who opened the door. It was a woman. The waiting snow rushed in at the opened door. Her hair was blown out by the incoming wind, and her long nightgown too. I was thinking it was a good thing I did not throw my arms around her there in the dark, thinking it was Ralph, as I asked weakly, “Does Mr. Ralph Glenwood live here?”
I had to repeat the question many times. And when she answered, I had the same difficulty to understand her that she had to understand me. She was French. At last I got it straightened out. Mr. Glenwood was not here at all. He was in Quebec, five hundred miles away.
I walked back to the station, where at least I could be sheltered from that fierce wind on the lonely hill. And something else in the station I remembered. A restaurant. Men on night duty, it seemed, came in there for coffee, for it was still open. I stopped at the door, and heard the waitress and one of the baggage hands speaking French together. So it would be useless to try to make them understand my English. I went in and pointed out to the girl, coffee and a ham sandwich. It seemed to me I had never tasted anything so delicious as that Canadian ham sandwich and that coffee. When I got through, again I thought I would not complicate things by speaking a language she did not understand. With my head, hand, stomach, pockets, I explained I had no money and had eaten because I was hungry. I turned my pockets inside out for her to see. Nothing came of that except a few pennies. I could not understand what she said in French. But I had some idea what she meant. She meant I could not leave the restaurant unless I paid for what I had eaten. Of course, that was fair enough. And I thought, it was a wise thing that I did not mention having no money with me before eating. I wrote down on a paper napkin in English, “I do not understand French. Only English.” She brought a boy from the kitchen who spoke English. Both were much amazed, and more so, because they decided at once that I was a mute. The apparition of a Chinaman, who was a mute—at four o’clock in the morning—a Chinaman and a mute—who had made use of the restaurant without money to pay . . . it was too much for French logic. They knew no precedent by which to act, and they argued with each other for a long time.
Presently their indignation began to change to sympathy, even awe—especially when I offered my overcoat to pay for my bill. The girl shook her head, with a glance through the window at the elements outside. Then I offered my scarf, and wrote down on paper: “I expect a friend with money. Keep this till I come back with fifteen cents.” She assented. Then I wrote, and again the boy interpreted, “I want to go to a hotel. Can you direct me?”
Again they conferred. The boy called up Queen’s Hotel. One of those sleighs was sent for me. I suppose they also reported that I was a mute, for when I arrived at the hotel, I found paper and pencil waiting for me to make my wants known, although at the hotel everybody spoke English as well as French. Already, too, they understood that I was expecting a friend to come and get me.
After registering for an indefinite stay at Queen’s Hotel, I went into the lounge to get warm by the open fire. From the glances cast by the servants, it was evident I was an object of mystery. Growing drowsy, I went to my room, to sleep until the regular breakfast hour. I was still hungry. For three days I did not leave the hotel, but settled myself before the fire downstairs every morning with my books. Outside the heavy Canadian snowstorm did not abate. And I remained an object of mystery, not only to the hotel management, but to the handful of guests. On all sides I heard myself being discussed, both in English and in French. Guesses as to my business were of the wildest. One was that I belonged to a religious order which I had come to establish in Canada, and that silence such as mine was enforced on all the members. Another rumor ran that I was literally the silent partner of another Chinaman, soon to appear, who intended with my help to open a laundry. One man wondered if my partner had yet started from China.
I promptly sent a note to Ralph at the only address I knew, that of the house on the hill. But it looked as if I would spend the holidays in Queen’s Hotel. The collection that my friends of Green Grove had taken for me would indeed be needed, I thought. . . .
Ralph burst in at the end of the third day on Christmas Eve. Since I was before the fire in the hotel lounge as usual, our meeting was staged in public and was dramatic. We were the center of all interest. People crowded around. Not only was the mystery of the mute Chinaman being cleared up, with silence broken, but Ralph himself was known to everyone and was by way of being a local hero in that town. He said the first news of me came at the station platform, where he was told of a mute Chinaman staying at Queen’s, news which at first he did not connect with me. Ralph paid my bill—he said the collection money had been forwarded to him for me, and we left the hotel arm in arm, shaking hands with everybody we met. At once we repaired to the station and redeemed my scarf. Here all warmly apologized, in English and in French, and received me like an old friend. That very boy who had directed me to Queen’s Hotel was in Ralph’s Sunday school class.
My first Christmas in America was a colonial Christmas, a Christmas spent on the frontier, so to speak. Ralph’s house was heated only by wood fires and lighted dimly by kerosene lamps. The little town was very primitive. If one would regain again the environment of a generation ago in the States, it might be found in Canada to this day. For my experience is, Canada is some fifty years behind the United States in every way. The weather, too, had an earlier northern potency, suggesting that described by some old Yankee in speaking of his childhood.
