Читать книгу A Search for America - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 4

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I was twenty-four years old when one day in the month of July I took passage from Liverpool to Montreal. I was not British-born; but my mother had been a Scotswoman, and from my earliest childhood I had been trained to speak the English of fashionable governesses. I had acquired--by dint of much study of English literature--a rather extensive reading and arguing vocabulary which however showed--and, by the way, to this day shows--its parentage by a peculiar stiff-necked lack of condescension to everyday slang. My father, Charles Edward Branden by name, had been of Swedish extraction, himself rather an Anglophile. For many years previous to my emigration, I, too, had affected English ways in dress and manners; occasionally, when travelling in Sweden or in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, I had connived at being taken for an Englishman. I am afraid, if I could meet myself as I then was, I should consider my former self as an insufferable snob and coxcomb.

I must explain at some length what induced me to go to America.

When I was a boy, my parents lived "in style"; that is to say, they had a place in the country, a rather "palatial" home, and a house in the fashionable residential district of a populous city on the continent of Europe. The exact localities are irrelevant. Every summer, as soon as at home the heat became oppressive, my mother, whom I adored and whom I remember as a Junoesque lady of very pronounced likes and dislikes, used to pack up and to go to the French coast--to Boulogne, Harfleur, St. Malo, Parisplage--or to Switzerland--the Zurich Lake, Landshut, Lucerne. She preferred the less frequented places, such as were prepared to meet her demands for comfort without being infested by tourist-crowds. And invariably she took one of her ten children along, mostly myself, probably because I was the youngest one and her only boy. She died when I was an adolescent.

About a year after my mother's death I went on a "tour of the continent", planned to take me several years. The ostensible reason was that I intended to pursue and to complete my studies at various famous universities--Paris, Bonn, Oxford, Rome. In reality I went because I had the wandering instinct. I by no means adhered to the prearranged plan, but allowed myself to be pushed along.

I will give one example. At Naples I made the acquaintance of a delightful young man--I forget whether he was Dutch or Danish--who knew the artistic circles of Paris--Gide, Regnier, and others. He somehow declared that I was the invariably best-dressed man whom he had ever met, a highly desirable acquaintance, and just the young Croesus who should interest himself in modern literary aspirations. He wished me to meet his Parisian friends and offered me cards of introduction; and although I had not been thinking of France just then--rather of Egypt and Asia Minor--I promptly took the next train to Nice and from there the Riviera Express to Paris. Soon I was all taken up with that particular brand of literature which was then becoming fashionable, filled with contempt for the practical man, and deeply ensconced in artificial poses.

My reputed wealth opened every door. I sometimes think that some of the men with whom I linked up--or upon whom I thrust myself--men, some of whom have in the meantime acquired European or even world-wide reputation, must have smiled at the presumptuous pup who thought he was somebody because he threw his father's money about with noble indifference. It is a strange fact that they received me on a footing of equality and led me on; they had time to spare for exquisite little dinners no less than for the nonsensical prattle of one who gave himself airs. Of course, there was an occasional man who kept himself at a distance; but on the whole I cannot avoid the conclusion that these idols had feet of clay.

Whenever my father enquired about the progress of my studies, I put him off by affected contempt. Anybody could pass examinations and take degrees; I was going to be one of the few Europeans who counted. Of course, nobody but myself ever valued me at exactly that figure. I had not done anything to make others aware of my worth. It would, however, have been a tremendous shock to my self-estimation, had I been able to foresee that one day I should value myself at exactly what the world valued me at while I remained utterly and absolutely unknown. I simply was not in a hurry. My aims were lofty enough. To master nothing less than all human knowledge was for my ambition--or, had I better say, for my conceit?--no more than the preliminary to swinging the earth out of its orbit and readjusting, while improving upon, the creator's work. What puzzles me to this day, is that my father seemed to accept these ravings at their face-value--though maybe the revelations which followed a few years later made it appear somewhat less astonishing. I was, after all, a true scion of his stock.

