Our little life

Front matter

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Chapter I

I T was in the late autumn of 1917 that Robert Fulton sat writing in a small flat on the O’Neil Street side, three floors up in Penelope’s Buildings. He wrote as if he were in earnest about what he was doing. Sometimes he would go straight ahead, dipping his pen old-fashionedly into the ink-pot on the deal table before him; and sometimes he would stop and lean his elbow on the table and his head on his hand and sit, gazing out of the window — out, over the Railway Yards to where he could just see a patch of sky; and then, as the word he was in search of came floating to him — down from that patch of most beautiful night-sky, perhaps — he would bend over his paper again, and get it down. As he did this a very charming smile would come to his face. His face would be irradiated by the smile, and you would see how nice a person Robert Fulton would be, if only he were happy.

But he wasn’t happy. You had only to look at him to see that. There is nothing, of course, to be proud of in being unhappy — very much the reverse: yet there are circumstances in this life in which it is difficult to be happy and content, and Robert Fulton was in the very midst of such circumstances — he was completely tangled up in them. He was a creature not made at any time for the acute kind of happiness, perhaps ; happiness of that kind is an effervescing draught, and Robert Fulton was accustomed to drink the still waters of life. Yet it seemed unnecessary for him to have had to come down to the dregs of life and have the bitter taste of them in his mouth. He could have been happy enough — he could have been infinitely content if contentment had come his way: as it was, he was drinking dregs. Not only was it unlikely now that he would ever taste the definite warm-blooded joys of life; it seemed equally unlikely if he would ever know contentment again.

Still, as he sat writing, he was not actively unhappy. This evening part of his life was what he looked forward to all day long. When he put his poor key into his shabby door and passed into his more than shabby room, he alwa!ys felt that he had left a great deal that was actively unpleasant behind him. Out in the world where he had to spend his days it was nearly all unpleasant. From early in the morning when he gently closed his door behind him till the time when he undid it at night, nothing agreeable of any kind — except lunch, perhaps — ever happened. All day long he was earning his living, as almost all of us have to do: and there is nothing bad in earning a living — God forbid! But to earn your bread by the sweat of your heart; to gain your pence in hour after hour of uncongenial labor; to have to be courteous whether you like it or not to discourteous and unreasonable people — is it clear why Robert Fulton disliked the day? And why, as he turned the key in his key-hole and came back into his shabby, cold, unattractive room he felt that he had come — home? All evening, all night long for that matter, he was free to do as he liked. When all is said and done, what we all like — what is to all of us the greatest treat in the world — is to do as we like. Leave us alone and we’ll all come home — sometime. Robert Fulton was no exception to the rule.

He wrote, bending low over his deal table. This was a good evening, evidently. There were nights when the pen wouldn’t talk and the paper remained blank; when, if the pen were forced to talk, it said the most — banal things. Occasionally when Robert had driven his pen where it didn’t want to go, and he read over what it had written at his dictation he was amazed that he — a passably intelligent human creature — could write such abominations of nonsense. He was never one of those writers who write spontaneously, as it were; one of those who, reading later what is written, stop amazed that such things should be written by themselves at all. Robert Fulton never knew what it was to have feeling run out of him and set itself down without let or hindrance in the form of words. He had never experienced the strange sensation that phrases — even the feelings that mold those phrases into shape — have lives of their own. As he read in cold blood what he had written down he did not know what it was to feel that kind of ingenuous astonishment that a woman feels when she sees the child that a little while ago was herself — and now is there, parted from her, with a definite life of its own. What Robert Fulton wrote he had ripely considered. He thought most of the day, while his hands did the mechanical work that was expected of them, what he would write at night. He was never surprised , when work went moderately well with him, at what he had written. He knew he was going to write more or less like that. He had thought it out, even, perhaps, to the very form of the words in which he would clothe his thought. The sensation of feelings of which he had never been conscious surging up (from where?) and writing themselves down, almost in spite of him; the immense joy of reading these, of knowing they were his, of realizing that he had written down in black and white a part of him that it would be impossible to reach by knife or scalpel . . . and yet to feel that these words and the emotions they represented had a life of their own independent of his: that exquisite pleasure Robert Fulton would never know as long as he lived.