Christmas morning came. The sparsely settled land was folded deep in snow. Looking out, one could see nothing, neither man nor bird nor ghost. But then out there a man would soon become only a bundle of snow. Looking like streamers of cotton dropping perpetually from the sky, the snow came down without end. Ralph and I went out after breakfast. We had been invited to spend the day with one of the humble families in his congregation. The sound of church bells carolling followed us as if from a distance, snow-muffled, as we plodded through the thick white banks of snow.
Over the hill and around the valley we went, until we reached a one-story house, or cabin, wooden as though made by an ax, much like Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. Inside was a single room plastered roughly in mud, with a sloping tent-shaped roof. The family was French. There was a thin dark man with a French whisker, but not in the words of Tennyson, an educated whisker, for he was a simple lumberjack, the kind wearing overalls all the year around except for Christmas and Sundays. And his red-cheeked wife, rather young-looking, stout, with dark hair. Her new percale dress of red and blue stripes had a good deal of material in it, suggesting dresses many years behind the time of those scanty short ones I had seen on the streets of New York. Into the back of her thick hair was thrust a large hefty comb. She wore besides heavy ribbed stockings, and high shoes. They had three children. The youngest—around four—like a big piece of squash, fat all over, looked like one satisfied with any condition in life—but then today was Christmas. His washed state was a marvel to see: a gleaming speckless face, undried, head watered newly, dripping still, brushed down slick with only one hair starting. He wore a tiny new red necktie, but peeked up shyly. The next boy was thin, lively, eager to show off his broken English. He was wearing new knickers and a new sweater with a letter. And then there was the big sister, old enough for a faintly blushing cheek; but her long legs were still in yard-long black ribbed stockings, and she wore a short blue serge skirt and a modest middy.
The room was fascinating. You kept discovering new things all the time. Everything done by the family was done in this one room. But everything just like the family had been shined up to receive us. Even the cowhide boots and the extra shoes in corners, the dresses, sweaters, big coats on walls, all were precisely straightened. There were two windows, one dark from looking out at the hill which sheltered one side of the house, and the other dark from looking out on the gray opaqueness of the thick-falling snow. An oil lamp was burning—a white one gay with red roses; and a great cooking stove, with pipe going up to the roof, was sending out a great glow and crackle and a savory smell of cooking things. A thick hooked-rug covered the whole of the floor. Near the entrance was a yellow dogskin with head complete. A few pictures without any frames were tacked up; one I remember, General Foch, from the colored supplement of a French newspaper. In one corner was an upright piano. Then there was the Christmas tree, of modest size, hung with some painted cardboard birds, red bells and candy canes—nothing very elaborate. Around the base of the tree waited the humble white paper parcels roughly tied. Ralph had brought some parcels for the Christmas tree too. Gifts for the children and for me. I received from Ralph the book David Copperfield and some knitted socks made by his mother. When it came time for dinner, mother and daughter took away the Bible from the middle of the table. A red cloth with white lines—roughly ironed but very clean—was laid, and some white napkins that did not match one another. We sat down to a large pork roast tied up with strings, mashed pumpkin, browned potatoes, home-canned green beans, and many different kinds of jellies and pickles made by the housewife. For dessert there was apple cake, and after that, tea and cheese.
Dinner over, Ralph played Christmas carols on the piano. The little girl sang obediently on request. Ralph had been her music teacher. Next he had her play the accompaniment while we sang. There and then he gave her a lesson, pointing out her mistakes patiently at the end of each hymn. Never was Ralph embarrassed to speak of mistakes. As a teacher he was most painstaking and uncompromising. You must do things his way. (I had had my arguments with Ralph. He insisted that I should say “Yes, please” or “No, thank you” on every possible occasion, such as raisins offered in his room or a book handed down for my examination. It was not that I felt the obstinacy of children against moving my tongue to form these polite phrases, but in Korea a constant succession of yes-and-no-thank-you’s is the sign of a yokel. Ralph was firm. To please him I compromised, making my voice as low as possible.) Ralph had the most rigid code of manners, morals, conduct. Yet he himself was the plainest and simplest of men, really living in the kingdom of God. At least, no one would ever doubt that duty, “stern Daughter of the Voice of God,” was his constant companion.
