theatres are thickest. It was on a Saturday afternoon and the walk was
crowded with amusement seekers. Presently in the press I observed a queer
old fellow carrying on his back a monstrous pack of umbrellas. He rang
a bell monotonously and professed himself a mender of umbrellas. He can
hardly have expected to find a customer in the crowd. Even a blinking
eye--and these street merchants are shrewd in these matters--must have told
him that in all this hurrying mass of people, the thoughts of no one ran
toward umbrellas. Rather, I think that he was taking an hour from the
routine of the day. He had trod the profitable side streets until truantry
had taken him. But he still made a pretext of working at his job and called
his wares to ease his conscience from idleness. Once when an unusually
bright beam of sunlight fell from between the clouds, he tilted up his hat
to get the warmth and I thought him guilty of a skip and syncopation in the
ringing of his bell, as if he too twitched pleasantly with the Spring and
his old sap was stirred.
I like these persons who ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter--the
fellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring--is a partner of a bootblack.
Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rusty
sign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. He
is so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he really can read
the sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, he is not squeamish at the
praise. As I have not previously been aware that any of his profession ever
came to general fame except the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, I have squinted
sharply at him to see if by chance it might be he, but there are no marks
even of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring my hat to a marvellous
whiteness and it may be true that he has really tended heads that are now
gone beyond Constantinople.
Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. Of this the long rag is
their instrument. They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the key
and then they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there is an unusual
genius in the bootblack--some remnant of ancient Greece--he plays such a
lively tune that one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or other
such nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as though
Orpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northern
feet.
Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our hearts go out to Adam in the
hour of his temptation. I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who
even leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart. "Those dear dirty
dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although
the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten.
They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery
fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the
rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I do
not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so
flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older
world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the
lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed,
there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for
gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I
once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff
called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like
to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth
was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and
unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its
wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets
up kinship with an author.
The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in
the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of
easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with
tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their
shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but sure
that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. When
else could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the
returning year--the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings
of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? If
such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even
of travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the first
fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and
has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even
though the jest be plain?
I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day of
April fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his finger
at your hat, humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for a supposed
defect! His glad shout will be your reward. Or if you are begged piteously
to lift a stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even though you
sniff the imposture, seize upon it with a will! It is thus, beneath these
April skies, that you play your part in the pageantry that marks the day.
The Friendly Genii
Do you not confess yourself to be several years past that time of greenest
youth when burnt cork holds its greatest charm? Although not fallen to a
crippled state, are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip and
stalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in
a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with back
humped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? But
doubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights--when Kazrac
the magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let us
hope that you played the villain with a swagger, or being cast in a softer
role, that you won a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done.
Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the parlor hangings as a
curtain with brown string from the pantry and safety pins. Although you had
no show to offer, you said "ding" three times--as is the ancient custom of
the stage when the actors are ready--and drew them wide apart. The cat
was the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward your activity. A
complaint that springs up in youth and is known as "snuffles" had kept you
out of school. It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were sunk in
fear of your lessons, but had abated at nine o'clock. Whether the cure came
with a proper healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the ringing
of the school bell, must be left to a cool judgment.
Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie came on her quest for dust, you
tooted once upon your nose, just to show that a remnant of your infirmity
persisted, then put your golden convalescence on the making of your
curtain.
But in the early hours of afternoon when the children are once more upon
the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and
fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they
were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil
the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at
least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or
step carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil their
suppers. Ah!--a bat goes by--a glove--a ball! And now from a vacant lot
there comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention to be made of
you--you, "molasses fingers"--the star left fielder--the timely batter?
What would you not give now for a clean bill of health? You rub your
offending nose upon the glass. What matters it with what deep rascality in
black mustachios you once strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you?
My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of squeaks and shadows
to all except the valiant. In it were low, dark corners where the night
crawled in and slept. But in the open part where the roof was highest,
there was the theatre. Its walls were made of a red cambric of a flowered
pattern that still lingers with me, and was bought with a clatter of
pennies on the counter, together with nickels that had escaped my
extravagance at the soda fountain.
A cousin and I were joint proprietors. In the making of it, the hammer and
nails were mine by right of sex, while she stitched in womanish fashion on
the fabrics. She was leading woman and I was either the hero or the villain
as fitted to my mood. My younger cousin--although we scorned her for her
youth--was admitted to the slighter parts. She might daub herself with
cork, but it must be only when we were done. Nor did we allow her to carry
the paper knife--shaped like a dagger--which figured hugely in our plots.
