"Stump yer!" he taunted.
I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we had
quite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car.
It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old man
alighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brown
water. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up the
cross-road, came over to us.
("Know him?" I whispered.)
("Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the white
top?" said Old Hundred. "Lord, is it so many years ago!")
"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I.
"Thot I didn't mistake ye," said the old man, putting out a large,
thin, but powerful hand. "Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to look
over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't know
it myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face."
"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked Old Hundred.
"I don't calc'late thar be any," said the old man. "The gol durn
trolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's
no good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam. Maybe the
little fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em
splashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in the
kitchen, same's in winter."
"But the boys must swim somewhere," said I.
"I presume likely they go to the beaches," said Henry Flint. "I see
'em ridin' off in the trolley."
"Yes," said I, "it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleys
so thick."
"It's too durn easy," he commented. "Thar hain't a place ye can't git
to, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts
high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on
'em."
He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer father wus a fine man," he
said to Old Hundred--"a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wus
born."
Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently a
return trolley approached.
"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "They go everywhere and
carry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the country
houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called
waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village
muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make
all the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one."
We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew near
a cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and we
signalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turned
silently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the
cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame houses
along the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw
cows lying down in a pasture.
"It's going to rain," said I.
"No," said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign when they lie down first
thing in the morning."
Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky,
rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, lay
familiar--how familiar!--to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks
and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green
blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white,
with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I
was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another
house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the
chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset.
"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper," said Old Hundred.
"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six," said I, "and the Cap'n one
hundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"
"It doesn't seem so," he answered. "It seems only yesterday that we
met up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns,
and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up at
Betsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?"
"I remember," said I, "the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'n
Charles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house,
and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next day
you did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there were
times when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave you
a walloping."
"It was some walloping, too," said Old Hundred, with a reminiscent
grin. "It would be a good time now," he added, "to swipe melons, if
Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stems
connected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought to
have taken out a patent on that invention!"
He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. "How small the
orchard is now," he mused. "The trees are like little old women. And
look at Crow's Nest--it used to be a hundred feet high."
The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of
our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter
Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you
still hesitate to turn over in bed?"
"Always," Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn over now, but it was years
before I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got that
superstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up in
Crow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walked
around the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other side
without turning over. Remember?"
I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well we
dug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars
for the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holding
the prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of the
twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place,
followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother,
and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around,
silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bent
sharply down. "Dig there," said Solon. He examined the twig to see if
the bark was twisted. It was, so he added, "Bent hard. Won't have ter
dig more'n ten foot." We dug twenty-six, but water came. And such
water!
"I want some of that water," said I. "I don't want to go into the
house; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some of
that water."
We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid bounding
down against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull
splash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house.
Old Hundred recognized him first.
"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he cried. "We've come to get
our hair cut."
Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. "Yes," he said,
"I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks
you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them.
John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it
none. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though.
Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps,
all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout three
year back--got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears."
A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. "Clarkie," he said, "you
were always up on such things--is it rats or warts that you write a
note to when you want 'em to go away?"
"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded, for the first
time, of our real quest.
"Why," said Clarkie, "you must be sure to make the note very
partic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that."
"Yes, yes," said we, "but is it warts or rats?"
"Well," said Clarkie, "it's both."
We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly.
"Only thar's a better way fer warts," Clarkie went on. "I knew a boy
once who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually to
sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five cents
fer yer warts,' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn,' and then they
go. Fact."
We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation
to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the
sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like
a checkered carpet over the low hills--the sweet, familiar hills. For
an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent
and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions,
we were boys again.
"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heard
the thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind, with the
peeled switch," he added, "looking dreamily up at the first star, and
wishing on it--wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'm
sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go."
As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap frame
houses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the
corner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman's
field. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boarded
the Boston train, rather cross for want of supper.
"I wonder," said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, "whether
we'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?"
[Illustration]
_Mumblety-peg and Middle Age_
Old Hundred and I were taking our Saturday afternoon walk in the
country--that is, in such suburbanized country as we could achieve in
the neighborhood of New York. We had passed innumerable small boys and
not a few small girls, but save for an occasional noisy group on a
base-ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing any definite
games.
"Did we use to wander aimlessly round that way?" asked Old Hundred.
"We did not," said I. "If it wasn't marbles in spring or tops in
autumn it was duck-on-the-rock or stick-knife or----"
"Only we didn't call it stick-knife," said Old Hundred, "we called it
mumblety-peg."
"We called it stick-knife," said I.
"Your memory is curiously bad," said Old Hundred. "You are always
forgetting about these important matters. It was mumblety-peg."
"My memory bad!" I sniffed. "I suppose you think I've forgotten how I
always licked you at stick-knife?"
Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin, to-day as much as thirty
years ago, is a mask for some coming trouble. He always grinned before
he sailed into the other fellow, which was an effective way to catch
the other fellow off his guard. I presume he grins now before he
cross-questions a witness. "I'll play you a game right now," he said
softly.
"You're on," said I.
We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a roadside fence. It was
in reality a part of somebody's yard, but it was the best we could do.
I still carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to whittle with
when we go for a walk, and this I produced and opened, handing it to
Old Hundred. "Now begin," said I, as we squatted down.
He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by the blade, then by the
handle. "Wha--what do you do first?" he finally asked.
"Do?" said I. "Don't you remember?"
"No," he replied, "and neither do you."
"Give me the knife," I cried. I relied on the feel of it in my hand to
awaken a dormant muscular memory to help me out. But no muscular
memory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me with a smile. "Begin,
begin!" he urged.
"Let's see," said I, "I think you took it first by the tip of the
blade, this way, and made it stick up." I threw the knife. It stuck,
but almost lay upon the ground.
"You've got to get two fingers under it," said Old Hundred. He tried,
but there wasn't room. "You fail," he cried. "There's a point for me."
"Not till you've made it stick," said I.
We grew interested in our game. We threw the knife from our nose and
chin, we dropped it from our forehead, we jumped it over our hand, we
half-closed the blade and tossed it that way, and finally, when the
talley was reckoned up in my favor, I began to look about for a stick
to whittle into the peg.
Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. "Here," I cried. "You're not
done yet!"
"Oh, yes I am!" he answered.
"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted.
"That may be," said he, "but a learned lawyer of forty-five with a
dirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy
you a dinner when we get to town."
"Oh, very well," said I, peevishly, "but I didn't think you'd so
degenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife."
"I'll admit it," said Old Hundred. "I suppose in a minute you'll ask
me to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo."
"What _was_ relievo, by the way?" I asked.
"Relievo--relievo?" said Old Hundred. "Why that was a game we played
mostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we got
tired of hockey, we all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile,
one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line around
the pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he got
around, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody was
caught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start."
"I remember that game," said I. "I remember how Frank White, who could
skate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd get
around a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile of
ice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't many
playing, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't think
that game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me."
"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred.
"I don't know," I answered. "It's funny how you forget things."
By this time we were strolling along the road again. "Speaking of
Birch Meadow," said Old Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids used
to have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pitying
the poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on a
half-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick,
and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever
forget that mile-long pond in the woods, not deep enough to drown in
anywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early as
Thanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon as
school was out!"
"Do you remember," said I, "how we passed it last year, and found the
woods all cut and the water drained off?"
"Don't be a wet blanket," said Old Hundred, crossly. "The country has
to grow."
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was on
him. I repented of my speech. "Yes," I answered. "No doubt the country
has to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the fire
department. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners nor
that long-drawn echo from the wooded shores when a crack crosses the
ice."
"I can see it all this minute," said Old Hundred. "I can see my little
self like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the
crowd. We had chosen up sides--ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones,
dragged from the shores, were put down for goals. Most of us had
hockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bit
of the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys who
could afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Pratt
was always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice,
against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles of white
pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the ice
sagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly,
darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from the
maze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action,
panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautiful
sight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roar
of the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!"
I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick got
caught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie
made!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where my
anatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface."
Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals we were!" he said. "I
suppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because we
live in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city,
dirtied all over with its spawn. Lord, Bill, think if we'd been
cramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for a
skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day,
wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds,
and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poor
beggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play a
game! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the American
spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em
playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smut
an otherwise attractive landscape."
"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of space and free open in
the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons
there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a
kind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitation
of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after
the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the
season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to
the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold,
snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as
hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one
period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they
didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game
periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and
climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the
artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be
wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we
accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our
parents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature which
surrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids'
games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help
believing that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, for
thousands of children, of one more game."
Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his
head approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt," he said. "I shall hereafter
regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear
an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor
little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with
a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts."
"They die hard," said I.
We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the
outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly
walking about.
"Why don't they _do_ something," Old Hundred exclaimed, half to
himself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"
"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.
Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, who
stopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever play
duck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarrassed
friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood.
After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boy
as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.
The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one
of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a
country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how," he said.
"They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State
all the time."
"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in an aside to me.
"You're a liar," said one of the other boys. "We ain't afraid, are we
Bill?"
"Naw," said Bill.
"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling his fists. "I'll
knock your block off in about a minute."
"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the other.
Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not fight, let's play," he
said. "If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to
learn, boys?"
They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion of
their class, decided in his favor, and assented. Like all men, Old
Hundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severest
critics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed
it on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck, Old Hundred tried
to count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn the
job over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:
"As I went up to Salt Lake
I met a little rattlesnake,
He'd e't so much of jelly cake,
It made his little belly ache."