Yet out of the other kind of writing, the thought-out, carefully-considered, conscientious work that he did, he got pleasure. Sometimes when he had managed to transmit to paper, in such a way that he thought it might be understood, the deep underworld of his own thought, he felt dimly as if he had perhaps touched a spot where — it is difficult to put into words — he met humanity’s thought. He felt, always dimly, that if you get down deep enough into your own underworld, you come also to the underworld of other people. That there is a communal region where we all feel — and if we feel must we not in time think — much alike; and that, in having cleared the way an inch or two towards that kingdom of satisfaction — contentment — peace, that core of life where sympathy and understanding are — he had done something worth doing. Robert Fulton had towards his work, in fact, the two-fold attitude that conscientious workers feel. He considered with one part of him that his work was good (that was the part that recognized what a trouble it had been to get the work there at all) ; and with the other part he was deeply disdainful of it, was sure that it was no good, commercially or otherwise, wondered how he could be such a fool as to write — and the next night set to with undiminished diligence. Probably, however, the chief thing about Robert Fulton’s writing was that he enjoyed himself while he was doing it. He thoroughly enjoyed himself — in his mild way. He even liked resting from his labors and poising his slender porcupine-quill pen in his hand and searching the universe for the right word. There was a deep satisfaction in leaning an elbow on the table and looking up into the sapphire night-sky and trying to find the word he wanted there. Even a word, if you want it badly enough, may be a definite aim in life. To Robert, to whom the world was a slippery place, a missing word was a foothold where he could perch for a moment and find satisfaction.

This autumn evening he was unusually deep in his work. It was a new piece of work he was beginning, and it happened to treat of a subject that went deeper — and climbed up higher — than anything he had attempted before. He was quite definitely in the thought-region, just trying to transmute into words his very definite impressions and opinions. His subject was not an emotional one: it was Canada. And Canada is a big subject, and Robert Fulton was anxious to rise — and also to get down — to his subject. He was finding it a difficult job, and he was consequently gazing a good deal more than usual into the night-sky.

The reason he wrote of Canada was because his opinion of the Dominion had grown to be such that it must out. He had no one to talk to about what he thought; he felt an irresistible desire to say what he thought to someone or something. He was saying it to the piece of cheap paper that lay on the deal table before him. Six years before Robert Fulton had brought to Canada wares to sell. These wares had been inside his head, and without being unduly proud of them, he had felt that they ought to be saleable — for something. They hadn’t been. Canada would have none of them. And no doubt this attitude of Canada to the wares he had wanted (very badly) to sell tinged Robert’s attitude to Canada, and made his reflections about her not so impersonal as he thought them.

Naturally he prided himself on being impartial — we all do; and the language he used was impartial: it was the literary language which does not permit itself the license of a more redblooded style. Yet, occasionally, behind the well-chosen words and the carefully-considered phrases, there was something visible that Robert Fulton did not know was there: between the lines, as well as behind them, personal sentiment made its appearance. Had Canada accepted with joy the wares Robert Fulton intended her to buy, Robert Fulton’s book would never have been written. Had the Dominion taken hold of him, accepted him and what he brought, given him what he himself called “real” work to do, he would never have wanted to say anything about her. As it was, he did want to say things. Only half consciously, perhaps, what he was doing as he sat at his deal table with the raw glare of the Penelopian gas-light streaming down on his paper was making plain his sense of injustice against the Dominion. He was oblivious of his surroundings. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he had for the moment forgotten his feelings in trying to find words to express them. Yet for all that he was getting rid of a little bit of his spleen against a country that had not used him any too well. Robert Fulton was not so impartial as he thought he was.

Canada had not really treated him badly, of course. He had no well-founded complaint to bring against her. Yet it is hard — well-nigh impossible — to be fond of anything that has not known how to use you. Robert Fulton felt that he was good for something. He knew that if “they” would set him “real” work, he would work; no one harder. But he also knew — or thought he did — that the only work he had been able to wring out of Canada was not “real” work. Robert Fulton served at a cheese-and-butter counter all day long. He handed out butter and he weighed off cheese. He told the price of eggs. He expatiated on the excellence of the pots of honey that were sold at his counter. He urged buying on the customer. He counted out change into countless hands. And over and over and over again he agreed to the same comments on the same weather. “How cold it has been today.” “Yes, Madam,” “How long the winter is.” “Yes, Madam.” “Seems as if the Spring would never come!” “No, Madam.” Wasn’t that enough to drive any man mad? Could any old mythology (prolific as it was in thinking of things) invent any torture worse than that? Oh, the boredom of it! The unutterable ghastly unforgivable boredom! It was, to some extent at least, this boredom with his uncongenial way of work that Robert Fulton poured into his views on Canada. But he thought that he was only writing down exactly what was the fact. He thought that, right down to the bottom of the place where reasoning goes. And, down below that, he knew better.

