demon of fury in him. He reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell
him how to cut hair, will you! A little more and he'll shave your
head--and not only half-way either, like the Norman soldiery at the time
of the Conquest! Even if you are able to restrain this impulse,
clenching your bib in your hands and perhaps dropping or tearing the
_Illustrated London News_, the mirror gives you strange, morbid
reflections. You recognize your face, but your head seems somehow
separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dotted mountain with two hands
holding the _Illustrated London News_. You are afraid momentarily that
the barber will lift it off and go away with it. Then is the time to
read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K. Chesterton. But your
mind reverts to a story you have been reading about how the Tulululu
Islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve the heads of their
enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwise quite
recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber to discover
any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry. And what is he going to get
now? A krees? No, a paint-brush. Is he going to paint you? And if
so--what color? The question of color becomes strangely important, as if
it made any real difference. Green? Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the
brush dry, tickling your forehead, tickling your ears, tickling your
nose, tickling you under the chin and down the back of your neck. After
the serious business of the haircut, a barber must have some relaxation.
There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the
bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which
nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors
you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of business
economy.
He takes off your bib.
From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give _his_ head
to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--already
as remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always
waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is
horrible--horrible--horrible!
The Passing of Indoors
By Zephine Humphrey
Indoors is going. We may just as well make up our minds on this
revolutionary point, and accept it with such degree of hardy rejoicing
or shivering regret as our natures prompt in us.
The movement has been long under way, gradually working the perfect
ejection which seems now at hand. We might have recognized the
dislodging process long ago, had we been far-sighted enough. It
began--who shall say when it did begin? Surely not in the shaggy breasts
of those rude ancestors of ours whom we hold in such veneration, and to
whose ways we seem to ourselves to be so wisely returning. They dragged
their venison into the depths of a cave darker and closer than any
house, and devoured it in great seclusion. Perhaps it began in the San
Marco Piazza at Venice, with the little open-air tables under the
colonnades. "So delightful! So charming!" Thus the tourists, as they
sipped their coffee and dallied with their ices. They were right; it was
delightful and charming, and so it is to this day, but it was perhaps
the thin edge of the wedge which is turning us all out now.
Supper was the first regular meal to follow the open-air suggestion,
country supper on the piazza in the warm summer evening. That also was
delightful, of course, and not at all alarming. All nations and ages
have practiced the sport of occasional festive repasts out of doors when
the weather has permitted. But breakfast was not long in following suit;
and when dinner, that most conservative, conventional of meals,
succumbed to the outward pressure and spread its congealing gravies in
the chilly air, we were in for the thing in good earnest, the new custom
was on. No longer a matter of times and seasons, the weather had nothing
to do with it now; and in really zealous families the regular summer
dining-room was out of doors. Summer dining-room--that sounds well;
since summer and warmth go together traditionally. But not always
actually in New England, where bleak rains overtake the world now and
then, and clearing north-west winds come racing keenly. It was soon
essential to introduce a new fashion in dinner garments: overcoats,
sweaters, and heavy shawls, felt hats and mufflers.
'Excuse me while I run upstairs to get a pair of mittens?'
'Finish your soup first, dear; it will be quite cold if you leave it.'
The adherents of the new doctrine are very conscientious and faithful,
as was only to be expected. We are a valiant race in the matter of our
enthusiasms and can be trusted to follow them sturdily, buckling on
armor or overcoats or whatever other special equipment the occasion
demands. Conscientiousness is a good trait, but there is perhaps more of
the joy of life in some other qualities.
Sleeping outdoors was the next great phase in the open-air movement.
That also began casually enough and altogether charmingly. One lingered
in the hammock, watching the stars, musing in the still summer night,
until, lo! there was the dawn beginning behind the eastern hills. A
wonderful experience. Not much sleeping about it truly,--there is
commonly not much sleeping about great experiences,--but so beautiful
that the heart said, 'Go to! why not have this always? Why not sleep
outdoors every night?' Which is of course exactly the way in which human
nature works; very reasonable, very sane and convincing, but
unfortunately never quite so successful as it should be. That which has
blessed us once must be secured in perpetuity for our souls to feast on
continually; revelation must fold its wings and abide with us. So we
soberly go to work and strip all the poetry of divine chance, all the
delight of the unexpected, from our great occasions by laying plans for
their systematic recurrence.
