Read Ebook: Wesblock the autobiography of an automaton by Walters Harry McDonald

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Ebook has 672 lines and 52023 words, and 14 pages

Release date: December 30, 2023

Original publication: London: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1914

WESBLOCK

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AUTOMATON

WESBLOCK

The Autobiography of an Automaton

LONDON AND TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED 1914

DEDICATED

MY SONS

BY BIRTH, BY ADOPTION, AND BY RIGHTS OF AFFECTION

PREFACE This work is in the form of a book. Outwardly a book, it is not a book in the ordinary sense. It is only an artless yarn. Wesblock is a common type, and he writes himself down as he knows himself or thinks he knows himself. His tale is not thrilling, except in so far as the understanding reader can see that he escaped being one of the great army of the unfit by a very narrow margin. Wesblock has in fact written as much for himself as for you. His story is an attempt to take stock of himself, and to discover whether life as he has experienced it is really worth while. If the book helps one poor soul to find what Wesblock found--that it is really worth while--it will have fulfilled its mission.

What he has said of persons and things only expresses his own opinions. They may not appear true to you; but they were true to him according to his light. He preaches sometimes; but not at you--at himself.

You may know more about Wesblock and his kind than he does, if so you can make a great book from this yarn by adding what you think necessary and rejecting what you know to be incorrect. Whatever impression the story of Wesblock makes upon you is the impression intended to be made.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"What are you doing there, my little man?" he asked.

"I'm dreaming," I replied.

"Dreaming, about what?" he inquired.

"About being alive," I answered. The man laughed.

"You can't be dreaming about being alive," he said; "you are alive."

"Yes," I said, "but why?"

"Good gracious child," he exclaimed, reaching into his trouser pocket, "here is a penny for you, go and buy candy. No one can answer that question."

At another time, after a dream on the snow, I ran into my mother and told her I had seen God. She was shocked, and even inclined to be angry. She threatened to whip me for telling her such a lie, but could not in reason do so, for my questions were too much for her.

"How do you know I did not see God?" I asked.

"Because no one can see Him," she answered.

"Did any one ever see Him?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"How do you know?"

"We are told so in the Bible."

"Who put it in the Bible?"

"Good men."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, Jack, you are too young to understand. Go away and don't tell lies; go and play!"

But I wanted sorely to understand this great matter. Whether I really believed that I had seen God, it would be hard to say. Either I deluded myself, as many imaginative and emotional children do, or half in innocence, half in childish slyness, laid a scheme to surprise my mother. For the mystery of my being continually teased me.

The question whence I had come was not to be set aside; and I cross-examined my mother about it frequently without getting much information. The only reply I got was that God had made me, which I understood as well then as I do now.

This question of mine, "How do you know?" became a byword in the family. Father thought it very amusing, and used it very much as an actor uses a bit of gag. It is a very disconcerting question when put earnestly.

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