Later in the afternoon a couple dropped in, a young husband and wife, in whom Ralph was especially interested. The woman was a large French-Canadian—buxom, bigger than her husband, dark, sanguine and strong-featured. She was Catholic. The man was fair, anemic, half-English, and a member of Ralph’s Protestant congregation. He had caused a great scandal by marrying outside his church. And from her church, too, the woman was ostracized for the same reason. The people of this little town were intensely sectarian, somewhat like the early New Englanders. Protestants thought that the difference between going to heaven and going to hell was the difference between going to meeting and going to mass; the Catholics thought so, too, but vice versa. When Ralph first came, this poor couple had been living as social outcasts, shunned and reviled by both factions. Ralph when he saw how matters stood went straight to the Catholic Father, to talk the case over. It was one of the first things Ralph did on taking charge of that congregation. He and the priest mapped things out. After that the couple were immediately remarried in the Catholic Church. The woman was to attend mass as usual, and her husband to go to his own church but either was left free to accompany the other when he or she so desired. Acts like this endeared Ralph to the community. In spite of his youth, he shared authority there with the Catholic Father and with the British Mayor (the latter an ignorant man but a straight shooter).
That dim and dark afternoon full of falling snow, others dropped into the little one-room house. Lumbermen from Ralph’s church. They came wearing huge fat boots, big black caps tied under the chin, enormous fur gloves, and as they entered from the blizzard outside, there was a great noise of stamping, the shaking of coats and the clapping of gloves. As soon as they had warmed themselves by the kitchen range, they took out whistles, flutes, harmonicas, and played ballad music, punctuating the time with stamps of their hobnailed shoes.
2
That Christmas vacation, Ralph devoted much of his spare time to reading David Copperfield with me, in order to improve my English. I thought he was taking too much trouble, but he said, no, he liked it. He regarded David Copperfield as the greatest book ever written (outside the Bible). We took turns reading aloud, and when I did so, he would correct me. He explained everything very carefully, as to a child. Sometimes I could not keep from teasing him by asking foolish questions just to get his answers, but he did not know this.
“Ralph, what does Mrs. Gummidge mean when she says ‘I’m a lone, lorn crittur’?”
“She means she doesn’t feel well,” answered Ralph patiently, touching his hand to his heart. “Here.”
Or another time:
“There is one thing I don’t understand, Ralph. And I would like to know. What is romance?”
“I will explain. Suppose there is a house—like this,” and as usual, he illustrated concretely, indicating four square walls with his hands. “A house that is a prison. Soldiers guard the house. And around it is a river too. Then there is a girl. A prisoner in this house. Now. If you should swim across the river, break into the house, get to the girl in spite of the soldiers, carry her away, swimming perhaps with her on your back across the river . . . that, you know, would be romance.”
I showed Ralph a news item in a Canadian paper which had just come out, about an American millionairess who decided to have a baby without getting married. She wanted a baby, not a husband: she was very logical.
“Ralph, is that romance?”
George Jum, I knew, would have been much interested. His mind would have played around that like a school of porpoises. But to Ralph, it didn’t even pose a question, raise an image, it didn’t give the slightest incentive to discussion.
“That’s not romance,” he said decidedly, “that’s moral blindness. You haven’t understood my definition.”
“But isn’t that a romantic thing to do?”
“She wouldn’t lose anything by getting married first. How would any child feel with that kind of start? Well, let’s not waste time. Let’s get back to David Copperfield.”
The snow kept coming down. It was hard in such surroundings to visualize New York. Outside, the Canadian countryside was just beginning to be populated, but the spiritual land of Canadians seemed fixed and set. The minds of men like Ralph Glenwood still inhabited the world of David Copperfield, made more rugged, simple, and democratic in a new continent; they lived here with the humbleness of Burns in “A Cotter’s Saturday Night”; duty and the church were a sustaining part of life—you were forcibly impressed with how the colonization of America was a direct result of the Reformation of Europe, of John Calvin and John Knox. Yes, the grim, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan was upon this land, though we do not hear so much of the Scotch Presbyterian of Canada as of the dying Puritanism of New England. And the mood of this Christmas interlude with Ralph was early transcendental, as if, with the strength of three generations ago, it still refused to rest on temporal things. This might have been the practical yet fanatical land of Whittier’s “Snowbound.” And more than to Keats, Ralph Glenwood must have responded to the homely simplicity of such a poem as that of the early-American John Trowbridge:
I watch the slow flakes as they fall
On bank and brier and broken wall;
Over the orchard, waste and brown,
All noiselessly they settle down,
Tipping the apple-boughs, and each
Light quivering twig of plum and peach.
The hooded beehive, small and low,
Stands like a maiden in the snow;
And the old door-slab is half-hid
Under an alabaster lid.
All day it snows: the sheeted post
Gleams in the dimness like a ghost;
All day the blasted oak has stood
A muffled wizard of the wood.
