“Never mind, dear—never mind!” said Mr. Mathews hastily.
It broke upon me! I alone knew why he hadn’t shaved. I had stolen his razor. Yes, Mr. Mathews was too polite to explain. But oh, how embarrassed I was—that most embarrassing moment of my life! Of course, I had only meant to borrow it—I had replaced it just before coming down to breakfast. But—too late!—I had taken it during just those five minutes of the day when Mr. Mathews always shaved. I imagined his confusion in not being able to find it. He must have spent all his time in the bathroom looking for it—so I imagined. Then perhaps he went into his bedroom and looked there. Finally there was no more time. He had to put on his collar and tie, and hurry down. He would have to go to business directly after breakfast, with out shaving! Oh, if I had only taken Mr. Mathews’ razor at any other time in the twenty-four hours!
I rose from the table and I went out with Mr. Mathews’ boy. I had a purpose. We visited a store in Scottsborough. It was the only store in town, and there were many horsewhips, oil lamps, hoes, washstand sets and bundles of ginghams and lawn, and many other things for sale. But I bought a razor. I paid $1.25. Practically my first luxury purchase in the New World, and destined to last me many years. Then I went back and dug potatoes in the potato garden very hard.
2
I was enrolled soon after as a special student in Maritime University, and put with one hundred other boys in the dormitory of Green Grove. Green Grove was an L-shaped building on top of a little hill, surrounded by oaks and pines and covered by a fine meadow grass. No crows to be fed on that soft grass—nothing unclean. The boys used to go out and play ball there on beautiful sunny days. Over the hill was an arm of the sea, and salty air rushed into the nose day and night, turning white faces red. It was said to be a mild oceanic climate, but always there was a little whip to the air and a good deal of fog in the morning not unlike the rawness of Mother England.
A piece to the left of Green Grove, Seaway Park was laid out with pines and firs. These magnificent trees were very tall and fragrant; they had spread a thick matting of needles over the ground. Here were many wandering roads through the pines, making the perfect rambling walk for a philosopher—or for Milton in Il Penseroso mood. Not many people seemed to use Seaway. It was open to the public, but it was so near the college, it was more like a college campus. On fine Sundays, you might encounter a few from the city here—an old gentleman or two, with yellow kid gloves and cane in hand, strolling very leisurely. On such days, a few horse carriages might walk slowly through as well, and when one of those old gentlemen met an old lady in one of these, the horse stopped, while the gentleman spoke with a courtly mumbling—slightly confused between his cane, his kid gloves, his cigarette, and his hat. His was the aloof, suave dignity of Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Plainly an “heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time” (for probably he knew his way about London—even though he had no use for crass New York). Such were the Nova Scotians, to share Seaway. But when a fine drizzling rain was sifting down, like a veil blown from the sea, you were sure to meet no one—with the exception perhaps of a lone ex-serviceman who had come back after the Great War to resume his interrupted studies in Maritime College; swinging along in his trench coat at a steady martial pace, his prematurely set and silent face showing that he wished to be disturbed no more than you did.
3
When I reported soon after arrival to the administration building and to Doctor MacMillan (a solid round British gentleman with a clerical collar), he handed me over to my two Green Grovian tutors, both studying for the ministry and both ex-servicemen. Ian was of medium height, slight, blond, very English-looking. He had a smooth, regular face, rather handsome, but closer to the feminine ideal than the masculine one. One eyebrow was always cocking up and he impressed one as being witty and ironic. Ralph on the other hand was an out-and-out Canadian, very big and masculine-looking, and of the farmer type. He was red all over, but of different shades. His face was a kind of lipstick red, but his hair and eyebrows more a sandy tint. Though he shaved with meticulous care, his cheeks and chin always suggested a stubbly field. Ralph was quiet, unhumorous, very serious, and had ladylike, minute ways of speech and action.
These two were to be my tutors and my guardians. They promptly helped me with my registration card, then guided me over to the University, where everybody had a college bulletin in hand and a number of cards. Here for the first time I was lost in a crowd of alien boys from every Canadian province around there, from professional classes, farms, factories, and even fishermen’s villages. But with true British love of precedent—“not swift nor slow to change but firm”—the father’s calling usually determined the son’s. (In this I saw Canadians to be unlike people from the States, who love to break all precedents, where rarely does the son follow in the steps of his father.)
While I was standing, a little apart, somewhat overwhelmed by the racial, national, and religious homogeneity I sensed around me, I was approached by a narrow-faced, tender-skinned boy with dark eyebrows which looked like two strong lines drawn with a Chinese brush. He was wearing a big sweater with a letter and had a rather sneering and boisterous expression. He surveyed me arrogantly, giving vent to a long-drawn whistle, and turning on his heel I heard him say something to his companions about this “yellow dog we have to live with.” His words were so wantonly contemptuous that I burned with a greater indignation than I had ever felt for all the rudeness of New York. From the frowns and severe expressions of others around him, I judged such insults were unpopular. But in the midst of reserve and silence from my future classmates I received an unforgettable impression of smugness and shut-off-ness, as if the irrepressible Leslie Robin, as his name was, had voiced what was in the back of the minds of all. From others there, as I was soon to know—though not from Leslie—there would be no lack of kindness and consideration, but the school itself was set in a rigid mold—quite unlike the colleges and universities of the United States—a mold which held the superiority of the Briton above all races created as its unquestioned dogma, which believed without a trace of modern scepticism, without a fraction of scientific aloofness or of new time-vision, “better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”—though (being only Canadian and incontestably New-World) it, too, must cringe, before the superiority of an elder country, England.
