lairs in the attic or cellar and place them in the upper and lower halls
in the most unexpected places. Then one is always sure to find them in
the dark. Uncle especially, coming home rather late from the lodge
meeting--but this is a tragic theme. We have been in uncle's place.
Pictures are then taken off the walls and laid in readily accessible
places on the floor. In this way one can put one's foot through a
lovely seascape, or tread upon the features of defunct relatives in
enlarged photographs, with the minimum of exertion. Personally, we
prefer walking into mirrors--the pieces look so much prettier.
Gradually the house assumes the appearance of a place in the devastated
area of Flanders. Furniture is piled up in barricades everywhere. Bales
of linen and curtains and that sort of thing are built up into parapets.
All they need is a firing-step and a periscope or two to look like the
real thing. Behind these obstructions the family cowers as it eats its
meals--if the food may be so described--and seeks shelter from the
prying eye when it goes to bed. You see, the windows are all bare and
one can't be too careful of the observer in the sniping-post across the
way. Probably the best course is to sit on the side of one's bed and
undress in the dark. Not only would this plan of action be more likely
to commend itself to the Moral Reform League, but it has the further
advantage of avoiding the tacks. One is not so apt to give an impromptu
imitation of a man who has inadvertently stepped on a porcupine.
At last the great day arrives! You are awakened by a large hairy man,
who wants to know when you are going to get out of your bed so he can
take it apart and load it into the van. Hurriedly you jump into the
oldest and most primitive clothing permitted by the rules of society and
the state of the weather. And you get busy--Homerically busy!
It is true that you have hired a couple of men and a huge waggon. But
these gentlemen are professionals. They direct the operation. They are
the headquarters' staff, so to speak. Occasionally they take a hand in
the game and then you wish they hadn't. You beg them to be careful with
the piano--rented--and promptly they carry off half the front porch on
the end of it. The enormous walnut whatnot, which has been "an old
family possession" ever since you bought it second-hand, is made to look
like part of the steerage furniture of the Ark.
Some artistic friends of ours had a fine cast of the Venus of Milo. It
was the only thing in the house to be proud of, and they were. They
loved it so much that they had never even pawned it, no matter how
bitter the temporary stringency. Then one sad moving-day, a
horny-handed cyclops with fusel oil instead of brains picked it up and
dropped it. If Venus had disputed the right-of-way with an armored car
she couldn't have been reduced to more or smaller pieces.
"Oh, how could you--how could you be so stupid?" sobbed the lady of the
house.
"Ah, it ain't worth makin' all that fuss about," growled the son of
Anak, "sure the darn old thing was bust anyhow."
Finally all the household effects are piled out on the sidewalk, while
the neighbors sit on their stoops and make remarks about the quantity
and quality of your equipment. Of course, no furniture would look good
under such circumstances. If the fittings of Buckingham Palace were
piled up on the front lawn, they would hardly be impressive. And you
are keenly conscious that your furniture has nothing on King George's.
The only thing to do is to pretend that you don't see your neighbors
while your sofas and chairs stand on their heads on the sidewalk,
kicking their ancient legs in the air, and showing with painful
frankness the places where they have been mended.
In the meantime, you keep travelling between the old house and the new
one. As the pile keeps diminishing in front of your home that has been,
it keeps growing in front of your home to be. There, too, the neighbors
are on the watch, and as your old mattresses are carried in, bleeding
excelsior from a dozen wounds, you can see their anticipations of your
desirability as an addition to the society of the block going steadily
down to below the freezing point.
At last the work is done. Everything you can think of has been piled up
higgledy-piggledy at the new place. The family sits forlornly in the
midst of it--camping out in a strange house!
"Where's the baby?" shrieks mother suddenly in the midst of the weary
silence.
Then you remember that you left the little innocent in the bath-tub in
the old house for safe keeping. As you tear madly off to retrieve him,
you keep wondering if he has turned on the water and drowned himself.
And yet, the following spring, your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of
still another move.
