Chapter VIII: A Wander-Year

Halifax exceeded Matt’s expectations, and gave him a higher opinion of his mother. For the first time his soul received the shock of a great town, or what was a great town to him. The picturesque bustle enchanted him. The harbor, with its immense basin and fiords, swarming with ships and boats, was an inexhaustible pageant, and sometimes across the green water came softened music from a giant iron-clad. High in the background of the steep city that sat throned between its waters rose forests of spruce and fir. From the citadel on the hill black cannon saluted the sunrise, and Sambro Head and Sherbrooke Tower shot rays of warning across the night. The streets throbbed with traffic, and were vivid with the blues and reds of artillery and infantry; and the nigger and the sailor contributed exotic romance. On the wharves of Water Street, which were lined with old shanties and dancing-houses, the black men sawed cord-wood, huge piles of which mounted skyward, surrounded by boxes of smoked herrings. On one of the wharves endless quintals of codfish lay a-drying in the sun. And when the great tide, receding, exposed the tall wooden posts, like the long legs of some many-legged marine monster, covered with black and white barnacles and slime of a beautiful arsenic green, the embryonic artist found fresh enchantment in this briny, fishy, muddy water-side. Then, too, the Government House was the biggest and most wonderful building Matt had ever seen, and the fish, fruit, and meat markets were a confusion of pleasant noises.

In the newly opened park on the “Point” the wives of the English officials and officers--grand dames, who set the tone of the city--strolled and rode in beautiful costumes. Matt thought that the detached villas in which they lived, with imposing knockers and circumscribing hedges instead of fences, were the characteristic features of great American cities. He loved to watch the young ladies riding into the cricket-ground on their well-groomed horses; beautiful, far-away princesses, whose exquisite figures, revealed by their riding-habits, fascinated rather than shocked his eye, accustomed though it was to the Puritan modesty of ill-fitting dresses, the bulky wrappings of a village where to go out “in your shape” was to betray impure instincts. He would peer into the enclosure with a strange, wistful longing, eager to catch stray music of their speech, silver ripples of their laughter. He wondered if he would ever talk to such celestial creatures, for whom life went so smooth and so fair. What charming pictures they made in the lovely summer days, when the officers played against the club, and they sat on the sward drinking tea under the shady trees, in white dresses, with white lace parasols held over their softly glinting hair to shield the shining purity of their complexions--a refreshing contrast of cool color with the scarlet of the officers’ uniforms. Sometimes the wistful eyes of the boy grew dim with sad, delicious tears. How inaccessible was all this beautiful life whose gracious harmonies, whose sweet refinements, some subtle instinct divined and responded to! At moments he felt he could almost barter his dreams of Art to move in these heavenly spheres, among these dainty creatures whose every gesture was grace, whose every tone was ravishment. There was one girl, the most bewitching of all, whom he only saw in the saddle, so that in his image of her, as in his sketches of her, she was always on a beautiful chestnut horse, which she sat with matchless ease and decision; a tall, slender girl, with yellow-brown hair that lay soft and fluffy about the forehead of her lovely English face. Her favorite canter was along the beach-road; and here, before he had found work, he would loiter in the hope of seeing her. How he longed--yet dreaded--that she might some day perceive his presence; sometimes so high flew his secret audacious dream that in imagination he patted her horse’s glossy neck.

In such an exhilarating atmosphere the boy felt great impulses surge within him. But, alas! the seamy side of great cities was borne in on him also. He had a vile lodging in the central slums, near the roof of a tall tenement-house that tottered between two groggeries, and here drunken wharfingers and sailors and negro wenches and Irishmen reeled and swore. To a lad brought up in godly Cobequid, where drunkenness was spoken of with bated breath, this unquestionable supremacy of Satan was both shocking and unsettling. Nevertheless, Matt spent the first days in a trance of delight, for--apart from and above all other wonders--there were picture-shops in the town; and the works of O’Donovan, the local celebrity, were marked at twenty, or thirty, and even fifty dollars apiece. They were sea-paintings of considerable merit, that excited Matt’s admiration without quite overwhelming him. On the strength of O’Donovan’s colossal prices, Matt invested some of his scanty stock of dollars in a kit of paint at a fairy shop, where shone collapsible tubes of oil-color, such as he had never seen before, and delightful brushes and undreamed-of easels and canvases. He also bought two yellow-covered books, one entitled _Artistic Anatomy_, and the other _Practical House Decoration_, which combined to oppress him with his ignorance of the human form divine and the house beautiful, and became his bed-fellows, serving to raise his pillow. His conceit fell to zero when he saw a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds among the collection in the Session Hall.