Garland and airy cap adorn
The sumach and the wayside thorn,
And clustering spangles lodge and shine
In the dark tresses of the pine.
The ragged bramble, dwarfed and old,
Shrinks like a beggar in the cold;
In surplice white the cedar stands,
And blesses him with priestly hands.
Still cheerily the chickadee
Singeth to me on fence and tree:
And in my inmost ear is heard
The music of a holier bird;
And heavenly thoughts, as soft and white
As snowflakes, on my soul alight,
Clothing with love my lonely heart,
Healing with peace each bruisèd part,
Till all my being seems to be
Transfigured by their purity.
3
And so my year in Canada passed by, my sojourn in the nineteenth century, in the Victorian age of the British Empire. At times I thought, “What am I doing here?” And still when I say Green Grove, I see pictures of my loneliness, my essential isolation and misfit. Dark days I see in the dark woodland park, dead snow and ice stretching out grayly on all sides, bright nights under the cold northern moon, as I stand facing the bitter winds, looking down on the ravening, gloomy waves. The glimmer of Green Grovian lights, which I can see from the knoll by the sea—to them I turn reluctantly, away from the wild sea and the free winds. For almost the constellations seem more friendly and warm. Up here by a solitary tower, watching the British battleships go by, somehow I feel more contact with reality than in the snug, warm, theological nooks of Green Grove, listening to the whimsical conversation of Ian with Allan or with Ralph. Away out here the destructive, hard, the brilliant syncopated rhythms of New York come back to me. And curiously enough they stab my heart with longing. . . .
Already, like the true New Yorker, I felt impatient of the rust and mold that gather gently on the provinces. Nor could I hope to be a real Green Grover, here in Canada. I was never treated as one. For me there was always special favor, special kindliness, special protection . . . the white-man’s-burden attitude toward dark colonies. Ralph’s kindness . . . Leslie’s brutal cruelty . . . I weighed them in my mind, and it seemed to me better to miss the kindness and not to have the cruelty. Yet the beauty of my surroundings could not fail to strike me in more ways than one. As you entered the big University hall, you saw written there in marble, with letters to last out the centuries, “Ora et Labora.” The sons of Maritime had gone away to be soldiers in the Great War. But there was no sign that bombshells had burst here. In course of time, the students had come back. They had put away their warfare for theology; in this world all was ordered, all decided, what was right or wrong, what was noble, what was base. Great figures of the past were here in pristine authority, the vigorous voice of Carlyle still in the air, the Wordsworthian plain living and high thinking, the Miltonic conscience, symbolized by those two portraits hung facing each other in the hall, Milton at the age of twelve just before beginning to write as “the handsome Lady of Christ’s”; Milton during his blindness dictating lines of Paradise Lost to his unloving, unwilling daughters. In the spell of this quiet atmosphere you were almost betrayed to say there is nothing wrong with the world, it is perfect, it is still intact, showing a late firm ripeness, Victorian highmindedness at the very height of Tennysonianism. Into this section, the ills, the discontent, the morbidness of the modern generation happily will not come. Missionaries will continue to go forth from Maritime, for the glory of God. “Ora et Labora.”
Over the pastoral landscape, the rich late spring had come. On the green meadows by Ritchie’s Pond where we had skated during wintry days, a little brook was flowing, bluets and other wild flowers waving beside its sluicy stream. I walked here under the powerful sunrays of noon, as well as under the crimson beauty of evening; sometimes a gentle mist fell on my hatless head, forming silver beads of the smallest size; sometimes in the deserted park, the new-leaved trees drooped heavily, their thick branches like plumes of mourning for their dead sire the sun. Then a black dragon hovered, a camel-shape burst, and thunder like a tiger was roaring on the wooded hills, to be echoed by the ocean, while fierce lightnings shot from heaven to earth. But after a shower the sun always came back again; then how the earth smiled in tremulous ecstasy through the late afternoon, until billows of color gorgeously rolled down to the dusky horizon, while shadows gathered, thickening at the trees! And as I saw the ever-shifting movements of this natural theatre, I mused on change in the world. I felt that nothing lasts. Where was the ancient habitation of my fathers, where were its ordered ways and everlasting laws? Gutted by time. Maritime seemed to me strangely immobilized. I had no wish to rest in another potential ruin of the age. If today I was dreaming in the warmth of the sun all about Tennyson and Dora, if this seemed a world of great rightness, gentleness and beauty, still I could not accept it as quite real, as any more than a kind of play by Barrie, such as I had seen with Clendenin in Halifax the other day. A closed-off world, far from great ports of Time, oblivious to the tune of cycles and great change, as much a back-wash of life as a village in the South Seas. Remembering Seoul and Tokyo, New York and Peking, I grew amazed:
“Can it be that only in this one corner of earth the tide of flux has not come, and all remains as if unchanged?”