[Illustration: VACATION VAGARIES]
*Vacation Vagaries*
Vacation is an excellent institution. Anything that makes a man so
contented with his job and his ordinary lot in life as it does must be a
good thing. After two weeks spent at the average summer resort the food
at home or in the old boarding-house in the city seems rich and varied,
and the work at the office proves an intellectual recreation.
The best thing about vacation is making plans for it. This is a truism,
did you say? Of course, it is a truism. Occasionally we indulge in
truisms, though our natural preference is for "isms" that are not true.
When we say "making plans," we mean plans only in the most general and
romantic sense. Once you come down to details all the poetry is squeezed
out of the thing. The business of writing to hotelkeepers and railway
passenger-agents and other rich but dishonest people for information is
a bore and a burden. So also is packing up.
Honestly, now, as one man to another, dear reader--or as one woman to a
man, or whatever the circumstances may require--did you ever bring half
the things you wanted, and did you ever use half the things you brought?
Did you? No, of course not. No one ever does.
Personally, we have travelled light, and we have travelled heavy, and
the result has always been the same. The year we took a trunk with
raincoats and overcoats and various weights of underwear, and all the
other encumbrances of civilization, the weather was fine and warm
throughout, and all we really needed was a couple of shirts and some
duck trousers. Even our toothbrush was useless, for we got practically
nothing to eat.
The next time we decided to limit our impedimenta very strictly, and we
carried our belongings in our pocket and a brown-paper parcel. That year
we encountered every one of the fifty-odd varieties of weather and
temperature, and two freight-cars couldn't have carried all the clothes
we needed. The irony of things?--yes, also the tinnery and leadery, and
any other base metal you can think of.
Therefore, we repeat, the practical details of getting ready for a
vacation are a weariness and an abomination. But the general plans, the
vague and glowing dreams--ah, the pictures of one's self poised like a
god in the path of the breakers while the peaches on the beaches gaze
longingly upon one, or again smiling carelessly while one steers canoes
containing beautiful ladies down dangerous rapids, or still again
singing amorous madrigals by moonlight while one drifts in the shadow of
the pines! These visions are well worth the disillusion which follows.
Every young man--whether fifteen or fifty--has cherished these or
similar dreams of the joys that await him in the days of vacation. And
nearly every young man has had the same experience of going up to the
same old summer hotel or boarding-house, where you sleep on a lumpy bed
with a crazy quilt, battle with the flies for your food, and spend your
evenings rowing a fat girl around a pond in a flat-bottomed boat.
Are we pessimistic?--well, perhaps we are pessimistic. But we have had
some experience of summer resorts. We have sat on the porch with the
married ladies in the evening, and listened to the merry crash as
character after character fell in ruins to the ground. We have gone
fishing for mythical bass and trout in famous fishing-grounds, where
there hadn't been a fish within the memory of man--driven out by the
mosquitoes, probably.
And the girls of summer resorts! We have walked with them, and read
poetry to them, and eaten ice-cream cones with them, and discussed with
them whether marriage is possible where true love is not. We have
paddled them around on hot afternoons, and retrieved the balls which
they drove into the river when we played tennis together. We have even
proposed to--but we must not carry these confidences too far. Suffice
it to state, that even those who accepted us let us see clearly that
they regarded the eternal affection we swore to one another as being
subject to recall with due notice. Sometimes they didn't even bother to
give us the notice.
It was all vanity, vanity! But we cannot help remembering that some of
the vanity was of a rather pleasant variety. There was that blonde up
at--oh, never mind where!--a little thin, you know, but very soulful.
She "adored" Browning, and claimed to understand "Sordello"--which was a
lie, of course. And the little brunette, brown eyes and reddish
hair--very "chick," eh, what?--with an abnormal appetite for brandied
chocolates. Nice girls both. But time passes and one forgets. We
don't even remember where they work!
If a man--almost any unattached male will do--wishes to feel the joys of
being sought after and an object of general female attention, let him
hasten away to a summer hotel, especially in one of the less fashionable
resorts. At the fashionable ones there are always a few gilded youth
about, who own motor boats and look divine in flannels. Their glory
would be apt to make his seem like a star in the presence of the sun.
