Wesblock, the autobiography of an automaton

by Harry McDonald Walters

Paul was before all a musician. He sang beautifully, easily and naturally in a great baritone voice, playing his own accompaniments with ease, a certain dash, and unerring taste. Such talents as his are rare and are generally given, I have observed, to effeminate creatures like Paul. He loved the women, loved particular ones in a particular way for a short time; but generally he loved them all. He was a wholesale lover and his affairs were numerous, sometimes interesting and exciting, and always amusing as told by himself to me, his confidant. I enjoyed his confidences not so much for themselves as for the music they led up to. When he was loved by a married woman much older than himself he always sang particularly well and gave me oceans of pleasure listening to his prattle and his songs. I would spend night after night with him, and allow him to babble till he was tired.

“Oh, my dear Jack,” he would say, “it was tragic, I assure you. ‘I could weep. When will I see you again?’ she asked me. I did not reply; but went to the piano and sang this.”

Then suiting the action to the word he would go to the piano and sing Tosti’s “Good-bye” so beautifully that I would nearly weep, although much inclined to laugh at his mannerisms and his vanity. Many of his love affairs ended as I have described in a song, after which he would walk sadly away to flutter about some other flame.

The Toreador song from Carmen always reminds me of Paul. I have heard it often, but never I think with such soul-stirring vim and gusto behind it as when he sang it.

In the year Nineteen of my era I matriculated in a kind of way; I passed, and that is all.

In the same year the religious incubus was lifted from my home. This had been coming for some time, and at last our house was free. It was no sudden happening, like the conversion some people seem to experience; but came about quite logically. Some people take religion like a disease, and it runs a similar course. They get sick, sicker, sickest; and then die or recover. With religion they get religious, more religious, most religious or fanatic, and then they go mad or suddenly become free-thinkers. People whose emotions are well-balanced and thoroughly under the control of intellect never go mad over a religious idea.

About three years prior to the year Nineteen my father had undertaken, in a burst of religious zeal, to teach a Bible-class in a church which is to-day a theatre of varieties. He was very successful in this. His teaching was both attractive and convincing and readily drew young men and women. For years he had an average attendance at this class of from fifty to sixty young people. He became so enthusiastic in this enterprise that it became his one hobby, and the only social life our family knew was bounded on the North, South, East and West by the Bible-class. As the Bible-class was made up of plumbers, gasfitters, counter-jumpers and the like, this did not elevate our social standing as social standing is gauged by the world. Father devoted all his leisure time to reading and study for the discourses he delivered to his young Band of Hope. As a rule he was not a man to do things very thoroughly; but this work possessed a great fascination for him, and he pursued it tirelessly and faithfully, with perfect confidence in himself.

As he read he widened in view, and as he widened, his interest in the search for truth increased; but truth seemed to elude him. In his final struggle he floundered about in a bog of statement and authority that bewildered him. His fall from grace came suddenly when he began the study of religions in general and other than Christianity. He was a quick, alert, understanding reader, and he had enormous energy. He consumed in a comparatively short time a veritable library of literature on every religion known, both ancient and modern. He delved into everything—philosophy, metaphysics and natural science. I only sketch a process which took several years to complete, years of the hardest work my father ever did.

As his views widened, his discourses to his flock were, of course, coloured by the change of idea. I do not believe that he realised the road he was travelling until the parson and the pillars of the church called upon him for an explanation of certain of his teachings. He explained, but his elucidation of his position on matters that were considered vital was not found satisfactory to the narrow-minded jury which sat upon him. A few weeks later he was driven from the church, branded with the brand of the infidel—an epithet which all churches have delighted to use towards those who dare to be faithful to themselves.

Father’s class followed him in a body, and for some months he lectured every Sunday afternoon at our home. Through this incident some of his young men were made uncomfortable in their families, others even in their business. For this reason father discontinued spreading what he considered to be the true light.