When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred
drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the
rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a
smiling by-stander. "Hi," he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'."
"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hundred.
I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of a
learned _litterateur_ of forty-five, but my speech was drowned in a
derisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable,
and hunted myself out a duck.
After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by those
supernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again to
pick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and sometimes not
succeeding, I was quite ready to quit. Old Hundred, flushed and
perspiring, was playing as if his life depended on it. When he was
tagged, he took his turn as It without a murmur. He was one of the
kids, and they knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in his
bones. We left the boys still playing, quite careless of whether we
went or stayed. We were dusty and hot; our hands were scratched and
grimed. "Ah!" said Old Hundred, looking back, "I've accomplished
something to-day and had a good time doing it! The ungrateful little
savages; they might have said good-bye."
"Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg for me," I said.
"My dear fellow," he replied, "that is quite different. To take a dare
from a man is childish. Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly."
"You talk like G. K. Chesterton," said I.
"Which shows that occasionally Chesterton is right," said he.
"Speaking of dares, I'd like to see a gang of kids playing dares or
follow-your-leader right now. Remember how we used to play
follow-your-leader by the hour? You had to do just what he did, like a
row of sheep. When there were girls in the game, you always ended up
by turning a somersault, which was a subtle jest never to be too much
enjoyed."
"And Alice Perkins used to take that dare, too, I remember," said I.
"Alice never could bear to be stumped," he mused. "She's either become
a mighty fine woman or a bad one. She was the only girl we ever
allowed to perform in the circuses up in your backyard. Often we
wouldn't even admit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you painted
to that effect? She was the lady trapeze artist and bareback rider.
You were the bareback, as I recall it--or was it Fatty Newell? Anyhow,
one of her stunts was to hang by her legs and drink a tumbler of
water."
I felt my muscles. "I wonder," said I, "if I could still skin the
cat?"
"I'll bet I can chin myself ten times," said Old Hundred.
We cast about for a convenient limb. There was an apple-tree beside
the road, with a horizontal limb some eight feet above the ground. I
tried first. I got myself over all right, till I hung inverted, my
fountain-pen, pencil, and eyeglass case falling out of my pocket. But
there I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to pull me up. So I
curled clean over and dropped to the ground, very red in the face, my
clothes covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old Hundred grasped
the limb to chin himself. He got up once easily, he got up a second
time with difficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort, the
veins standing out on his forehead. The fourth time he stuck two
inches off the ground.
"'You are old, Father William,'" I quoted.
He rubbed his biceps sadly. "I'm out of practice!" he said with some
asperity. But we tried no more stunts on the apple-tree.
Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail fence, gray and old, with
brambles growing at the intersections--one of the relics of an elder
day in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked at it as he put on his
coat.
"There ought to be a bumblebees' nest in that fence," he said. "If we
should poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over
rotted wood from our fingers."
"Are you looking for trouble?" I asked. "However, if you hold your
breath, a bee can't sting you."
"I recall that ancient superstition--with pain," he smiled. "Why does
a bee have such a fascination for a boy? Is it because he makes
honey?"
"Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's because he's a bee," I
answered. "Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets'
nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer?
We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, and
nobody could get back in the door without being stung. It was against
the unwritten law to stone the school-house nests in vacation time!"
"Recess!" mused Old Hundred. "Do you know, sometimes in court when the
judge announces a recess (which he pronounces with the accent on the
second syllable, a manifest error), those old school-days come back to
me, and my case drops clean out of my head for the moment."
"I should think that would be embarrassing," said I.
"It isn't," he said, "it's restful. Besides, it often restores my
mislaid sense of humor. I picture the judge out in a school-yard
playing leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prosecution and the
foreman of the jury. It makes 'em more human to see 'em so."
"A Gilbertian idea, to say the least," I smiled. "Why not set the
whole court to playing squat-tag?"
"There was step-tag, too," said Old Hundred. "Remember that? The boy
or girl who was It shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened his
eyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you moving you became It. On
'ten' you tried to freeze into stiffness. We must have struck some
funny attitudes."
"Attitudes," said I, "that was another game. Somebody said 'fear' or
'cat' or 'geography,' and you had to assume an attitude expressive of
the word. The girls liked that game."
"Oh, the girls always liked games where they could show off or get
personal attention," replied Old Hundred. "They liked hide-and-seek
because you came after them, or because you took one of 'em and went
off with her alone to hide behind the wood-shed. They liked kissing
games best, though--drop-the-handkerchief and post-office."
"Those weren't recess games," I amended. "Those were party games. You
played them when you had your best clothes on, which entirely changed
your mental attitude, anyhow. When a girl dropped the handkerchief
behind you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you could, and when
you got a letter in post-office you had to go into the next room and
be kissed. Everybody tittered at you when you came back."
