Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din_. Henry D. Barnham is the translator, and
Sir Valentine Chirol, an authority on Turkey and the East, provides an
entertaining and instructive foreword. Although the wisdom in these
fables is generally for young and old, it can scarcely be illustrated
except by quotation. I select for that purpose, and on account of its
brevity, a fable for grown-ups:
“The Khoja had two wives. He gave each of them a blue shell as a
keepsake, telling each not to let anyone see it. One day they came in
together and asked him, ‘Which of us do you love best? Who is your
favorite?’
“‘The one,’ he answered, ‘who has my blue shell.’
“Each of the women took comfort. Each one said in her heart, ‘’Tis I he
loves best,’ and looked with scornful pity upon the other.
“Clever Khoja! That is the way he managed his wives!”
For contrast, we may pick up _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose
Anthology_, edited by Joseph Lewis French. Here are selections, and
the best selections, from the best American humorous writers, from
Artemus Ward to the absolutely contemporary Sam Hellman, of “Low Bridge”
reputation. The selections from Josh Billings remind us that he relied
for some of his effect on misspelling, just as Ring Lardner does today.
Edward Eggleston’s “The Spelling-Bee”; Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of
Calaveras”; Bill Nye’s “Skimming the Milky Way”; and Eugene Field’s “The
Cyclopeedy” are representative inclusions. More recent humorists for whom
Mr. French has found place are Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Thomas
L. Masson, George Horace Lorimer, Stephen Leacock, Don Marquis, Irvin
S. Cobb, Ellis Parker Butler, George Fitch, Montague Glass, Christopher
Ward, Robert C. Benchley and Harry Leon Wilson. _Sixty Years of American
Humor_ provides considerably more than the ordinary humorous book’s
quantity of diversion to the square inch.
But I come at last to the two books whose claim to inclusion in this
chapter is most undeniable—two books of which it can truthfully be said,
not only that they are not found elsewhere, but that they contain a
thousand things not to be found elsewhere.
John Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_ is so wonderful in its completeness
and its resourcefulness that although it went without revision for
twenty-three years, it remained the best book of its kind and no more
recent work was able to displace it. It has now been revised and enlarged
by Nathan Haskell Dole, so that the new quotations included are from
nearly 200 of the more important writers of the last few decades, not
included before, among them Stevenson, Swinburne, Kipling and Mark Twain.
This, then, is the book without which newspapermen, editors, writers,
public speakers, scholars, librarians, and many, many households could
not exist—at least, the households could not exist in harmony. It is the
book which saves you from saying, “fresh fields and pastures new”; that
tells you it should be “fresh _woods_,” and that the line is Milton’s. Is
it possible that in this book of 1,400 pages, citing from nearly 1,000
authors, and with its quotations indexed and cross-indexed under their
various outstanding words, so that the index has almost 50,000 entries—is
it possible that there is some phrase you half-recall and yet cannot
find? It is just possible. If it occurs, there is something left for you
yet to do. You may try Frank J. Wilstach’s _A Dictionary of Similes_ (the
new and enlarged edition).
Mr. Wilstach’s social register of similes is the only book of reference
of its kind. Since its original publication, in 1916, _A Dictionary of
Similes_, with its 17,000 quaint figures of speech, has become pretty
nigh indispensable for writers, speakers, teachers and students. One
hundred pages have been added in the new edition, as Mr. Wilstach
says that similes should be kept fresh, like oysters. And the figures
of speech themselves? They are drawn from the writings of a great
number of authors, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, through English and
American literature, to O. Henry and Irvin S. Cobb. The arrangement is
alphabetical under subject headings. I have nothing against the 16,999
other comparisons in the book, though personally I shall always maintain
that the best simile in the world is Irvin S. Cobb’s “no more privacy
than a goldfish.” I have looked for hours in Mr. Wilstach’s masterpiece
in search of a suitable comparison for _A Dictionary of Similes_.
Well, I cannot find one.
21. Frank L. Packard Unlocks a Book
i
From his home on the shore of the St. Lawrence, Frank L. Packard sent
word that the title was _The Locked Book_. No details. _The Locked Book_
remained a locked book until the manuscript arrived. One had a vision of
Mr. Packard going to his safe and turning the combination and swinging
open the door and taking out the story, complete, released only in its
entirety. Knowing his work, one has similar visions of the tales he has
written unlocking themselves and stepping, full-statured, into his mind.