He who bends to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses a joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
It is a pity that William Blake could not teach us that once for all. As
a matter of fact, of course, great occasions care nothing at all for our
urging; and a plan is an institution which they cordially abhor. The
stars and the dawn do not condescend to such paraphernalia for waylaying
them as sleeping-bags, rubber blankets, air-pillows, and mosquito
netting, with a stout club close at hand in case of tramps or a skunk.
One experience of my own recurs to my memory poignantly here, and I
think I cannot do better than set it forth. I had passed an
unforgettable night all alone in a meadow, detained by the evening
almost insensibly into 'solemn midnight's tingling silences,' and thence
into the austere dawn. It was an episode such as should have sealed my
lips forever; but I profanely spoke of it, and at once the contagion of
interest spread through the little village.
'What fun! Did you have your rubbers on? Did you sit in a chair? I
should think you would have sat in a chair--so much more comfortable!
Well, I tell you what, let's do it together,--a lot of us, so we won't
be afraid,--and let's climb a mountain. The sunset and dawn will be
beautiful from a mountain.'
We did it; I blush to confess that some twenty-five of us did it. It
was an excursion planned and discussed for a matter of two weeks (a full
moon being part of the programme), and there was no accident unforeseen,
no event unprovided for. The procession that wended its way, toiling and
puffing, up the ascent of Haystack,--the favored mountain selected for
the high pedestal of our rapture,--on the auspicious night, was about as
sad, and withal as funny, an affront as the secrecy of beauty ever
received. Blankets, steamer-rugs, pillows, shawls, hammocks,
whiskey-flasks--how we groaned beneath the burden of all these things.
We lost the way, of course, and had to beat the woods in every
direction; we were tired and hot and--cross? Perhaps. But we knew what
our rôle was, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we all of us
stood very solemnly in a row and said, 'How beautiful!'
It was beautiful; that was just the fineness of the night's triumph over
us--over me at least; I cannot speak for the other twenty-four. To this
day, be it said in parentheses, whenever we mention that night on
Haystack we lift our eyes in ecstasy, and no one of us has ever
confessed any sense of lack. But honestly, honestly at the last (dear
stalwart relief of honesty!), that experiment was a failure--so
beautiful that the spirit should have been lifted out of the body, and
would have been, had it stood alone, had it not already exhausted itself
in plans and expectations. Beneath us, a far-spreading sea of misty,
rolling hills, all vague and blended in the light of the soaring moon;
above us, such a sweep of sky as only mountain-tops command; around us,
silence, silence. Yet the unstrenuous orchard at home, with its tranquil
acceptance of such degree of sunset light as was granted to it, and of
the moon's presence when she rose above the apple trees, would have
conveyed the night's message a thousand times more clearly.
It is seldom worth while to describe any failure of the spirit very
minutely, and tragedy is not the tone this paper would assume; but one
slight episode of the dawn following that fatal night must be related.
We were gathered on the eastern edge of our mountain top, a tousled,
gray, disheveled lot, heavy-eyed and weary. Does the reader understand
the significance of the term 'to prevent the dawn'? He does if he has
stood and waited for the sun to rise--or the moon or any of the
constellations, for that matter. All heavenly bodies retard their
progress through the influence of being waited for. 'Surely now!' a
dozen times we warned one another there, with our faces toward the
quickening east; yet no glittering, lambent rim slid up to greet our
eyes.