"Well, soak and scrub were recess games, anyhow. I can hear that glad
yell, 'Scrub one!' rising from the first boy who burst out of the
school-house door. Then there were dare-base, and foot-ball, which we
used to play with an old bladder, or at best a round, black rubber
ball, not one of these modern leather lemons. We used to kick it, too.
I don't remember tackling and rushing, till we got older and went to
prep school--or you and I went to prep school."
"I'd hate to have been tackled on the old school playground," said I.
"It was hard as rocks."
"It _was_ rocks," said Old Hundred. "You could spin a top on it
anywhere."
"Could you spin a top now?" I asked.
"Sure!" said Old Hundred. "And pop at a snapper, too."
"It's wicked to play marbles for keeps," said I impressively. "Only
the bad boys do that."
"Poor mother!" said Old Hundred. "Remember the marble rakes we used to
make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one,
two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete
sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from
the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had
to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the
boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for the
owner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went into
the kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences of
gambling."
"I know," said I. "It was almost as terrible as sending 'comic
valentines.' Remember the 'comics'? They were horribly colored
lithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally
horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought
'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles
wouldn't sell 'em."
"Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "Shall you ever forget Emily
Ruggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a
flight of steps--a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it
was just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars'
companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines,
fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools,
needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over
strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster
with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed
and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which
side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often
wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us
youngsters, for all her forbidding manner."
"Of course she loved us," said I. "She loved her country, too. Don't
you remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil
War, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poor
woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us.
She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a
procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully
entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of
pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see
such shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops and
marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees
nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important
any longer."
Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a
hill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its
misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun.
Old Hundred sat down on a stone.
"I'm weary," he said, "and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore and
forty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You
look ridiculous."
"Shut up," said I, "and don't get maudlin just because you can't chin
yourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"
"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said viciously. "A year at
Muldoon's wouldn't bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game,
would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, or
following a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling 'Daddy
on the castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped on Frank Swain's
veranda and off again into his mother's flower-bed!"
"I trust not," said I. "Just what are you getting at?"
"This," answered Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into things
now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of
playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive--usually a sordid
one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time
we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the
time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of
life is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right."
"Old Hundred," said I, "you are something of an idiot. Those games of
ours were nature's school; nature takes that way to teach us how to
behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how to
conquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake,
can't you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood without
becoming maudlin?"
"You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall," retorted Old Hundred. "No
doubt our games were nature's way of teaching us how to be men, but
that doesn't alter the fact that the process of being taught was
better than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hate
these folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as 'potential
little men.' Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because they
_ain't_ men yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory,
because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nasty
little beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you!
Well, come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous heap of mortar
down there to the south, where there are no children who know how to
play, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees' nests in the
fences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, the
gravestone of a game, and the only sport left is the playing of the
market for keeps!"
He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hill
in silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. "What do
you say to the club for dinner?" he asked. "I ought to go across to
the Bar Association afterward and look up some cases on that rebate
suit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"
"That pleases me all right," I answered. "I've got to meet Ainsley
after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going
to like it better than the old."
At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a
newsboy. "I want to see how the market closed," he explained, as he
buried himself in his paper.
[Illustration]
_Barber Shops of Yesterday_
I have just been to a barber shop,--not a city barber shop, where you
expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a
table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give
your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, "Manicures
himself!"--but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I
rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened
pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very
good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not,
that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse
on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even
the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used
shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he
held a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite like
his city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say the
cut _wasn't_ all right, when the barber held that hand-glass behind
his head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was
antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the
walls!
But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of
the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie
Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one
flight up--a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair
between the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go by
below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't
smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs
and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with
the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a
dark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of the
sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the
spittoons,--large shallow boxes, two feet square,--four of them, full
of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps,
and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The
shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt
letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of
our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top
shelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used to
thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, to
see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the
not-too-distant future.
Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several of
those pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New York
I came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and was
restrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I've
been ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. I
feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burning
building upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious
streams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles of
the engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from every
window of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block three
stories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save all
adjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picture
in Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, wore
red shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still another
displayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it was
coated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depicted
the same fire, because the trees were in full leaf in the others.
There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss of
the Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, and
figures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shaken
hickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with relief
to Maude S. standing before a bright green hedge and looking every
inch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches
long, framed under glass, with his weight--a ponderous figure--printed
on the frame.
Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he loved
was angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of
rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long time
to cut your hair, even when, on the first hot day of June, you bade
him, "take it all off with the lawn-mower." (Do any boys have their
heads clean-clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talked
of fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew every
brook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next day
where Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or a
shave on the first of April, when "the law went off on trout."
Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Saturday, many a
pious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshaven
or untrimmed.
I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless they
have gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of our
vanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he sold
me when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shall
always cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never could
shave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only proved
himself thereby the ultimate Yankee.