After a depressing delay, mitigated only by the sight of his fair horsewoman, he found work in a furniture shop at the top of an old rambling warehouse that was congested with broken litter and old pianos. The proprietor not only dealt in débris, but bought new furniture and had it painted in the loft. Matt received six dollars a week, half of which he saved for his English campaign. At first he had the atelier to himself, but as the proprietor’s business increased he was given a subordinate--a full-grown Frenchman, rather shorter than himself, who swore incomprehensibly and was restive under Matt’s surveyorship. By this time Matt had learned something of the wisdom of the serpent, so he treated his man to liquor. After the Frenchman had got drunk several times at the expense of his sober superior, he discovered that Matt was his long-lost brother, and peace reigned in the paint-shop.

But Matt did not remain long in Halifax. The Frenchman’s jabber of the mushroom millionaires of the States (though he failed to explain his own distance from these golden regions) fired Matt’s imagination, and he resolved to go to Boston in accordance with his original programme. He considered he had sufficiently studied his mother’s wishes, and her letters had become too incoherent for attention. It was a pain, not a pleasure, to receive them. He was not surprised to learn from Billy’s letters that domestic broils were frequent, and that the deacon’s proverbial wisdom did not avail to cope with Mrs. Strang’s threats of suicide. It was only poor Ruth’s girlish sweetness that could bring calm into these household cyclones.

And so one fine evening Matt set sail for the city of culture and “Crœsuses.” Everything seemed of good augury. Though the expense of the trip had wellnigh eaten up his savings, his heart was as light as his pocket. He was going only to the States, but he felt that, in quitting his native soil, the voyage to London, the temple of Art, and to his uncle, its high-priest, had begun. The moon shone over the twinkling harbor like a great gold coin, and as the vessel spread its canvas wings and glided out of the confusion of shipping, Matt felt that its name was not the least happy omen in this auspicious moment. The ship was named _The Enterprise_.

* * * * *

That night, finding some confusion about the distribution of bunks, Matt lay down on deck, with _Artistic Anatomy_ and _Practical House Decoration_ for his pillows, and slept the sleep of the weary, tempered by a farrago of inconsequent dreams.

When he woke up next morning he rubbed his eyes from more than sleepiness. Halifax seemed still to confront his vision--its hills, its forts, its wharves, George Island, the Point, and the great harbor in which _The Enterprise_ rocked gently. What was this hallucination?

He soon discovered that it was reality. There had been a head-wind in the night, and the ship had dropped her anchor in the harbor for safety.

The incident was typical. In the course of the voyage Matt learned to know the captain--a grizzled old sea-dog with the heart of a bitch. The ship was his own, and he sailed it himself to save expense and check dishonesty. There is a proverb about saving a pennyworth of tar, and Captain Bludgeon illustrated it. No man was ever so unfitted to walk the quarter-deck. His idea of navigation was to hug the coast, and he seized every pretext for putting in at creeks or ports and anchoring for the night, when the crew would go ashore and come back incapable. The schooner itself was an old tub, a cumbrous, dingey-like craft, but sound in timber. Matt had a rough time, though the reading of the _Arabian Nights_ made the voyage enchanted. The passengers were a plebeian crowd--a score of women, mostly servant-girls and single, fifteen men emigrating to the States, and a few children. There were only six bunks. The mate had given up his state-room--which Matt was to have shared--to some of the women. Those who could not secure bunks herded dressed in a big field bed, which also accommodated some of the men, likewise sleeping in their clothes. For toilet operations all the women resorted to the state-room, which held a mirror and washing apparatus. Etiquette was free-and-easy. The food was horrible, the cook’s menus being almost ingenious in their unpalatableness. Fortunately most of the passengers were sick already. Matt had no immunity. All the pangs of his first pipe were repeated, without the moral qualms which rationalized those. He continued to sleep on deck as often as he could, making friends with the stars; when the night was too chilly he couched on the wood-pile near the stove. Thus was he spared licentious spectacles, and his innocence was granted a little longer term. They passed the signals and flag-staff of Sable Point safely, Captain Bludgeon’s face as white as the breakers that girdled its barren rock; then, instead of making a bee-line for Boston, the captain fetched a semicircle, following the New England coast line, and holding on to the apron-strings of his mother earth. Such voyaging he conceived to be sure, if slow; mistakenly enough, considering the iron-bound character of the coast.

