Chapter 12: Mr. Wilbur Meredith Legion

Were a man never so lonely, there is something in a first introduction to a strange city which communicates a spirit of elation. The mere strangeness of what he sees, the novel aspect of things, the touch of the original and unexpected in the buildings, the conformation of the streets, the faces of the hurrying throngs—this new note of life, everywhere audible, is itself so surprising and absorbing that the mind is insensibly withdrawn from the contemplation of private griefs and memories. A more exact examination may reveal the depressing fact that a new world is new alone in name; that men carry their conventions with them wheresoever they travel, and may reproduce upon the loneliest rock of the Pacific or in the heart of the Sahara the complete social counterpart of those narrower forms of civilisation which they might be supposed to have renounced for ever. But even so, it still remains true that the thing which seems new is really new to us, for we live by our sensations as much as by our knowledge. He who cannot yield himself to this illusion of the senses will certainly deny himself the finer pleasures of existence; he will march across the world with the stiff air of the pedant, who sacrifices poetry to precision, declining more and more into a bloomless frugality of life, until at last not alone the outer world but the inner places of his own heart will become arid as a desert.

Arthur was much too young to reject the illusion of the senses, and too essentially a poet to desire to do so. He had his own private griefs, and they were by no means a negligible burden. In the noisy darkness of the long nights at sea, when the clanging of the piston kept him wakeful, he had again and again reviewed these griefs with a self-torturing persistence. Would he ever see his mother again?—and sometimes out of the heart of the black night a voice told him he would not. Would that exquisite but slender bond that held him to Elizabeth withstand the strain of a dateless separation? Would he find the things he sought, have strength to build the life he had had the vision to design, justify himself before the world? These and many cognate thoughts oppressed him; they wrote their abrupt interrogations on the curtain of the night, until he hid his face from them, and could have wept for weakness. But in spite of these oppressions, his spirit had gained both in hope and fortitude upon the voyage. He had begun to find himself blunderingly, as all men must at first, yet with some sincerity and real truth of vision. Two things he had discovered in himself which appeared to him a sufficient base for life, at once a programme and a creed—the one was the fixed determination to be content only with the best kind of life, the other was a faith in the Guiding Hand. From this creed he drew both his inspiration and his courage, and the more he dwelt upon it the more his heart leaped to meet the future, and the less did he regret the dissolution of the past.

And so that first vision of the New World thrilled him with a vague but joyous wonder. New York impressed him as the most superb of all examples of man’s will to live. Here, upon a narrow strip of rock, the most ill-fitted spot in all the world for a city metropolitan, man had compelled nature to his purpose; he had disregarded her intention and had triumphed over it; he had bridged the very seas with ropes of steel, carried his means of locomotion into the upper air, and, unable wholly to escape the limitation of the jealous earth, had invaded the sky with his monstrous fortresses of steel and masonry. The very absence of grace, suavity, dignity in all he saw was itself impressive. Brutal as it was, yet was it not also the assertion of a strength which made for its object with a kind of elemental directness, not only scorning obstacles, but defying in its course the most august conventions of the centuries? The will to live—that was the legend flaunted by invisible banners on each sky-daring tower; the city hummed and sang with its crude music; it was written on every face he met in lines of grim endeavour. And it was a needed lesson for such as he. It struck him like a buffet from a strong hand, roused him like a challenge. To the perpetual oncoming hosts of invaders from an older world, New York spoke its iron gospel, “Man is unconquerable, if he have the will to conquer.” And the oncoming host received that stern gospel with acclamation as indeed good news—not the highest gospel, nor the sweetest, but assuredly a needed gospel.

Certainly his situation called for both fortitude and hopefulness, for it was highly precarious. He had left London in such haste that he had had no time to make any plans for the future; he had simply acted on an imperative instinct of the soul to assert its rights, to seize upon immediate freedom. A voice within him had whispered, “Now or never,” and in a sudden access of resolution he had broken his bonds. He did not regret its precipitation, but he had begun to perceive its consequences.

The only persons to whom he had confided his intention were Hilary Vickars and Mrs. Bundy. Immediately after the midnight interview with his mother he had gone to Vickars, who listened to his story in grave silence. How every detail of that hour passed with Hilary Vickars stood out in his memory! He could see the face of Vickars, pale and eager, as it bent toward him; he remembered how he noted that the lock of hair that fell across his forehead was newly streaked with gray, and how the veins in the long thin hands showed every intricate reticulation. He recollected how he watched a little patch of sunlight as it crept across the floor, saying to himself with a kind of childish irrelevance, “When it touches the wainscot, I must go.” And what length of years or gulfs of immense vicissitude could obliterate the face of Elizabeth, as he saw it through that difficult hour—so pale, so sweet, so intense, her lips parted in surprise, her eyes signalling to him messages of faith and constancy?

“You are doing right,” said Vickars, and he had laid the long, blue-veined hand upon his head in benediction; and then Elizabeth had taken Arthur’s hand in hers, and kissed it softly, and held it for a moment to her bosom—and both acts had been done so solemnly that they seemed like sacred rites in a religious ceremony.

When he rose to go—it was in the exact moment when the patch of sunlight touched the wainscot—Vickars had offered him some practical advice.