If we gave her any word to speak, it was as taffy to keep her silent about
some iniquity that we had worked against her. In general, we judged her to
be too green and giddy for the heavy parts. At the most, she might take
pins at the door--for at such a trifle we displayed our talents--or play
upon the comb as orchestra before the rising of the curtain.
The usual approach to this theatre was the kitchen door, and those who came
to enjoy the drama sniffed at their very entrance the new-baked bread. A
pan of cookies was set upon a shelf and a row of apples was ranged along
the window sill. Of the ice-box around the corner, not a word, lest hunger
lead you off! As for the cook, although her tongue was tart upon a just
occasion and although she shooed the children with her apron, secretly she
liked to have them crowding through her kitchen.
Now if you, reader--for I assume you to be one of the gathering
audience--were of the kind careful on scrubbing days to scrape your feet
upon the iron outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed parts, then
it is likely that you stood in the good graces of the cook. Mark your
reward! As you journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and bit scallops
in its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was in you--as commonly comes up in the
middle afternoon--you waived this slower method and crammed yourself with
a recklessness that bestrewed the purlieus of your mouth. If your ears lay
beyond the muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order.
Is there not a story in which children are tracked by an ogre through the
perilous wood by the crumbs they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogre
lurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It would be near the
top, farthest from the friendly kitchen, that the attack might come, for
there the stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it was best
to look sharp and to turn the corners wide. A brave whistling kept out the
other noises.
It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us.
My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb within
my fist. We were frequent companions. Together we had sat on benches in the
park and poked the gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. Although
his eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equal
age.
The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried a bag of candy against a
sudden appetite--colt's foot, a penny to the stick. Here and there ushers
were clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first corn
within a popper. Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the day
would have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It was as though
a thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make his
cover. The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Stratford
Church and we dimly saw its spire.
Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scampering
to get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waiting
on the stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lost
mountaineers--for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the Public
Library, that had come last beneath my thumb--ghostly heads looked down
upon us across the gallery rail.
And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger--whose Adam's
apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation--you will see
in the center of the murk above you a single point of light. It is the
spark that will ignite the great gas chandelier. I strain my neck to the
point of breaking. My grandfather strains his too, for it is a game between
us which shall announce the first spurting of the light. At last! We cry
out together. The spark catches the vent next to it. It runs around the
circle of glass pendants. The whole blazes up. The mountaineers come to
life. They lean forward on their elbows.
From the wings comes the tuning of the violins. A flute ripples up and down
in a care-free manner as though the villain Kazrac were already dead and
virtue had come into its own. The orchestra emerges from below. Their
calmness is but a pretense. Having looked on such sights as lie behind the
curtain, having trod such ways, they should be bubbling with excitement.
Yet observe the bass viol! How sodden is his eye! How sunken is his gaze!
With what dull routine he draws his bow, as though he knew naught but
sleepy tunes! If there be any genie in the place, as the program says, let
him first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy!
We consult our programs. The first scene is the magician's cave where he
plans his evil schemes. The second is the Chinese city where he pretends to
be Aladdin's uncle. And for myself, did a friendly old gentleman offer me
lollypops and all-day-suckers--for so did the glittering baubles present
themselves across the footlights--like Aladdin I, too, would not have
squinted too closely on his claim. Gladly I would have gone off with him on
an all-day picnic toward the Chinese mountains.
We see a lonely pass in the hills, the cave of jewels (splendid to the eye
of childhood) where the slave of the lamp first appears, and finally the
throne-room with Aladdin seated safely beside his princess.
Who knows how to dip a pen within the twilight? Who shall trace the figures
of the mist? The play is done. We come out in silence. Our candy is but a
remnant. Darkness has fallen. The pavements are wet and shining, so that
the night might see his face, if by chance the old fellow looked our way.
All about there are persons hurrying home with dinner-pails, who, by their
dull eyes, seem never to have heard what wonders follow on the rubbing of a
lamp.
But how the fires leaped up--how ambition beat within us--how our attic
theatre was wrought to perfection--how the play came off and wracked the
neighborhood of its pins--with what grace I myself acted Aladdin--these
things must be written by a vain and braggart pen.
Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit
When it happens that a man has risen to be a member of Parliament, the
Secretary of the British Navy and the President of the Royal Society, when
he has become the adviser of the King and is moreover the one really bright
spot in that King's reign, it is amazing that considerably more than one
hundred years after his death, when the navy that he nurtured dominates the
seven seas, that he himself on a sudden should be known, not for his larger
accomplishments, but as a kind of tavern crony and pot-companion. When he
should be standing with fame secure in a solemn though dusty niche in the
Temple of Time, it is amazing that he should be remembered chiefly for
certain quarrels with his wife and as a frequenter of plays and summer
gardens.