Mr. Packard, one of the most disconcerting of men, would not be himself
disconcerted by such apparitions. His is a personality full of outward
contradictions and inward reconcilements. There is something gruff,
even ferocious, in his speech and manner on many occasions; it melts
every other moment into a really exquisite urbanity. He is alarmingly
direct, dreadfully uncompromising—and he is the soul of hospitality
and gentleness, a person of stainless honor. He assumes rudeness like
a mask and his blue eyes and the look in them give him quite away with
an utter transparency. His coat is rough, fuzzy, scratchy, yet his
heart is on the sleeve of it. And his fiction? Full half of it moves
in the “underworld” and is peopled with criminals; yet the thing that
most markedly distinguishes Frank L. Packard from all other writers of
mystery-adventure stories is his belief in a moral order. Immanuel Kant
and Sherlock Holmes are commingled in him; and, though he may invent
plots he really believes in miracles.
He is, as everyone must know, the author of _The Miracle Man_, a novel
which George M. Cohan made into a successful play and which, as a motion
picture, made millions of dollars for various persons _not_ including the
author.... A moral order has some advantages over a money order.
ii
Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2
February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The
following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut
Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work
in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began
writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories.
_On the Iron at Big Cloud_ (1911), _The Wire Devils_ (1918), which tells
of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of
cipher codes, and _The Night Operator_ (1919) are best characterized in
Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to _The Night Operator_:
“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also,
it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations
and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason
that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected
strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the
mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.
“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of
the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side
merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps
through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of
its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils
eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things
in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy
whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose
percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify
in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and
the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they
learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others,
naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked
mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is _grand_. That is the
Hill Division.”
So much for the setting.
“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big,
ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the
lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a
caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas,
and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the
full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their
ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”
The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today
as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of
vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots
began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic
incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and
simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks
of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are
tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is
the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a
wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.
iii
In 1910 Mr. Packard married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre, of Montreal, and
the next year saw the publication of his first book, _On the Iron at Big
Cloud_. In 1912 he wrote his first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_. The
novel was written in Lachine, a city eight miles from Montreal, where
Packard had settled and where his home is now. The outline of the story
is as follows:
“Varge, the hero, was a foundling brought up by Dr. and Mrs. Merton as if
he had been their own son. Their real son, Harold, kills his father in a
quarrel, and begs Varge to disappear so that it will seem that he is the
actual murderer. Varge goes further than that. He does not run away, but
publicly shoulders the guilt for the sake, not of Harold, but of Mrs.
Merton, whose heart would break if she knew that her son had killed his
father. Varge believes he owes them this act of sacrifice in return for
the life-long kindness of his benefactors. The story thereafter is the
story of this sacrifice; his life in prison, where as a trusty he meets
the warden’s daughter, Janet Rand; his love for Janet which both impels
him to escape and to give himself up again—and finally his freedom as
Harold Merton, dying, confesses the truth.”[95]
Here was a novel on the theme of sacrifice, a theme which had already
been persistent and noticeable in Frank L. Packard’s short stories, and a
theme which was to recur later, but interwoven with another idea of equal
strength and beauty. The discovery of that other idea—its discovery, that
is, in the necessary terms of a story—was to come in the same year in
which _Greater Love Hath No Man_ was published. If you journey directly
north from Montreal, you will find yourself after a while in mountainous
country with summits of less height than many on the North American
continent. Nevertheless the Laurentian Mountains have a distinction
more interesting than altitude; they are geologically the oldest
formation—older than the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, the Rockies; older
than the plains. They are fundamental and as unchanging as the capacity
to wonder and the will to believe in the heart of that higher insect,
Man. In 1913 Packard was in the Laurentians and there and at Lachine he
was engaged in writing a novel which he purposed calling “The Wrong Right
Road.” When it was finished it appeared as a complete novel in Munsey’s
Magazine for February, 1914. A set of advance proofs was sent to George
M. Cohan, who bought the dramatic rights and changed the title. The book
was arranged to appear immediately and Mr. Cohan at once set to work to
fashion the play.
The scene of Packard’s story was the village of Needley, Maine. In
Needley, says an outline,[96] “lives an old man—deaf, dumb and almost
blind—known as the Patriarch. For many years, through the exercise of
faith, he has cured the people in the neighborhood of their simple
ailments. An article about him finds its way into a New York City
newspaper which comes under the eye of the celebrated ‘Doc’ Madison, a
quick-witted and ingenious confidence man, who at once evolves a scheme
to make the Patriarch’s home a shrine to which Doc will entice all ailing
humanity from far and near, and then pluck the golden hoard through his
trickery.