And yet there were some changes even in Green Grove. Allan for instance. His engagement was broken. Now he turned to have completely opposite views upon women; and all about love which he had told me before, he must tell me again, vice versa: “Love is silly. Only distracts a man. Girls are a waste of time.” No more he became with Edwin a passionate reader of Tennyson’s Maud, or a tender admirer of The Princess.
And one of the boys—Horace Thompson, who had been my tutor in Greek—got a scholarship to go across to Edinburgh. He was discussed with awe, as the most fortunate of beings, for was he not going to the home of the Scots, to the mother-civilization? Who would not choose those beautiful isles where “the centuries behind repose like a fruitful land”?
And Leslie Robin no longer triumphed but was sent home in disgrace. During the final exams he did dishonest work in chemistry. In the middle of writing he asked to be excused in order to go to the washroom, where he had planted a convenient friend with a textbook. A proctor suspected. He took up Robin’s question slip with the answers written out from the textbook. Robin was summoned before the pope and the cardinals, as the student-governing body was called, and expelled. Poor Leslie! A hard beginning for a boy. A long road ahead for him!
I had my moment of swelling pride, too, when Doctor MacMillan stopped me as I walked in Seaway Park. He congratulated me on my marks in Professor Donald’s class—in a tone of pleased surprise. Green Grove, he said, was proud of me. He offered me my scholarship for another year, and said he hoped that I would finish up my course there.
4
As Maritime closed for the summer, my spirit sped New York-ward, but that journey was more difficult for my body. I had had no paying work during the whole school year. I must first earn my fare. So it fell out that toward the middle of June, I was trudging on foot toward Stratford, a small neighboring town, with a letter of introduction to Mr. McCann, who owned a boxmaking factory there, and was the brother of the Green Grove “pope.” I had made boxes for a living once before, while going to school in the Orient.
Stratford was a sleepy little place on the river Avon, a wide, tranquil, gray stream which was always salty and had tides like the sea. The boats traveling up from Boston and Fundy Bay came in with the tide. When the tide was high, water mounted over the quay. When the tide went out, the water retreated, and the town, being left behind, promptly went to sleep again. The apple blossoms along the river were just beginning to scatter. It was a calm, gentle, peaceful land, filled with extensive fruit orchards, fertile pastures with long juicy grass interwoven with wild flowers . . . or else cropped short and green as a golf course by the sheep. The place was considered very historical. A little farther down the Avon, past the town, were the old willows of Evangeline and the meadows of Grand Pré. But though I looked everywhere, I saw no forest primeval with murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
Mr. McCann proved to be a tall, slouching man with a mustache, always two days behind in shaving except on Sundays. Around his factory, you could not tell him from one of his own hands. He wore grease-stained working clothes and inspected the machinery himself. His factory—a square, high three-story structure, gray, the same color as the water—was on the bank of the river Avon and appeared to me almost as sleepy as that body. From its windows you could see green trees. The noise of the sawing machinery went z-z-z-z-z-z-, even from afar, like the buzz of industrious bees. In certain sections of the lower story, a thundering roar of electric sawing issued, like a great waterfall. But on the third floor where I worked, the buzz-saws dwindled again to little more than the sound of bees, a dreamy spell to which hands worked hypnotically.
Mr. McCann promptly took me under his protection. He saw that I was installed in a comfortable boarding house. Indeed, perhaps it was the only boarding house there. Mrs. Moody, who ran it, was an old lady, very hardworking and humbly dressed. When I first met her, I remember, Mr. McCann had to call her in from her strawberry beds, where her face had got very pink and warm. She was wearing a rough farming straw hat, which she took off to hang up behind the kitchen door, smoothing down her dress to receive Mr. McCann. Her hair was black and white, but mostly white, puffed high in front and flattened by a huge comb behind. She started to smile, and she looked as if her eyes were beginning to cry because of the many wrinkles in a network around them. Big dignified eyes she had, behind glasses that magnified them, and her pink cheeks looked always shining and polished.
Mrs. Moody’s house was a short, two-story one, very low to the ground, and almost covered with climbing red roses and other vines. The room she gave to me was very quiet, tidy and peaceful. It had matting. The smell of matting is associated for me with that faraway summer on the Avon with its peaceful tides. Above the matting, which completely covered the floor, were two handmade rugs, with bunches of roses at either end. I had a big double bed and a big walnut dresser, a washstand with bowl and pitcher, and a little black leather chair much worn and cracked at the arms. There was a low bench in my room with several pots of red geraniums. The roses outside were so thick and so enshading that I did not need to use any window blinds.