There are all sorts of ways of looking at Canada, of course, just as there are all sorts of ways of looking at everything. Canada looks one thing to the unsuccessful immigrant and another thing — quite another thing ! — to the successful one : and it looks another thing still to the son or the grandson or the daughter or the granddaughter of the successful or the unsuccessful immigrant. Observe that the emphasis must be laid on the “successful” or the “unsuccessful” immigrant. For — and this is perhaps where the New World differs a little from the Old — the mirror in which you look at things is money. In older countries there are things still (not many) which can be had without money; but in the new countries there is nothing that can be had without money — things unbuyable and unsaleable don’t exist there. Sometimes as Robert Fulton was walking home at night he would look up at that most beautiful of all Canada’s beautiful possessions — her sky: and he would think bitterly to himself, “Why, it’s impossible to admire even that without money!” He meant that he was either too cold (for you can’t buy warm enough wear for the Canadian winters on butter and cheese) or too hot (for you can’t provide for the Canadian summer comfortably on a similar basis) and that therefore he was not physically comfortable enough to . . . well, to be artistic, I suppose. It is a nice question just how comfortable we need to be for the artist in us to exert himself. Can you be artistic when the thermometer is 24 below and an icy wind is blowing and you haven’t a fur coat? Can you be artistic while you have a raging tooth-ache? How did Shakespeare see the world when he had a tooth-ache? Robert Fulton saw the world very much askew when he was too poor to be comfortable; a good meal, nicely served, would have paved his way to a far keener appreciation of lovely things. When he turned into Penelope’s Buildings he felt, every night afresh, as if the world was an ugly place, an unworthy place — an odious slatternly wicked place. He hated Penelope’s Buildings. How he hated them! And he hadn’t money enough to live anywhere else.

On the whole, these facts probably colored his monograph on Canada.

Chapter II

T HE first thing Robert saw when he waked up the morning after his busy evening was a letter slipped under the door. He recognized at once the postal service, as it plied from one “apartment” (as the Penelopians loved to call their flats) of Penelope’s Buildings to another. And, as he knew quite well from whom the letter must come, he didn’t trouble at first to get up and look inside it. He merely lay where he was and lazily contemplated it as it lay on the floor with its outer edge still under the door.

We can judge from Robert Fulton’s way of regarding this letter that it was not a very important document — to him. If it had been a love-letter he would have been up in an instant, pressing it to his bosom; and if it had been that long envelooe from the lawyer’s firm, which so many of us pass our lives hoping for (and not getting), he would also have been up, not pressing it to his bosom but undoing it and taking out what was inside with trembling, eager hands. Knowing, as he did, that it was a letter from Miss McGee, on the first-floor flat on the Drayton Place side, he merely lay in his poor bed regarding it in the dim light of the October morning. He knew what the letter contained. An invitation to something. He said to himself that Miss McGee would be asking him in to evening “tea” perhaps, or that she would be making some overture for the Sunday afternoon. He was glad to get her invitations — he didn’t get so many that he could afford to throw away any: but he was also aware that these invitations of hers did not afford him any special pleasure. He was glad to go to Miss McGee’s, as things were; but if things had been otherwise — and how he wished they were ! — he wouldn’t have been glad to go. And he knew it.

