MINCE PIE
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
TO
F.M. AND L.J.M.
[Illustration]
INSTRUCTIONS
This book is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read
it anywhere else.
In order to obtain the best results for all concerned do not read a
borrowed copy, but buy one. If the bed is a double bed, buy two.
Do not lend a copy under any circumstances, but refer your friends to
the nearest bookshop, where they may expiate their curiosity.
Most of these sketches were first printed in the Philadelphia _Evening
Public Ledger_; others appeared in _The Bookman_, the Boston _Evening
Transcript_, _Life_, and _The Smart Set_. To all these publications I am
indebted for permission to reprint.
If one asks what excuse there can be for prolonging the existence of
these trifles, my answer is that there is no excuse. But a copy on the
bedside shelf may possibly pave the way to easy slumber. Only a mind
"debauched by learning" (in Doctor Johnson's phrase) will scrutinize
them too anxiously.
It seems to me, on reading the proofs, that the skit entitled "Trials of
a President Travelling Abroad" is a faint and subconscious echo of a
passage in a favorite of my early youth, _Happy Thoughts_, by the late
F.C. Burnand. If this acknowledgment should move anyone to read that
delicious classic of pleasantry, the innocent plunder may be pardonable.
And now a word of obeisance. I take this opportunity of thanking several
gentle overseers and magistrates who have been too generously friendly
to these eccentric gestures. These are Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday,
editor of _The Bookman_ and victim of the novelette herein entitled "Owd
Bob"; Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, literary editor of The Boston _Transcript_,
who has often permitted me to cut outrageous capers in his hospitable
columns; and Mr. Thomas L. Masson, of _Life_, who allows me to reprint
several of the shorter pieces. But most of all I thank Mr. David E.
Smiley, editor of the Philadelphia _Evening Public Ledger_, for whom
the majority of these sketches were written, and whose patience and
kindness have been a frequent amazement to
THE AUTHOR.
PHILADELPHIA _September, 1919_
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON FILLING AN INK-WELL 17
OLD THOUGHTS FOR CHRISTMAS 24
CHRISTMAS CARDS 31
ON UNANSWERING LETTERS 35
A LETTER TO FATHER TIME 41
WHAT MEN LIVE BY 48
THE UNNATURAL NATURALIST 54
SITTING IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR 60
BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES 64
163 INNOCENT OLD MEN 69
A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON 75
BULLIED BY THE BIRDS 81
A MESSAGE FOR BOONVILLE 87
MAKING MARATHON SAFE FOR THE URCHIN 92
THE SMELL OF SMELLS 98
A JAPANESE BACHELOR 102
TWO DAYS WE CELEBRATE 117
THE URCHIN AT THE ZOO 132
FELLOW CRAFTSMEN 139
THE KEY RING 144
"OWD BOB" 150
THE APPLE THAT NO ONE ATE 167
AS TO RUMORS 174
OUR MOTHERS 181
GREETING TO AMERICAN ANGLERS 186
MRS. IZAAK WALTON WRITES A
LETTER TO HER MOTHER 190
TRUTH 193
THE TRAGEDY OF WASHINGTON SQUARE 195
IF MR. WILSON WERE THE WEATHER MAN 202
SYNTAX FOR CYNICS 205
THE TRUTH AT LAST 209
FIXED IDEAS 211
TRIALS OF A PRESIDENT TRAVELLING ABROAD 215
DIARY OF A PUBLISHER'S OFFICE BOY 217
THE DOG'S COMMANDMENTS 219
THE VALUE OF CRITICISM 221
A MARRIAGE SERVICE FOR COMMUTERS 224
THE SUNNY SIDE OF GRUB STREET 226
BURIAL SERVICE FOR A NEWSPAPER JOKE 236
ADVICE TO THOSE VISITING A BABY 238
ABOU BEN WOODROW 240
MY MAGNIFICENT SYSTEM 242
LETTERS TO CYNTHIA
1 IN PRAISE OF BOOBS 245
2 SIMPLIFICATION 250
TO AN UNKNOWN DAMSEL 256
THOUGHTS ON SETTING AN ALARM CLOCK 258
SONGS IN A SHOWER BATH 259
ON DEDICATING A NEW TEAPOT 261
THE UNFORGIVABLE SYNTAX 263
VISITING POETS 264
A GOOD HOME IN THE SUBURBS 270
WALT WHITMAN MINIATURES 272
ON DOORS 292
MINCE PIE
ON FILLING AN INK-WELL
Those who buy their ink in little stone jugs may prefer to do so because
the pottle reminds them of cruiskeen lawn or ginger beer (with its
wire-bound cork), but they miss a noble delight. Ink should be bought in
the tall, blue glass, quart bottle (with the ingenious non-drip spout),
and once every three weeks or so, when you fill your ink-well, it is
your privilege to elevate the flask against the brightness of a window,
and meditate (with a breath of sadness) on the joys and problems that
sacred fluid holds in solution.
How blue it shines toward the light! Blue as lupin or larkspur, or
cornflower--aye, and even so blue art thou, my scriven, to think how far
the written page falls short of the bright ecstasy of thy dream! In the
bottle, what magnificence of unpenned stuff lies cool and liquid: what
fluency of essay, what fonts of song. As the bottle glints, blue as a
squill or a hyacinth, blue as the meadows of Elysium or the eyes of
girls loved by young poets, meseems the racing pen might almost gain
upon the thoughts that are turning the bend in the road. A jolly throng,
those thoughts: I can see them talking and laughing together. But when
pen reaches the road's turning, the thoughts are gone far ahead: their
delicate figures are silhouettes against the sky.
It is a sacramental matter, this filling the ink-well. Is there a
writer, however humble, who has not poured into his writing pot, with
the ink, some wistful hopes or prayers for what may emerge from that
dark source? Is there not some particular reverence due the ink-well,
some form of propitiation to humbug the powers of evil and constraint
that devil the journalist? Satan hovers near the ink-pot. Luther solved
the matter by throwing the well itself at the apparition. That savors to
me too much of homeopathy. If Satan ever puts his face over my desk, I
shall hurl a volume of Harold Bell Wright at him.
But what becomes of the ink-pots of glory? The conduit from which
Boswell drew, for Charles Dilly in The Poultry, the great river of his
Johnson? The well (was it of blue china?) whence flowed _Dream Children:
a Revery_? (It was written on folio ledger sheets from the East India
House--I saw the manuscript only yesterday in a room at Daylesford,
Pennsylvania, where much of the richest ink of the last two centuries is
lovingly laid away.) The pot of chuckling fluid where Harry Fielding
dipped his pen to tell the history of a certain foundling; the ink-wells
of the Café de la Source on the Boul' Mich'--do they by any chance
remember which it was that R.L.S. used? One of the happiest tremors of
my life was when I went to that café and called for a bock and writing
material, just because R.L.S. had once written letters there. And the
ink-well Poe used at that boarding-house in Greenwich Street, New York
(April, 1844), when he wrote to his dear Muddy (his mother-in-law) to
describe how he and Virginia had reached a haven of square meals. That
hopeful letter, so perfect now in pathos--
For breakfast we had excellent-flavored coffee, hot and strong--not
very clear and no great deal of cream--veal cutlets, elegant ham
and eggs and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more
plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the
eggs--and the great dishes of meat. Sis [his wife] is delighted, and
we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had
no night sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore
against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a
skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for
the stove. The fire kept in all night. We have now got four dollars
and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three
dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in
excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop--so that I hope soon to
get out of trouble.
[Illustration]
Yes, let us clear the typewriter off the table: an ink-well is a sacred
thing.
Do you ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a
public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried,
in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune?
What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and
sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. And the ink-wells on hotel
counters--does not the public dipping place of the Bellevue Hotel,
Boston, win a new dignity in my memory when I know (as I learned lately)
that Rupert Brooke registered there in the spring of 1914? I remember,
too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the
Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above
on the same page.
Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has
done honor to the ink-well. His _Apology for the Bottle Volcanic_ is in
his best flow of secret smiling (save an unfortunate dilution of Riley):
Sometimes I dip my pen and find the bottle full of fire,
The salamanders flying forth I cannot but admire....
O sad deceiving ink, as bad as liquor in its way--
All demons of a bottle size have pranced from you to-day,
And seized my pen for hobby-horse as witches ride a broom,
And left a trail of brimstone words and blots and gobs of gloom.
And yet when I am extra good ... [_here I omit the transfusion
of Riley_]
My bottle spreads a rainbow mist, and from the vapor fine
Ten thousand troops from fairyland come riding in a line.
I suppose it is the mark of a trifling mind, yet I like to hear of the
little particulars that surrounded those whose pens struck sparks. It
is Boswell that leads us into that habit of thought. I like to know what
the author wore, how he sat, what the furniture of his desk and chamber,
who cooked his meals for him, and with what appetite he approached them.
"The mind soars by an effort to the grand and lofty" (so dipped Hazlitt
in some favored ink-bottle)--"it is at home in the groveling, the
disagreeable, and the little."
I like to think, as I look along book shelves, that every one of these
favorites was born out of an ink-well. I imagine the hopes and visions
that thronged the author's mind as he filled his pot and sliced the
quill. What various fruits have flowed from those ink-wells of the past:
for some, comfort and honor, quiet homes and plenteousness; for others,
bitterness and disappointment. I have seen a copy of Poe's poems,
published in 1845 by Putnam, inscribed by the author. The volume had
been bought for $2,500. Think what that would have meant to Poe himself.
Some such thoughts as these twinkled in my head as I held up the Pierian
bottle against the light, admired the deep blue of it, and filled my
ink-well. And then I took up my pen, which wrote:
A GRACE BEFORE WRITING
On Filling an Ink-well
This is a sacrament, I think!
Holding the bottle toward the light,
As blue as lupin gleams the ink:
May Truth be with me as I write!
That small dark cistern may afford
Reunion with some vanished friend,--
And with this ink I have just poured
May none but honest words be penned!
OLD THOUGHTS FOR CHRISTMAS
[Illustration]
A new thought for Christmas? Who ever wanted a new thought for
Christmas? That man should be shot who would try to brain one. It is an
impertinence even to write about Christmas. Christmas is a matter that
humanity has taken so deeply to heart that we will not have our festival
meddled with by bungling hands. No efficiency expert would dare tell us
that Christmas is inefficient; that the clockwork toys will soon be
broken; that no one can eat a peppermint cane a yard long; that the
curves on our chart of kindness should be ironed out so that the "peak
load" of December would be evenly distributed through the year. No
sourface dare tell us that we drive postmen and shopgirls into
Bolshevism by overtaxing them with our frenzied purchasing or that it is
absurd to send to a friend in a steam-heated apartment in a prohibition
republic a bright little picture card of a gentleman in Georgian costume
drinking ale by a roaring fire of logs. None in his senses, I say, would
emit such sophistries, for Christmas is a law unto itself and is not
conducted by card-index. Even the postmen and shopgirls, severe though
their labors, would not have matters altered. There is none of us who does
not enjoy hardship and bustle that contribute to the happiness of
others.
There is an efficiency of the heart that transcends and contradicts that
of the head. Things of the spirit differ from things material in that
the more you give the more you have. The comedian has an immensely
better time than the audience. To modernize the adage, to give is more
fun than to receive. Especially if you have wit enough to give to those
who don't expect it. Surprise is the most primitive joy of humanity.
Surprise is the first reason for a baby's laughter. And at Christmas
time, when we are all a little childish I hope, surprise is the flavor
of our keenest joys. We all remember the thrill with which we once
heard, behind some closed door, the rustle and crackle of paper parcels
being tied up. We knew that we were going to be surprised--a delicious
refinement and luxuriant seasoning of the emotion!
Christmas, then, conforms to this deeper efficiency of the heart. We are
not methodical in kindness; we do not "fill orders" for consignments of
affection. We let our kindness ramble and explore; old forgotten
friendships pop up in our minds and we mail a card to Harry Hunt, of
Minneapolis (from whom we have not heard for half a dozen years), "just
to surprise him." A business man who shipped a carload of goods to a
customer, just to surprise him, would soon perish of abuse. But no one
ever refuses a shipment of kindness, because no one ever feels
overstocked with it. It is coin of the realm, current everywhere. And we
do not try to measure our kindnesses to the capacity of our friends.
Friendship is not measurable in calories. How many times this year have
you "turned" your stock of kindness?
