My Brother’s Return—Scenery—Old Providence—Robert Louis Stevenson—New York—At Sea—The Change
IN August that year I at last received a letter from my brother, telling me he had left California and would arrive in Providence in a few days. I was delighted, for I was then completely on the rocks, having spent all my earnings on buying a violin bow and a stock of music! My comrade the Swede promised to come with me to meet my relative at the station.
The next day we stood on the platform together at eleven o’clock. The telegram said 12.30 P.M., but we were young and eager. We rubbed our hands with joyful anticipation as we stood there anxiously watching. Our funds were low and my brother had performed a miracle—he was a poet and journalist, and had made money out of his profession. When the train steamed in and the saloon car door opened I recognised at a glance the characteristic contour of the family face, though I had not seen my brother since we were children. I rushed forward overjoyed, and the welcome of brotherhood smiled in his expression. Six feet in height, and correspondingly athletic in appearance, he was well able to carry his own portmanteau, but privations and thoughts of affluence from his exchequer inspired me. Impulsively I seized it!
Years of residence in the States seemed to have changed his original nationality and the accent of his speech. He stood smiling before me, a Yankee of the aristocratic type. His keen grey eyes stared at my shabby clothes: the situation was evident to him at a glance. In a store by the civic centre, with an entrance that looked like the south nave of the Crystal Palace, my comrade and I were measured for new suits. Words could not express my gratitude.
With this lightening of my financial cares I felt the dim delirium, the exuberance, the faint revival of my old romantic glamour return; the world seemed beautiful after all.
My Swedish friend was delighted too, and smiled from ear to ear. I can still see his tall, lanky figure, and his merry round blue eyes as he puffs and tootles away on his beloved clarionet. Ah, how happy we were, marching on, carelessly unfulfilling the great promise of youth while we were yet youthful! Yet what is the good of promise fulfilled when youth is gone, when the glamour has faded, and you look through the grim spectacles of reality at the rouged cheeks of blushing truth and beauty? Oh, to remould this scheme of life, and be born old! To travel with Time and grim experiences down the years towards cheerful, glorious youth, back, back to the innocence and beauty of childhood’s dreams! To die full of hope and fond beliefs—and let the true believers travel the other way!
I know not where we went or why we went. I only know that my brother embraced the occasion and caught the vagabond fever; and that our valet, an old Turk (who kept swearing that he wasn’t an Armenian), sang jovial songs that were musically reminiscent of his harem days as he stumbled and struggled behind us, carrying our bundles of fruit, new suits, bouquets of flowers, and my long-wanted expensive copyright Etudes, Petrie’s Violin Studies, and all that sudden and unexpected affluence inspired us to buy.
I recall, too, how we were walking up the brilliantly lighted main street when a negro, who was anxiously watching for the editor of a Providence journal (that had criticised his lodging-house and the lady lodgers who kept such late hours), suddenly whipped out a revolver and fired. The editor had appeared at his door and received a bullet in his face, but he too had a revolver—probably he had been expecting the negro’s compliments—and he fired back and blew all the negro’s front teeth out. The next bullet from the negro’s revolver went through the Violin Studies which I held by my side, and but for the fortunate ricochetting of the bullet I should not now be able to write my reminiscences! I think the negro recovered from his wound and the editor was severely reprimanded for not hitting a vital spot. For the sins of negroes are dwelt upon like the sins of the poor relation, and I must admit that negroes are sometimes almost as bad as white men. There were no moving pictures in those days to perpetuate the episode, but still it is flashed vividly before my mind’s eye. I see the three races of good fellowship, my tall brother and myself, between us my lanky Swede comrade, and, just behind us, straight-nosed Turkey struggling along on bandy legs. Equipped with argosies of youthful dreams, pitching the moon and stars and sun from hand to hand, with rollicking song on our lips we fade away down the uncharted seas of Westminster Street, Providence!—to awaken on dim shores of cold daybreak as once more I kneel and take the sacrament before the grim, mock-eyed old priest—Reality! When I was twenty years and one month old—how long ago it seems!
We visited most of the fashionable places of interest, went almost everywhere, through the Open Sesame of my brother’s liberality. And that is saying a good deal, for theatres and palatial halls of amusement abound. There’s “The Gaiety,” “The Colonial,” “Hippodrome,” “Sans Souci,” “Bijou,” and heaven knows how many more, wherein the cheerful multitudes of R.I. folk scream with laughter and weep over unreal dramas.
I no longer played the monotonous second fiddle in the orchestra of the music hall; we sat, a happy trio, the smiling occupants of orchestral stalls, where I saw the Indian squaw fade to a shadow and die rather than sell her honour; and the American missionary weep over the grave of the half-caste Zulu in Timbuctoo who had died sooner than he would drink rum! Here was no painting of true life, no dramatic, realistic scene showing the besotted derelict who died far away in the isolation of some alien land—the man from nowhere, who took the wrong turning twenty years before, being hurried into his roughly made coffin: then his two lonely comrades watching the sunrise gleam in his dead eyes, and the half-boyish smile on the silent lips, as they place the coffin lid on, and creep along at daybreak, carrying him under the mahogany-trees to the hole by the swamp. They say a prayer and murmur: “Pity, Bill, that we left the bottle of whisky by his bed. Didn’t he rave about someone in the old country? Wonder what ’twas all about. The weather’s hot. Buried him rather quick, eh? Here’s the cross: ‘Bill.’ No name. ‘Died of Fever, Remembered by Us.’”