But at the others, those quiet family-hotels, to which people go
ostensibly because the air is so much better, and they dislike the noise
and fashion of the other places, but really because the board is five
times cheaper--at these seminaries of bored spinsters a rash bachelor
who intrudes can easily persuade himself that he is a combination of
Richard the Lion-Heart and Don Juan.
What gay and girlish groups will be formed about him! How they will
laugh at his jokes and listen with awe to his opinions! With what
warmth they will admire his atrocious ties and homicidal socks--the
colors are so striking and virile you know. They may even sit still
while he sings.
The only objection is that popularity of this sort is apt to send a man
back to the office a mental and physical wreck. Even a year of loafing
on the boss's time hardly qualifies a man to paddle canoes, play tennis,
walk miles, go for hay-cart drives, eat canned goods, and dance the
foxtrot till one every morning, and then retire to fight for his life
with a dozen big husky mosquitoes that have been sitting on the foot of
his bed waiting for him in bloodthirsty fury for hours.
Talking of mosquitoes, have you ever seen any mosquitoes or flies to
equal for size and ferocity those that flourish at any summer hotel or
boarding-house? And the poorer the place the more various and highly
developed are the entomological specimens.
There are mosquito-nets on the windows, of course, but they seem merely
to annoy those birds of prey, and exacerbate their naturally hasty
temper. After being obliged to bite his way through two or three folds
of pink or blue gauze, no wonder a mosquito sits on your pillow and
shrieks insanely in your ear what he is going to do to you. He then
proceeds to do it, worse luck!
As for the flies, deserting in the most heartless manner the cows and
horses they have lived with all winter, they rush with a glad shout into
the dining-room, and standing with their hind feet in your
bacon-and-eggs, reach over and lap up your coffee, or whatever it is
people serve under that alias. Very chummy those flies, much more
democratic than flies in town. The simple life of the country probably
accounts for that--also for the way they wade into the butter like a
hired man.
But if you really want to know what flies and mosquitoes--not to speak
of ants and beetles and caterpillars--can really do, you ought to go
"roughing it." As if the ordinary summer boarding-house wasn't rough
enough for anything but the most exotic taste! "Roughing it" is a
disease to which Canadian youth between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-five is peculiarly liable.
We succumbed once. We went with a canoe and a tent and some beans and a
couple of fellows who said they were old woodsmen and knew how to cook.
Some day we may be able to bring ourself to write up that trip in
detail. But it is only ten years ago, and the memory still rankles too
bitterly.
After two weeks of carrying loads over portages, washing dishes, eating
the bread and pancakes those two murderers baked, and sitting up nights
to stab the bugs that crept upon us in the dark, we had almost to be
sent to a sanitarium to recuperate. But good nursing and cod-liver oil
brought us around again in a month or so. Roughing it?--yes, only
"rough" seems a mild word to apply to it.
Everyone has his own notion of the perfect vacation. We have ours, and
that is the vacation which takes one home to a small town a long way
off. This, of course, implies considerable foresight in picking out
one's ancestral seat. You must also arrange to have a mother there
waiting for you--preferably with white hair. Always mention the color of
the hair when ordering a mother. White is best, and perhaps next to
that iron-grey.
Let us suppose that you haven't been home in a couple of years or more.
You have written a number of letters and telegrams telling them the
exact hour you will arrive, and so when you finally chug-chug into the
little station on the same old stub-line which is always half an hour
late, you find them all drawn up to meet you.
For a few minutes the world becomes one blur of arms that go around
one's neck, and faces held up to be kissed. And then you are gravely
passed in review, the cut of your clothes and the color of your hat, and
whether or not you have got stouter or leaner or greyer than before.
In the ordinary world where you live and move and have your job and
vote, you may be a man of standing, a well-known politician or banker or
editor. But here, whether captain or clerk, you are just "Mollie's boy,
Bill," or "Annie's boy, Pete," or whatever may be your mother's first
name and your own. Here you are never permitted to grow up. Here you
are liable to be called "Willie" or "Babe" to your death at eighty.