How good this kind and simple landlady was to me! She was rather a lonely woman, or so it seemed to me, but one not given to self-pity, or even introspection. Her husband was still living, but he was always away on a ship somewhere, for he had followed the seafaring profession. Both her son and daughter had grown up, married, and deserted Canada for the States. She saw them rarely. Mrs. Moody worked all the time. Only for a short time in the evening was she idle after the supper dishes were washed and put away. Then she would sit down in her parlor, bend back the white curtain, and just look out for a while. But not for long. Soon she would rise and go into the kitchen where were the ironing board and the mending basket. Here, if she still felt the need of recreation, she would read, standing up, her Halifax paper, or the Montgomery Ward catalogue, before settling down for the evening’s work. The price I paid her—$3.50 a week—apparently included all my laundry, which she did herself, down to the mending of my threadbare shirts and socks. How carefully she darned my socks, even making them over with scraps of her own selection! And she had given me the very best room in her boarding house, although I paid no more than others did.
Every morning immediately after breakfast I went to Mr. McCann’s factory, walking up the stairs (the elevator was only used for freight, for the parts of unmade boxes brought from the sawing plant below) to the third floor which held a series of garret rooms, all opening into each other, all large, well-lighted and exhaling the fresh aromatic smells of shavings and shingles. I was given the small room at the end overlooking the river, where I worked in private. I had a sewing machine which used wire instead of thread, and for the less supple strips of wood for larger boxes, a special hammer and tacks.
In the room next to mine two girls were working. One girl, Queenie, was very tall and thin, with a lively sallow, sharp-chinned face shaped just like a triangle. The other, Alice, was smaller, more refined-looking, with dark hair and a small white neck. They used to come to work as if dressed for a party, then something happened to these clothes until it was time to go home, for their owners were always seen during working hours in faded gray smocks covered with shavings. Alice and Queenie came in to see me often and were very kind, showing me many tricks for faster work. There were others, girls and boys, who worked in another room beyond, but I did not see much of them. Sometimes a little short girl, no more than fourteen, worked between Queenie and Alice, but she was not regular. I was thankful. When she was there, she made great mischief, and used to hide my hammer. She would take Queenie’s big hat and put it on my head—to see if I looked like a Negro woman, she said. I guess she did not make much money. Work was done by the piece, or rather by the box. You got paid by the number of boxes built. At least this was the system by which I worked. It did not matter how much time I put in, or how much time I wasted. I could stop and study awhile, or if it was hot, go out for a swim. Light, clean work it was . . . monotonous—still there were ways of varying that. I wrote out poems and tacked them on the wall to read as I worked. Sometimes, on those thin, light boards like paper, I wrote out Chinese verses very beautifully. I kept them in my work drawer and, by the time I was ready to leave, had quite a book. Through the windows, a breeze was almost always stirring the sawdust smells and the shingle dust, and the low sleepy sound of the saws came up, varied now and then by the ponderous creaking movements of the freight elevator . . . a perfect atmosphere in which to read nineteenth-century English poetry. Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters, for instance. But the less I dreamed, the less I studied, the more money I made, and the sooner I would get back to New York.
Alice took me home with her one night to meet her parents and her young man. We sang “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” which Alice played on the piano. Once or twice Mr. McCann invited me to dinner. He had a spacious beautiful countrified white house, a pleasant wife who ran all the charity organizations in the town, and two incredibly beautiful children, fair-haired and rosy-cheeked. On Sundays I usually went to hear Doctor Elton preach at the Presbyterian church. It was a help to my English and it was the only way of going to the heart of the social organization of Stratford. One time I dressed up a little bit to go. I had a stiff collar—one I had worn with my school uniform in the Orient. I had noticed that the boys in Ralph’s town, when they went to parties, put on stiff collars. Mine seemed very appropriate for a church. It was straight and smooth, just like a clerical collar, with no grooves for the necktie. When I was all ready, I saw that my tie naturally wished to ride up. I must not forget to pull it down with my hands. But it was a hot Sunday, and Doctor Elton’s voice affected me much like the noise of the bees and the ripple of the river. I almost went to sleep. I forgot my tie. Outside I remembered, but could not pull it down immediately, so many people were shaking hands with me and smiling.