But you must not imagine that I went idle, for I did not. My work lacked simply that measure of coordination which might have made it useful for the purpose of earning a living when the necessity arose. I mastered, for instance, five modern languages, wrote an occasional tract in tolerable Latin, and read Homer and Plato with great fluency before I was twenty-two. I dabbled in Mathematics and in Science, and even attended courses in Medicine. Theology and Jurisprudence were about the only two fields of human endeavour which I shunned altogether.

Meanwhile, having seen in an incidental way a good deal of Europe, I longed for more extensive travel. In my reading I had, so I thought, pretty well exhausted the literatures of the world--difficile est satiram non scribere--and so there remained the world itself to see.

An opportunity offered when an uncle of mine took a transcontinental trip to Vladivostock--it was before the days of the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad. I accompanied him and returned to Europe by way of Japan and Singapore. Hardly home again, I struck at my father's pocketbook by asking him for ten thousand dollars to finance a year's tour around Africa. I got the money and made the trip. America beckoned--not so much Canada, or the "commercialised" United States--both of which I despised--as Mexico and Peru with their great traditions.

Then the entirely unexpected happened.

I asked my father for an interview and submitted to him my intention of spending a year or two on the continent of America. Without a word of argument or explanation, he drew his cheque-book, made out a cheque, and pushed it across the table at which we were sitting.

We were in the library of his town-house, a high and imposing room done in dark oak, with its walls nearly hidden by the vast array of books which he had assembled during a half century of what I imagined to have been a most successful career in the business of raising trees for the reforesting activities of various governments around the Baltic Sea. He was the tallest and most distinguished looking septuagenarian I have ever beheld. To the very day of this interview he had lived like a "grand seigneur" of the old school--with three ideals: social prestige, liberal culture of the mind, physical prowess. He was six feet five inches tall, with a long, narrow, still fair-haired head sitting on wide, straight shoulders, and a slender body still under perfect control, encased in an immaculate "morning-coat". To imagine a man like him without money would have been an absurdity.

I had asked him for ten thousand dollars. When I glanced at the cheque, as a preliminary to slipping it into my pocket, I saw that it read for seven hundred and fifty. The world seemed to reel--I did not understand. My father was looking at me with great and expectant seriousness; but not without kindness. It even seemed as if behind his earnest and nearly anxious look there lingered in his grey, white-lashed eyes a twinkle of humour.

Then he spoke substantially as follows.

"When fifty years ago, your mother married me, my boy, she brought me about half a million in addition to the landed estate which I owned. My father had been a peasant, but a money-maker. We have been calling him a landed proprietor, probably to cover the ignominy of our origins; but when he started out, he owned only a very small farm. He amassed property--under my hand it has melted away. To-day, after allowing for a fair valuation of all these things that still go as mine"--he looked about as if he could cover it all with a glance--"there are no more than ten thousand dollars left. I am glad that your sisters are married and provided for. As for you, I might hand you what is left and blow my brains out. You surmise that that is not my way.

"I have often longed to drop all pretence, to quit this 'mansion',"--he smiled at the word--"and to retire into the country in order to live as I should like to live; that is, to buy myself a small cottage, with one or two rooms, to appoint it in the simplest manner, and to prepare myself for the life to come by reading about the life that is past. These books which were the pride of your mother were to be the consolation of my old age. To put it briefly, I am on the point of becoming a hermit.

"I might say in self-defence that during the half century of my wedded life I have always lived in clothes which did not fit me. I married your mother because I loved her. She married me because she liked me. I was young, brilliant, rich, a skilful spender. She expected me to keep it up; I did not disappoint her. She died when it was time for her to go. Since her death all my worries have ceased because I am free to do as I please. Ever since she closed her eyes, I have been engaged upon the task of winding up my affairs. You have been away a good deal, or you would have been aware of the fact that unusual things were going on. I have finished my task. So much for myself.

"Now as to you. For several days I have been worried about the best way to broach the subject. I am glad you introduced it yourself.