4
—gray twilight pour’d
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient peace.
It was strange how the ghost of elderly England was in the new air here. Green Grove overlooked the city of Halifax, a naval city on the irregular Atlantic seacoast. In certain sections—notably the large and beautiful residential district and the many outlying homes—you saw walls with beautiful flowers climbing over stone, and hedged gardens as in England. Marvellous how this noisy colonial town could still convey obliquely an Old-World pattern, reminding of the English home. The downtown section of course was not attractive by reason of the thriving industrial atmosphere—the many factories concerned with iron founding, brewing, distilling, sugar refining, tanning etc. But the first impression here, too, was of British atmosphere. Well-dressed British naval and military officers were seen everywhere. Bright red coats, bright blue jackets. And many ex-servicemen, showing how thoroughly the British Empire had been mobilized a short while ago.
This city had been one of the chief bases of British operations against the revolting Americans during the Revolution. And also the War of 1812 found the Nova Scotians active and is said to have brought much wealth to the town. During the Civil War in the United States, this harbor was the starting point for numerous blockade runners and many of the citizens now living in the beautiful residential district made their fortunes at that time. Canadian fortunes—not so large certainly as those of United States millionaires, but undoubtedly going farther, lasting longer. For lik
e England itself Canada bespoke the tenacity, the conservatism proper to Britons, and to Tennyson’s
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent.
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fulness wrought,
The strength of some diffuse thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.
5
I was studying English Literature in earnest. Tennyson and Browning, Ruskin and Carlyle. The professor at Maritime College I remember best was Doctor Donald, whom the boys called Donnie behind his back. He was a very dignified old gentleman, with Tennysonian locks and beard, and Browning personality. Sunset and evening star . . . the time of that looked just like him . . . and all is well with the world. I doubt if he would have assumed it necessary to argue the matter incessantly as Browning did . . .
This world’s no blot for us, nor blank.
It means intensely and means good.
For how could it be a blot or blank to Doctor Donnie with England in the offing?
Since all had to take the Liberal Arts Course at Maritime, every freshman had Doctor Donald’s Survey of English Literature and his classes were very large. Almost all the freshmen I knew were in my section—which contained more than one hundred students. Leslie Robin and his chums were there—and many others. Donnie was much respected. Even Leslie, always rough, wild, and insolent, dared no open rebellion before him. No high-necked sweaters, none, could enter here. At the start, Donnie had announced: “Two things I will not stand. I want nobody to chew gum here!” (Anybody with gum in the mouth promptly pressed it under the tongue, or stuck it beneath his chair.) “And I want nobody to wear sweaters in my class. When we sit down here for literary discussion, it must be done as English gentlemen.” Just before Donnie’s class was a busy time in lockers. It was like getting dressed for dinner. Every one had to put on that missing tie, or Donnie would not let him into the classroom.
Donnie himself always entered wearing his cap and gown. As he appeared, slowly and impressively, carrying a little bag of books for use in the classroom, there was a perfect silence, not a loud breath drawn. “Johnny Milton—Billy Shakespeare”—so one boy wrote in his theme, and Doctor Donald did not like that and commented a long time. He told the students, “Bad—bad—bad” (in a thundering voice). “You are very bad in composition. . . . But even so, you are better than American boys in American freshman classes,” he added confidentially. (Doctor Donnie also gave courses as visiting professor in an American university.)
All the boys clapped their hands and beat their heels against the floor at that, glad to be favorite sons. In the United States, you hear very little about Canadian colleges. But Canadian colleges are very America-conscious.
But then Doctor Donald clearly was still living in England, not in America. Very proud he was to be an Englishman:
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built of Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea
. . . This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!
He felt like that, with the same ecstasy and pride. To him, American colonization was the result of English enterprise; the oceanic highway was initiated and made safe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owing to bold English expansion of commerce; and with Queen Victoria and the industrial revolution, then truly was the Empire most glorious of all, extending far and near, with spiderlike steel nets of communication covering the surface of all the earth.