One of these cordial people was a stranger—a large, prosperous, shiny gentleman, with something in his bustling movements and his air of peppy activity suggesting the States. Sure enough, I heard from the conversation around that he was from the States. He had come to Stratford on his way up to Boston, and it being Sunday and the boat not yet in, had paid a visit to Doctor Elton’s church. He seemed to be in the book-publishing business and knew something of Maritime. At least, he said he thought Maritime a wonderful college but he was sending his son to Harvard because Harvard was much bigger. All the colleges in the States were bigger, he said, and he somehow implied that if so, they must be better. There was more business down that way too, so he mentioned. Altogether, it was the only place, one gathered—the States. Particularly Boston.
“Well, well, my boy, so you are going to college,” he said to me genially.
I told him that I should probably be in the States some day, not mentioning however that I intended going to Boston that same fall. And he gave me his card which read on it “D. J. Lively . . . Universal Education Publishing Company.”
I knew it was not unusual for men in the publishing business to be traveling into Canada on business—especially in the religious or educational publishing business—for like New England this part of Canada was not a bad bookselling field and the tastes were somewhat similar.
“D. J. Lively: There he is,” went on the Stratford stranger, pointing to his card, and beaming at me. “D. J. Lively is always glad to help out a fine deserving lad. Look me up when you come to Boston. I may be able to do something for you there.”
He somehow conveyed that he was very proud of D. J. Lively and the Universal Publishing Company and so any man ought to be.
I went home in a glow after this meeting, more eager than ever to leave Canada and reach the land of golden opportunity. (When I looked in the glass, I saw that all during the social amenities after Doctor Elton’s sermon, my tie had been riding up. By now it was away up above my collar and around toward one ear. I hastily took it off and hurled it into the wastepaper basket—the last time I wore a stiff collar, even in Canada.)
5
I had a speaking acquaintance with all the people who went to Doctor Elton’s church, but some I knew better than others. My greatest friends were Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy, retired missionaries from the New Hebrides. Their time of active service was now over, and they had settled down in this quiet out-of-the-way spot, this New-World Stratford-on-Avon, to await the heavenly reward and immortality according to their faith. Their quiet dark well-shaded house took one on a far journey to tropical isles, for it was filled with exotic souvenirs, each with its own bizarre story. Cupboards and cases and bookshelves of beautiful shells, dresses, stones, pearls, strange native objects . . . years later in visiting a part of the British Museum, I recognized articles like those I had once seen in Doctor Lovejoy’s collection. But each was endeared to the Lovejoys for personal reasons. And my, what tales Doctor Lovejoy had to tell! Bloodcurdling. So quietly he told them, too. You knew they were all true. Many times he and his wife had almost been killed. Twice they had been shipwrecked in strange seas. And they had lived fearlessly in the midst of jungle communities like those Oriental sages of old tales who, fortified by the wisdom of poetry, could look lions in the eye and force them to retreat. Many times he had come into conflict with the people of his savage congregation. Once Doctor Lovejoy had tried to prevent a man from burying his wife alive. He had stopped him, but the man wished for revenge. This frail, dignified, unworldly couple had lived a life of the most stirring adventure. Yet both had pink-white faces and soft peaceful expressions, as if they had never come into contact with any evil, but only good throughout their lives. Almost like sleep-walkers. Mrs. Lovejoy had snow-white hair in abundance, he none at all, except in the beard. She was a little bit taller than he, walking always very very straight, in spite of her frailness, while he was a little bit bent. They never varied their ways of dressing; she always wore long dresses touching the ground and a starched white net collar high at the neck, even in the heat of summer. He wore an old but very tidy well-brushed suit, and looked the gentleman through and through. His education indeed had been very wide, for he was one of those old-fashioned pioneer missionaries who must be a bit of everything, doctor, teacher, governor, preacher. He was a graduate of Princeton and of the Edinburgh Medical College. And he seemed to have been almost everywhere on the globe except the Far East.
On his invitation, I would often go to see Doctor Lovejoy. He was very punctual—whether he went for a walk with me along the river Avon, or waited for me in his lovely little garden for a game of croquet. If I was late, my conscience used to reproach me as if I had committed a sin. He would also have me read to him, on his cool shaded porch, where for long hours he helped me with my English, correcting my pronunciation, choosing books for me to read from his own library. Sometimes he and Mrs. Lovejoy would entertain me by playing the victrola. They had many records, all being hymns and prayers, or celestial organ music. “Greenland’s Icy Mountains” too, I remember, with many voices. They had, besides, records of special prayers by famous divines, to which they listened on Sunday afternoons, and while listening Mrs. Lovejoy always bowed her head and shut her eyes, as if she had been in church, her fragile white hands crossed in her lap reminding me of the bones of white coral. They were really the most delicate and exquisite of people. Fantastic to associate them with those wild and savage tales. Doctor Lovejoy himself used to wash the cups after Sunday tea. He was as careful as a cat about not getting his hands wet at the same time. He would run the hot water from the faucet into those thin cups, then daintily and delicately turn them around without wetting even a finger-nail. Last of all, he would peer like a botanist into them, to see if any sugar were left. Such a fastidious old man to have spent his entire life with savages of the New Hebrides!