[Illustration]
_The Button Box_
"Have you," said I, "anything like the ones left?"--and I held out to
my wife a shirt just back from the laundry, and minus a strategic
button.
"I'll look in my button box and see," she answered, taking the shirt.
Her button box! I did not know she had one, and followed her into her
retreat to see it. But alas! it was a grievous disappointment, being
nothing but a drawer set in some sort of a fancy contraption of
chintz-covered pasteboard, like a toy bureau, which stood on her work
table. No doubt it contained buttons, and was serviceable. But a
button box! To call it that were to libel a noble institution of an
elder day.
As I waited for the restoration of my shirt I thought tenderly of the
button box of my childhood. It was no dinky six-by-four-inch
pasteboard drawer, not two inches deep--no, sir! It was a cylindrical
wooden box of the substantial and finished workmanship which went into
even such humble things as a butter box a century ago, for mother had
inherited it from her mother. It must once have contained ten pounds
of butter, but all traces of its original service had long
disappeared. The drum, of very thin, tough wood, which had kept its
shape uncracked, had been polished a dark nut brown by countless
hands. The bottom and cover, of pine, were darkened, too, but without
polish. This box dwelt on the second shelf of the old what-not, which,
in turn, stood in the closet passage underneath the stairs. When any
accident befell our garment fastenings, "Go and get the button box,"
mother said, as she reached for her needle. Or, on rainy days, when we
grew more and more restless and all other devices failed, "You may go
and get the button box," mother would say, and we were solaced till
supper time.
No modern patent sewing-table receptacle could possibly hold one
quarter of the contents of that button box, the accumulation of at
least three generations. It was heavy, and having no handles, you had
to grasp it with open palms on either side--hence the polish. It
rattled when taken down from its shelf, and the very first thing you
did when the lid was off was to plunge your two hands down into the
mass, and let fistfuls of buttons trickle through your fingers.
Sometimes we played it was a treasure chest, and these buttons were
Spanish doubloons. Sometimes we trickled them just for the cool feel
of it, the sound of the rattle, the sensation of plunging fingers
into the oddly liquid mass. There were great steel buttons, little
pearl buttons, white bone buttons, black suspender buttons, cloth
buttons, silk buttons, crocheted buttons, elongated crystal buttons
(which we held to the light "to make prisms"), lovely agate buttons,
brass military buttons with the U. S. eagle upon them, wooden buttons,
either once covered or yet to be covered, shoe buttons (which
invariably were in practical demand and invariably had sunk to the
bottom of the box), strange great buttons from some long-forgotten
garment of grandmother's, familiar buttons from some newly remembered
garment of our own.
It seems odd, when I think of it now, the endless delight we children
got just from the contemplation and discussion of those buttons.
Sometimes, of course, we picked out the suitable ones, and strung them
in long chains. Sometimes we used them for counters in games. But
often we just turned them over and over, or tipped them out on a paper
spread on the floor, and from the hints they gave us reconstructed
ancient garments or recalled forgotten clothes of our own.
"Oh, that one used to be on my winter jacket!"
"Look, here's one of papa's pants buttons--it says 'Macullar and
Parker' on it!"
"Hi, there's my old brown overcoat!"
"Oh, dear, I wish I still had that pretty gray suit, with those steel
buttons on it!"
The silly talk of children--and how like some conversations the
propinquity of piazzas has since forced me to listen to!
To find just the button she wanted was sometimes a long task for
mother, and father, it must be admitted, had varied the proverbial
needle simile for our domestic establishment, to read, "like hunting
for a button in your mother's button box." But still the odd buttons
continued to go in, and only the ones needed came permanently out. You
never could tell, to be sure, when the most unlikely button would come
in handy. Sometimes there were days when the village dress-maker
arrived after breakfast and remained till almost supper time,
converting the upstairs front chamber into a maze of threads and
snippings, and requisitioning the button box in long searches for "a
set of six". That was a fine game! Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes
only five could be found of the type she particularly desired. But
never did the box fail completely; always there were enough of _some_
button that, she said, without dropping the pins from her mouth, would
do, "though it ain't quite what I wanted."
All this flashed through my memory as I waited for my wife to
reestablish connections on my shirt. As she finally finished, and
pushed in her silly little drawer, I said:
"Do you call that thing a button box? Why don't you have a real one?"
"That's quite large enough when you have to find a match," said she,
"and too large when you drop it."
Women are practical creatures; there is no sentiment in them. Their
alleged possession of it is the most spurious of all the arguments
against equal suffrage.