"You will acknowledge that I have been a good father. I have given you the most liberal opportunities to finish your education; I have invariably and unstintingly supplied you with money or paid your debts; I have sent you around the world and even kept up appearances as far as I myself was concerned, in order to assist you in those social aspirations which you have no doubt inherited from your mother. You are well liked everywhere; everywhere great things are expected of you. Among your closest friends are men of letters, artists, scholars, men of the world, and diplomats. All you need to do in order to find promotion waiting for you is to make a choice of whatever calling you prefer, and then disclose your present position to the leading men in your chosen field; they will place you where an honourable and successful career cannot fail you. I know you are a genius,"--he said it without the ghost of a smile--"now is the time to show the world what you are. That little cheque will help you to get established."

I had listened under a spell; no thought of mine had been for the cheque any longer. I was so bewildered that I did not know what to do or say. At this mention of the cheque I looked at it and impulsively pushed it across the table, back to him.

He laughed. "No, no," he said; "I do not intend to leave you stranded. It would not be fair, I should feel worried. You will oblige me by keeping the trifle."

I crushed it into my pocket and ran over to him. He gripped my outstretched hand, but by that very move held me at a distance. Then he said in an entirely unemotional but not unfriendly way, "Don't let it for a moment enter your head that you should feel sorry for me. As I said, I am shaking off ill-fitting clothes in order to be better fitted. I see Paradise ahead."

With these words he ended the interview. I left him alone.

There followed a series of other interviews. The phrase, "Awfully sorry, old man, but I don't see what I could do for you," recurred more than a few times; in fact, till it became an obsession. I drank from Timon's cup.

Especially hard was I hit by the refusal of one of my former friends, a young millionaire-writer whom I had, before he came into his money, repeatedly treated to rather expensive hospitality; he had made two trips with me, one to Paris, one to Venice; both had been made at my invitation and at my expense--or rather, my father's. Now he refused me the loan of one thousand dollars which I wanted in order to return to my studies and to pass such examinations as would enable me to take advantage of the only opening that any one could find for me. This opening consisted in a position as lecturer on archeological subjects offered by a few university men who had been my disappointed teachers--disappointed, because they, like others, had accepted me as a genius till I dashed their expectations of what I might be and do to pieces by my lack of perseverance along a definite and limited line of endeavour. This young millionaire--son of a manufacturer of European fame--had the nerve, as I called it then, to point out to me that he considered it a bad investment to loan money to a man who intended to do nothing more lucrative than to embark upon a university career. I judge him somewhat more charitably to-day.

Meanwhile I had promptly though regretfully given up my habit of travelling about in reserved sections of "trains-de-luxe" which carried only first-class compartments. Like other poor people I bought third-class tickets for single seats; I frequented medium-priced hotels, and generally adapted myself to my reduced circumstances. I sold a diamond-brooch left me by my mother and a small steel sailing-craft which I had been keeping on the Baltic. For nearly a year the proceeds of these and similar sales kept me in funds. The reader will wonder why I did not use this money to put myself through my Ph.D. Well, I can only say I wonder myself, for I know as little about it as he does; but maybe it will appear less incomprehensible later on, when we meet with more such decisions and indecisions. For one thing, though, the money came in instalments; I did not, at first, think of parting with a legacy of my mother's; she had, that I knew, intended it as a wedding-gift to the woman that would be my wife; I held it in trust. But the reader might just as well understand from the outset that this story of a few years of my life is not meant as an apotheosis. I do not intend in these pages to gloss over any actions of mine. More than once, as my patient reader will find, I did not grasp opportunity by the forelock when it passed my way. If that is sin or crime, I have paid the penalty and finally still worked out my own salvation; that is all. I even have to confess that the moment I had the money which paid for my sailing-craft, about six hundred dollars, I took one hundred dollars out of it, went to Paris, had just one dinner at Paillard's, took the night-flyer back to Brussels, and was by that one hundred dollars poorer. It was not so easy as it sounds to change from the habits of a young "man about town" to those of a thrifty young scholar.