6
I remember one poem read to me by Doctor Lovejoy, read and re-read and carefully explained, not didactically as Ralph Glenwood would have done, but simply and with his own candor of spirit. It was a poem by Browning, in which these lines occur:
Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands.
What, have fear of change from thee who are ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before.
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
I doubt if Doctor Lovejoy got the significance of his choice of this poem for me—Chungpa Han—the very child of change—waiting impatiently here between the world of the past and the world of the future, longing eagerly to reach a great city famed like Babylon for its fleshpots and worldliness, famed so like any great city, as a complex of man. But perhaps such a quotation is the best comment I can make upon this other world, the world of the old-fashioned missionary, which has necessarily influenced my destiny profoundly, and nevertheless has reaped in me results and reactions never contemplated. The Westernized Oriental is the child of the nineteenth century, and yet a curious detachment is possible for him such as neither truculent old-timers nor their sophisticated modern children can normally expect. His own elders were neither Atheists nor Believers, Fundamentalists nor Scientists—but so widely remote as to be classical Confucians. In vast perspective he sees three different times—not only intellectually but sympathetically. Nor can the nineteenth century be either accepted as final or spurned in inevitable reaction toward the new, for in his struggle to reach the faraway boundaries of modern thought, the recapitulation of an eternal embryo is necessary for him, and the past becomes his transient stepping stone. . . .
Many other retired clergymen besides the Lovejoys lived in this quiet little town whose waters led to Boston. And a large proportion of the town were leisured elderly people, many of whom had sons and daughters who had deserted Canada for the States. Often the daughters came back bringing children for a nice quiet summer vacation with grandparents. There were only two classes in Stratford: the leisured, and the laboring. But both were quiet and old-fashioned. The young people released from the small Stratford factories stood around on street corners after six, waiting wistfully for whatever fun might come, but it seemed quiet fun. The primitive wooden movie-house became a dancing hall on certain nights, but even then it was never noisy, and nobody seemed to get drunk. And everybody went to church on Sunday mornings, for all the sects were represented here. Restless, discontented bodies were automatically shipped down to Boston. But doubtless one needed a good deal of ambition and restlessness to break away, if one were native here. I remember the Stratford barber who boarded at Mrs. Moody’s all the time. (The others were mostly transients—men working temporarily in the shipyards there, women taking courses in the Baptist normal school close by, etc.) This barber looked like a farmer and not a barber, and in fact I think he had newly become a barber, not liking the dirt of farm life. It was his ambition to get down to Boston. He was engaged to a girl who ran the only beauty shop in Stratford and who was always unusually dressed. Her clothes, though they were made at home by her dressmaker sister, seemed copies of Parisian styles. One time she would appear in a dress with long sleeves—extraordinarily long, I mean, down to the knees. Or she would wear an enormously wide flopping straw hat with streamers. Besides, she was always exceptionally decorated underneath, whether as an advertisement of her shop or just to take advantage of it, I can’t say. One time she would have black hair—another dark auburn, put up in many different ways, but always very shiny and very curled, with eyelashes and eyebrows made fancy too. She, too, no doubt, was eager to get down to Boston. They never managed it. Several years later, as I drifted north once more, I saw them both in Stratford, married and settled down. Those same dresses she was wearing still, but how much faded, and under her hat she was quite natural-looking. They had a fat boy-baby now, whose ambition ultimately perhaps will be to go to Boston.
But no roots could tie me to this land. When I had earned my fare to New York and a little over, I paid my last good-byes to Doctor and Mrs. Lovejoy. How simply and affectionately they parted with me, a ghostly world of love and kindly light shining out around them! They were the perfect and celestial representatives of that fantastical mysticism which has sent Christian missionaries far and wide to the remotest pockets of the earth, face to face with all the varying puzzlements of nature, breaking ground for ruthless, blindly selfish Western forces, but they themselves all innocent and unconscious, returning at last with delicate brittleness unbroken to such quiet native spots as this—Stratford-on-Avon. The last to be seen of Doctor Lovejoy as I turned away was his bent back going up the garden path toward his small vine-clad house, one arm around Mrs. Lovejoy, clasping her hand. . . . The closing picture of the land of my first college year, my spiritual stopping-off place between Korea and New York.