At last a decent comely cloud came to the rescue of the sun, halting and
embarrassed, and settled snugly all about the mountain of the
day-spring. Into this the sun was born, so obscurely that it rode high
above the mountain's edge, shorn and dull, a rubber ball, before we
discovered it. 'Why--why--' some one began, stammering; and then there
was a dramatic pause. Brave and determined though we were in our pursuit
of ecstasy, we could not burst forth into song like Memnon statues at
the sight of that belated orange, 'Lo, the Lord Sun!' Not at all. It was
the merest varlet. In this dilemma of our hearts, a funny little wailing
cry came from the cliff's edge: 'I want my money back! I want my money
back!' It was a perfect commentary on the whole situation, as fine and
humorous and true an utterance as could be asked on the foiled occasion.
We laughed at it, and all the air was straightway clearer for us. Then
down the mountain-side we trooped, and went home to bed.
Of course I am not unaware of the impatience of some readers, if they
have taken pains to scan so far this earnest exposition. The outdoor
movement is not one primarily of sentiment, but of health and happiness;
and the story just related is aside from the point. That may be true. I
certainly stand in respect of the great claims of the physical side of
the subject, and would not deal with them. By all means, let all people
be as well as possible. But it is still the other side, the side of
sentiment and rapture, which is most pleadingly often brought home to
me.
It is pitiful how helpless we are against the invasions of a new
enthusiasm like this--we sober, conservative folk. I still sleep in my
bed, in my room, but the satisfaction I used to take in the innocent
practice is broken of late by haunting fears that I may not be able to
keep it up. My friends will not let me alone.
'Of all things! why don't you sleep out here, on this little upper
piazza? Precisely the place! I can't understand how you can ignore such
an opportunity.'
'Well, you see,'--my answer was glib at first,--'the piazza overhangs
the road, and the milk-wagons go by very early. I don't want to get up
at four o'clock every morning.'
'They couldn't see much of you, I should think,'--with a thoughtful
measuring glance,--'not more than your toes and the tip of your nose.'
'Oh, thank you, that's quite enough!'
'Well, you might saw off the legs of a cot, to bring it below the
railing. Or just a mattress spread on the floor would do very well.'
Just a mattress spread on the floor! That closes the argument. I have no
spirit left to prefer any other objections to these dauntless souls,
such as the rain (the piazza has no roof). But what would a cold bath be
if not distinctly so much to the good in view of the toilet operations
of the following morning? There is no course left me but that final
one,--which should in honesty have come first,--of damning myself by the
hopeless assertion, 'I don't want to sleep out of doors.' This locks the
argument, and the barrier stands complete, shutting me off in a world by
myself, interrupting the genial flow of sympathetic friendship. But I
love my friends. Therefore it follows that I tremble for my further
repose in my bed. I fear I shall yet utter midnight sighs on that piazza
floor.
Indoors, dear indoors! I would I might plead its cause a little here.
Does no one ever pause to reflect that there was never any outdoors at
all until indoors was created? The two had a simultaneous birth, but it
was an appurtenance of the latter that marked the distinction and gave
the names. A little humiliating that might have seemed to any creatures
less generous than woods and mountains--to have been here really from
the beginning, ages and ages in glorious life, and then to take their
first generic name, find their first classification, all of them in a
lump together (what a lump!) as the other side of a fragile barrier to a
mushroom construction. One wonders that those who exalt the outdoors as
everything nowadays, do not find some better title for it than its
dooryard term. But those who love the indoors too, though they may smile
at the calm presumption of its dubbing the universe, accept the
conclusion without any question. Man is after all the creature of
creatures, and his life is of first importance. We do not hear that the
woodchuck speaks of _out-hole_, or the bird of _out-tree_.
Such life of man is an inner thing, intensely inner; its essence lies in
its inwardness. It can hardly know itself 'all abroad'; it must needs
have devised for itself a shelter as soon as it came to
self-consciousness, a refuge, not only from storm and cold but from the
distracting variety of the extensive world. Indoors is really an august
symbol, a very grave and reverend thing, if we apprehend it rightly. It
stands for the separate life of man, apart from (though still a part of,
too) the rest of the universe. Take any one room inhabited daily by a
person of strong individuality,--how alive it is! How brisk and alert in
the very attitudes of the chairs and the pictures on the walls! Or, more
happily, how serene and reposeful! Or how matter-of-fact! Morbid and
passionate, flippant, austere, boisterous, decorous,--anything,
everything a room may be which a human creature may be; and that range,
as most of us know, is almost unlimited.