After a bit he stretched out his hand for his watch; that watch, which, like the porcupine-quill pen, had no connection at all with the twentieth century. It was a watch wound up in the good old way with a key (which went a-missing the moment you took your eye off it) and keeping excellent time so long as it was not put into the hands of a Canadian watchmaker. When Robert’s hand had reached this watch of his and he had consulted it, he said “Oh!” — that expressive monosyllable by which those of us who live alone do so much conversation with ourselves. He put the watch back on the table beside his bed, and he got up. He didn’t leap up. You don’t leap unless you feel in a leaping mood. Robert Fulton got up slowly, one leg and one arm at a time, and when he was wholly out of bed he stretched and said “Oh!” again — and began to dress. He had no bath-room. In Penelope’s Buildings there were no bath-rooms at all. Nobody thought of such things. The Penelopians went to their wash-basins as a matter of course, and, for better for worse, according to the way they were made, they washed themselves clean. Robert Fulton was made for better in that particular way. He was not one of those Englishmen, conventionalized in the Canadian mind, who on their arrival in the Dominion fall from a pinnacle of superfine cleanliness into a bottomless pit of dirt. He had not, from sheer desperation, ceased to use a tooth-brush; nor had he ceased to brush his hair. His clothes were poor and threadbare — he couldn’t help that; but he brushed them and he brushed himself. In spite of the drawbacks of living as he did, he remained self-respecting. He looked neat. In so far as he could possibly manage it, in short, he triumphed over the wash-basin and made it seem as like a bath as he could. It was his one heroism.

It wasn’t until he had got on his suit (which he would have to change for a white linen one as soon as he reached the store) that he approached the door of his room and stooped for the letter. As soon as he had got out of bed he had placed his small sauce-pan on the spirit-lamp, and now, before he read the letter, he took the tea-pot off the top of the sauce-pan (where it had been warming), placed in it the requisite teaspoonful and a half of tea, filled the tea-pot with the boiling water, extinguished the lamp : and sat down to breakfast. Breakfast is not a complicated meal when you live alone and have to get it in a hurry. Robert Fulton’s breakfast consisted of a cup of tea and a piece of bread (and margarine with it) on weekdays all the year round. On Sundays he added to this anchorite repast another cup of tea and an egg — or some marmalade — or a little honey: and he eked out these delicacies with the reading of a book — which on ordinary mornings he couldn’t afford to do. His Sunday morning breakfast was the pleasantest time of the whole week; and if, as the day went on, it proved rather a forlorn and desolate day (as Sundays in a strange land are apt to do), still it was Sunday, and that was a great thing. There was no mention of butter or cheese from morning till night; and he was not required to talk of the weather with anyone.

The present day was Friday and there was need for hurry. Robert Fulton had been five minutes too late in looking at his watch. He poured out his cup of tea, and between his rapid bites of bread and margarine he took up the letter. It was a small tidily-folded piece of paper. No envelope — such luxuries were not necessary in the simple postal service of Penelope’s Buildings: merely a piece of paper of poor quality, tom off a “pad,” folded in three, and addressed in a careful illiterate hand, “Mr. Robert Fulton.”

Robert hastily unfolded it, with a knife in his hand. It contained what he had expected, an invitation to “tea.”

“Well,” he thought to himself, “all the better. I’ll go.” He went on buttering his bread while he was thinking this. “And,” he said to himself suddenly, putting down his knife, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll take the manuscript down and read it to her.”

He knew this was a desperate resolution. He was well enough aware that what he had been writing the night before (for it was of this he was thinking) was above Miss McGee’s powers of comprehension. Miss McGee was intelligent, but her intelligence had never had a chance to get itself cultivated in any way. It was the native thing she had brought into the world with her: and Robert Fulton knew very well that what he had written the night before needed some cultivated as well as some native intelligence to comprehend as well as appreciate it. He knew Miss McGee would not understand a great deal of what he had written. He also knew he must read what he had written to somebody. The time had come to share, and he had nobody — nobody on earth — with whom he could share but Miss McGee. He had the unlucky artistic streak that demands sympathy . . . “She’ll pretend to understand if she doesn’t,” he said to himself, definitely showing his artistic streak and glancing down at the letter before him; “she’ll pretend — and that’ll be something.” He turned the poor little piece of paper round, wrote rapidly on the back of it in his legible practised hand, “I shall be delighted to come. Thank you. R. F.” — and he rose up and washed the breakfast things and put them away, made up his bed (for he couldn’t bear to come back at night to an untidy room) , seized his hat, took a rapid glance round to see that nothing was in too-furious disorder, opened the door, went out, locked the door behind him — and made off. He ran down-stairs, stopping to slip the return letter under Miss McGee’s door as he ran (he ran because he would have to pay a fine if he were late and he couldn’t afford fines) : and then, making his way out of the front door of Penelope’s Buildings, he forged in the direction of the store. “Yes, I’ll read it to her,” he thought as he made his way through the clear fine transparent morning; “I’ll know she doesn’t understand, but it’ll be nice of her to try” He knew she would try. He knew he would feel grateful to her for doing her best to please him. He knew he would even derive some benefit — some actual literary help — from the un-understanding warm human sympathy Miss McGee would be sure to shower out on him. “You gain things from reading aloud anyway,” he further said to himself; and then, once more consulting the watch, he said, “Now then, get on. Don’t talk. Hurry. You’ll be late.” The thought of the fine began to obscure all other thoughts and his pace quickened almost to a run.

