EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY By ALGERNON BLACKWOOD CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1923 _Printed in Great Britain_ To ALFRED H. LOUIS EPISODES BEFORE THIRTY CHAPTER I A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred. I see a room in a New York boarding-house. I can touch the wooden bed, the two gas-brackets beside the looking-glass, the white door of the cupboard, the iron “register” in the wall that let in heated air, the broken sofa. The view from the dirty windows towards the high roof of Tony Pastor’s music hall in 14th Street, with a side glimpse of the trees in Irving Place, show clearly. The rattle of the Broadway cable cars, the clang of their bells, still come to me through that stifling August air, when the shade thermometer stood at a hundred, with humidity somewhere about 95 per cent. Thoughts of the sea and mountains, vainly indulged within those walls, are easily remembered too. The room I am writing in now seems less actual than the one in the East 19th Street boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Bernstein, a German Jewess, whose husband conducted his own orchestra in a Second Avenue restaurant. Though thirty years ago, it is more clearly defined for me than Lady X’s dining-room where I dined last night, and where the lady I took in said graciously, “I simply loved your _Blue Lagoon_,” which, naturally, I was able to praise unreservedly, while leaving her with the illusion as long as possible that she had made friends with its gifted author. And this detailed clarity is due, I am sure, to the fact that in that New York room I had my first experience of three new emotions, each of which, separately, held horror. Horror draws its lines deep; its pictures stand out in high relief. In my case the horrors were, perhaps minor ones, but at the age of twenty-one--an exceptionally inexperienced twenty-one--they seemed important; and the fact that they were combined entitles them to be considered major. They were three in number: the horror of loathsome vermin running over my body night after night, the horror of hunger, and the horror of living at close quarters with a criminal and degraded mind.