CHAPTER V
Before I had the fever described in the earlier pages, while still a mere baby, I was sent to a ladies’ school among little girls. There was only one other boy in the school besides myself, and for him I formed an attachment. He was a French child, a delicate little chap with large dreamy eyes and a huge nose, which looked as if it did not belong to him. He enjoyed the possession of a very beautiful and euphonious name—Paul de la Croix. Paul and I knew each other as children only during a few months but we liked each other and played together. We were the only boys who enjoyed the very special privilege of attending the ladies’ seminary. We nearly always spent our lunch hours among the big girls, who were very fond of us, because we were small enough to mother and protect.
My illness separated me from my little French friend and I did not see him again until we were nearly men. I met him once more when I was eighteen and was studying under a tutor for my matriculation at M’Gill University. My father had decided that I should be a civil engineer. The reasons for this decision are not very plain to me. Certainly I had very little inclination towards engineering, but as I showed little talent in any particular direction, and many spasmodic tendencies in all directions, his decision was perhaps as wise as any. Possibly he was influenced by the thought that the life of a civil engineer would give me an outdoor existence.
I worked with my tutor daily, learning things whichI have long since forgotten, with the exception of Euclid. Euclid always had a particular charm for me, not so much for the value of the information I received but for its keen and irresistible reasoning, so clear, plain and irrefragable.
The mere fact that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and if the sides are produced the angles on the other side of the base will be equal, is nothing to me, but the being able to prove the fact is a great pleasure.
I am a born unbeliever, and facts are not facts to me because they are recorded as facts by some one else, or everybody else for that matter. Like the unbelieving Thomas I want to examine the evidence. So Euclid appealed to me.
I had, and still have, a great sympathy with many of the Bible characters who have been held up to opprobrium like Thomas, Baalam, Ananias and the Pharisee who thanked the Lord he was different from other people. If there is anything for which a man ought to be thankful it is that he is different from other people. The story of Ananias I always found a very thin tale for a greedy money-grabbing church to tell; it is so transparent.
I liked my tutor very much. He was a very human young man and handled me with great wisdom. In the winter we skated daily. It was during the winter of the year Eighteen that I met once more the friend of my childhood, Paul de la Croix. It was at the skating rink, and I knew him at once by his nose, which was a more pronounced, protuberant horn than ever. He had the looks of a hawk and the character of a goose. I was anything but a manly youth, but Paul was actually effeminate. I saw him often now for severalyears, after which he dropped out of my life entirely. He left an indelible mark upon my character, both musically and otherwise. It was through him, in fact, that I met the woman who became my wife, and for this and other things he has my gratitude.
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 fromCarmenalways reminds meof 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. Asa 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, otherseven in their business. For this reason father discontinued spreading what he considered to be the true light.
Whether his faith was founded on fact or fiction, he was true to what his reason dictated; but he felt that he could not allow himself to be an injury in any way to young people who had life’s fight to make in a world that was ready to persecute those who did not toe a line laid down by some church.
I have always noticed that it has ever been the system of organised religion to persecute in mean and small ways all those who disagree with it. All the willingness to go even farther and use the faggot, the stake and the rack still remains in our midst, among a very large class who are enthusiastic and ignorant, but full of faith in some fetish. They only lack the power. I have yet to learn that any man branded as an unbeliever has ever in the smallest way persecuted anybody. Nearly all religions foster fear in man’s heart, and fear always fights, which explains the bloody history of Christian peoples.