It is hard to understand how any person can fail to respond to the warm
appeal of his own abode. Say one has been abroad all day (another term
that assumes the house as a starting-point), climbing the mountains,
exploring the woods, ravishing eyes and heart with the beauty of the
excellent world. Night comes at last, and weariness droops upon the
flesh. Enough! Even the spirit's cry finds a pause. Enough, enough! The
wide world suddenly spreads so vast that it overwhelms and frightens;
there is something pitiless in the reach of the unbounded sky. Then, as
fast as they can, the lagging feet make for a point on the hillside
where the eyes can command the valley, and swiftly, eagerly flies the
glance to one dear accustomed goal. A white house nestled among the
trees,--that is all, yet it thrills the heart with a potent summons
which mountain-peaks and sunsets do not know. Home! Ah, hurry, then!
Down the hill, across the pasture, in at the white gate, and up the two
marble steps. The front door stands open unconcernedly. The house makes
no stir at receiving its inmate back,--its inmate whose life it has held
and brooded during his absence, waiting to reinvest him with it when he
wants it again,--but there is a quiet sense of welcome, a content of
returning, which is among the sweetest and most establishing of human
experiences. The clock ticks steadily in the hall, its hands approaching
the genial hour of supper-time. Within the open library door, the books
dream on the shelves. Little sounds of a tranquil preparation come from
the dining-room; the tea-kettle sings, the black kitten purrs. Blessed
indoors! It draws a veil gently over the tired head, bewildered with
much marveling, lays a cool hand over the eyes, says, 'Now rest, rest.'
Indoors is like the Guardian Angel in Browning's poem.
After supper, one sits by the lamp and reads peacefully. Aunt Susan
reads, too, on the other side of the big table, and Cousin Jane sews.
The books and the pictures look on benignly, and even the furniture is
instinct with a mute eloquence of companionship. The song of the night
insects throbs without, and millers hurl themselves with soft thuds
against the windows; an owl mutters to himself in the maple tree. But
not for anything would one go out, not for anything would one leave this
glowing, brooding, protecting indoors which one has regained. After a
while, one goes upstairs and lays one's self in the safe white bed in
one's own room. The windows are open to the night, but solid walls are
all round about; and, before the sleepily closing eyes, gleam one's own
peculiar cherished belongings in the creeping moonlight. Into the very
heart of one's life one has returned at the close of the day, and there
one goes to sleep. 'In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in
quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.'
And we will not? Is the discouraged clause, promptly succeeding to that
most beautiful verse of Isaiah, true, then, of us? Are we going to
despoil ourselves of all the poetry, the intimate meaning of our indoor
life?
'A place in which to dress and undress--that is all I want of a house,'
an energetic young woman said.
A bath-house would suit her perfectly. Perhaps that is what we are
coming to--rows of bath-houses, with sleeping-bags stored up in them
against the night. Alas for the pictures! Alas for the music! Alas for
the books!
The books! There is a happy suggestion. I believe the books will save
us. There is certainty nothing that objects with greater decision and
emphasis to sleeping out of doors than a book--yes, even a volume of
Walt Whitman. Books are obstinate in their way; they know their own
minds, and there are some things which they will not do. The effect of
leaving one in the orchard inadvertently over night has a final
melancholy about it which most book-lovers understand poignantly. Could
books be printed on india rubber and bound in water-proof cloth?
Perhaps; but the method does not sound attractive enough to be feasible
even in these practical days. No, I believe the books will save us. They
are a great army and they have power; a steady conservative hold is
theirs on their restless owners. Other threatening situations, they have
saved and are constantly saving.