“Among Doc’s disciples is a clever and beautiful girl named Helena
Vail. Another is a dope fiend, Pale Face Harry, an artful dodger with
a hacking cough. The faker that Doc Madison selects to take the star
part in setting the procession of ailing ones in motion is called the
Flopper. The Flopper has an uncanny control over his joints by which he
can, with a single gesture, convert himself into a loathsome cripple,
twisted and broken, begging in the streets, shattered in body and soul;
truly a spectacle to soften the hardest heart. Doc Madison rounds up his
little band of efficient scoundrels, takes them to Needley, Maine, and
plants them on the sweet-souled Patriarch, whose faith in his own powers
to heal is merely his faith in the influence upon man’s soul and body of
love and goodness and belief in all that is worth while. Helena forces
herself upon him as his grandniece, and becomes his trusted confidante.
The Flopper crawls from the train through the dust of the street to the
Patriarch’s threshold. Here the old man, practically blind, surrounded by
a crowd of visitors and devotees from all over the country, stretches out
his thin hands, and the Flopper rises from the earth a new man. At the
same moment a crippled child, helpless from birth and staggering along on
crutches, throws his artificial supports from him and cries aloud: ‘I can
walk!’”
This supreme moment of _The Miracle Man_—book, play and picture—leads
to the wreck of Doc Madison’s scheme; the crooks are self-defeated by
the advent of a power they cannot understand. A valley has been exalted,
a mountain and hill have been made low, the crooked has been made
straight....
And Mr. Packard had made the discovery of his second idea, the theme
of regeneration which is so much the most powerful manifestation known
to human lives. In finding it he had unlocked more than a book, or a
striking play, or an extraordinary motion picture. The camera version
of this simple tale did indeed make lasting reputations for Thomas F.
Meighan, Betty Compson and Lon Chaney, as well as enhance the reputation
of the late George Loan Tucker, whom Mr. Meighan prodded into directing
the picture; money rolled in upon the picture’s backers in a tidal wave;
the success of “The Birth of a Nation” was outdone, nor has any film
since surpassed the record set by Packard’s story. These phenomena are
picturesque—staggering, if you like. But they came afterward; they had
little to do with the author, who, perhaps, could have used some of the
money but to whose work these successes could have no true relevance.
What Mr. Packard had unlocked was an inwardness in himself, the fullness
of his own mind. He was, perhaps, never to write well in the sense of
writing with literary distinction; he was to become a master of plot and
of incident, and to do stories in which characterization was to suffer
from the very rush of action and the galvanization of suspense. But he
was never to write a book in which the emotion was cheap or the immanent
morality less than uncompromising. And with his themes of sacrifice and
regeneration, intertwined, he was to arrest, enthrall and convince the
thousands.
iv
The next book was _The Belovéd Traitor_ (1916. And please make three
syllables of the adjective). Jean Laparde and Marie-Louise are fisher
folk in a French village and are affianced. Jean, who is always modeling
little figures in clay, is a genius. A wealthy American named Bliss
discovers him. Jean is sent to Paris to study and his great gift
ultimately causes a sensation. Bliss’s daughter makes him her conquest,
for adulation has turned the sculptor’s head and he has forgotten
Marie-Louise. Jean and Myrna Bliss sail for America where they are to
be married at the Bliss home. Marie-Louise in her great loneliness
decides to go to America. On shipboard, in the steerage one night, Jean
sees Marie-Louise. His love for her returns, and with it repentance for
the way he has used her. It is now a question of both sacrifice and
regeneration. Regeneration comes first; and the apparent sacrifice is
canceled by a far greater success; for on his return to France, Jean’s
work reflects the new sincerity of his life and love.
Consider _The Sin That Was His_ (1917). Here regeneration leads to
sacrifice, or willingness to sacrifice, and the story develops with
a power which makes Packard’s first novel, _Greater Love Hath No
Man_, appear weak and insufficiently motivated. Raymond Chapelle,
alias Three-Ace Artie, a gambler, is banished from the Yukon. Later,
in a little village in French Canada, in order to save himself from
the consequences of a murder which he has not done, but in which
circumstantial evidence would insure his conviction, he masquerades as
Father Aubert, a young priest who had been hurt. The story shows the
conditions that force Raymond to continue the rôle of Father Aubert;
tells how he loves Valerie; how he converts an old hag named Mother
Blondin and becomes the idol of the parish; how, finally, the real Father
Aubert becomes the victim of that same circumstantial evidence which
Raymond has tried to escape. When the real priest is tried and sentenced
to death Raymond’s assumed rôle has so wrought upon him that he confesses
the false part he has played—which, in the situation, involves taking the
death sentence upon himself. Mother Blondin, his convert, who is really
guilty of the murder, in turn saves him.