The passengers--once they had got over their sickness--did not complain, for they had the leisure of poverty, and the prospect of indefinite board and lodging was not unpleasing, and their frequent stopping-places diversified the monotony of the voyage with little excursions. One night, having been driven into harbor by a capful of wind, they witnessed the torch-light fishing. It was a scene that set Matt’s fingers itching for the brush--waving torches glittering on the water from dozens of boats, and lighting up the tanned faces of the fishers, who were scooping up the herrings with nets. Every detail gave him the keenest joy--the wavering refractions in the water, the leaping silver of the fish touched with gold flame, the sombre mystery of sea and sky above and around. The night was made even more memorable, for some of the girls who had landed brought back in giggling triumph many bundles of cured herrings, which they had pilfered from an unguarded smoke-house, and these they generously distributed, so that the whole ship supped deliciously in defiance of the cook.

On another occasion--in the afternoon at high-water--Matt and about a score of the passengers, the majority females, went on shore to pick gray-beards, as they called the gray cranberries that grew in the swamps. And they tarried so long that when they came back to the boat they found the tide turned, and two hundred yards of mud between them and the water. One of the men tried the mud, and sank to the knees in slimy batter. In the end there was nothing for it but to launch the empty boat, and then wade to it. The launching was easy, the boat slipping along as on grease, but the sequel was boisterous. Jack Floss, a strapping Anglo-Saxon with a blond mustache and a devil-may-care humor, set the example of giving a woman a pick-a-back to save her skirts, and the few other men followed suit, returning again and again for fresh freight. The air resounded with hysterical giggling and screaming as the women frantically clutched their bearers, some of whom extorted unreluctant kisses under jocose threats of tumbling their burdens over into the mud. One or two actually carried out their threats, by involuntarily stepping suddenly into a gutter worn by the rains and sinking up to the waist, but the mishaps abated no jot of the madcap merriment--it rather augmented the rowdiness as the women were hauled from their mud-baths. For his part Matt waded warily, more conscious of the responsibility than of the fun, for he was doing his duty manfully, as became a lad stout, sturdy, and sixteen. His second burden was a slim, pretty servant-girl named Priscilla, and when he was depositing her, speckless, in the boat, she took the opportunity of the embrace to kiss him in hearty gratitude. Matt dropped her like a hot coal. He felt scorched and flustered, and had a bewildered moment of burning blushes ere he ploughed his way back to rescue another of the distressed damsels. That sudden kiss was an epoch in his growth. A discomfort at the time, the after-taste of it lent new warmth to his interest in the royal amours of the _Arabian Nights_. In his dreams he bore delectable Eastern princesses across perilous magic marshes, and their gratitude found him stockish no longer.

The next episode in this curious creeping voyage was superficially more critical for Matt. A sudden gale upset all poor Captain Bludgeon’s calculations. He was near shore as usual, and tried to beat into harbor almost under bare poles; but the haven was of a dangerous entrance, narrow and choked in the throat by a rock, and no one on board had sufficient seamanship to get the schooner in. The mate advised abandoning the hope of harbor, and setting the jib and the jib-foresail to make leeway. The captain swore by everything unholy he would not go a cable farther out to sea. The night was closing in, but, the wind dying away, _The Enterprise_ anchored outside the harbor. But in the night the wind sprang up from the opposite quarter fiercer than ever, and the vessel dragged her anchors and drove towards the rock that squatted on guard at the mouth of the harbor, pitching helplessly in the shifting troughs. In the inky blackness great swamping waves carried off her boats, her top-sails, and both houses. Her anchors were left behind her, and part of the bulwarks was likewise torn away. Fortunately her cables held out as she drove bumping along, though they did not moderate her pace sufficiently to prevent her keel being partially torn away when she bumped upon a reef. Yet she jolted over the reef and drifted blindly on and on, none knew whither.