It is the gradual approach to the Great Surprise that lends full savor
to the experience. It has been thought by some that Christmas would gain
in excitement if no one knew when it was to be; if (keeping the festival
within the winter months) some public functionary (say, Mr. Burleson)
were to announce some unexpected morning, "A week from to-day will be
Christmas!" Then what a scurrying and joyful frenzy--what a festooning
of shops and mad purchasing of presents! But it would not be half the
fun of the slow approach of the familiar date. All through November and
December we watch it drawing nearer; we see the shop windows begin to
glow with red and green and lively colors; we note the altered demeanor
of bellboys and janitors as the Date flows quietly toward us; we pass
through the haggard perplexity of "Only Four Days More" when we suddenly
realize it is too late to make our shopping the display of lucid
affectionate reasoning we had contemplated, and clutch wildly at
grotesque tokens--and then (sweetest of all) comes the quiet calmness of
Christmas Eve. Then, while we decorate the tree or carry parcels of
tissue paper and red ribbon to a carefully prepared list of aunts and
godmothers, or reckon up a little pile of bright quarters on the
dining-room table in preparation for to-morrow's largesse--then it is
that the brief, poignant and precious sweetness of the experience claims
us at the full. Then we can see that all our careful wisdom and
shrewdness were folly and stupidity; and we can understand the meaning
of that Great Surprise--that where we planned wealth we found ourselves
poor; that where we thought to be impoverished we were enriched. The
world is built upon a lovely plan if we take time to study the
blue-prints of the heart.
Humanity must be forgiven much for having invented Christmas. What does
it matter that a great poet and philosopher urges "the abandonment of
the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy"?
Theology is not saddled upon pronouns; the best doctrine is but three
words, God is Love. Love, or kindness, is fundamental energy enough to
satisfy any brooder. And Christmas Day means the birth of a child; that
is to say, the triumph of life and hope over suffering.
Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the stupid,
harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live
according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of
good will. We grant ourselves the complete and selfish pleasure of
loving others better than ourselves. How odd it seems, how unnaturally
happy we are! We feel there must be some mistake, and rather yearn for
the familiar frictions and distresses. Just for a few hours we "purge
out of every heart the lurking grudge." We know then that hatred is a
form of illness; that suspicion and pride are only fear; that the
rascally acts of others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human
relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may
have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we
looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia!
So at Christmas we tap that vast reservoir of wisdom and strength--call
it efficiency or the fundamental energy if you will--Kindness. And our
kindness, thank heaven, is not the placid kindness of angels; it is
veined with human blood; it is full of absurdities, irritations,
frustrations. A man 100 per cent. kind would be intolerable. As a wise
teacher said, the milk of human kindness easily curdles into cheese. We
like our friends' affections because we know the tincture of mortal acid
is in them. We remember the satirist who remarked that to love one's
self is the beginning of a lifelong romance. We know this lifelong
romance will resume its sway; we shall lose our tempers, be obstinate,
peevish and crank. We shall fidget and fume while waiting our turn in
the barber's chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a
few hours, what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve,
to pages which those who speak our tongue immortally associate with the
season--the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as long
as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a
pound cake is full of fruit. A pound cake will keep moist three years; a
sponge cake is dry in three days.
And now humanity has its most beautiful and most appropriate Christmas
gift--Peace. The Magi of Versailles and Washington having unwound for us
the tissue paper and red ribbon (or red tape) from this greatest of all
gifts, let us in days to come measure up to what has been born through
such anguish and horror. If war is illness and peace is health, let us
remember also that health is not merely a blessing to be received intact
once and for all. It is not a substance but a condition, to be
maintained only by sound régime, self-discipline and simplicity. Let the
Wise Men not be too wise; let them remember those other Wise Men who,
after their long journey and their sage surmisings, found only a Child.
On this evening it serves us nothing to pile up filing cases and rolltop
desks toward the stars, for in our city square the Star itself has
fallen, and shines upon the Tree.
CHRISTMAS CARDS
By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and
10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to
rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers
design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to
the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.
This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have
nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.
After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found
not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true
romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around
us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in
snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a
blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of
mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they
were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in
Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and
circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled
in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?
Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket
of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and
holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but meager
flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest, 'tis
actual, 'tis tangible and potable. And where, among all the Christmas
cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our
triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar
against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves
with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around
us?
It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination;
that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it
is. Certainly a visitor from another sphere, looking on our fantastic
and exciting civilization, would find little reflection of it in the
Christmas card. He would find us clinging desperately to what we have
been taught to believe was picturesque and jolly, and afraid to assert
that the things of to-day are comely too. Even on the basis of
discomfort (an acknowledged criterion of picturesqueness) surely a
trolley car jammed with parcel-laden passengers is just as satisfying a
spectacle as any stage coach? Surely the steam radiator, if not so
lovely as a flame-gilded hearth, is more real to most of us? And instead
of the customary picture of shivering subjects of George III held up by
a highwayman on Hampstead Heath, why not a deftly delineated sketch of
victims in a steam-heated lobby submitting to the plunder of the
hat-check bandit? Come, let us be honest! The romance of to-day is as
good as any!
Many must have felt this same uneasiness in trying to find Christmas
cards that would really say something of what is in their hearts. The
sentiment behind the card is as lovely and as true as ever, but the
cards themselves are outmoded bottles for the new wine. It seems a cruel
thing to say, but we are impatient with the mottoes and pictures we see
in the shops because they are a conventional echo of a beauty that is
past. What could be more absurd than to send to a friend in a city
apartment a rhyme such as this:
As round the Christmas fire you sit
And hear the bells with frosty chime,
Think, friendship that long love has knit
Grows sweeter still at Christmas time!
If that is sent to the janitor or the elevator boy we have no cavil, for
these gentlemen do actually see a fire and hear bells ring; but the
apartment tenant hears naught but the hissing of the steam in the
radiator, and counts himself lucky to hear that. Why not be honest and
say to him:
I hope the janitor has shipped
You steam, to keep the cold away;
And if the hallboys have been tipped,
Then joy be thine on Christmas Day!
We had not meant to introduce this jocular note into our meditation, for
we are honestly aggrieved that so many of the Christmas cards hark back
to an old tradition that is gone, and never attempt to express any of
the romance of to-day. You may protest that Christmas is the oldest
thing in the world, which is true; yet it is also new every year, and
never newer than now.
ON UNANSWERING LETTERS
[Illustration]
There are a great many people who really believe in answering letters
the day they are received, just as there are people who go to the movies
at 9 o'clock in the morning; but these people are stunted and queer.
It is a great mistake. Such crass and breathless promptness takes away a
great deal of the pleasure of correspondence.
The psychological didoes involved in receiving letters and making up
one's mind to answer them are very complex. If the tangled process could
be clearly analyzed and its component involutions isolated for
inspection we might reach a clearer comprehension of that curious bag of
tricks, the efficient Masculine Mind.
Take Bill F., for instance, a man so delightful that even to
contemplate his existence puts us in good humor and makes us think well
of a world that can exhibit an individual equally comely in mind, body
and estate. Every now and then we get a letter from Bill, and
immediately we pass into a kind of trance, in which our mind rapidly
enunciates the ideas, thoughts, surmises and contradictions that we
would like to write to him in reply. We think what fun it would be to
sit right down and churn the ink-well, spreading speculation and
cynicism over a number of sheets of foolscap to be wafted Billward.
Sternly we repress the impulse for we know that the shock to Bill of
getting so immediate a retort would surely unhinge the well-fitted
panels of his intellect.
We add his letter to the large delta of unanswered mail on our desk,
taking occasion to turn the mass over once or twice and run through it
in a brisk, smiling mood, thinking of all the jolly letters we shall
write some day.
After Bill's letter has lain on the pile for a fortnight or so it has
been gently silted over by about twenty other pleasantly postponed
manuscripts. Coming upon it by chance, we reflect that any specific
problems raised by Bill in that manifesto will by this time have settled
themselves. And his random speculations upon household management and
human destiny will probably have taken a new slant by now, so that to
answer his letter in its own tune will not be congruent with his present
fevers. We had better bide a wee until we really have something of
circumstance to impart.
We wait a week.
By this time a certain sense of shame has begun to invade the privacy of
our brain. We feel that to answer that letter now would be an
indelicacy. Better to pretend that we never got it. By and by Bill will
write again and then we will answer promptly. We put the letter back in
the middle of the heap and think what a fine chap Bill is. But he knows
we love him, so it doesn't really matter whether we write or not.
Another week passes by, and no further communication from Bill. We
wonder whether he does love us as much as we thought. Still--we are too
proud to write and ask.
A few days later a new thought strikes us. Perhaps Bill thinks we have
died and he is annoyed because he wasn't invited to the funeral. Ought
we to wire him? No, because after all we are not dead, and even if he
thinks we are, his subsequent relief at hearing the good news of our
survival will outweigh his bitterness during the interval. One of these
days we will write him a letter that will really express our heart,
filled with all the grindings and gear-work of our mind, rich in
affection and fallacy. But we had better let it ripen and mellow for a
while. Letters, like wines, accumulate bright fumes and bubblings if
kept under cork.
Presently we turn over that pile of letters again. We find in the lees
of the heap two or three that have gone for six months and can safely be
destroyed. Bill is still on our mind, but in a pleasant, dreamy kind of
way. He does not ache or twinge us as he did a month ago. It is fine to
have old friends like that and keep in touch with them. We wonder how he
is and whether he has two children or three. Splendid old Bill!
By this time we have written Bill several letters in imagination and
enjoyed doing so, but the matter of sending him an actual letter has
begun to pall. The thought no longer has the savor and vivid sparkle it
had once. When one feels like that it is unwise to write. Letters should
be spontaneous outpourings: they should never be undertaken merely from
a sense of duty. We know that Bill wouldn't want to get a letter that
was dictated by a feeling of obligation.
Another fortnight or so elapsing, it occurs to us that we have entirely
forgotten what Bill said to us in that letter. We take it out and con it
over. Delightful fellow! It is full of his own felicitous kinks of whim,
though some of it sounds a little old-fashioned by now. It seems a bit
stale, has lost some of its freshness and surprise. Better not answer it
just yet, for Christmas will soon be here and we shall have to write
then anyway. We wonder, can Bill hold out until Christmas without a
letter?
We have been rereading some of those imaginary letters to Bill that have
been dancing in our head. They are full of all sorts of fine stuff. If
Bill ever gets them he will know how we love him. To use O. Henry's
immortal joke, we have days of Damon and Knights of Pythias writing
those uninked letters to Bill. A curious thought has come to us. Perhaps
it would be better if we never saw Bill again. It is very difficult to
talk to a man when you like him so much. It is much easier to write in
the sweet fantastic strain. We are so inarticulate when face to face. If
Bill comes to town we will leave word that we have gone away. Good old
Bill! He will always be a precious memory.
A few days later a sudden frenzy sweeps over us, and though we have many
pressing matters on hand, we mobilize pen and paper and literary shock
troops and prepare to hurl several battalions at Bill. But, strangely
enough, our utterance seems stilted and stiff. We have nothing to say.
_My dear Bill_, we begin, _it seems a long time since we heard from you.
Why don't you write? We still love you, in spite of all your
shortcomings_.
That doesn't seem very cordial. We muse over the pen and nothing comes.
Bursting with affection, we are unable to say a word.
Just then the phone rings. "Hello?" we say.
It is Bill, come to town unexpectedly.
"Good old fish!" we cry, ecstatic. "Meet you at the corner of Tenth and
Chestnut in five minutes."
We tear up the unfinished letter. Bill will never know how much we love
him. Perhaps it is just as well. It is very embarrassing to have your
friends know how you feel about them. When we meet him we will be a
little bit on our guard. It would not be well to be betrayed into any
extravagance of cordiality.
And perhaps a not altogether false little story could be written about a
man who never visited those most dear to him, because it panged him so
to say good-bye when he had to leave.
A LETTER TO FATHER TIME
(NEW YEAR'S EVE)
Dear Father Time--This is your night of triumph, and it seems only fair
to pay you a little tribute. Some people, in a noble mood of bravado,
consider New Year's Eve an occasion of festivity. Long, long in advance
they reserve a table at their favorite café; and becomingly habited in
boiled shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well armed with a
commodity which is said to be synonymous with yourself--money--they seek
to outwit you by crowding a month of merriment into half a dozen hours.
Yet their victory is brief and fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by
night they will move grindingly on the axle the next morning. None of us
can beat you in the end. Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray
and dies at last babbling of greenbacks.
To my own taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a
season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies
of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good
resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a
certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we all--every human being of
us--share alike in bondage to your oppression. There is the only true
and complete democracy, the only absolute brotherhood of man. The great
ones of the earth--Charley Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, General
Pershing and Miss Amy Lowell--all these are in service to the same
tyranny. Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority;
suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by.
Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little
book that was to be called "Life at Twenty-five"--before he got it
written he was long past the delectable age--and now we rub our eyes and
see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so
delightfully contemplated. If there is one meditation common to every
adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, "Well, bo, Time
sure does hustle."