[Illustration]
_Peppermints_
I have just purchased a little bag of peppermints, and returned with
them to my rooms above the Square. I did not purchase them at the
promptings of a sweet tooth, but of a hungry heart. They take me back
into the forgotten Aprils of my life, where I often love to loiter,
not from any resentment that I have been unable to emulate Peter Pan
and remain a boy forever, but because this great town is drab and
dusty and imprisoning, and it is sweet to escape down the green lanes
of April, even if only in a memory. A physical sensation--the sound of
a voice, a hand patting us to the rhythm of "Tell Aunt Rhody", an
odor--can plunge us deeper and swifter down to the buried places of
our memory than any process of deliberate recollection. No robin sings
against my window of a morning here--only the noisy sparrows twitter
and quarrel, reminding me of the curb market. No lilac sheds its
perfume on the still air. I am perforce reduced to peppermints. The
taste of peppermints on my tongue, the pungent fragrance of them in my
nostrils, have the power, however, to transport me far from this maze
of mortared canyons, back across the years, to a land where the robins
sang against the spacious sky and a little boy dreamed great dreams.
So now I am sitting high up above the Square, with my little bag of
peppermints before me (somewhat diminished in quantity already), and
think, between slow, sipping nibbles, of that little boy.
In his day, in the land where he came from, peppermints were almost a
symbol of life's best things--of grandmothers and other dear old
ladies who kept cookies in cool stone crocks in sweet-smelling
"butt'ries" (sometimes foolishly called pantries by those who put on
airs); of Christmastides when to the joy of peppermint sticks was
added the unspeakable delight of sucking barley toys,--red dogs,
golden camels that lost their humps and elephants that lost their
trunks as the tongue went succulently 'round and 'round them; of the
wonderful village "notion" store, presided over by a terrible female
person with a deep bass voice, who asked you over the counter as you
entered, "Which side, young man?" It was bad enough to be called
"Bubbie", but to be called "young man" in this ironic bass was almost
insufferable. Yet you bore it nobly, for the sake of the pound of shot
for your air-gun or the blood-alley or the great pink and white
peppermints, two for a cent, that reposed in a glass jar on the left
side of the shop. Was Miss Emily so terrible a person, I wonder now?
She was always looked upon a little askance by the ladies of our
village because she was "so masculine". But if she did not conceal a
softness for children under her stern exterior why did she keep a
stock of so many things dear to the childish heart, from paper
soldiers (purchased by the yard) to sleds and shot? Perhaps that
fantastic stock of hers was her curious expression of the Eternal
Motherly. After she died, every year on the 30th of May the
"Vet'rans," as they marched two by two in annually dwindling lines
about the cemetery, placed a fresh print flag and a basket of
geraniums on her grave, because she had sent a substitute to the War.
To us youngsters this substitute used to explain why she kept shot for
sale; she was by nature a bellicose person, and, we were sure, her
great grief was her sex.
In my own family peppermints were directly connected, by legend, with
feminine attractiveness. A great grandmother on my mother's side had
been in her day a famous beauty. And when asked the secret of her
charm, as she frequently was (to my infant imagination she appeared as
a superhumanly radiant vision who walked about the streets in a
hoop-skirt with an admiring throng in her wake, constantly being
forced to explain why she was beautiful), she did not utter
testimonials for anybody's soap, nor for a patent dietary system, nor
even for outdoor exercise. She replied simply, "Peppermints". Great
grandmamma died when my mother was a girl, and to mother fell the task
of going through the old lady's possessions. She says it was a task;
probably it was a privilege. At any rate, my mother records that she
found peppermints everywhere, in every kind of wrapper, stowed in the
different receptacles, in boxes, bags, trunks, in bureau drawers and
writing desks and "secretaries". They were among letters and laces, in
the folds of silk gowns and even the table linen. Some of the
peppermints had crumbled and almost evaporated. Some had "ossified",
as mother says. "And," she used to add, telling the tale to
large-eyed, hungry-mouthed little me, "I have not seen so many
peppermints outside a candy shop since that day."
"But did the peppermints really make great grandmamma beautiful?" I
would ask.
"She always said so," my mother would reply, "and she was certainly
very beautiful."
"Is that why you eat peppermints?" I then inquired, on a day when I
had detected her with a bag of the confection.
At this point there was a masculine chuckle from the armchair by the
bookcase. Also, a peppermint was promptly produced for my personal
consumption. I had a great fondness for the memory of my beautiful
ancestor.
Peppermints, too, are intimately connected with the religious
experiences of my childhood; or, perhaps I should say, with the
religious observances of my childhood. Our minister's whiskers always
interested me more than his discourses. As I nibble a peppermint from
the bag before me--lingeringly, for the supply is being fast
depleted--and the frail yet pungent odor fills my nostrils, I am once
more in that half-filled church, on a Sabbath morning in early Spring,
dozing through the sermon, with my head tumbling sleepily now and then
against my father's shoulder. Slowly the scene comes back, in every
least detail, the smallest sights and sounds of that morning all here,
but all thin and faint and frail, spun of the gossamer web of memory.