Yet this is the fate of Samuel Pepys. Before the return of the Stuarts he
held a poor clerkship in the Navy Office and cut his quill obscurely at
the common desk. At the Restoration, partly by the boost of influence, but
chiefly by his substantial merit, he mounted to several successively higher
posts. The Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and when he became
Lord High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684,
Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became
King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite
a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the
conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a
prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later victories
that were to sweep the seas may be traced in part to him. Nelson rides upon
his shoulders. These achievements should have made his fame secure. But
on a sudden he gained for posterity a less dignified although a more
interesting and enduring renown.
In life, Samuel Pepys walked gravely in majestical robe with full-bottomed
wig and with ceremonial lace flapping at his wrists. Every step, if his
portrait is to be believed, was a bit of pageantry. Such was his fame, that
if his sword but clacked a warning on the pavement, it must have brought
the apprentices to the windows. Tradesmen laid down their wares to get a
look at him. Fat men puffed and strained to gain the advantage of a sill.
Fashionable ladies peeped from brocaded curtains and ogled for his regard.
Or if he went by chair, the carriers held their noses up as though offended
by the common air. When he spoke before the Commons, the galleries were
hushed. He gave his days to the signing of stiff parchments--Admiralty
Orders or what not. He checked the King himself at the council table. In
short, he was not only a great personage, but also he was quite well aware
of the fact and held himself accordingly.
But now many years have passed, and Time, that has so long been at bowls
with reputations, has acquired a moderate skill in knocking them down. Let
us see how it fares with Pepys! Some men who have been roguish in their
lives have been remembered by their higher accomplishments. A string
of sonnets or a novel or two, if it catches the fancy, has wiped out a
tap-room record. The winning of a battle has obliterated a meanly spent
youth. It is true that for a while an old housewife who once lived on the
hero's street will shake a dubious finger on his early pranks. Stolen
apples or cigarettes behind the barn cram her recollection. But even a
village reputation fades. In time the sonnets and glorious battle have the
upper place. But things went the other way with Pepys. Rather, his fate
is like that of Zeus, who--if legend is to be trusted--was in his life a
person of some importance whose nod stirred society on Olympus, but who is
now remembered largely for his flirtations and his braggart conduct. A not
unlike evil has fallen on the magnificent Mr. Pepys.
This fate came to him because--as the world knows--it happened that for
a period of ten years in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting and
honest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he was still a poor clerk
living with his wife in a garret, and ended it in 1669, when, although he
had emerged from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been set on him.
All the facts of his life during this period are put down, whether good or
bad, small or large, generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent in
work at his office, of his consultations with higher officials. There
is much running to and fro of business. The Dutch war bulks to a proper
length. Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys goes upon the
streets in the days of the plague and writes the horror of it--the houses
marked with red crosses and with prayers scratched beneath--the stench and
the carrying of dead bodies. He sees the great fire of London from his
window on the night it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen.
He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, and
afterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and the
crowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper.
He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at an
ale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Retire," a song
of his own making, and tells how his listeners "cried it up."
In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for his
attentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne
in her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" Mrs. Knipp, for his
love of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry
late at night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps we recall him
best for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the time
of the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a
"camlett cloak with gold buttons," or for sitting for his portrait in an
Indian gown which he "hired to be drawn in." Who shall say that this is not
the very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons?
Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked,
would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their dusky
fingers at him?
Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, "poor
wretch," was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she
washed his "foul clothes"--that by degrees he came to be wealthy and
rode in his own yellow coach--that his wife went abroad in society "in
a flowered tabby gown"--that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and
exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the
pit--and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was
but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box.
Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepys
chiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. If
only the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting of
the Committee for Tangier--when the Prince of Wales was present and such
smaller fry as Chancellors--is dull and is matter for a skipping eye.
If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens that
there is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page--maybe no
more than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's name pops in
sight)--bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chance
of roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiralty
business, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs.
Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that
the start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandal
about Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart
came to court--such things tease one from the sterner business.
And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the
importance of Pepys' diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about
Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and
that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in reality
the diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface,
he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture to
write of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote in
a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had
reason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825,
when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequent
editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final.
But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in
the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.
If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which
a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data.
Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.
More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more
importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the
close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty
years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its
fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return
of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was
that was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different from
the Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the
north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. It
no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the
rain. The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit. They
were ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like
congenial neighbors. But these days are past. Let Bartholomew Fair be as
rowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark,
the theatre has risen in the world! It has put on a wig, as it were, it has
tied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable. And although it has
taken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind and
will make it feel at home in the upper circles.