Some of them have scurvily entreated you, old Time! The thief of youth,
they have called you; a highwayman, a gipsy, a grim reaper. It seems a
little unfair. For you have your kindly moods, too. Without your gentle
passage where were Memory, the sweetest of lesser pleasures? You are
the only medicine for many a woe, many a sore heart. And surely you have
a right to reap where you alone have sown? Our strength, our wit, our
comeliness, all those virtues and graces that you pilfer with such
gentle hand, did you not give them to us in the first place? Give, do I
say? Nay, we knew, even as we clutched them, they were but a loan. And
the great immortality of the race endures, for every day that we see
taken away from ourselves we see added to our children or our
grandchildren. It was Shakespeare, who thought a great deal about you,
who put it best:
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound--
It is to be hoped, my dear Time, that you have read Shakespeare's
sonnets, because they will teach you a deal about the dignity of your
career, and also suggest to you the only way we have of keeping up with
you. There is no way of outwitting Time, Shakespeare tells his young
friend, "Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." Or, as a
poor bungling parodist revamped it:
Pep is the stuff to put Old Time on skids--
Pep in your copy, yes, and lots of kids.
It is true that Shakespeare hints another way of doing you in, which is
to write sonnets as good as his. This way, needless to add, is open to
few.
Well, my dear Time, you are not going to fool me into making myself
ridiculous this New Year's Eve with a lot of bonny but impossible
resolutions. I know that you are playing with me just as a cat plays
with a mouse; yet even the most piteous mousekin sometimes causes his
tormentor surprise or disappointment by getting under a bureau or behind
the stove, where, for the moment, she cannot paw him. Every now and
then, with a little luck, I shall pull off just such a scurry into
temporary immortality. It may come by reading Dickens or by seeing a
sunset, or by lunching with friends, or by forgetting to wind the alarm
clock, or by contemplating the rosy little pate of my daughter, who is
still only a nine days' wonder--so young that she doesn't even know what
you are doing to her. But you are not going to have the laugh on me by
luring me into resolutions. I know my weaknesses. I know that I shall
probably continue to annoy newsdealers by reading the magazines on the
stalls instead of buying them; that I shall put off having my hair cut;
drop tobacco cinders on my waistcoat; feel bored at the idea of having
to shave and get dressed; be nervous when the gas burner pops when
turned off; buy more Liberty Bonds than I can afford and have to hock
them at a grievous loss. I shall continue to be pleasant to insurance
agents, from sheer lack of manhood; and to keep library books out over
the date and so incur a fine. My only hope, you see, is resolutely to
determine to persist in these failings. Then, by sheer perversity, I may
grow out of them.
[Illustration]
What avail, indeed, for any of us to make good resolutions when one
contemplates the grand pageant of human frailty? Observe what I noticed
the other day in the Lost and Found column of the New York _Times_:
LOST--Hotel Imperial lavatory, set of teeth. Call or communicate
Flint, 134 East 43d street. Reward.
Surely, if Mr. Flint could not remember to keep his teeth in his mouth,
or if any one else was so basely whimsical as to juggle them away from
him, it may well teach us to be chary of extravagant hopes for the
future. Even the League of Nations, when one contemplates the sad case
of Mr. Flint, becomes a rather anemic safeguard. We had better keep Mr.
Flint in mind through the New Year as a symbol of human error and
disappointment. And the best of it is, my dear Time, that you, too, may
be a little careless. Perhaps one of these days you may doze a little
and we shall steal a few hours of timeless bliss. Shall we see a little
ad in the papers:
LOST--Sixty valuable minutes, said to have been stolen by the
unworthy human race. If found, please return to Father Time, and no
questions asked.
Well, my dear Time, we approach the Zero Hour. I hope you will have a
Happy New Year, and conduct yourself with becoming restraint. So live,
my dear fellow, that we may say, "A good Time was enjoyed by all." As
the hands of the clock go over the top and into the No Man's Land of
the New Year, good luck to you!
Your obedient servant!
WHAT MEN LIVE BY
What a delicate and rare and gracious art is the art of conversation!
With what a dexterity and skill the bubble of speech must be maneuvered
if mind is to meet and mingle with mind.
There is no sadder disappointment than to realize that a conversation
has been a complete failure. By which we mean that it has failed in
blending or isolating for contrast the ideas, opinions and surmises of
two eager minds. So often a conversation is shipwrecked by the very
eagerness of one member to contribute. There must be give and take,
parry and thrust, patience to hear and judgment to utter. How uneasy is
the qualm as one looks back on an hour's talk and sees that the
opportunity was wasted; the precious instant of intercourse gone
forever: the secrets of the heart still incommunicate! Perhaps we were
too anxious to hurry the moment, to enforce our own theory, to adduce
instance from our own experience. Perhaps we were not patient enough to
wait until our friend could express himself with ease and happiness.
Perhaps we squandered the dialogue in tangent topics, in a multitude of
irrelevances.
[Illustration]
How few, how few are those gifted for real talk! There are fine merry
fellows, full of mirth and shrewdly minted observation, who will not
abide by one topic, who must always be lashing out upon some new byroad,
snatching at every bush they pass. They are too excitable, too
ungoverned for the joys of patient intercourse. Talk is so solemn a rite
it should be approached with prayer and must be conducted with nicety
and forbearance. What steadiness and sympathy are needed if the thread
of thought is to be unwound without tangles or snapping! What
forbearance, while each of the pair, after tentative gropings here and
yonder, feels his way toward truth as he sees it. So often two in talk
are like men standing back to back, each trying to describe to the other
what he sees and disputing because their visions do not tally. It takes
a little time for minds to turn face to face.
Very often conversations are better among three than between two, for
the reason that then one of the trio is always, unconsciously, acting as
umpire, interposing fair play, recalling wandering wits to the nub of
the argument, seeing that the aggressiveness of one does no foul to the
reticence of another. Talk in twos may, alas! fall into speaker and
listener: talk in threes rarely does so.
It is little realized how slowly, how painfully, we approach the
expression of truth. We are so variable, so anxious to be polite, and
alternately swayed by caution or anger. Our mind oscillates like a
pendulum: it takes some time for it to come to rest. And then, the
proper allowance and correction has to be made for our individual
vibrations that prevent accuracy. Even the compass needle doesn't point
the true north, but only the magnetic north. Similarly our minds at best
can but indicate magnetic truth, and are distorted by many things that
act as iron filings do on the compass. The necessity of holding one's
job: what an iron filing that is on the compass card of a man's brain!
We are all afraid of truth: we keep a battalion of our pet prejudices
and precautions ready to throw into the argument as shock troops,
rather than let our fortress of Truth be stormed. We have smoke bombs
and decoy ships and all manner of cunning colorizations by which we
conceal our innards from our friends, and even from ourselves. How we
fume and fidget, how we bustle and dodge rather than commit ourselves.
In days of hurry and complication, in the incessant pressure of human
problems that thrust our days behind us, does one never dream of a way
of life in which talk would be honored and exalted to its proper place
in the sun? What a zest there is in that intimate unreserved exchange of
thought, in the pursuit of the magical blue bird of joy and human
satisfaction that may be seen flitting distantly through the branches of
life. It was a sad thing for the world when it grew so busy that men had
no time to talk. There are such treasures of knowledge and compassion in
the minds of our friends, could we only have time to talk them out of
their shy quarries. If we had our way, we would set aside one day a week
for talking. In fact, we would reorganize the week altogether. We would
have one day for Worship (let each man devote it to worship of whatever
he holds dearest); one day for Work; one day for Play (probably
fishing); one day for Talking; one day for Reading, and one day for
Smoking and Thinking. That would leave one day for Resting, and
(incidentally) interviewing employers.
The best week of our life was one in which we did nothing but talk. We
spent it with a delightful gentleman who has a little bungalow on the
shore of a lake in Pike County. He had a great many books and cigars,
both of which are conversational stimulants. We used to lie out on the
edge of the lake, in our oldest trousers, and talk. We discussed ever so
many subjects; in all of them he knew immensely more than we did. We
built up a complete philosophy of indolence and good will, according to
Food and Sleep and Swimming their proper share of homage. We rose at 10
in the morning and began talking; we talked all day and until 3 o'clock
at night. Then we went to bed and regained strength and combativeness
for the coming day. Never was a week better spent. We committed no
crimes, planned no secret treaties, devised no annexations or
indemnities. We envied no one. We examined the entire world and found it
worth while. Meanwhile our wives, who were watching (perhaps with a
little quiet indignation) from the veranda, kept on asking us, "What on
earth do you talk about?"
Bless their hearts, men don't have to have anything to talk _about_.
They just talk.
And there is only one rule for being a good talker: learn how to listen.
THE UNNATURAL NATURALIST
It gives us a great deal of pleasure to announce, officially, that
spring has arrived.
Our statement is not based on any irrelevant data as to equinoxes or
bluebirds or bock-beer signs, but is derived from the deepest authority
we know anything about, our subconscious self. We remember that some
philosopher, perhaps it was Professor James, suggested that individuals
are simply peaks of self-consciousness rising out of the vast ocean of
collective human Mind in which we all swim, and are, at bottom, one.
Whenever we have to decide any important matter, such as when to get our
hair cut and whether to pay a bill or not, and whether to call for the
check or let the other fellow do so, we don't attempt to harass our
conscious volition with these decisions. We rely on our subconscious and
instinctive person, and for better or worse we have to trust to its
righteousness and good sense. We just find ourself doing something and
we carry on and hope it is for the best.
From this deep abyss of subconsciousness we learn that it is spring.
The mottled goosebone of the Allentown prophet is no more
meteorologically accurate than our subconscience. And this is how it
works.
Once a year, about the approach of the vernal equinox or the seedsman's
catalogue, we wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning. This is an immediate
warning and apprisement that something is adrift. Three hundred and
sixty-four days in the year we wake, placidly enough, at seven-ten, ten
minutes after the alarm clock has jangled. But on this particular day,
whether it be the end of February or the middle of March, we wake with
the old recognizable nostalgia. It is the last polyp or vestige of our
anthropomorphic and primal self, trailing its pathetic little wisp of
glory for the one day of the whole calendar. All the rest of the year we
are the plodding percheron of commerce, patiently tugging our wain; but
on that morning there wambles back, for the nonce, the pang of Eden. We
wake at 6 o'clock; it is a blue and golden morning and we feel it
imperative to get outdoors as quickly as possible. Not for an instant do
we feel the customary respectable and sanctioned desire to kiss the
sheets yet an hour or so. The traipsing, trolloping humor of spring is
in our veins; we feel that we must be about felling an aurochs or a
narwhal for breakfast. We leap into our clothes and hurry downstairs and
out of the front door and skirmish round the house to see and smell and
feel.
It is spring. It is unmistakably spring, because the pewit bushes are
budding and on yonder aspen we can hear a forsythia bursting into song.
It is spring, when the feet of the floorwalker pain him and smoking-car
windows have to be pried open with chisels. We skip lightheartedly round
the house to see if those bobolink bulbs we planted are showing any
signs yet, and discover the whisk brush that fell out of the window last
November. And then the newsboy comes along the street and sees us
prancing about and we feel sheepish and ashamed and hurry indoors again.
There may still be blizzards and frozen plumbings and tumbles on icy
pavements, but when that morning of annunciation has come to us we know
that winter is truly dead, even though his ghost may walk and gibber
once or twice. The sweet urge of the new season has rippled up through
the oceanic depths of our subconsciousness, and we are aware of the
rising tide. Like Mr. Wordsworth we feel that we are wiser than we know.
(Perhaps we have misquoted that, but let it stand.)
There are other troubles that spring brings us. We are pitifully
ashamed of our ignorance Of nature, and though we try to hide it we keep
getting tripped up. About this time of year inquisitive persons are
always asking us: "Have you heard any song sparrows yet?" or "Are there
any robins out your way?" or "When do the laburnums begin to nest out in
Marathon?" Now we really can't tell these people our true feeling, which
is that we do not believe in peeking in on the privacy of the laburnums
or any other songsters. It seems to us really immodest to keep on spying
on the birds in that way. And as for the bushes and trees, what we want
to know is, How does one ever get to know them? How do you find out
which is an alder and what is an elm? Or a narcissus and a hyacinth,
does any one really know them apart? We think it's all a bluff. And
jonquils. There was a nest of them on our porch, we are told, but we
didn't think it any business of ours to bother them. Let nature alone
and she'll let you alone.
