One day, as I was walking along a country road, I was stopped by a sailor, who asked me how far it was to some distant place. He was carrying a small bundle, and was walking, he told me, until he came to a certain sea-port. He did not beg, but accepted gladly enough what I gave him. He had been on many voyages, and had picked up a good many words of different languages, which he mispronounced in a scarcely intelligible jargon of his own. He had been left behind by his ship in Russia, where he had stayed on account of a woman: she could speak no English, and he but little Russian; but it did not seem to have mattered. It was the first time I had seemed to come so close to the remote parts of the world; and as he went on his way, he turned back to urge me to go on some voyage which he seemed to remember with more pleasure than any other: to the West Indies, I think. I began to pore over maps, and plan to what parts of the world I would go.
Meanwhile, little by little, I was beginning to live my own life at home; I played the piano on Sundays, to whatever tune I liked; I read whatever I liked on Sundays; and, finally, I ceased to go to church. Latterly I had come to put my boredom there to some purpose: I followed the lessons word by word in Bibles and Testaments in many languages, and, while the sermon was going on I kept my Bible quietly open on my knees, and read on, chapter after chapter, while the preacher preached I knew not what: I never heard a word of it, not even the text. I read, not for the Bible's sake, but to learn the language in which I was reading it. My parents knew this, but after all it was the Bible, and they could hardly object to my reading the Bible. Sometimes I scribbled down ideas that came into my head; sometimes I merely sat there, with a stony inattention, showing, I fancy, in my face, all the fierce disgust that I felt. During the sermon I always found it quite easy to abstract my attention; during the hymns I amused myself by criticising the bad rhymes and false metaphors; but during prayer-time, though I kept my eyes wide open, and sat as upright as I dared, I could hardly help hearing what was said. What was said, very often, made me ashamed, as if I were unconsciously helping to repeat absurdities to God.
When I told my parents that I could go to church no longer, I had no definite reason to allege, except that the matter did not interest me. I did not doubt the truth of the Christian religion; I neither affirmed nor denied; it was something, to me, beside the question. I could argue about dogma; I defended a liberal interpretation of doctrines; I insisted that there were certain questions which we were bound to leave open. But I was not alienated from Christianity by intellectual difficulties; it had never taken hold of me, and I gave up nothing but a pretence in giving up the sign of outward respect for it. My parents were deeply grieved, but, then as always, they respected my liberty.
The first time I remember going to London, for I had been there when a child, was by an excursion, which brought me back the same night. Of the day, or of what I did then, I can recall nothing; daylight never meant so much to me as the first lighting of the lamps. I found my way back to King's Cross, in some bewilderment, to find that one train had gone, and that the next would leave me an hour or two more in London. I walked among the lights, through hurrying crowds of people, in long, dingy streets, not knowing where I was going, till I found myself outside a great building which seemed to be a kind of music-hall. I went in; it was the Agricultural Hall, and some show was being given there. There were acrobats, gymnasts, equilibrists, performing beasts; there was a vast din, concentrating all the noises of a fair within four walls; people swarmed to and fro over the long floor, paying more heed to one another than to the performance. I scrutinised the show and the people, a little uneasily; it was very new to me, and I was not yet able to feel at home in London. I found my way to the station like one who comes home, half dizzy and half ashamed, after a debauch.
The next time I went to London, I went for a week. I stayed in a lodging-house near the British Museum, a mean, uncomfortable place, where I had to be indoors by midnight. During the day I read in the Museum; the atmosphere weighed upon me, and gave me a headache every day; the same atmosphere weighed upon me in the streets around the Museum; I was dull, depressed, anxious to get through with the task for which I had come to London, anxious to get back again to the country. I went back with a little book-learning, of the kind that I wanted to acquire; I began to have books sent down to me from a Library in London; I worked, more and more diligently, at reading and studying books; and I began to think of devoting myself entirely to some sort of literary work. It was not that I had anything to say, or that I felt the need of expressing myself. I wanted to write books for the sake of writing books; it was food for my ambition, and it gave me something to do when I was alone, apart from other people. It helped to raise another barrier between me and other people.
I went up to London again for a longer visit, and I stayed in a lodging-house in one of the streets leading from the Strand to the Embankment, near the stage-door of one of the theatres. A little actress and her mother were staying in the house, and I felt that I was getting an intimate acquaintance with the stage, as I sat up with the little actress, after her mother had gone to bed, and listened timidly to her stories of parts and dresses and the other girls. She was quite young, and still ingenuous enough to look forward to the day when she would have her name on the placards in letters I forget how many inches high. I had been to my first theatre, it was Irving in 'King Lear,' and now I was hearing about the stage from one who lived on it. A little actress, afterwards famous for her beauty, and then a child with masses of gold hair about her ears, lived next door, at another lodging-house, which her mother kept. I watched for her to pass the window, or for a chance of meeting her in the street. When I went back again to the country, it was with a fixed resolve to come and live in London, where, it seemed, I could, if I liked, be something more than a spectator of the great, amusing crowd. The intoxication of London had got hold of me; I felt at home in it, and I felt that I had never yet found anywhere to be at home in.
I lived in London for five years, and I do not think there was a day during those five years in which I did not find a conscious delight in the mere fact of being in London. When I found myself alone, and in the midst of a crowd, I began to be astonishingly happy. I needed so little at the beginning of that time. I have never been able to stay long under a roof without restlessness, and I used to go out into the streets, many times a day, for the pleasure of finding myself in the open air and in the streets. I had never cared greatly for the open air in the country, the real open air, because everything in the country, except the sea, bored me; but here, in the 'motley' Strand, among these hurrying people, under the smoky sky, I could walk and yet watch. If there ever was a religion of the eyes, I have devoutly practised that religion. I noted every face that passed me on the pavement; I looked into the omnibuses, the cabs, always with the same eager hope of seeing some beautiful or interesting person, some gracious movement, a delicate expression, which would be gone if I did not catch it as it went. This search without an aim grew to be almost a torture to me; my eyes ached with the effort, but I could not control them. At every moment, I knew, some spectacle awaited them; I grasped at all these sights with the same futile energy as a dog that I once saw standing in an Irish stream, and snapping at the bubbles that ran continually past him on the water. Life ran past me continually, and I tried to make all its bubbles my own.
ESTHER KAHN.
Esther Kahn was born in one of those dark, evil-smelling streets with strange corners which lie about the Docks. It was a quiet street, which seemed to lead nowhere, but to stand aside, for some not quite honest purpose of its own. The blinds of some of these houses were always drawn; shutters were nailed over some of the windows. Few people passed; there were never many children playing in the road; the women did not stand talking at their open doors. The doors opened and shut quietly; dark faces looked out from behind the windows; the Jews who lived there seemed always to be at work, bending over their tables, sewing and cutting, or else hurrying in and out with bundles of clothes under their arms, going and coming from the tailors for whom they worked. The Kahns all worked at tailoring: Esther's father and mother and grandmother, her elder brother and her two elder sisters. One did seaming, another button-holing, another sewed