Outside the station the same old family horse is rubbing his ear against
the same old battered telephone pole to which he is hitched. He gazes
with mild indifference on the confusion and bustle around him. He has
long ceased to show interest in anything but oats.
As you drive up the main street you notice with extraordinary interest
that old man Johnson has put a new plate-glass front in his store, and
young Brown has hung his shingle up as a doctor. You pass by the one
street-car waiting to make its half-hourly trip, and the motorman yells
joyfully, "H'lo, Pete, when did yuh get back?"
At the house the dinner is waiting--ah, a dinner that really is a
dinner! There are all the things you used to like, and have ever since
wistfully dreamed of in city restaurants, the fried chicken and the
pumpkin-pie and all.
"And now," says mother, as you lay down your knife and fork and come up
to breathe, "how is your Aunt Kate, and have you seen Cousin Maggie
lately, and have you heard how Lizzie is getting on with that fellow she
married, and when were you last in--?"
And you begin and talk for two weeks.
[Illustration: LAWNLESS TENNIS]
*Lawnless Tennis*
Lawn tennis is not generally regarded as a sport of a violent nature.
We make this statement without fear of contradiction or controversy.
There is little likelihood of our finer feelings ever being harrowed by
accounts of the brutalities of tennis. Editors of newspapers are in no
danger of being besieged with letters from "Constant Reader" and "Pro
Bono Publico" demanding why the police don't interfere in championship
tennis matches and bind the participants over to keep the peace.
No, tennis is not usually a violent or brutal sport. In fact, it is
frequently associated in the popular mind with weak tea and girls and
beg-pardons and curates and other evidences of the amenities of life.
Rough persons who play lacrosse or football are apt to class tennis with
tiddlywinks or casino.
We had some such idea ourself before we took it up. We could see
ourself treading daintily across a verdant lawn and popping a nice white
ball, covered in wool so it wouldn't hurt anyone, over a nice white net
to a nice white young lady on the other side. If we should have the
misfortune to put it in a place where she couldn't pop it back to us, we
would apologize in a profuse and genteel manner, and then would go
blushingly to the other side of the court and pop it over again.
Somehow or other the picture did not at first appeal to us. Was thy
servant a bank-clerk that he should do this thing? And yet we needed
exercise, gentle exercise. Not that we were getting fat--we are not of
a stout habit--but we could feel our arteries hardening from day to day,
and rheumatism working slowly but surely into many of our most useful
joints.
We decided to do something to arrest the progress of senile
decay--something easy and pleasant. Besides, we knew a fellow who
belonged to a tennis club, and he insisted on us joining it. We
succumbed at last, but it was a long time before we admitted as much to
our newspaper associates. One is so apt to be misunderstood.
The first day we went up to the tennis club Harry accompanied us. Harry
was a nice chap who wore glasses and spoke grammatically, and we felt we
were in safe hands. He was also very fond of music, and we had some dim
notion that perhaps he played the mandolin and sang in the shade between
"sets." We made up our mind that we wouldn't sing ourself, no matter
how much the company insisted. The way we came to know what a "set"
meant, was that we had been preparing ourself by reading several volumes
on the history and practice of the game, with short biographies of about
a hundred champions. We had decided to become one.
The first shock came in the club-house when we were taken into the
locker-mom. It was just like the locker-room of any athletic club.
Wire lockers were ranged along the walls, and the benches were of
somewhat battered wood. Somehow we had expected silk curtains and
cushions and natty little bows of pink ribbon.
On the benches a number of gentlemen in various stages of dishabille,
and with varying claims to manly beauty, were getting into or out of
tennis clothes. When they didn't like their own clothes, they took some
out of someone else's locker--just like the pirates who occupy their
leisure with rougher games. If Harry had not been there we would have
felt sure we had got into the wrong place.
Every now and then a man would stagger into the room in very damp ducks
or flannels, would tumble out of them, and would totter over to a shower
where he would yell with inarticulate rage as the cold water struck him.