My father, meanwhile, had also gone to Paris and had, for the remainder of his fortunes, bought a "rente viagère"--an annuity--and a little cottage between Boulogne and Etaples--a coast which he loved as I have always loved it. He was fortunate; for at last he realized his dream, even though only for a short time; and I can imagine how he felt about it, taking it as a final reward for duty well done during a lifetime of disguise.

There was consolation, and a good deal of poetry, too, in the fact that he should have gone there to die; for that is exactly what he did. The letter-carrier found him dead on the concrete steps to his hermitage, one morning late in spring, stricken down, so it seemed, by a stroke of apoplexy. It is a significant fact that I received half a dozen letters from citizens of the nearby town--Etaples--plain tradesmen, who spoke with a glowing enthusiasm of this "gentilhomme" who had passed away. In a shed belonging to his cottage there were found sixty-three living rabbits, the pets of his solitude.

When I received the news, I quietly and quickly wound up my little affairs and took stock. The only man whom I should have hated to disappoint by failing to become a great man was dead. Why struggle? My father's desire for a quiet life in obscurity had become my own desire. I was bleeding from bitter disappointments--my state of mind was Byronic.

As it happened, being at the time at Stockholm, I met one evening, in a certain famous cafe, a young Swedish nobleman with whom I had been intimate, although originally he had been merely an acquaintance from the tennis courts. I was sitting at a small table and brooding. He entered, ushering in his two sisters, brilliant young ladies with whom I had had many a dance. I rose to pay my compliments; but the trio passed me as if I had been air.

I paid my bill, went home to my hotel, counted my money, called up the railway station, found that I could just catch a through-train via Malmoe, Copenhagen, Hamburg, to Ostend, and thence a boat to England, engaged a sleeper, and packed up.

I had, in a flash, made up my mind to leave Europe and all my old associations behind. Not that I felt really hurt or still cared to rub elbows with nobility; but I did not want to be "cut" or snubbed because I was no longer the son of a reputed millionaire.

While dozing in my berth, I determined upon a gamble. Not for a moment did it occur to me to go anywhere except into an Anglo-Saxon country. I might, of course, have appealed to one of my sisters; I was too proud to do so. Canada, the United States, South Africa, or Australia--on one of these four my choice had to fall. What I resolved to do, was this. I intended to step in at Cook's tourist-office in London--on the Strand, if I remember right--and to ask for the next boat which I stood any chance of catching, either at Liverpool or at Southampton, no matter where she might be bound. As it happened, when, a day or two later, I carried this idea out, a White-Star liner was to weigh anchor next day, going from Liverpool to Montreal. The boat train was to leave Euston Station the same night at ten o'clock. I bought my passage--second cabin--received a third-class railway ticket free of charge and--had burnt my bridges. Thus I became an immigrant into the western hemisphere.

As I have said, I was twenty-four years old at the time; it was late in July.

While we were sailing up the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, I naturally pondered a good deal on my venture. I was starting a new life at a time when I should have been well on in my old one. Gradually some conceptions worked themselves out in my mind. I thought I had a very definite aim; and I imagined that I also had some very definite assets to work with. I did not realize at the time how much I was also burdened down with very serious disabilities which were to handicap me sorely in the American game as I understood it. My aim I conceived to be modest enough. I wanted to found a home and an atmosphere for myself. Woman might or might not enter into my scheme of things. There was the picture of a girl somewhere in the background of my mind, it is true; but I thought of her with resignation only. To do what might win her seemed quite impossible. I had met her in the heyday of my fortunes at Palermo and attached myself to her orbit for a week or so, following her to Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin. Now she was one of those infinitely distant stars which you still see because a few centuries ago they sent out their light on its path, and it keeps on travelling and reaching our globe, although the star that sent it has perhaps long since been extinguished.