Within the schooner the scene was almost as wild as without. The women’s screams rivalled those of the wind; the distracted creatures ran up and down the companion-ladder, getting in the way of the crew; the captain went below to quiet them--and did not return. Apparently he preferred the society of his own sex. The mate, thus left in command, boarded up the companion-way to stop the aimless scurrying, and told off some of the crew to help him unload the cargo, which consisted of plaster, and to pitch it overboard. Matt and the cook bore a hand in the work. Not daring to unhatch for fear of being water-logged, they had to pass the plaster through the lazaret.

Jack Floss did his best to comfort the females by profanities. He laughed, and hoped the Lord would damn the old hulk, whose fleas were big enough to swim ashore on. His cool blasphemies calmed some, but others plainly regarded him as a Jonah. Matt was half perturbed, half fascinated by this unconventional vagabond; of the real danger his own buoyancy made light.

When the morning light came at last, it showed that they had providentially skirted the grim rock and were drifting into harbor. The deck was covered with débris and with sand, which the ship had stirred and raked up in her dragging progress along the shallow waters. Piles of grit had accumulated in the corners, and the waves on which she tossed were discolored with dirt. Very soon she passed a little island where a brig lay moored; and with great difficulty--for the sea was still running high--the brig sent her a hawser and made her fast. Then they were enabled to realize further the extent of their luck, for the harbor was strewn with wreckage. No fewer than seven schooners had gone down, and only two men had been saved. The harbor was alive with boats looking for the dead. Captain Bludgeon, bestriding his desolate quarter-deck, congratulated himself on his seamanship. He arranged with a tug to draw _The Enterprise_ back to St. John, New Brunswick, for repairs. The few impatient passengers who could afford to pay an extra fee went on to Boston by the rescuing brig, but the majority stuck to _The Enterprise_ and Captain Bludgeon, who was compelled to board and lodge them at a cheap water-side hotel while the schooner was laid up. Thus were the fates kind to these waifs on the ocean of life, who enjoyed the holiday after their manner--plain living and high jinks--and had no need of Satan, or even Jack Floss, to find mischief for their idle hands to do.

Matt, however, was not of the roysterers. He had remained with _The Enterprise_, of course, not having the money to exchange; but the scenery of a new town--and that a hill-girt town like St. John, with a cathedral, a silver water, and a forest afire with flowers--was always sufficient business for him. The cathedral was not so colossal as it had loomed to his childish fancy through McTavit’s reminiscences. After a day or two Matt found an even more delightful occupation. He happened to remark to Jack Floss that the ceiling of the hotel sitting-room would be all the better for a little ornamentation, and that worthy straightway sought out the proprietor, a gentleman of Scotch descent, and expressed himself so picturesquely that Matt was offered a dollar to make the ceiling worthy of being sat under by artistic souls like Jack Floss. Thereupon Jack Floss and everybody else, except Matt, were turned out of the sitting-room, and the boy, guided by his _Practical House Decoration_ in the mixing of colors and the preparation of plaster, stood on the ladder and stencilled one of his imaginative medleys. His fellow-passengers were not permitted to see it till it was ready, but speculation was rife, and the rumor of its glories had spread about the water-side, and on show-day the room was packed with motley spectators, gazing reverently heavenward as at fireworks, some breaking out into rapturous exclamations that made the boy more hot and uncomfortable than even the damsel’s kiss had done. He was glad he was almost invisible, squeezed into a corner by the crowd. And despite his discomfort, aggravated by a crick in the back of the neck, due to painting with his hand over his head, there was a subtle pleasure for him in his fellow-passengers’ facile recognition of the torch-light fishing scene which formed the centre of the decorations. The hotel bar did good business that day.

Just before _The Enterprise_ started again for Boston a man came to see the ceiling, and immediately offered the artist a commission. There was a paint-shop in the railway-carriage works, and Matt could have a situation just vacant there at ten dollars a week. Dazzled by these fabulous terms, which seemed almost to realize his ambition at a bound, Matt accepted; and _The Enterprise_, patched up and refitted, sailed without him. A few hours later he discovered that it had also sailed without Priscilla, that seductive young person having found a berth as chambermaid in the hotel. She came into Matt’s room to tidy up, and expressed her joy at the prospect of looking after his comfort. But the boy told her he must seek less comfortable quarters, and, despite her protests and her offers to help him temporarily, he departed for cheaper lodgings, leaving behind him a perfunctory promise to call and see her soon. Jack Floss, whom Matt gratefully regarded as the architect of his fortunes, had half a mind to stay behind, too. He said he wanted to go under, and _The Enterprise_ didn’t seem to have any luck. But at the last moment he found that he could not desert the ladies.