'I sometimes think I'd give up housekeeping, and not have a home any
more,' one woman said, 'if it weren't for my books. But I can't part
with them, nor yet can I get them all into one room; so here I stay.'
'Buy books?' exclaimed a New York man. 'No; it hurts them too much to
move them.'
Which innocent implication has caused me many a thoughtful smile.
Essentially human,--with the humanity of the ages, not of a few
decades,--books understand what man really wants, and what he must have,
better than he does himself. In the serene and gracious indoors, they
took up their places long ago, and there they remain, and there they
will always make shift to abide. Perhaps, if we sit down close at their
feet, we, too, may abide.
The Contented Heart
By Lucy Elliot Keeler
_Coeur Content, grand Talent_, runs the motto of one of my friends;
which early led me to dub her, Contented Heart. Is it not human nature,
such easy assumption of an interesting aspiration as a fact to be
posted? As logical as to expect Mr. Short to check his stature at five
feet two; as humanly contrary as for the Blacks to name their girls
Lily, Blanche, and Pearl. They usually do. I remember a Bermudian
rector, leaning down to inquire the name of the black baby to be
christened, suddenly quickened into audibility by the mother's reply:
'Keren-Happuck, sir, yes, sir, one of the Miss Jobs, sir.' Now Job's
daughters were fairest among the daughters of men.
Contented Heart has obsessed my mind of late. I like to take the other
side: everybody does. Does like to and does; and because the air to-day
is redolent of unrest and discontent, I put in the assertion that,
nevertheless, the great majority of my acquaintances possess that great
talent,--translate it knack, or translate it acquirement,--a contented
heart. I seldom talk intimately with anybody but I hear something like
this:--
'I have been visiting at the X's. What a superb place! but I do not envy
them. Think of the care and expense and the servant question. Simple as
my cot is, I honestly prefer it.' Or, 'What a fortune the H's appear to
have. It would be comfortable to get what one wants and go where one
wishes; not to worry at tax-paying time and new-suit time. Still I doubt
if they get half the enjoyment from their acquisitions that we do who
have to save and plan for ours.' Or, 'You do not use eye-glasses? How
fortunate! they are such a nuisance. But hush--such a boon. I should be
helpless without them. I am not sure but it is even a good thing to be
born with them on, so to speak. My contemporaries who are beginning to
use them are most unhappy, while glasses are just a part of my face.'
Or, 'It is a great affliction to be deaf in even one ear. The person on
that one side of you thinks you prefer the conversation of the person on
the other side. Yet, as my brother said when he saw me struggling to
make out a dull speaker's words, "Why abuse your natural advantage?"
How do people with two good ears sleep? They cannot bury them both in
the pillow. Suppose our ears were so sensitive that we noticed every
footstep on the street! Being deaf is merely to enjoy some of the
advantages that the society to prevent unnecessary noises seeks to
confer on a normal public. We admire a beautiful face and then add, 'But
how she must hate to grow old; a tragedy of the mirror that we homely
souls are spared.' All my life I envied persons with straight noses till
I began to observe that with age the straight nose droops into a beak,
whereas the youthful tip-tilt and concavity kind straightens its end to
a fair classicism. Thus others than the Vicar of Wakefield draw upon
content for the deficiencies of fortune.
Of course content is dilemma enough to have its two horns: the double
peaks of taking life too easily, and of taking it too hard. In his
statue of Christ, Thorvaldsen expressed his conviction that he had
reached his culminating point,--since he had never been so satisfied
with any work before,--and was 'alarmed that I _am_ satisfied.' That
'the people ask nothing better' is the slogan of the grafter. No reform
comes without its preceding period of discontent; dissatisfaction is the
price to be paid for better things; a revolutionary attitude must be
maintained. Stevenson knew a Welsh blacksmith who at twenty-five could
neither read nor write, at which time he heard a chapter of _Robinson
Crusoe_ read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat
content, huddled in his ignorance; but he left the kitchen another man.
There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and
printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.
Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to
borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy, only
one in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length
with entire delight read _Robinson_.