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 howeve
r 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.
East Goes West Page 17