Matt was more sorry to part from him than from Priscilla; there was something in the young man’s devil-may-care manner that appealed to the germs of Bohemianism in the artistic temperament. The young artist had, however, an unpleasant reminder of the defects of the Bohemian temperament, for Jack Floss was forced to confess that he had lost the copy of the _Arabian Nights_ which he had persuaded Matt to lend him to beguile the tedium of the days of waiting. The boy was grievously distressed by the loss; it seemed an insult to Ruth Hailey and a misprision of her kindly wishes. However, it was no use crying over spilled milk, and Jack Floss slightly assuaged his chagrin by fishing out from among his miscellaneous effects a volume of Shelley in small type, and another--with an even more microscopic text--containing the complete works of Lord Byron. Both books opened as by long usage at their most erotic pages. Through these ivory gates the boy passed into the great world of romantic poetry. Whole stanzas remained in his memory. The brain that had refused to retain Bible verses, spending hours in quest of the tiniest, absorbed the sensuous images of the poets without effort; he fell asleep with them on his lips.

In the railway-carriage shop--a spacious saloon as full of painters as an atelier in the Quartier Latin--Matt was allowed a free hand on great canvases that, when filled with flowers and landscapes, were nailed to the roofs of the carriages by electroplated pins. He also decorated the wooden panels with scroll-work and foliage, and gilded the lettering outside the doors. Thus was the citizen fed on art at every turn, standing under his ceiling, or sitting on his chair, or lying on his sofa, or travelling on his railway. Art is notoriously elevating; but as the depraved quarters of the town continued to flourish, the art must have been bad.

Matt’s career in the paint-shop was neither so long nor so pleasant as he had anticipated. His pictures did not please his fellow-artists as much as his employers, and he became the butt of the place. A series of impalpable irritations almost too slight for analysis, subtle with that devilish refinement of which coarseness is only capable when it is cruel, rendered his life intolerable. Matt’s vocabulary was too mincing for his fellow-craftsmen; they resented his absence of expletives, though imperceptibly he succumbed to the polluted atmosphere which had surrounded him ever since he set foot in Halifax; and the boy, whose mind was stored with lovely images and ethereal lyrics, began to bespatter his talk with meaningless oaths. Nor was this his only coquetry with corruption, for the daily taunt of “milksop” conspired with the ferment of youth.

“Varnishing-day” was his day of danger. It was pay-day, and Matt had boundless money. It was also the hardest day of the six, the wind-up, when all the work of the week was varnished in an atmosphere of sixty degrees; and the poor lad, drunk with the fumes of turpentine, sticky from head to foot, his face besplashed, his eyes stinging, his nose red, and his brain dizzy, threw off his apron and overalls, and reeled to the door, and groped his way into the streets to breathe in the glorious fresh air, and revel like the rest of his fellows in the joy of life--aye, and the joy of license, the saturnalia of Saturday night. For the glorious fresh air soon palled, and in the evening Matt was dragged by his mates to a species of music-hall in a hotel near the harbor, where, in a festive reek of bad tobacco and worse whiskey, he repeated the choruses of winking soubrettes, dubious refrains whose inner meaning the brag and badinage of the workshop had made obscurely clear. But disgust invariably supervened; Byron and Shelley were his Sunday reading, and under the spell of their romantic song, which chimed with his soul’s awakening melodies, he revolted against his low-minded companions, hating himself for almost sinking to their level.

He felt that he inhabited a rarer ether; he was conscious of a curious aloofness, not only from them, but from humanity at large, and yet here he was joining in their coarse conviviality. To such a mood the accidental turning up of an old sketch of his Halifax divinity on her horse appealed as decisively as an accidental text was wont to appeal to his mother. The beautiful curves of her figure, the purity of her complexion, rebuked him. Perhaps it was because he was an artist that his soul was touched through the concrete. In a spasm of acuter disgust, and in a confidence of higher destinies, he threw up his berth.