Sometimes they were very pale, and sometimes very red in the face. But
always they were perspiring and exhausted, and we could not help
wondering what the dickens they had been doing to get themselves into
that condition. Too much tea, perhaps!
We got into our own outfit--all nice and new and unspotted of the world.
We had brought it along in a suit-case. We had white ducks and white
shoes and a white shirt, low in the neck. We felt like a young girl
high-school graduate just about to receive her diploma. Also we had a
blazer. Possibly the reader does not know what a "blazer" is. We would
hate to think so, but we will explain. A "blazer" is a striped
sack-coat, which was originally designed as part of a costume to ride
zebras in, or to prevent dangerous convicts from escaping--we are not
sure which. Anyway, it makes the man who wears it look like a
party-brick of ice-cream--you know the way they deposit the stuff in
gorgeous layers.
Our blazer was composed of stripes of purple and black, each about two
inches wide. We selected it because it was so quiet compared to the
others. When we put it on that first day, however, we had an unpleasant
consciousness that two or three gentlemen in our immediate neighborhood
said something about "hell." Possibly a little theological controversy.
Just the same, we never wore it again. We lost our taste for it.
Being both togged out in our tennis outfit, we stepped through the door
leading to the courts. Personally we gave one wild look around and
turned to Harry with a gasp of dismay.
"But where's the lawn?" we asked.
Harry seemed annoyed, but we couldn't help it. We had expected to see a
wide smooth lawn, with shady elms and tea-trays and gentle curates and
all the rest of it. We thought that was why the game was called "lawn
tennis." What we actually saw was a great big backyard with a pounded
clay floor. A series of dingy nets ran down the centre of it, and it
was crossed and recrossed by a gridiron of half-obliterated lines.
It was easy to see what had obliterated the lines, for some eighteen or
twenty active young men in badly rumpled attire were tearing up and down
in clouds of dust, working like demons, jumping and rushing and dodging
about, and all the while banging away with fury at balls which we
afterwards discovered did not possess a particle of wool to cover them.
It had all been knocked off. Gentle popping?--good lord!
Surrounding the courts was a lovely vista of other backyards with
clothes hung out to dry. Extraordinary the amount of washing the people
in that block seemed to do! Every day was wash-day in that
neighborhood. During the weeks that followed we became thoroughly
acquainted with the clothes of its inhabitants. We discovered who wore
red flannel petticoats, and who leaned toward gay and passionate
pyjamas. We also knew who wore--but perhaps we had better stop right
here. There are things which no gentleman should discuss--certainly not
in the cold light of public print. But it was astonishing how life-like
they used to look--especially in a breeze.
Over that first game with Harry we would like to draw a veil, a good
thick veil--say, several plies of sack-cloth. We did not shine, or, if
we did, it was rather as a conflagration than a star. We turned red with
the very first ball we hit--we knocked it on to a neighboring
housetop--and we slowly became a richer and richer maroon during the
progress of the match. Somehow or other we seemed to be too strong for
the game. When we hit a ball, which wasn't often, we put it into the
bleachers for a home run, or tore a hole in the net with it.
The rest of the time we fanned the atmosphere in a ferocious manner
which was not without its humorous features. We didn't notice the humor
ourself, but a number of our new fellow-members did. They stopped
playing and crowded around to see us. They were very encouraging, but
we were a little confused by their coaching. They kept counting us out
on strikes, or when we got a hit would beseech us to stretch it into a
three-bagger or slide into the home plate. They got us so worked up
that we actually called "Ball!" like a baseball umpire when Harry served
out of the proper court. Presumably we were waiting for four before
taking our base. It was a very trying game--very!
Of course, this was only the beginning. We wouldn't write about tennis
at all, if we couldn't give the reader a better account of ourself than
this. Our first game filled us with rage, but also with determination.
After that we were up at the courts every day the weather permitted, and
a few that it didn't. And we worked--Heavens, how we worked! If we had
worked like that in the office, we would own the plant by now. When we
came in day after day out of the dust and smother, we used to be too
tired even to holler in the cold shower. There was no hot water--it was
considered effeminate.