Can I hold them till they are set down? I shall have to eat another
precious white lozenge from my bag.
My cheek had bumped my father's shoulder again when I caught a sudden
whiff of peppermint drops and raised my head just in time to see an
old lady across the aisle whisk her dress down over her petticoat
pocket. For a few moments I watched her in envy, for her mouth was
moving ever so little and I could fancy the delicious taste. But how
could she enjoy the candy and not make her mouth go more than that, I
wondered. I did not shut my eyes again, but sat very still against my
father's arm and let my eyes wander around the church.
Ours was one of the "new" churches. The beautiful old "meeting house"
at the head of the village green, with its exquisite white spire and
its pillard pulpit and windows of "common" glass, purpling with age,
was the property of the Methodists--which in some manner I could not
then understand (and do not clearly yet) was always a source of
resentment in our congregation. Our church had stained windows, a
chocolate brown field with white stars in the centre and around the
edges tiny squares of many colors, atrocious reds, blues and yellows.
These windows were opened a little at the top, and through the
openings came soft sounds of Spring, the wind racing among the budding
branches, the sudden call of a bird, and occasionally the crooning,
sleepy cackle of hens from a distance. Now and then a cloud drifted
by, across the sun, dimming the interior for a moment, so that the
minister's voice seemed to come from farther off. The sunlight through
the stained glass projected colored splotches here and there. I
wondered if the people knew how homely they looked with those
splotches on their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested a
pastime to relieve the monotony.
Starting with the choir (which consisted of four people, boxed in
before the organ at the right of the pulpit) I began to count people
with colored spots. First there was the tenor with a purple spot on
his left cheek and on his sandy hair and beard. But the organist and
soprano were splashed with scarlet. Then I forget to count, because I
noticed that the 'alto had a new violet hat, which eclipsed the
soprano's old green one. I wondered whether she had gone to Boston to
buy it, or had "patronized home industries"--a phrase I had just
discovered with pride in our local paper. The bass was nodding and
letting his hymn book slip toward a fall. I hoped slily that it would
fall, and braced my nerves for the crash. But he woke with a funny
jerk, like my jack-in-the-box, just in time to catch it, and began
listening intently to the sermon as if he had been awake all the
while. The soprano smiled at someone in the congregation, whispered to
the tenor, and then sat silent again.
My gaze wandered to the minister's pleasant face, with its great
square-cut gray beard, which always suggested to me--why, I don't
know--one of the minor prophets; and then past him to the gilded cross
that was painted on the apsidal wall behind him. I knew that if I
looked at this cross, with its gilded rays spreading out in all
directions, long enough the rays would begin to melt together and then
to turn 'round and 'round in a kind of dizzy dance. So I looked
steadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my eyes with a great
effort. Then I fell to speculating on the tablets painted at the left
of the pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets were encased in a
design that suggested a twin tombstone. On one of them were the words,
"God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
and in truth," a sentence which had always given me great difficulty.
But this morning I interpreted it at last to my satisfaction. It
meant, I decided, that a man must first die and become a ghost, a
spirit, before he could tell what church he really ought to go to. I
wondered if, in that spirit region, there would be any Methodists.
Directly below the tablets, in a front pew, sat Miss Emily, she of a
bass voice and the "notion" store. Her Paisley shawl was folded
tightly around her broad, bony shoulders, and made the lower half of a
diamond down her back, the pattern exactly in the middle. If the
pattern had not been exactly in the middle I am sure the service would
have stopped automatically, till it was adjusted. She sat very
straight and looked with partly turned head, showing her masculine
profile, sternly at the minister, as if defying him to be unorthodox.
I tried to picture her asking _him_, as he entered her shop, "Which
side, old man?" Would she dare, I wondered? And what would he reply? A
few pews behind Miss Emily sat "the spilled-over old lady". My sister
had first called her the spilled-over old lady, because she seemed to
have been crowded out by the six old ladies in the pew behind, and to
have been permanently soured by the slight. Her hair was done up in a
tight, emphatic pug, her profile suggested vinegar--or perhaps it was
her complexion. At any rate, when I looked at her I thought of
vinegar. I wondered if she ever ate peppermints, and if they tasted
the same to her as to other people.
Presently I leaned forward and extracted a hymn book from the rack
attached to the back of the pew in front. This rack contained, besides
hymn books, a pair of old gloves done into a wad wrong side out, two
fans, "leaflets" of all sorts, and little envelopes for the
collection. Most of the "leaflets" were appeals for charity, I fancy.
At any rate, many of them were full of pictures of poor little city
children suffering from all sorts of diseases, and oppressed me
horribly. But I could always rely on the hymn book. My first
consciousness that there is any difference between prose and poetry
except in the matter of rhyme came from reading the hymn book, from
Whittier's,--
I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.