He had saved twenty dollars--twenty stout planks between him and the deep. But the luck that had been his hitherto deserted him. In six weeks he had only one fortunate fortnight, when he carried the hod for a house-joiner, and was nearly choked by the veering round of a little ladder, through which he had popped his head in mounting a bigger.

One by one his twenty planks slipped from under him, and then he found himself struggling in the lowest depths. The few dollars he had squandered on the music-hall haunted him with added reproach.

Too proud to beg or to go back to the paint-shop or to write to his mother, his only possessions his clothes and a box of cheap water-colors he carried with his slim library in his jacket pockets, he searched the streets for an odd job, or stood about the wharves amid the stevedores and negroes to earn a copper by unasked assistance in rolling casks into warehouses, till at last, when the cathedral lawn was carpeted with autumn leaves, the streets became his only lodging. Hungry and homeless, he was beginning to regret his hut in the woods, and to meditate a retreat from civilization, for in the frosty nights that shadowed the genial autumn days this unsheltered life was not pleasant, when, by one of those strokes of fortune which fall to the most unfortunate, he found a night-refuge. A fellow-lodger of his at the Hotel of the Beautiful Star, a glass-blower out of work with whom he had once halved his evening bread, fell into employment, and gratefully offered him the nocturnal hospitality of the factory. Here, voluptuously couched on warm white sand, piles and barrels of which lay all about, the boy forgot the gnawing emptiness of his stomach and the forlornness of his situation in the endless fascination of the weird effects of light and shade. It was a vast place, dim despite its gas-jets, mysterious with shadowy black corners. The red flannel shirts of the men struck a flamboyant note of color in the duskiness; the stokers were outlined in red before the roaring furnaces, the blowers were bathed in a dazzling white glow from the glass at the end of their blow-pipes, so that their brawny bare arms and the sweat on their brows stood out luridly. With every movement, with every flickering and waning light, there was a changing play of color. Matt would lie awake in his corner, taking mental notes, or recording the action of muscles by the pencilled silhouette of some picturesque figure rolling the pliant glass. Great painters, he thought, in his boyish ignorance, worked from imagination on a basis of memory; but he was not strong enough yet to dispense with observation, though observation always brought despair of his power to catch the ever-shifting subtleties of living nature. In the enthralment of these studies, and in his sensuous delight in the Dantesque effects, Matt often omitted to sleep altogether. And sometimes, on that background of ruddy gloom, other visions opened out to the boy dreaming on his bed of sinuous sand; the real merged into the imaginative, and this again into the fantasies of delicious drowsihead. The walls fell away, the factory blossomed into exotic realms of romance; peerless houris, ripe in womanhood, passed over moon-silvered waters in gliding caïques; prisoned princesses, pining for love, showed dark starry eyes behind the lattice-work of verandas; pensive maidens, divinely beautiful, wandered at twilight under crescent moons rising faint and ghostly behind groves of cedars.

London, too, figured in the pageantry of his dreams, glittering like a city of the _Arabian Nights_, ablaze with palaces, athrob with music; and perched on the top of the tallest cupola, on the loftiest hill, stood his uncle Matthew, holding his paint-brush like a sceptre, king of the realm of Art. Hark! was that not the king’s trumpeters calling, calling him to the great city, calling him to climb up and take his place beside the sovereign? Oh, the call to his youth, the clarion call, summoning him forth to toils and triumphs in some enchanted land! Oh, the seething of the young blood that thronged the halls of dream with loveliness, and set seductive faces at the casements of sleep, and sanctified his waking reveries with prescient glimpses of a sweet spirit-woman waiting in some veiled recess of space and time to partake and inspire his consecration to Art! The narrow teachings of his childhood--the conception of a vale of tears and temptation--shrivelled away like clouds melting into the illimitable blue, merging in a vast sense of the miracle of a beautiful world, a world of infinitely notable form and color. And this expansion of his horizon accomplished itself almost imperceptibly because the oppression of that ancient low-hanging heaven overbrooding earth, of that sombre heaven lying over Cobequid Village like a pall, was not upon him, and he was free to move and breathe in an independence that made existence ecstasy, even at its harshest. So that, though he walked in hunger and cold, he walked under triumphal arches of rainbows.