[Illustration]
But there is a pettifogging cult about that says you ought to know these
things; moreover, children keep on asking one. We always answer at
random and say it's a wagtail or a flowering shrike or a female
magnolia. We were brought up in the country and learned that first
principle of good manners, which is to let birds and flowers and animals
go on about their own affairs without pestering them by asking them
their names and addresses. Surely that's what Shakespeare meant by
saying a rose by any other name will smell as sweet. We can enjoy a rose
just as much as any one, even if we may think it's a hydrangea.
And then we are much too busy to worry about robins and bluebirds and
other poultry of that sort. Of course, if we see one hanging about the
lawn and it looks hungry we have decency enough to throw out a bone or
something for it, but after all we have a lot of troubles of our own to
bother about. We are short-sighted, too, and if we try to get near
enough to see if it is a robin or only a bandanna some one has dropped,
why either it flies away before we get there or it does turn out to be a
bandanna or a clothespin. One of our friends kept on talking about a
Baltimore oriole she had seen near our house, and described it as a
beautiful yellowish fowl. We felt quite ashamed to be so ignorant, and
when one day we thought we saw one near the front porch we left what we
were doing, which was writing a check for the coal man, and went out to
stalk it. After much maneuvering we got near, made a dash--and it was a
banana peel! The oriole had gone back to Baltimore the day before.
We love to read about the birds and flowers and shrubs and insects in
poetry, and it makes us very happy to know they are all round us,
innocent little things like mice and centipedes and goldenrods (until
hay fever time), but as for prying into their affairs we simply won't do
it.
SITTING IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR
Once every ten weeks or so we get our hair cut.
We are not generally parsimonious of our employer's time, but somehow we
do hate to squander that thirty-three minutes, which is the exact
chronicide involved in despoiling our skull of a ten weeks' garner. If
we were to have our hair cut at the end of eight weeks the shearing
would take only thirty-one minutes; but we can never bring ourselves to
rob our employer of that much time until we reckon he is really losing
prestige by our unkempt appearance. Of course, we believe in having our
hair cut during office hours. That is the only device we know to make
the hateful operation tolerable.
To the times mentioned above should be added fifteen seconds, which is
the slice of eternity needed to trim, prune and chasten our mustache,
which is not a large group of foliage.
We knew a traveling man who never got his hair cut except when he was on
the road, which permitted him to include the transaction in his expense
account; but somehow it seems to us more ethical to steal time than to
steal money.
We like to view this whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic
way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is
due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get
our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She
says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort
of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After
five weeks' growth, however, we begin to look quite distinguished. The
difficulty then is to ascertain just when the law of diminishing returns
comes into play. When do we cease to look distinguished and begin to
appear merely slovenly? Careful study has taught us that this begins to
take place at the end of sixty-five days, in warm weather. Add five days
or so for natural procrastination and devilment, and we have seventy
days interval, which we have posited as the ideal orbit for our
tonsorial ecstasies.
When at last we have hounded ourself into robbing our employer of those
thirty-three minutes, plus fifteen seconds for you know what, we find
ourself in the barber's chair. Despairingly we gaze about at the little
blue flasks with flowers enameled on them; at the piles of clean
towels; at the bottles of mandrake essence which we shall presently
have to affirm or deny. Under any other circumstances we should deeply
enjoy a half hour spent in a comfortable chair, with nothing to do but
do nothing. Our barber is a delightful fellow; he looks benign and does
not prattle; he respects the lobes of our ears and other vulnerabilia.
But for some inscrutable reason we feel strangely ill at ease in his
chair. We can't think of anything to think about. Blankly we brood in
the hope of catching the hem of some intimation of immortality. But no,
there is nothing to do but sit there, useless as an incubator with no
eggs in it. The processes of wasting and decay are hurrying us rapidly
to a pauperish grave, every instant brings us closer to a notice in the
obit column, and yet we sit and sit without two worthy thoughts to rub
against each other.
Oh, the poverty of mortal mind, the sad meagerness of the human soul!
Here we are, a vital, breathing entity, transformed to a mere chemical
carcass by the bleak magic of the barber's chair. In our anatomy of
melancholy there are no such atrabiliar moments as those thirty-three
(and a quarter) minutes once every ten weeks. Roughly speaking, we spend
three hours of this living death every year.
And yet, perhaps it is worth it, for what a jocund and pantheistic
merriment possesses us when we escape from the shop! Bay-rummed,
powdered, shorn, brisk and perfumed, we fare down the street exhaling
the syrups of Cathay. Once more we can take our rightful place among
aggressive and well-groomed men; we can look in the face without
blenching those human leviathans who are ever creased, razored, and
white-margined as to vest. We are a man among men and our untethered
mind jostles the stars. We have had our hair cut, and no matter what
gross contours our cropped skull may display to wives or ethnologists,
we are a free man for ten dear weeks.
BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES
"What is an equinox?" said Titania.
I pretended not to hear her and prayed fervently that the inquiry would
pass from her mind. Sometimes her questions, if ignored, are effaced by
some other thought that possesses her active brain. I rattled my paper
briskly and kept well behind it.
"Yes," I murmured husbandly, "delicious, delicious! My dear, you
certainly plan the most delightful meals." Meanwhile I was glancing
feverishly at the daily Quiz column to see if that noble cascade of
popular information might give any help. It did not.
Clear brown eyes looked across the table gravely. I could feel them
through the spring overcoat ads.
"What is an equinox?"
"I think I must have left my matches upstairs," I said, and went up to
look for them. I stayed aloft ten minutes and hoped that by that time
she would have passed on to some other topic. I did not waste my time,
however; I looked everywhere for the "Children's Book of a Million
Reasons," until I remembered it was under the dining-room table taking
the place of a missing caster.
When I slunk into the living room again I hastily suggested a game of
double Canfield, but Titania's brow was still perplexed. Looking across
at me with that direct brown gaze that would compel even a milliner to
relent, she asked:
"What is an equinox?"
I tried to pass it off flippantly.
"A kind of alarm clock," I said, "that lets the bulbs and bushes know
it's time to get up."
"No; but honestly, Bob," she said, "I want to know. It's something about
an equal day and an equal night, isn't it?"
"At the equinox," I said sternly, hoping to overawe her, "the day and
the night are of equal duration. But only for one night. On the
following day the sun, declining in perihelion, produces the customary
inequality. The usual working day is much longer than the night of
relaxation that follows it, as every toiler knows."
"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "but how does it work? It says something
in this article about the days getting longer in the Northern
Hemisphere, while they are getting shorter in the Southern."
"Of course," I agreed, "conditions are totally different south of Mason
and Dixon's line. But as far as we are concerned here, the sun,
revolving round the earth, casts a beneficent shadow, which is generally
regarded as the time to quit work. This shadow--"
"I thought the earth revolved round the sun," she said. "Wasn't that
what Galileo proved?"
"He was afterward discovered to be mistaken," I said. "That was what
caused all the trouble."
"What trouble?" she asked, much interested.
"Why, he and Socrates had to take hemlock or they were drowned in a butt
of malmsey, I really forget which."
"Well, after the equinox," said Titania, "do the days get longer?"
"They do," I said; "in order to permit the double-headers. And now that
daylight saving is to go into effect, equinoxes won't be necessary any
more. Very likely the pan-Russian Soviets, or President Wilson, or
somebody, will abolish them."
"June 21 is the longest day in the year, isn't it?"
"The day before pay-day is always the longest day."
"And the night the cook goes out is always the longest night," she
retorted, catching the spirit of the game.
"Some day," I threatened her, "the earth will stop rotating on its
orbit, or its axis, or whatever it is, and then we will be like the
moon, divided into two hostile hemispheres, one perpetual day and the
other eternal night."
She did not seem alarmed. "Yes, and I bet I know which one you'll
emigrate to," she said. "But how about the equinoctial gales? Why should
there be gales just then?"
I had forgot about the equinoctial gales, and this caught me unawares.
"That was an old tradition of the Phoenician mariners," I said, "but the
invention of latitude and longitude made them unnecessary. They have
fallen into disrepute. Dead reckoning killed them."
"And the precession of the equinoxes?" she asked, turning back to her
magazine.
This was a poser, but I rallied stoutly. "Well," I said, "you see, there
are two equinoxes a year, the vernal and the autumnal. They are well
known by coal dealers. The first one is when he delivers the coal and
the second is when he gets paid. Two of them a year, you see, in the
course of a million years or so, makes quite a majestic series. That is
why they call it a procession."
Titania looked at me and gradually her face broke up into a charming
aurora borealis of laughter.
"I don't believe you know any more about the old things than I do," she
said.
And the worst of it is, I think she was right.
163 INNOCENT OLD MEN
I found Titania looking severely at her watch, which is a queer little
gold disk about the size of a waistcoat button, swinging under her chin
by a thin golden chain. Titania's methods of winding, setting and
regulating that watch have always been a mystery to me. She frequently
knows what the right time is, but how she deduces it from the data given
by the hands of her timepiece I can't guess. It's something like this:
She looks at the watch and notes what it says. Then she deducts ten
minutes, because she remembers it is ten minutes fast. Then she performs
some complicated calculation connected with when the baby had his bath,
and how long ago she heard the church bells chime; to this result she
adds five minutes to allow for leeway. Then she goes to the phone and
asks Central the time.
"Hullo," I said; "what's wrong?"
"I'm wondering about this daylight-saving business," she said. "You
know, I think it's all a piece of Bolshevik propaganda to get us
confused and encourage anarchy. All the women in Marathon are talking
about it and neglecting their knitting. Junior's bath was half an hour
late today because Mrs. Benvenuto called me up to talk about daylight
saving. She says her cook has threatened to leave if she has to get up
an hour earlier in the morning. I was just wondering how to adjust my
watch to the new conditions."
"It's perfectly simple," I said. "Put your watch ahead one hour, and
then go through the same logarithms you always do."
"Put it ahead?" asked Titania. "Mrs. Borgia says we have to put the
clock _back_ an hour. She is fearfully worried about it. She says
suppose she has something in the oven when the clock is put back, it
will be an hour overdone and burned to a crisp when the kitchen clock
catches up again."
"Mrs. Borgia is wrong," I said. "The clocks are to be put ahead one
hour. At 2 o'clock on Easter morning they are to be turned on to 3
o'clock. Mrs. Borgia certainly won't have anything in the oven at that
time of night. You see, we are to pretend that 2 o'clock is really 3
o'clock, and when we get up at 7 o'clock it will really be 6 o'clock. We
are deliberately fooling ourselves in order to get an hour more of
daylight."
"I have an idea," she said, "that you won't get up at 7 that morning."
"It is quite possible," I said, "because I intend to stay up until 2
a.m. that morning in order to be exactly correct in changing our
timepieces. No one shall accuse me of being a time slacker."
Titania was wrinkling her brow. "But how about that lost hour?" she
said. "What happens to it? I don't see how we can just throw an hour
away like that. Time goes on just the same. How can we afford to shorten
our lives so ruthlessly? It's murder, that's what it is! I told you it
was a Bolshevik plot. Just think; there are a hundred million Americans.
Moving on the clock that way brings each of us one hour nearer our
graves. That is to say, we are throwing away 100,000,000 hours."
She seized a pencil and a sheet of paper and went through some
calculations.
"There are 8,760 hours in a year," she said. "Reckoning seventy years a
lifetime, there are 613,200 hours in each person's life. Now, will you
please divide that into a hundred million for me? I'm not good at long
division."
With docility I did so, and reported the result.
"About 163," I said.
"There you are!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "Throwing away all that
perfectly good time amounts simply to murdering 163 harmless old men of
seventy, or 326 able-bodied men of thirty-five, or 1,630 innocent little
children of seven. If that isn't atrocity, what is? I think Mr. Hoover
or Admiral Grayson, or somebody, ought to be prosecuted."
I was aghast at this awful result. Then an idea struck me, and I took
the pencil and began to figure on my own account.
"Look here, Titania," I said. "Not so fast. Moving the clock ahead
doesn't really bring those people any nearer their graves. What it does
do is bring the ratification of the Peace Treaty sooner, which is a fine
thing. By deleting a hundred million hours we shorten Senator Borah's
speeches against the League by 11,410 years. That's very encouraging."
"According to that way of reckoning," she said with sarcasm, "Mr.
Borah's term must have expired about 11,000 years ago."
"My dear Titania," I said, "the ways of the Government may seem
inscrutable, but we have got to follow them with faith. If Mr. Wilson
tells us to murder 163 fine old men in elastic-sided boots we must
simply do it, that's all. Peace is a dreadful thing. We have got to meet
the Germans on their own ground. They adopted this daylight-saving
measure years ago. They call it Sonnenuntergangverderbenpraxis, I
believe. After all, it is only a temporary measure, because in the fall,
when the daylight hours get shorter, we shall have to turn the clocks
back a couple of hours in order to compensate the gas and electric light
companies for all the money they will have lost. That will bring those
163 old gentlemen to life again and double their remaining term of years
to make up for their temporary effacement. They are patriotic hostages
to Time for the summer only. You must remember that time is only a
philosophical abstraction, with no real or tangible existence, and we
have a right to do whatever we want with it."