There was a bite in the air as he went through it. The trees, which bordered the streets as he got further west, were hung with amber and golden leaves. The world looked lovely, and it seemed, as it so often unreasonably does, as if it should be a lovely and a happy world. Robert Fulton went along resolutely, more stoically perhaps than resignedly. He thought transitorily of the day before him, and the sensation came over him — as it often did — of hanging by his teeth and nails to life; and then his thoughts went back to Miss McGee’s poor little invitation. “Mr. Fulton,” she had put on the top of the paper; and a little lower down, “Will you come to tea to-night — 7:30, if you can. I have a chickun.” And then at the foot of the paper she had signed “Miss McGee.” “Yes, I’ll take the manuscript along,” he said, reverting to the pleasantest thing in sight as he walked through the golden morning. “I’ll take it — and read it to her.” And, a moment afterwards, he added, “It’ll be something to do.”

He reached the store, passed through its fine marble portal, made his way to the cement back premises, and there changed into his professional linen suit and cap. You would hardly have recognized him when he was dressed for the day. He looked like a salesman; just like any other salesman — except for his eyes. But who casts eyes on the eyes of the man selling butter and cheese? No one. Robert Fulton took his place behind the sanitary glass-covered counter with the white tiled wall behind him and the cement floor beneath his feet. He prepared for his doom. “A beautiful morning!” “Yes, Madam.” “I hope we shan’t have rain, eh!” “No, Madam. Did you say one pound? We have beautiful honey — just come in.” “How much is it a section?” “Forty cents, Madam.” “Oh! Well, just pick me a good section, will you ...”

Robert Fulton’s day had begun.

Chapter III

T HE acquaintance between Miss McGee and Robert Fulton had formed itself in the most casual manner. One day Robert had encountered Miss McGee on the stairs. He was going, after his day’s work, up to his solitary room; and Miss

McGee, who had returned a little earlier from her work, was struggling up the stairs as well as she could in front of him with a bag of coal in her arms. She looked bent and frail and unable to cope with such work; and Robert, without giving himself time for reflection, had run up the stairs that divided him from her, and lifting his hat, as Miss McGee said afterwards, “like a gen’leman,” had offered to carry her burden up the rest of the way. Miss McGee had faltered and blushed (not at being spoken to by a “gen’leman” but because she was “caught” in the actual carrying-out of one of her shifts of poverty) ; it was a little time before she gave way, but in the end she had allowed him to carry her coal for her — even allowed him to carry it into her flat: and no one in Penelope’s Buildings, except Miss Healy from her garret-room at the top of the Building and Mrs. Morphy from the other side of the court, had ever been allowed to cross Miss McGee’s threshold. Miss McGee was a great believer in keeping oneself to oneself and not having truck with the neighbors. But when Robert Fulton at the door of her “apartment” had said to her in that quiet way of his that rarely awakened opposition, “Let me carry it in for you,” she had not said no. He penetrated right into the very fastness of Miss McGee’s kitchenette (a black hole of a cupboard which she dignified by that name), dumped the coal there, and made his way out again. After that Miss McGee and Robert Fulton “bowed” when they met on the stairs ; and occasionally one of them would say “a frosty night,” or “a lovely morning,” as the case might be — and the subject of the weather, approached in this way, seemed to one of them less repellent than usual.

Miss McGee in a rather lonely life was not accustomed to having much done for her; and this incident of the coal, when something had been done, stuck in her mind. She thought about it a great deal. On her way to work it would come into her mind and she would ponder over it. When she was “doing out” her flat, either before she went out in the morning or after she came home at night, it would cross her brain and she would entreat it to stay. Sometimes when she was lying in bed unable to sleep (she was not a remarkable sleeper) she would lie and think of Mr. Fulton two flats up on the O’Neil Street side, and wonder about him and his family and how he came to be where he was. “He’s the round peg in the square hole be-lieve we,” said Miss McGee to herself — her sharp eyes had seen at once that Robert was a misfit where he was. “Sure,