The marriage being over, the small solemn crowd of wedding-guests drove away to a small sombre house in a highly respectable street, and made merry without the least appearance of joy.
If it is true that we human creatures are much affected by things that happen in the critical months before we come into the world, then the doings of the small house in that small Montreal street ought to be of some account in this chronicle. But since this is a true record, and I have no facts to go upon, I pass on now to the ordinary beginning of a boy’s life.
CHAPTER II
I arrived in the city of Montreal long before the time of telephones, electric street cars or automobiles. It was a dark morning in the month of January of the year One—I call it the year One because that is what it was to me.
Man cannot imagine eternity—Time that always was and always will be, without beginning or end. Hence the word Time to indicate the small measure of the infinite duration of eternity that insignificant man can grasp. The year 1913 in which I write means to most of us nothing more than the year following 1912, or so many years since a certain event vital to us. We can say “a thousand years ago” but only a very few are capable of conceiving such a period, and as for “world without end,” we cannot think it. For these reasons I say I arrived in the year One:—a wee, puny, unappreciable atom of a creature, weighing considerably under three pounds. Naked, wailing, hairless, incomplete even to the finger-tips, I was considered by the old women who hover about on these occasions as a distinct failure.
So small a specimen being difficult to adapt to the usual swaddling clothes, I was simply wrapped in cotton wool and put to bed in a cardboard box near the fire, without much hope or expectation on the part of my parents that I would survive.
At the time of my birth my father and mother were a most unsophisticated couple of very tender years, my mother being seventeen and my father nineteen. It is not clear to me even now how far my insignificant start in life under their charge was destined to affect my later career. But as I look back, it seems of a part with the whole course of petty circumstances that made me into an automaton.
Before I learnt to speak and began to think, I grew very much as other children do. From a comparatively formless lump of human clay, I developed into a sturdy, well-shaped chubby urchin. At four years of age I was considered worthy of having my photograph taken, and one of my first recollections is of that remarkable incident and the Scotch cap with silver buckle which I donned for the occasion. This brings me to the childish litany of “Why?” and “How?” so often heard during these early days. By this time I had already become dimly conscious that being alive was a great mystery. The “Why” and the “How” of it gave me indeed much thought. I had questions to put on the subject every day; but received very unsatisfactory answers from my parents. Other children, moreover, did not help me much; for they did not understand me.
The fact of my being born in the middle of winter may account for my loving that season beyond all others as a small boy. Winter was so different then from what it is now. The snow was not cleared away as soon as it fell but was allowed to accumulate till spring. It lay upon the sidewalks or was shovelled into the street until it was sometimes six or seven feet high. Huge mounds of it bordered every street, with passages cut in steps through the frozen barriers, here and there, to allow of the coming and going of the townsfolk. When walking on one side of the street you could not see the people on the other side, and the sleighs were on a road as high as a man’s head above the walk. The street cars were built on runners, and passed along any convenient street that offered a clear road. They were drawn by horses, an extra pair being stationed at the foot of every hill to help the car up the grade. The floors of these vehicles were carpeted with straw, and after dark they were lighted by small smoky oil-lamps.
The streets themselves were lighted by gas-lamps, and at dusk men with ladders could be seen running from one lamp-post to another, and climbing up to kindle a dim flame which only made the darkness less black. But to return to the snow-mountains, for so they seemed to me, children would dig wonderful houses and castles out of their dirty-white heaps. For other reasons I learnt to love the snow. I discovered that by climbing on top of a broad bank of it, where I could lie on my back and look at the sky, it was possible in that attitude to think wonderful things. One day, while sprawling in bliss on top of such a bank, and chewing a hole in one of the beautiful red mits knitted by my mother, I was surprised by a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind who had spied me and climbed up after me.