"I will remind you of that," she said, "at getting-up time on Sunday
morning. I still think that if we are going to monkey with the clocks at
all it would be better to turn them backward instead of forward.
Certainly that would bring you home from the club a little earlier."
"My dear," I said, "we are in the Government's hands. A little later we
may be put on time rations, just as we are on food rations. We may have
time cards to encourage thrift in saving time. Every time we save an
hour we will get a little stamp to show for it. When we fill out a whole
card we will be entitled to call ourselves a month younger than we are.
Tell that to Mrs. Borgia; it will reconcile her."
A lusty uproar made itself heard upstairs and Titania gave a little
scream. "Heavens!" she cried. "Here I am talking with you and Junior's
bottle is half an hour late. I don't care what Mr. Wilson does to the
clocks; he won't be able to fool Junior. He knows when it's, time for
meals. Won't you call up Central and find out the exact time?"
A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON
Marathon, Pa., April 2.
This is a very embarrassing time of year for us. Every morning when we
get on the 8:13 train at Marathon Bill Stites or Fred Myers or Hank
Harris or some other groundsel philosopher on the Cinder and Bloodshot
begins to chivvy us about our garden. "Have you planted anything yet?"
they say. "Have you put litmus paper in the soil to test it for lime,
potash and phosphorus? Have you got a harrow?"
That sort of thing bothers us, because our ideas of cultivation are very
primitive. We did go to the newsstand at the Reading Terminal and try to
buy a Litmus paper, but the agent didn't have any. He says he doesn't
carry the Jersey papers. So we buried some old copies of the
_Philistine_ in the garden, thinking that would strengthen up the soil a
bit. This business of nourishing the soil seems grotesque. It's hard
enough to feed the family, let alone throwing away good money on feeding
the land. Our idea about soil is that it ought to feed itself.
Our garden ought to be lusty enough to raise the few beans and beets
and blisters we aspire to. We have been out looking at the soil. It
looks fairly potent and certainly it goes a long way down. There are
quite a lot of broken magnesia bottles and old shinbones scattered
through it, and they ought to help along. The topsoil and the humus may
be a little mixed, but we are not going to sort them out by hand.
Our method is to go out at twilight the first Sunday in April, about the
time the cutworms go to roost, and take a sharp-pointed stick. We draw
lines in the ground with this stick, preferably in a pleasant
geometrical pattern that will confuse the birds and other observers. It
is important not to do this until twilight, so that no robins or insects
can watch you. Then we go back in the house and put on our old trousers,
the pair that has holes in each pocket. We fill the pockets with the
seed, we want to plant and loiter slowly along the grooves we have made
in the earth. The seed sifts down the trousers legs and spreads itself
in the furrow far better than any mechanical drill could do it. The
secret of gardening is to stick to nature's old appointed ways. Then we
read a chapter of Bernard Shaw aloud, by candle light or lantern light.
As soon as they hear the voice of Shaw all the vegetables dig
themselves in. This saves going all along the rows with a shingle to
pat down the topsoil or the humus or the magnesia bottles or whatever
else is uppermost.
Fred says that certain vegetables--kohl-rabi and colanders, we
think--extract nitrogen from the air and give it back to the soil. It
may be so, but what has that to do with us? If our soil can't keep
itself supplied with nitrogen, that's its lookout. We don't need the
nitrogen in the air. The baby isn't old enough to have warts yet.
[Illustration]
Hank says it's no use watering the garden from above. He says that
watering from above lures the roots toward the surface and next day the
hot sun kills them. The answer to that is that the rain comes from
above, doesn't it? Roots have learned certain habits in the past million
years and we haven't time to teach them to duck when it rains. Hank has
some irrigation plan which involves sinking tomato cans in the ground
and filling them with water.
Bill says it's dangerous to put arsenic on the plants, because it may
kill the cook. He says nicotine or tobacco dust is far better. The
answer to that is that we never put fertilizers on our garden, anyway.
If we want to kill the cook there is a more direct method, and we
reserve the tobacco for ourself. No cutworm shall get a blighty one from
our cherished baccy pouch.
Fred says we ought to have a wheel-barrow; Hank swears by a mulching
iron; Bill is all for cold frames. All three say that hellebore is the
best thing for sucking insects. We echo the expletive, with a different
application.
You see, we have no instinct for gardening. Some fellows, like Bill
Stites, have a divinely implanted zest for the propagation of chard and
rhubarb and self-blanching celery and kohl-rabi; they are kohl-rabid, we
might say. They know, just what to do when they see a weed; they can
assassinate a weevil by just looking at it. But weevils and cabbage
worms are unterrified by us. We can't tell a weed from a young onion. We
never mulched anything in our life; we wouldn't know how to begin.
But the deuce of it is, public opinion says that we must raise a garden.
It is no use to hire a man to do it for us. However badly we may do it,
patriotism demands that we monkey around with a garden of our own. We
may get bitten by a snapping bean or routed by a rutabaga or infected by
a parsnip. But with Bill and those fellows at our heels we have just got
to face it. Hellebore!
What we want to know is, How do you ever find out all these things about
vegetables? We bought an ounce of tomato seeds in desperation, and now
Fred says "one ounce of tomato seeds will produce 3,000 plants. You
should have bought two dozen plants instead of the seed." How does he
know those things? Hank says beans are very delicate and must not be
handled while they are wet or they may get rusty. Again we ask, how does
he know? Where do they learn these matters? Bill says that stones draw
out the moisture from the soil and every stone in the garden should be
removed by hand before we plant. We offered him twenty cents an hour to
do it.
The most tragic odor in the world hangs over Marathon these days; the
smell of freshly spaded earth. It is extolled by the poets and all
those happy sons of the pavement who know nothing about it. But here are
we, who hardly know a loam from a lentil, breaking our back over seed
catalogues. Public opinion may compel us to raise vegetables, but we are
going to go about it our own way. If the stones are going to act like
werewolves and suck the moisture from our soil, let them do so. We don't
believe in thwarting nature. Maybe it will be a very wet summer and we
shall have the laugh on Bill, who has carted away all his stones.
And we should just like to see Bill Stites write a poem. We bet it
wouldn't look as much like a poem as our beans look like beans. And as
for Hank and Fred, they wouldn't even know how to begin to plant a poem!
BULLIED BY THE BIRDS
Marathon, Pa., May 2.
I insist that the place for birds is in the air or on the bushy tops of
trees or on smooth-shaven lawns. Let them twitter and strut on the
greens of golf courses and intimidate the tired business men. Let them
peck cinders along the railroad track and keep the trains waiting. But
really they have no right to take possession of a man's house as they
have mine.
The nesting season is a time of tyranny and oppression for those who
live in Marathon. The birds are upon us like Hindenburg in Belgium. We
go about on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, for fear of annoying them. It
is all the fault of the Marathon Bird Club, which has offered all sorts
of inducements to the fowls of the air to come and live in our suburb,
quite forgetting that humble commuters have to live there, too. Birds
have moved all the way from Wynnewood and Ambler and Chestnut Hill to
enjoy the congenial air of Marathon and the informing little pamphlets
of our club, telling them just what to eat and which houses offer the
best hospitality. All our dwellings are girt about with little villas
made of condensed milk boxes, but the feathered tyrants have grown too
pernickety to inhabit these. They come closer still, and make our homes
their own. They take the grossest liberties.
I am fond of birds, but I think the line must be drawn somewhere. The
clothes-line, for instance. The other day Titania sent me out to put up
a new clothesline; I found that a shrike or a barn swallow or some other
veery had built a nest in the clothespin basket. That means we won't be
able to hang out our laundry in the fresh Monday air and equally fresh
Monday sunshine until the nesting season is over.
Then there is a gross, fat, indiscreet robin that has taken a home in an
evergreen or mimosa or banyan tree just under our veranda railing. It is
an absurdly exposed, almost indecently exposed position, for the
confidential family business she intends to carry on. The iceman and the
butcher and the boy who brings up the Sunday ice cream from the
apothecary can't help seeing those three big blue eggs she has laid.
But, because she has nested there for the last three springs, while the
house was unoccupied, she thinks she has a perpetual lease on that
bush. She hotly resents the iceman and the butcher and the apothecary's
boy, to say nothing of me. So these worthy merchants have to trail round
a circuitous route, violating the neutral ground of a neighbor, in order
to reach the house from behind and deliver their wares through the
cellar. We none of us dare use the veranda at all for fear of
frightening her, and I have given up having the morning paper delivered
at the house because she made such shrill protest.
[Illustration]
Frightening her, do I say? Nay, it is _we_ who are frightened. I go
round to the side of the house to prune my benzine bushes or to plant a
mess of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her
nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I
stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again
that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a
whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back
kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave and Titania whispers sharply,
"You mustn't shave in there. There's a tomtit nesting in the shutter
hinge and the light from your shaving mirror will make the poor little
birds crosseyed when they're hatched." I try to shave in the dining-room
and I find a sparrow's nest on the window sill. Finally I do my toilet
in the coal bin, even though there is a young squeaking bat down there.
A bat is half mouse anyway, so Titania has less compassion for its
feelings. Even if that bat grows up bow-legged on account of premature
excitement, I have to shave somewhere.
We can't play croquet at this time of year, because the lawn must be
kept clear for the robins to quarry out worms. The sound of mallet and
ball frightens the worms and sends them underground, and then it's
harder for the robins to find them. I suppose we really ought to keep a
stringed orchestra playing in the garden to entice the worms to the
surface. We have given up frying onions because the mother robins don't
like the odor while they're raising a family. I love my toast crusts,
but Titania takes them away from me for the blackbirds. "Now," she says,
"they're raising a family. You must be generous."
If my garden doesn't amount to anything this year the birds will be my
alibi. Titania makes me do my gardening in rubber-soled shoes so as not
to disturb the birds when they are going to bed. (They begin yelping at
4 a.m. right outside the window and never think of my slumbers.) The
other evening I put on my planting trousers and was about to sow a
specially fine pea I had brought home from town when Titania made signs
from the window. "You simply mustn't wear those trousers around the
house in nesting season. Don't you know the birds are very sensitive
just now?" And we have been paying board for our cat on Long Island for
a whole year because the birds wouldn't like his society and plebeian
ways.
Marathon has come to a pretty pass, indeed, when the commuters are to be
dispossessed in this way by a lot of birds, orioles and tomtits and
yellow-bellied nuthatches. Some of these days a wren will take it into
its head to build a nest on the railroad track and we'll all have to
walk to town. Or a chicken hawk will settle in our icebox and we'll
starve to death.
As I have said before, I believe in keeping nature in its proper place.
Birds belong in trees. I don't go twittering and fluffing about in oaks
and chestnuts, perching on the birds' nest steps and getting in their
way. And why should some swarthy robin, be she never so matronly, swear
at me if I set foot on my own front porch?
A MESSAGE FOR BOONVILLE
When corncob pipes went up from a nickel to six cents, smoking
traditions tottered. That was a year or more ago, but one can still
recall the indignation written on the faces of nicotine-soaked gaffers
who had been buying cobs at a jitney ever since Washington used one to
keep warm at Valley Forge. It was the supreme test of our determination
to win the war: the price of Missouri meerschaums went up 20 per cent
and there was no insurrection.
Yesterday we went out to buy our annual corncob, and were agreeably
surprised to learn that the price is still six cents; but our friend the
tobacconist said that it may go up again soon. We took the treasure,
gleaming yellow with fresh varnish, back to our kennel, and we are
smoking it as we set down these words. A corncob is sadly hot and raw
until it is well sooted, but the ultimate flavor is worth persecution.
The corncob pipes we always buy come from Boonville, Mo., and we don't
see why we shouldn't blow a little whiff of affection and gratitude
toward that excellent town. Moreover, Boonville celebrated its
centennial recently: it was founded in 1818. If the map is to be
believed, it is on the southern bank of the Missouri River, which is
there spanned by a very fine bridge; it is reached by two railroads
(Missouri Pacific and M., K. and T.) and stands on a bluff 100 feet
above the water. According to the two works of reference nearest to our
desk, its population is either 4252 or 4377. Perhaps the former census
omits the 125 men of the town who are so benighted as to smoke briars or
clays.
Delightful town of Boonville, seat of Cooper County, you are well named.