Doctor Donald taught not only English literature—always he reflected English history, too. Somebody acted England’s heroic deeds . . . somebody sang them at the same time. He did not agree with William Morrison, who said, “History has remembered the kings and warriors because they destroyed; art has remembered the people because they created.” Doctor Donnie remembered all; warriors, kings, too, Chaucer was with Crecy and Poitiers, Shakespeare with Drake and Raleigh, Milton with Cromwell; Blake, Shelley, and Wordsworth, sandwiching Wellington with Tennyson and Browning. He would have found himself perfectly at home with his contemporary, Kipling, to whom he often referred. English literature was rightly great because it was the mirror for a great people, backed by a great moral sense, expanding over the world in a great empire. English laws, English democratic government had shocked all races into study and imitation. Behind everything worthwhile was the God-fearing, keen-thinking, liberty-loving, but decent and conservative English temperament. Day after day Doctor Donnie told how sublimation of the spirit, self-control, character, responsibility had always characterized the Britons’ civilization. “Through these unacknowledged legislators of the world, the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge has come to me,” said Doctor Donnie in one of his lectures.
6
English literature appealed to me more than anything else I was taking. Far more than English history, or British civilization. Day and night I read and read, until certain things that Doctor Donald was teaching were memorized unconsciously. It was the Oriental method of study. In my conversation, hardly knowing it, I used lines from Tennyson and Browning and many other poets. Sometimes the boys caught on, sometimes they did not. Tennyson was especially good, as his lines easily became prose, especially those in the long narrative poems. “Where were you yesterday? Whose child is that? What are you doing here?” It was like a conversation manual. I could say almost anything I craved to say now. But I had more trouble with the written English. I think I read too much Macaulay in studying for Doctor Donnie’s class. All my written sentences began to look like the life of Johnson; long sentences, the dovetailed kind—somehow the head verb was always getting lost or tangled. Ralph, my tutor, was very patient. He would attack some ambitious sentence of mine that curled and wound around itself. He would reduce it. “This sentence is just like saying, ‘I—hungry.’ Now what else do you need?” Ralph was always serious, never humorous. He would explain anything ad infinitum, always in the lowest and simplest terms.
Ian was my humorous tutor. To know Ian a little, you would not think him serious about anything. He seemed to effuse an air of raillery. When I came into his room for tutoring, the first fifteen minutes he might sit like an English gentleman, but only for the first fifteen minutes. Then he would put his coat collar up over his head, hunch his head down into it, and look at me with eyebrow cocked, out from underneath his coat. Underneath his prankishness, Ian was very reserved. His humor was all of the active kind, a practical joking, a daily drollery which seemingly he put up as a fence to shield the real workings of his mind.
Later I found out, from Ian’s mother, that all through the year he was writing religious poetry, appearing in his hometown paper. He never showed this to any one at Green Grove. But he showed his drawings to all. They were humorous drawings. Ian was a clever cartoonist, it was said. He did all the cartoons for the college paper—for instance, a man sitting on a piano, a man with a high hat and a maid coming in and dusting the hat with the man still in it. I didn’t see anything very funny in that, but Western humor was hard for me to get. Ian himself had just such a tall hat. His funniest joke was to put on that high hat with a very high white collar and cravat and play the ukulele.
Ian had been studying to be an engineer, before the war, but his service in France seemed to have knocked all desire for engineering out of him. He was tired of science, he said.
“Why?” I questioned.
“Well, in times of peace, it takes away a man’s job. In times of war, it takes away his life.”
But Ian would never go into this deeply, only semi-humorously, so it was hard to tell what he really thought. Sometimes th
ere were symposiums in Ian’s room, in which he admitted cheerfully that the Bible could never be reconciled with itself, or with anything else. But that didn’t matter.
“Anyhow, I’m only interested in composing sermons, you know. Each one a noble little essay. But there will be jokes here and there, so people won’t get too bored.”
The other theologues were serious, not humorous. Except Allan. And Allan was not so much humorous as frivolous. He, too, was of the age to have been overseas, and always he wore his service button prominently. Not at all studious, Allan was more society-minded. He was small, but very good-looking, with beautifully combed crisp hair, and a dimple in his cleft chin. Always he was unusually well-dressed for Green Grove. Everything he ever wore was well pressed and clean, with the exception of his trench overcoat, of which he was very fond, though it was beginning to wear out. “Are you ashamed to go out with me in this?” he used to joke with me.
All that he had from overseas he treasured. Like most of the older boys in Green Grove, he was known as a hero-volunteer. Others were shy about confessing it. Not Allan. He loved to talk of that time overseas. All the hero-volunteers were allowed to choose what courses to omit on their overseas “credit,” and Allan was very pleased to cross out mathematics, natural science and psychology, which were generally considered very stiff stuff.
He loved to go to the “cinema” and often he would take me with him, paying my way. The first movie I saw made me cry—it was all Romeo and Juliet sentiment. But afterwards every movie seemed somewhat a repetition of the first one, and I didn’t cry any more—unlike good poetry which can be cried over many times.
7
That autumn there was to be a track race around Seaway Park. It was the big athletic event of Green Grove that season. The town people came to look on, and even visitors from afar. Boys everywhere said to me, “You’ll run, of course?” I had been a leader in sports among my childhood friends. Since then I had not had much chance to practise up. But I said, “Yes, if I knew what to wear.” All the other contestants had track costumes.
East Goes West Page 14