What I desired as an atmosphere was what I considered the necessities for a life devoted to quiet studies, to the search for contact with Nature, to service, unpretentious and unselfish service of mankind. Cicero's "otium cum dignitate" was what I desired. To this day I believe that to be a worthy aim. To this day I believe that we should be a better people, that our country would be a better place to live in, good as it is even for him who is without worldly ambition, if more people set themselves that aim, no matter whether they are philosophically inclined or not.

Just what that meant in the way of a fortune, is hard to say. But I believe that even in our days of higher and higher costs the interest on about forty thousand dollars would have covered all my wants as I saw them then. This I vaguely hoped to achieve in from ten to twenty years. You see that, as American expectations go, mine were modest enough.

I had no definite plans. It did not matter how I did it or what I might do to reach my goal. The aim was all-important, nothing else of any consequence. I have since lived to see the error in this. To-day my maxim is, What is the goal to us who love the road?

I did not mind, then, what I might be doing, so long as for the time being it yielded me a decent living and enabled me besides year after year to lay by a certain sum, sufficient to insure my independence within a reasonable time.

I thought a good deal of a man whom I had known as a dignified member of the small but select English colony at Dresden. His calling-card showed a "The Hon." in front of his name; and while I knew him, he had lived the quiet and independent life of a scholar of wide views and large experience; not a brilliant, but a carefree life. I had admired him for his perfect form and breeding; and I had always assumed that he probably had never done anything useful in his life, beyond setting an example of noble leisure to the younger men of whom he ever had a circle surrounding him. But one day I had received a revelation. It so happened that I became very intimate with one of these younger men, a physician who had known him for a number of years and who possessed his confidence to an unusual degree. Now this young doctor one day told me confidentially that the honourable gentleman had been exceedingly poor when young. So he had gone to South Africa and learned the business of an hotel-keeper. He had successively been the porter, the clerk, the manager, and the owner of a small-town hotel, had lived there for twelve years under an assumed name, had "made his pile", and returned to Europe to step back into his proper place in society.

In my meditations about this man I found only one thing which I could not approve of. I could not bring myself to the point of thinking it right of him to return to the haunts of his youth. He should have stayed in the country of his adoption, I thought, paying with his culture-influence for the money he had taken out. Viewing as I did the colonials as probably sorely in need of such influence, I vowed to myself that, if ever I should succeed in my endeavours, I should settle down wherever I had "made my pile" and spend it, thus paying back my debt and throwing in my influence for good, such as it might be, by way of interest. Ecce homo! Crucified to ease and honour.

Another resolve I made was this that, no matter what line of work I might follow, as a cog in a machine to start with, of course--I meant to be quite modest--I should always do a little better than my mere duty, and, if such were possible, not only a little, but a good deal better. In this I was honest enough, for there was really no need of taking such a resolution; I am temperamentally unable to do anything by halves while I am at it; though, also temperamentally, I am next to unable to stay with it for very long if it completely absorbs my energies. I have to this very day not yet made up my mind as to whether this is a weak point or a strong one. It has, on the one hand, prevented me from achieving any very conspicuous success along a single, definite line; on the other, it has given me a range of experience in various fields, a knowledge of men, things, processes, languages, and even nations, which I should never have achieved without this defect.

Some of the pages which follow may read like a huge indictment of the Americas. I can assure the patient reader that they were never meant as such. Whoever follows me to the end, will see the unmistakable intention of this book. I have, of course, had bitter hours since I first landed on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. I have sometimes felt inclined, in a spirit of accusation, to put down my education among the liabilities rather than among the assets. I have long since learned to smile at my discomfitures and to think with pleasure even of things that were horrors in the living.

I want to state with all due emphasis that this is the story of an individual, and that I do not mean to put it down as typical except in certain attitudes towards phenomena of American life--attitudes which later study and work among hundreds of immigrants have shown me to be typical. If then, with this distinct understanding, there is no lesson left for the American to learn, that is to say, if parts at least of this story do not uncover weak spots in a great organization, then let these pages go into oblivion as they will deserve.