How great a boon you have conferred upon a troubled world! Long after
more ambitious towns have faded in the memory of man your quiet and
soothing gift to humanity will make your name blessed. I like to imagine
your shady streets, drowsing in the summer sun, and the rural
philosophers sitting on the verandas of your hotels or on the benches of
Harley Park ("comprising fifteen acres"--New International
Encyclopedia), looking out across the brown river and puffing clouds of
sweet gray reek. Down by the livery stable on Main street (there must be
a livery stable on Main street) I can see the old creaky, cane-bottomed
chairs (with seats punctured by too much philosophy) tilted against the
sycamore trees, ready for the afternoon gossip and shag tobacco. I can
imagine the small boys of Boonville fishing for catfish from the piers
of the bridge or bathing down by the steamboat dock (if there is one),
and yearning for the day when they, too, will be grown up and old enough
to smoke corncobs.
[Illustration]
What is the subtle magic of a corncob pipe? It is never as sweet or as
mellow as a well-seasoned briar, and yet it has a fascination all its
own. It is equally dear to those who work hard and those who loaf with
intensity. When you put your nose to the blackened mouth of the hot cob
its odor is quite different from that fragrance of the crusted wooden
bowl. There is a faint bitterness in it, a sour, plaintive aroma. It is
a pipe that seems to call aloud for the accompaniment of beer and
earnest argument on factional political matters. It is also the pipe
for solitary vigils of hard and concentrated work. It is the pipe that a
man keeps in the drawer of his desk for savage hours of extra toil after
the stenographer has powdered her nose and gone home.
A corncob pipe is a humble badge of philosophy, an evidence of tolerance
and even humor. It requires patience and good cheer, for it is slow to
"break in." Those who meditate bestial and brutal designs against the
weak and innocent do not smoke it. Probably Hindenburg never saw one.
Missouri's reputation for incredulity may be due to the corncob habit.
One who is accustomed to consider an argument over a burning nest of
tobacco, with the smoke fuming upward in a placid haze, will not accept
any dogma too immediately.
There is a singular affinity among those who smoke corncobs. A Missouri
meerschaum whose bowl is browned and whose fiber stem is frayed and
stringy with biting betrays a meditative and reasonable owner. He will
have pondered all aspects of life and be equally ready to denounce any
of them, but without bitterness. If you see a man on a street corner
smoking a cob it will be safe to ask him to watch the baby a minute
while you slip around the corner. You would even be safe in asking him
to lend you a five. He will be safe, too, because he won't have it.
Think, therefore, of the charm of a town where corncob pipes are the
chief industry. Think of them stacked up in bright yellow piles in the
warehouse. Think of the warm sun and the wholesome sweetness of broad
acres that have grown into the pith of the cob. Think of the bright-eyed
Missouri maidens who have turned and scooped and varnished and packed
them. Think of the airy streets and wide pavements of Boonville, and the
corner drug stores with their shining soda fountains and grape-juice
bottles. Think of sitting out on that bluff on a warm evening, watching
the broad shimmer of the river slipping down from the sunset, and
smoking a serene pipe while the local flappers walk in the coolness
wearing crisp, swaying gingham dresses. That's the kind of town we like
to think about.
MAKING MARATHON SAFE FOR THE URCHIN
The Urchin and I have been strolling about Marathon on Sunday mornings
for more than a year, but not until the gasolineless Sabbaths supervened
were we really able to examine the village and see what it is like.
Previously we had been kept busy either dodging motors or admiring them
as they sped by. Their rich dazzle of burnished enamel, the purring hum
of their great tires, evokes applause from the Urchin. He is learning,
as he watches those flashing chariots, that life truly is almost as
vivid as the advertisements in the _Ladies' Home Journal_, where the
shimmer of earthly pageant first was presented to him.
Marathon is a village so genteel and comely that the Urchin and I would
like to have some pictures of it for future generations, particularly as
we see it on an autumn morning when, as I say, the motors are kenneled
and the landscape has ceased to vibrate. In the douce benignance of
equinoctial sunshine we gaze about us with eyes of inventory. Where my
observation errs by too much sentiment the Urchin checks me by his
cooler power of ratiocination.
Marathon is a suburban Xanadu gently caressed by the train service of
the Cinder and Bloodshot. It may be recognized as an aristocratic and
patrician stronghold by the fact that while luxuries are readily
obtainable (for instance, banana splits, or the latest novel by Enoch A.
Bennett), necessaries are had only by prayer and advowson. The drug
store will deliver ice cream to your very refrigerator, but it is
impossible to get your garbage collected. The cook goes off for her
Thursday evening in a taxi, but you will have to mend the roof, stanch
the plumbing and curry the furnace with your own hands. There are ten
trains to take you to town of an evening, but only two to bring you
home. Yet going to town is a luxury, coming home is a necessity. The
supply of grape juice seems almost unlimited, yet coal is to be had
catch-as-catch-can.
Another proof that Marathon is patrician at heart is that nothing is
known by its right name! The drug store is a "pharmacy," Sunday is "the
Sabbath," a house is a "residence," a debt is a "balance due on bill
rendered." A girls' school is a "young ladies' seminary," A Marathon man
is not drafted, he is "inducted into selective service." And the
railway station has a porte cochère (with the correct accent) instead of
a carriage entrance. A furnace is (how erroneously!) called a "heater."
Marathon people do not die--they "pass away." Even the cobbler, good
fellow, has caught the trick; he calls his shop the "Italo-American Shoe
Hospital."
This is an innocent masquerade! If Marathon prefers not to call a
flivver a flivver, I shall not expostulate. And yet this quaint
subterfuge should not be carried quite so far. Stone walls are made for
sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven
vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more
delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all
airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his
tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature
herself has taken to the same insincerity. The landscape round Marathon
is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be
gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water,
reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute to the eye. In a
robuster community it would be a swimming hole--but with us, an
ornamental lake. Only in one spot has Nature forgotten herself and been
so brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the
loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in
cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown
stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It
is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly
turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are
hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth--they, and excellent
Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who contemplates
that rugged and honest beauty as he tills his garden on the land
abandoned by squeamish burghers. That is our Aceldama, our Potter's
Field, only approached by the athletic, who keep their eyes from
Nature's indiscretion by vigorous sets of tennis in the purple shadow of
the cliff.
Life is queerly inverted in Marathon. Nature has been so bullied and
repressed that she fawns about us timidly. No well-conducted suburban
shrubbery would think of assuming autumn tints before the ladies have
got into their fall fashions. Indeed none of our chaste trees will even
shed their leaves while any one is watching; and they crouch modestly in
the shade of our massive garages. They have been taught their place. In
Marathon it is a worse sin to have your lawn uncut than to have your
books or your hair uncut. I have been aware of indignant eyes because I
let my back garden run wild. And yet I flatter myself it was not mere
sloth. No! I want the Urchin to see what this savage, tempestuous world
is like. What preparation for life is a village where Nature comes to
heel like a spaniel? When a thunderstorm disorganizes our electric
lights for an hour or so we feel it a personal affront. Let my rearward
plot be a deep-tangled wild-wood where the happy Urchin may imagine
something more ferocious lurking than a posse of radishes. Indeed, I
hardly know whether Marathon is a safe place to bring up a child. How
can he learn the horrors of drink in a village where there is no saloon?
Or the sadness of the seven deadly sins where there is no movie? Or
deference to his betters where the chauffeurs, in their withered leather
legs, drive limousines to the drug store to buy expensive cigars, while
their employers walk to the station puffing briar pipes?
I had been hoping that the war would knock some of this topsy-turvy
nonsense out of us. Maybe it has. Sometimes I see on the faces of our
commuters the unaccustomed agitation of thought. At least we still have
the grace to call ourselves a suburb, and not (what we fancy ourselves)
a superurb. But I don't like the pretense that runs like a jarring note
through the music of our life. Why is it that those who are doing the
work must pretend they are not doing it; and those not doing the work
pretend that they are? I see that the motor messenger girls who drive
high-powered cars wear Sam Browne belts and heavy-soled boots, whereas
the stalwart colored wenches who labor along the tracks of the Cinder
and Bloodshot console themselves with flimsy waists and light slippers.
(A fact!) By and by the Urchin will notice these things. And I don't
want him to grow up the kind of chap who, instead of running to catch a
train, loiters gracefully to the station and waits to be caught.
THE SMELL OF SMELLS
I Smelt it this morning--I wonder if you know the smell I mean?
It had rained hard during the night, and trees and bushes twinkled in
the sharp early sunshine like ballroom chandeliers. As soon as I stepped
out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that
dim, warm sweetness. It was the smell of summer, so wholly different
from the crisp tang of spring.
It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance. It comes only when
the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice,
and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the
subtle vapors of field and woodland. It is a smell that rarely if ever
can be discerned in the city. It needs the wider air of the unhampered
earth for its circulation and play.
I don't know just why, but I associate that peculiar aroma of summer
with woodpiles and barnyards. Perhaps because in the area of a farmyard
the sunlight is caught and focused and glows with its fullest heat and
radiance. And it is in the grasp of the relentless sun that growing
things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant
essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as
blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of
birch logs, heaped up behind a barn in Pike County, where that mellow
richness of summer flowed and quivered like a visible exhalation in the
air. It is the goodly soul of earth, rendering her health and sweetness
to her master, the sun.
[Illustration]
Every one, I suppose, who is a fancier of smells, knows this blithe
perfume of the summer air that is so pleasant to the nostril almost any
fine forenoon from mid-June until August. It steals pungently through
the blue sparkle of the morning, fading away toward noon when the
moistness is dried out. But when one first issues from the house at
breakfast time it is at its highest savor. Irresistibly it suggests
worms and a tin can with the lid jaggedly bent back and a pitchfork
turning up the earth behind the cow stable. Fishing was first invented
when Adam smelt that odor in the air.
The first fishing morning--can't you imagine it! Has no one ever
celebrated it in verse or oils? The world all young and full of
unmitigated sweetness; the Garden of Eden bespangled with the early dew;
Adam scrabbling up a fistful of worm's and hooking them on a bent thorn
and a line of twisted pampas grass; hurrying down to the branch or the
creek or the bayou or whatever it may have been; sitting down on a
brand-new stump that the devil had put there to tempt him; throwing out
his line; sitting there in the sun dreaming and brooding....
And then a tug, a twitch, a flurry in the clear water of Eden, a pull, a
splash, and the First Fish lay on the grass at Adam's foot. Can you
imagine his sensations? How he yelled to Eve to come--look--see, and,
how annoyed he was because she called out she was busy....
Probably it was in that moment that all the bickerings and back-talk of
husbands and wives originated; when Adam called to Eve to come and look
at his First Fish while it was still silver and vivid in its living
colors; and Eve answered she was busy. In that moment were born the
men's clubs and the women's clubs and the pinochle parties and being
detained at the office and Kelly pool and all the other devices and
stratagems that keep men and women from taking their amusements
together.
Well, I didn't mean to go back to the Garden of Eden; I just wanted to
say that summer is here again, even though the almanac doesn't vouch for
it until the 21st. Those of you who are fond of smells, spread your
nostrils about breakfast time tomorrow morning and see if you detect it.
A JAPANESE BACHELOR
The first obligation of one who lives by writing is to write what
editors will buy. In so doing, how often one laments that one cannot
write exactly what happens. Suppose I were to try it--for once!
I have been lying on the bed--where the landlady has put a dark blue
spread, instead of the white one, because I drop my tobacco
ashes--smoking, and thinking about a new friend I met today. His name is
Kenko, a Japanese bachelor of the fourteenth century, who wrote a little
book of musings which has been translated under the title "The
Miscellany of a Japanese Priest." His candid reflections are those of a
shrewd, learned, humane and somewhat misogynist mind. I have been lying
on the bed because his book, like all books that make one ponder deeply
on human destiny, causes that feeling of mind-sickness, that swimming
pain of the mental faculties--or is it caused by too much strong
tobacco?
My acquaintance with Kenko began only last night, when I sat in bed
reading Mr. Raymond Weaver's very pleasant article about him in a
recent _Bookman_. My last act before turning out the light was to lay
the magazine on the table, open at Mr. Weaver's essay, to remind me to
get a copy of Kenko the first thing this morning. Happily to-day was
Saturday. I don't know what I should have done if it had been Sunday. I
felt that I could not wait another day without owning that book. I
suspected it was a good deal in the mood of another bachelor, an
Anglo-American Caleb of to-day--Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, whose
whimsical "Trivia" belongs on the same shelf.
