The great failure of Wesblock’s life was brought about by many causes, the first of them far back in the beginning of things. He learned to think and know too late to be of much use to himself or his immediate family, and this he tells you in his own way. You may know some of the people to whom he refers, and you may think he is not fair in some of his characterisations. He is, however, just as fair to others as he is to himself. Finally it may be as well to warn the Preface-reader that this is a story without a plot and without a hero.
WESBLOCK
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AUTOMATON
CHAPTER I
In a little mean street, which ends at a steep hill running down to the river through the Quebec suburbs of Montreal, stood about fifty years ago a tiny old-fashioned church built entirely of wood after the dog-house style of architecture. So lacking in imagination were the builders of this place of prayer that they went no further than the name of the street for the name of the church. The church was gloomy and cheerless within and looked as if it were partitioned off for cattle. The pews were all very high, plain and closed with doors. A narrow little winding stair led to the pulpit, a high and massive affair overhung by a huge sounding board. A large cushion of faded red rep trimmed with coarse woollen fringe and tassels decorated the reading-desk, which was flanked by two pretentious lamps of hideous design in wrought iron. The place had the odour of a damp cellar, and the air of a religion, stern and unforgiving to the sinner, and not very promising to the saved.
The little street is not to be found now, while the little church is a wreck, and its remains are smothered by places of business. But in the early sixties it was a power among the plain, severe, hard-mouthed people who worshipped there an unforgiving God of wrath.
Nearly a year before I arrived on earth a marriage took place in this church between a boy and a girl. The boy was a lean, hatchet-faced youth with sharp eager blue eyes, set in a face marked already with experience of the world. He was dressed in decidedly foppish style, with a resplendent waistcoat and a collar of the old-fashioned “choker” type. His dress coat had brass buttons and very long tails, and his tight lavender trousers, matching in shade his kid gloves, were strapped down to the verge of splitting.
The little girl who was marrying the boy was a beautiful sad-eyed thing with rosy cheeks, a sensitive mouth and freckles on her nose. Her hands and feet were small and shapely. Her monstrously ugly clothes and extravagant hoops did not mar her appearance.
It was a very solemn function, this marriage; no music, no flowers, no guests; just a handful of the immediate relatives of the bride and groom. The father of the boy would almost have passed for the elder Weller; being a large, horsey-looking man, who might be otherwise characterised as an old buffer. The old buffer’s wife was a little prim woman dressed in grey.
The father of the bride was a military-looking man, tall and slim, with curly black hair; his wife a hook-nosed woman with a face like one of the old Spanish inquisitors.