I had no idea what kind of a palm a fronded palm is, but I fancied it
something much grander and taller than other palms; and the whole hymn
filled my mind with a large, expansive imagery, breathed over my
little spirit an ineffable serenity. This hymn I now read while the
minister talked away behind his minor-prophet whiskers;--this, and
Wesley's,--
A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.
This stanza always made me want to get up and shout. I read and
re-read it, repeating it, with noiseless lips. The tune it went to
seemed inadequate, the more so as in our church tunes were always
dragged to the limit of non-conformist dolorousness. The stanza seemed
to me, even then, happy, hopeful, staccato, jubilant. I wonder what I
should have thought had I known its author was a Methodist? Could good
come out of Nazareth, after all? Instead, I fell to wondering about
the after life in the sky. Heaven I pictured as a city builded on a
cloud. If, on a very clear day, the cloud should dry up what, I
speculated, would the angels walk on? Then it occurred to me that they
do not walk, they fly. So they would go flying about streets out of
which the bottoms had dropped, and look right through far down to the
earth, which to their sight would doubtless resemble the raised map of
America in our school, that stood on a table in the corner and always
had chalk dust, like snow, in the inch-deep ravines of the Rocky
Mountains. I wondered if the lower stories of the houses would have
any floors. The cellars wouldn't, anyway. What kept the furnaces in
position? Perhaps they didn't need furnaces in heaven; it was the
other place where the furnaces were. Then I dozed.
In our church Sunday School began at noon, immediately following the
church service, in a large room at the rear, known as the vestry. The
first small boy on his way to school stamped by on the walk outside,
with what sounded like defiant aggressiveness. I roused from my doze
in time to see the old man in front of me wake up with a start at the
sound and reach quickly for his hymn book, as if he supposed the
sermon were over. Then the stamping of other children was heard on the
walk. The scholars passed in groups, talking shrilly. I knew it must
be nearly twelve o'clock. In the congregation there was a rustle of
gathering restlessness; women put on their gloves, tried to glance
back at the clock without seeming to do so, stirred in their seats.
The last vestige of sleep mysteriously yielded to this influence and
left me. At last the minister came to the conclusion of his discourse,
and instantly there was a sound all over the church as of waters
released and hurrying over dead leaves. It was the congregation
shifting their positions, expelling their breaths, and turning the
pages of their hymn books. I listened curiously for the next sound.
It was the clearing of a hundred throats, getting ready to sing. I too
arose and in my tuneless treble made a joyful noise unto the Lord.
Then church was over.
And my peppermints are all eaten, too, and the gossamer web of memory
dissolves, the picture fades, and I see before me this room of mine,
littered with some learned literature but more pipes and prints and
miscellaneous rubbish, and I hear outside in the Square, not the
spring wind racing among the budding branches, but the coughing of a
consumptive motor car, the penetrating squeak of a trolley rounding a
curve on a dry track, the irritating jolt of heavy drays, and a great,
subdued, never-ceasing rumble and roar, the key-note of the giant
city. Only the little bag remains. Shall I blow it up and "bust" it?
That act, with a final pop, will bring back a flash of my childhood.
Here goes....
It didn't pop nicely at all. It exploded in a kind of a spudgy
collapse, with very little noise. Ah, well, you cannot eat your
peppermints and have them too--nor the bag! But it has been very
pleasant to eat them, to wake up with a whiff and a nibble the memory
of those vanished days, those voices and peaceful paths of life very
far from here and now. It may be true that we mount on our dead selves
to higher things, but it is well to hold little Memorial Days now and
then, and on the graves of our dead, especially of those who died
young in the flower of innocence, to leave a peppermint, as the
soldiers leave on the grave of Miss Emily a print flag and a basket of
geraniums. A cemetery need not be a mournful place. Maids were wooed
and won in _our_ cemetery, and the high school pupils ate their
lunches out of collapsable tin boxes every noon on the tomb of Major
Barton, he of Revolutionary fame, who horse-whipped the British
captive when he refused to eat beans. Noble New Englander! And perhaps
my own peppermint feasts are not so much memorial banquet, after all,
as ceremonial rites in honor of my native land. For I cannot think of
this great city of New York as my home, I cannot fit into the rushing,
roaring cogs and grooves of its machinery without a protest, without a
hope that some day I may hear the wheels no longer roar at their cruel
revolutions. Thus my peppermints speak to me of home, of quiet, of
certain green places and a lilac hedge; there is about them the taste
and odor of the ideal. They are for the future as well as for the
past. Perhaps in some subtle way they do after all have potency for
beauty. I fancy that some day I too shall stow away bags of them amid
my worthless precious junk, and when prying hands disturb the dust the
nostrils of a youngster now unborn will be greeted by a frail yet
pungent aroma. I can only trust that he will know well what it is.