This morning I tried to argue myself out of the decision. It may be a
very expensive book, I thought; it may cost two or three dollars; I have
been spending a lot of money lately, and I certainly ought to buy some
new undershirts. Moreover, this has been a bad week; I have never
written those paragraphs I promised a certain editor, and I haven't paid
the rent yet. Why not try to find the book at a library? But I knew the
only library where I would have any chance of finding Kenko would be the
big pile at Fifth avenue and Forty-second street, and I could not bear
the thought of having to read that book without smoking. I felt
instinctively (from what Mr. Weaver had written) that it was the kind
of book that requires a pipe.
Well, I thought, I won't decide this too hastily; I'll walk down to the
post office (four blocks) and make up my mind on the way. I knew
already, however, that if I didn't go downtown for that book it would
bother me all day and ruin my work.
I walked down to the post office (to mail to an editor a sonnet I
thought fairly well of) saying to myself: That book is imported from
England, it may be a big book, it may even cost four dollars. How much
better to exhibit the stoic tenacity of all great men, go back to my
hall bedroom (which I was temporarily occupying) and concentrate on
matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either
in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter
was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street,
and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the
papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in
its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to the subway.
In the dimly lit vestibule of the subway car, a boy of sixteen or so sat
on an up-ended suitcase, plunged in a book. I can never resist the
temptation to try to see what books other people are reading. This
innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am
short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles. And
usually the people who read books on trolleys, subways and ferries are
women. How often I have stalked them warily, trying to identify the
volume without seeming too intrusive. That weakness deserves an essay in
itself. It has led me into surprising adventures. But in this case my
quarry was easy. The lad--I judged him a boarding school boy going back
to school after the holidays--was so absorbed in his reading that it was
easy to thrust my face over his shoulder and see the running head on the
page--"The Light That Failed."
I left the subway at Pennsylvania Station. Just to appease my
conscience, I stopped in at the agreeable Cadmus bookshop on
Thirty-third street to see if by any chance they might have a
second-hand copy of Kenko. But I know they wouldn't; it is not the kind
of book at all likely to be found second-hand. I tarried here long
enough to smoke one cigarette and pay my devoirs to the noble profession
of second-hand bookselling. I even thought, a little wildly, of buying a
copy of "The Monk" by M.G. Lewis, which I saw there. So does the frenzy
rage when once you unleash it. But I decided to be content with paying
my devoirs to the proprietor, a friend of mine, and not go on (as the
soldier does in Hood's lovely pun) to devour my pay. I hurried off to
the office of the Oxford University Press, Kenko's publishers.
It should be stated, however, that owing to some confusion of doors I
got by mistake into the reception room of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender
Billiard Table Company, which is on the same corridor as the salesroom
of the Oxford Press. It was a pleasant reception room, not very bookish
in aspect, but in my agitation I was too eager to feel surprised by the
large billiard table in the offing. I somewhat startled a young man at
an adding machine by demanding, in a husky voice, a copy of "The
Miscellanies of a Japanese Priest." I was rather nervous by this time,
lest for some reason I should not be able to buy a copy of Kenko. I
feared the publishers might be angry with me for not having made a round
of the bookstores first. The young man saw that I was chalking the wrong
cue, and forwarded me.
In the office of the Oxford Press I met a very genial reception. I had
been, as I say, apprehensive lest they should refuse to sell me the
book; or perhaps they might not have a copy. I wondered what credentials
I could offer to override their scruples. I had made up my mind to tell
them, if they demurred, that I had once published an essay to prove that
the best book for reading in bed is the General Catalogue of the Oxford
University Press. This is quite true. It is a delightful compilation of
several thousand pages, on India paper. But to my pleasant surprise the
Oxonians seemed not at all surprised at the sudden appearance of one
asking, in a voice a little shaken with emotion, for a copy of the
"Miscellanies." Mr. Campion and Mr. Krause, who greeted me, were
kindness itself.
"Oh, yes," they said, "we have a copy." And in a minute it lay before
me. One of those little green and gold volumes in the Oxford Library of
Prose and Poetry. "How much?" I said. "A dollar forty." I paid it
joyfully. It is a good price for a book. Once I wrote a book myself that
sells (when it does sell) at that figure. When I was at Oxford I used to
buy the O.L.P.P. books for (I think) half a crown. In 1917 they were
listed at a dollar. Now $1.40. But I fear Kenko's estate doesn't get the
advantage of increased royalties.
The first thing to do was to find a place to read the book. My club was
fifteen blocks away. The smoking room of the Pennsylvania Station, where
I have done much reading, was three long blocks. But I must dip into
Kenko immediately. Down in the hallway I found a shoe-shining stand,
with a bowl of indirect light above it. The artist was busy in the
barber shop near-by. Admirable opportunity. I mounted the throne and
fell to. The first thing I saw was a quaint Japanese woodcut of a buxom
maiden washing garments in a rapidly purling stream. She was treading
out a petticoat with her bare feet, presumably on a flat stone. In a
black storm-cloud above a willow tree a bearded supernatural being, with
hands spread in humorous deprecation, gazes down half pleased, half
horrified. And the caption is, "Did not the fairy Kumé lose his
supernatural powers when he saw the white legs of a girl washing
clothes?" Yet be not dismayed. Kenko is no George Moore.
By and bye the shoeshiner came out and found me reading. He was
apologetic. "I didn't know you were here," he said. "Sorry to keep you
waiting." Fortunately my shoes needed shining, as they generally do. He
shined them, and I still sat reading. He was puzzled, and tried to make
out the title of the book. At that moment I was reading:
One morning after a beautiful snowfall I sent a letter to a friend's
house about something I wished to say, but said nothing at all about
the snow. And in his reply he wrote: "How can I listen to a man so base
that his pen in writing did not make the least reference to the snow!
Your honorable way of expressing yourself I exceedingly regret." How
amusing was this answer!
The shoeshiner was now asking me whether anything was wrong with the
polish he had put on my boots, so I thought it best to leave.
In the earlier pages of Kenko's book there are a number of allusions to
the agreeableness of intercourse with friends, so I went into a nearby
restaurant to telephone to a man whom I wished to know better. He said
that he would be happy to meet me at ten minutes after twelve. That left
over half an hour. I felt an immediate necessity to tell some one about
Kenko, so I made my way to Mr. Nichols's delightful bookshop (which has
an open fire) on Thirty-third Street. I showed the book to Mr. Nichols,
and we had a pleasant talk, in the course of which she showed me the
five facsimile volumes of Dickens's Christmas books, which he had
issued. In particular, he read aloud to me the magnificent description
of the boiling kettle in the first "Chirp" of "The Cricket on the
Hearth," and pointed out to me how Dickens fell into rhyme in describing
the song of the kettle. This passage Mr. Nichols read to me, standing
in front of his fire, in a very musical and sympathetic tone of voice
which pleased me exceedingly. I was strongly tempted to buy the five
little books, and wished I had known of them before Christmas. With a
brutal effort at last I pulled out my watch, and found it was a quarter
after twelve.
I met my friend at his office, and we walked up Fourth Avenue in a flush
of sunshine. From Twenty-fourth to Forty-second Street we discussed the
habits of English poets visiting this country. At the club we got onto
Bolshevism, and he told me how a bookseller on Lexington Avenue, whose
shop is frequented by very outspoken radicals, had told him that one of
these had said, "The time is coming, and not far away, when the gutters
in front of your shop will run with blood as they did in Petrograd." I
thought of some recent bomb outrages in Philadelphia and did not laugh.
With such current problems before us, I felt a little embarrassed about
turning the talk back to so many centuries to Kenko, but finally I got
it there. My friend ate chicken hash and tea; I had kidneys and bacon,
and cocoa with whipped cream. We both had a coffee éclair. We parted
with mutual regret, and I went back to the Hallbedroom street, intending
to do some work.
Of course you know that I didn't do it. I lit the gas stove, and sat
down to read Kenko. I wished I were a recluse, living somewhere near a
plum tree and a clear running water, leisurely penning maxims for
posterity. I read about his frugality, his love of the moon and a little
music, his somewhat embittered complaints against the folly of men who
spend their lives in rushing about swamped in petty affairs, and the sad
story of the old priest who was attacked by a goblin-cat when he came
home late at night from a pleasant evening spent in capping verses. I
read with special pleasure his seven Self-Congratulations, in which he
records seven occasions when he felt that he had really done himself
justice. The first of these was when he watched a man riding horseback
in a reckless fashion; he predicted that the man would come a cropper,
and he did so. The next four self-congratulations refer to times when
his knowledge of literary and artistic matters enabled him to place an
unfamiliar quotation or assign a painted tablet to the right artist. One
tells how he was able to find a man in a crowd when everyone else had
failed. And the last and most amusing is an anecdote of a court lady who
tried to inveigle him into a flirtation with her maid by sending the
latter, richly dressed and perfumed, to sit very close to him when he
was at the temple. Kenko congratulates himself on having been adamant.
He was no Pepys.
I thought of trying to set down a similar list of self-congratulations
for myself. Alas, the only two I could think of were having remembered a
telephone number, the memorandum of which I had lost; and having
persuaded a publisher to issue a novel which was a great success. (Not
written by me, let me add.)
I found my friend Kenko a rather disturbing companion. His condemnation
of our busy, racketing life is so damned conclusive! Having recently
added to my family, I was distressed by his section "Against Leaving Any
Descendants." He seems to be devoid of the sentiment of ancestor worship
and sacredness of family continuity which we have been taught to
associate with the Oriental. And yet there is always a current of
suspicion in one's mind that he is not really revealing his inmost
heart. When a bachelor in his late fifties tells us how glad he is never
to have had a son, we begin to taste sour grapes.
I went out about six o'clock, and was thrilled by a shaving of shining
new moon in the cold blue winter sky--"the sky with its terribly cold
clear moon, which none care to watch, is simply heart-breaking," says
Kenko. As I walked up Broadway I turned back for another look at the
moon, and found it hidden by the vast bulk of a hotel. Kenko would have
had some caustic remark for that. I went into the Milwaukee Lunch for
supper. They had just baked some of their delicious fresh bran muffins,
still hot from the oven. I had two of them, sliced and buttered, with a
pot of tea. Kenko lay on the table, and the red-headed philosopher who
runs the lunchroom spotted him. I have always noticed that "plain men"
are vastly curious about books. They seem to suspect that there is some
occult power in them, some mystery that they would like to grasp. My
friend, who has the bearing of a prizefighter, but the heart of an
amiable child, came over and picked up the book. He sat down at the
table with me and looked at it. I was a little doubtful how to explain
matters, for I felt that it was the kind of book he would not be likely
to care for. He began spelling it out loud, rather laboriously--
Section 1. Well! Being born into this world there are, I suppose,
many aims which we may strive to attain.
To my surprise he showed the greatest enthusiasm. So much so that I
ordered another pair of bran muffins, which I did not really want, so
that he might have more time for reading Kenko.
"Who was this fellow?" he asked.
"He was a Jap," I said, "lived a long time ago. He was mighty thick with
the Emperor, and after the Emperor died he went to live by himself in
the country, and became a priest, and wrote down his thoughts."
"I see," said my friend. "Just put down whatever came into his head,
eh?"
"That's it. All his ideas about the queer things a fellow runs into in
life, you know, little bits of philosophy."
I was a little afraid of using that word "philosophy," but I couldn't
think of anything else to say. It struck my friend very pleasantly.
"That's it," he said, "philosophy. Just as you say, now, he went off by
himself and put things down the way they come to him. Philosophy. Sure.
Say, that's a good kind of book. I like that kind of thing. I have a lot
of books at home, you know. I get home about nine o'clock, and I most
always read a bit before I go to bed."
How I yearned to know what books they were, but it seemed rude to
question him.
He dipped into Kenko again, and I wondered whether courtesy demanded
that I should order another pot of tea.
"Say, would you like to do me a favor?"
"Sure thing," I said.
"When you get through with that book, pass it over, will you? That's the
kind of thing I've been wanting. Just some little thoughts, you know,
something short. I've got a lot of books at home."
His big florid face gleamed with friendly earnestness.
"Sure thing," I said. "Just as soon as I've finished it you shall have
it." I wanted to ask whether he would reciprocate by lending me one of
his own books, which would give me some clue to his tastes; but again I
felt obscurely that he would not understand my curiosity.
As I went out he called to me again from where he stood by the shining
coffee boiler. "Don't forget, will you?" he said. "When you're through,
just pass it over."
I promised faithfully, and tomorrow evening I shall take the book in to
him. I honestly hope he'll enjoy it. I walked up the bright wintry
street, and wondered what Kenko would have said to the endless flow of
taxicabs, the elevators and subways, the telephones, and telegraph
offices, the newsstands and especially the plate-glass windows of
florists. He would have had some urbane, cynical and delightfully
disillusioning remarks to offer. And, as Mr. Weaver so shrewdly says,
how he would enjoy "The Way of All Flesh!"