Again: _From Now On_ (1920) tells the story of Dave Henderson, who
succumbs to temptation and steals $100,000. He succeeds in hiding the
money before he is caught, convicted and sentenced to five years in the
penitentiary. When he is released both the bookmaker who had employed
him, and who is an inherent crook, and the police take up his trail.
But it is a woman’s love and his love for her which finally bring Dave
Henderson to the point of returning the money. Regeneration. A sacrifice.
In _Pawned_ (1921)—a story of pawned people, not pawned things—the father
of Claire sacrifices his rights and privileges as a father in the effort
toward regeneration. Ultimately he sacrifices his life to free her from
a man more dissolute, and far more evil, than himself. Regeneration
fails, but redemption takes its place. It is John Bruce, to save whose
life Claire has risked everything, who is regenerated. The novel is an
extraordinary achievement in plot construction, the precursor of _The
Four Stragglers_ in that respect; for _Doom of the Night_ (1022) was
earlier in point of composition.
In order to trace connectedly through a succession of novels the dual
themes of sacrifice and regeneration which are Packard’s forte, we have
omitted mention of his best-known figure, Jimmie Dale. He was introduced
with _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1917), carried through _The Further
Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1919) and not necessarily finished with
_Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ (1922). Mr. Packard began to write
these tales of his gentleman burglar in 1914 and it is a tribute to
his skill as a storyteller that, ten years afterward, people read _The
Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ with a conviction that he will never do better
stories.
Jimmie Dale is a rich young man, the inheritor of a fortune made in
manufacturing safes. “It had begun really through his connection with his
father’s business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy
the cleverest criminals.... It had begun through that—but at the bottom
of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit. He had meant to set the
police by the ears.”[97] What he had been doing was to force safes as a
burglar might force them. The police would find no theft, “in the last
analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime.” Partly “as
an added barb,” partly “that no innocent bystander of the underworld,
innocent for once, might be involved,” he had made a habit of pasting
conspicuously in sight (on the safe’s dial, generally) a diamond- or
lozenge-shaped paper wafer, prepared with adhesive on one side and
handled with tweezers to avoid leaving a finger print. The succession of
crimes without theft became known as the work of the Gray Seal. Then, one
night, he had been caught while at work in Maiden Lane, New York. He had
wrapped a string of pearls around his wrist in a facetious moment and
discovery had compelled him to a desperate dash without time to leave
the jewelry behind. Not until the next day had he known that his detector
was a woman. “The first letter from her had started by detailing his
every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: ‘The
cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook, lack but one
thing,’ she had naïvely written, ‘and that one thing is a leading string
to guide it into channels worthy of his genius.’ In a word, _she_ would
plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or
else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair
appeal to him?”
Cold consideration convinced Jimmie Dale that not even his own father
(then alive) would believe in his innocence. “And then had followed those
years in which there had been _no_ temporizing, in which every plan was
carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable,
bewildering affairs ... until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure
with.” In all this time Jimmie Dale, though communicated with by letter
and telephone, had never been able to trace or identify his directress.
A year before the book opens she had written: “Things are a little too
warm, aren’t they Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”
Mr. Packard opens, in masterly fashion, at this point; it is the
technique of Conan Doyle in the case of Sherlock Holmes (to quote no
other examples). One establishes one’s detective or criminal—or other
exceptional character who tests plausibility—by raising the curtain on
him in full career. The way to begin is—not to plunge, but just to slip
casually into the middle of things. At first our interest is centered
on Jimmie Dale’s successive adventures—extremely well-constructed—but
as the book develops, the importance and interest of the woman back
of Jimmie Dale asserts itself. Jimmie Dale is led into a series of
adventures strictly on her behalf; and what has been in effect a
chain of connected short stories becomes virtually a novel. But one
characteristic stands out in every chapter. Other writers have shown,
though only rarely, an equal ingenuity; no one that I can now recall
has shown the same fundamental concerns, the same intense preoccupation
under his melodramatic structure. For the exploits of Jimmie Dale, those
bizarre and disconnected enterprises to which he is ordered, are Robin
Hood exploits, rightings of wrongs, crimes of form and philanthropies
of intention. So, later, are the struggles into which Jimmie Dale is
precipitated on behalf of the woman whom, no longer mysterious, he deeply
loves. Simply, Frank L. Packard is a man who cannot abide the spectacle
of a world unless it is the philosopher’s world, erected about the steel
framework of a moral order. He indulges in crime for morality’s sake.
v