I came back to Hallbedroom street, and set down these few meditations.
There is much more I would like to say, but the partitions in hall
bedrooms are thin, and the lady in the next room thumps on the wall if I
keep the typewriter going after ten o'clock.
TWO DAYS WE CELEBRATE
[Illustration]
If we were asked (we have not been asked) to name a day the world ought
to celebrate and does not, we would name the 16th of May. For on that
day, in the year 1763, James Boswell first met Dr. Samuel Johnson.
This great event, which enriched the world with one of the most vivid
panoramas of human nature known to man, happened in Tom Davies's
bookshop in Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Davies were friends of the
Doctor, who frequently visited their shop. Of them Boswell remarks
quaintly that though they had been on the stage for many years, they
"maintained an uniform decency of character." The shop seems to have
been a charming place: one went there not merely to buy books, but also
to have a cup of tea in the back parlor. It is sad to think that though
we have been hanging round bookshops for a number of years, we have
never yet met a bookseller who invited us into the private office for a
quiet cup. Wait a moment, though, we are forgetting Dr. Rosenbach, the
famous bookseller of Philadelphia. But his collations, held in amazed
memory by many editioneers, rarely descend to anything so humble as tea.
One recalls a confused glamor of ortolans, trussed guinea-hens,
strawberries reclining in a bowl carved out of solid ice, and what used
to be known as vintages. It is a pity that Dr. Johnson died too soon to
take lunch with Dr. Rosenbach.
"At last, on Monday, the 16th of May," says Boswell, "when I was sitting
in Mr. Davies's back parlor, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs.
Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies, having
perceived him through the glass door, announced his awful approach to
me. Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him.
I was much agitated." The volatile Boswell may be forgiven his
agitation. We also would have trembled not a little. Boswell was only
twenty-two, and probably felt that his whole life and career hung upon
the great man's mood. But embarrassment is a comely emotion for a young
man in the face of greatness; and the Doctor was speedily put in a good
humor by an opportunity to utter his favorite pleasantry at the expense
of the Scotch. "I do, indeed, come from Scotland," cried Boswell, after
Davies had let the cat out of the bag; "but I cannot help it." "That,
sir," said Doctor Johnson, "is what a great many of your countrymen
cannot help."
The great book that dated from that meeting in Davies's back parlor has
become one of the most intimately cherished possessions of the race. One
finds its admirers and students scattered over the globe. No man who
loves human nature in all its quirks and pangs, seasoned with bluff
honesty and the genuineness of a cliff or a tree, can afford to step
into a hearse until he has made it his own. And it is a noteworthy
illustration of the biblical saying that whosoever will rule, let him be
a servant. Boswell made himself the servant of Johnson, and became one
of the masters of English literature.
It used to annoy us to hear Karl Rosner referred to as "the Kaiser's
Boswell." For to _boswellize_ (which is a verb that has gone into our
dictionaries) means not merely to transcribe faithfully the acts and
moods and import of a man's life; it implies also that the man so
delineated be a good man and a great. Horace Traubel was perhaps a
Boswell; but Rosner never.
It is pleasant to know that Boswell was not merely a kind of animated
note-book. He was a droll, vain, erring, bibulous, warm-hearted
creature, a good deal of a Pepys, in fact, with all the Pepysian vices
and virtues. Mr. A. Edward Newton's "Amenities of Book Collecting" makes
Boswell very human to us. How jolly it is to learn that Jamie (like many
lesser fry since) wrote press notices about himself. Here is one of his
own blurbs, which we quote from Mr. Newton's book:
Boswell, the author, is a most excellent man: he is of an ancient
family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a
little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future
greatness. His parts are bright, and his education has been good. He
has traveled in post chaises miles without number. He is fond of
seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially
apple pie. He drinks Old Hock. He has a very fine temper. He is
somewhat of a humorist and a little tinctured with pride. He has a
good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has
infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy
cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather
young than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears
spectacles.
This brings the excellent Boswell very close to us indeed: he might
almost be a member of the Authors' League. "Especially apple pie, bless
his heart!"
When we said that Boswell was a kind of Pepys, we fell by chance into a
happy comparison. Not only by his volatile errors was he of the tribe of
Samuel, but in his outstanding character by which he becomes of
importance to posterity--that of one of the great diarists. Now there is
no human failing upon which we look with more affectionate lenience than
that of keeping a diary. All of us, in our pilgrimage through the
difficult thickets of this world, have moods and moments when we have to
fall back on ourselves for the only complete understanding and
absolution we will ever find. In such times, how pleasant it is to
record our emotions and misgivings in the sure and secret pages of some
privy notebook; and how entertaining to read them again in later years!
Dr. Johnson himself advised Bozzy to keep a journal, though he little
suspected to what use it would be put. The cynical will say that he did
so in order that Bozzy would have less time to pester him, but we
believe his advice was sincere. It must have been, for the Doctor kept
one himself, of which more in a moment.
"He recommended to me," Boswell says, "to keep a journal of my life,
full and unreserved. He said it would be a very good exercise and would
yield me great satisfaction when the particulars were faded from my
remembrance. He counselled me to keep it private, and said I might
surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death."
Happily it was not burned. The Great Doctor never seemed so near to me
as the other day when I saw a little notebook, bound in soft brown
leather and interleaved with blotting paper, in which Bozzy's busy pen
had jotted down memoranda of his talks with his friend, while they were
still echoing in his mind. From this notebook (which must have been one
of many) the paragraphs were transferred practically unaltered into the
Life. This superb treasure, now owned by Mr. Adam of Buffalo, almost
makes one hear the Doctor's voice; and one imagines Boswell sitting up
at night with his candle, methodically recording the remarks of the day.
The first entry was dated September 22, 1777, so Bozzy must have carried
it in his pocket when Dr. Johnson and he were visiting Dr. Taylor in
Ashbourne. It was during this junket that Dr. Johnson tried to pole the
large dead cat over Dr. Taylor's dam, an incident that Boswell recorded
as part of his "Flemish picture of my friend." It was then also that
Mrs. Killingley, mistress of Ashbourne's leading inn, The Green Man,
begged Boswell "to name the house to his extensive acquaintance."
Certainly Bozzy's acquaintance was to be far more extensive than good
Mrs. Killingley ever dreamed. It was he who "named the house" to me, and
for this reason The Green Man profited in fourpence worth of cider, 134
years later.
There is another day we have vowed to commemorate, by drinking great
flaggonage of tea, and that is the 18th of September, Dr. Johnson's
birthday. The Great Cham needs no champion; his speech and person have
become part of our common heritage. Yet the extraordinary scenario in
which Boswell filmed him for us has attained that curious estate of
great literature the characteristic of which is that every man imagines
he has read it, though he may never have opened its pages. It is like
the historic landmark of one's home town, which foreigners from overseas
come to study, but which the denizen has hardly entered. It is like
Niagara Falls: we have a very fair mental picture of the spectacle and
little zeal to visit the uproar itself. And so, though we all use
Doctor Johnson's sharply stamped coinages, we generally are too lax
about visiting the mint.
But we will never cease to pray that every honest man should study
Boswell. There are many who have topped the rise of human felicity in
that book: when reading it they feel the tide of intellect brim the mind
with a unique fullness of satisfaction. It is not a mere commentary on
life: it _is_ life--it fills and floods every channel of the brain. It
is a book that men make a hobby of, as golf or billiards. To know it is
a liberal education. I could have understood Germany yearning to invade
England in order to annex Boswell's Johnson. There would have been some
sense in that.
What is the average man's conception of Doctor Johnson? We think of a
huge ungainly creature, slovenly of dress, addicted to tea, the author
of a dictionary and the center of a tavern coterie. We think of him
prefacing bluff and vehement remarks with "Sir," and having a knack for
demolishing opponents in boisterous argument. All of which is passing
true, just as is our picture of the Niagara we have never seen; but how
it misses the inner tenderness and tormented virtue of the man!
So it is refreshing sometimes to turn away from Boswell to those
passages where the good old Doctor has revealed himself with his own
hand. The letter to Chesterfield is too well known for comment. But no
less noble, and not nearly so well known, is the preface to the
Dictionary. How moving it is in its sturdy courage, its strong grasp of
the tools of expression. In every line one feels the weight and push of
a mind that had behind it the full reservoir of language, particularly
the Latin. There is the same sense of urgent pressure that one feels in
watching a strong stream backed up behind a dam:
I look with pleasure on my book, however defective, and deliver it
to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavored well. That
it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a
few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of
such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with
laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt, but useful diligence
will at last prevail, and there never can be wanting some who
distinguish desert; who will consider that no dictionary of a living
tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to
publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a
whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even
a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes
whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not
understand; that a writer will sometimes be tarried by eagerness to
the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task, which
Scaliger compares to the labors of the anvil and the mine; that what
is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the
mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain
trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he
knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his
thoughts to-morrow.
I know no better way of celebrating Doctor Johnson's birthday than by
quoting a few passages from his "Prayers and Meditations," jotted down
during his life in small note-books and given shortly before his death
to a friend. No one understands the dear old doctor unless he remembers
that his spirit was greatly perplexed and harassed by sad and disordered
broodings. The bodily twitchings and odd gestures which attracted so
much attention as he rolled about the streets were symptoms of painful
twitchings and gestures within. A great part of his intense delight in
convivial gatherings, in conversation and the dinner table, was due to
his eagerness to be taken out of himself. One fears that his solitary
hours were very often tragic.
There were certain dates which Doctor Johnson almost always commemorated
in his private notebook--his birthday, the date of his wife's death,
the Easter season and New Year's. In these pathetic little entries one
sees the spirit that was dogmatic and proud among men abasing itself in
humility and pouring out the generous tenderness of an affectionate
nature. In these moments of contrition small peccadilloes took on tragic
importance in his mind. Rising late in the morning and the untidy state
of his papers seemed unforgivable sins. There is hardly any more moving
picture in the history of mankind than that of the rugged old doctor
pouring out his innocent petitions for greater strength in ordering his
life and bewailing his faults of sluggishness, indulgence at table and
disorderly thoughts. Let us begin with his entry on September 18, 1760,
his fifty-second birthday:
RESOLVED, D.j.
To combat notions of obligation.
To apply to study.
To reclaim imaginations.
To consult the resolves on Tetty's [his wife's] coffin.
To rise early.
To study religion.
To go to church.
To drink less strong liquors.
To keep a journal.
To oppose laziness by doing what is to be done to-morrow.
Rise as early as I can.
Send for books for history of war.
Put books in order.
Scheme of life.
The very human feature of these little notes is that the same good
resolutions appear year after year. Thus, four years after the above, we
find him writing:
Sept. 18, 1764.
This is my 56th birthday, the day on which I have concluded 55 years.
I have outlived many friends, I have felt many sorrows. I have made few
improvements. Since my resolution formed last Easter, I have made no
advancement in knowledge or in goodness; nor do I recollect that I have
endeavored it. I am dejected, but not hopeless.
I resolve,
To study the Scriptures; I hope, in the original languages. Six hundred
and forty verses every Sunday will nearly comprise the Scriptures in a
year.
To read good books; to study theology.
To treasure in my mind passages for recollection.
To rise early; not later than six, if I can; I hope sooner, but as soon
as I can.
To keep a journal, both of employment and of expenses. To keep accounts.
To take care of my health by such means as I have designed.
To set down at night some plan for the morrow.
To-morrow I purpose to regulate my room.
* * * * *
At Easter, 1765, he confesses sadly that he often lies abed until two in
the afternoon; which, after all, was not so deplorable, for he usually
went to bed very late. Boswell has spoken of "the unseasonable hour at
which he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose." On
New Year's Day, 1767, he prays: "Enable me, O Lord, to use all
enjoyments with due temperance, preserve me from unseasonable and
immoderate sleep." Two years later than this he writes:
"I am not yet in a state to form many resolutions; I purpose and hope to
rise early in the morning at eight, and by degrees at six; eight being
the latest hour to which bedtime can be properly extended; and six the
earliest that the present system of life requires."
One of the most pathetic of his entries is the following, on September
18, 1768:
"This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy.
On this I purpose to deliberate; I know not whether it may not too much
disturb me."
From time to time there have been stupid or malicious people who have
said that Johnson's marriage with a homely woman twenty years older than
himself was not a love match. For instance, Mr. E.W. Howe, of Atchison,
Kan., in most respects an amiable and well-conducted philosopher,
uttered in _Howe's Monthly_ (May, 1918) the following words, which (I
hope) he will forever regret:
"I have heard that when a young man he (Johnson) married an ugly and
vulgar old woman for her money, and that his taste was so bad that he
worshiped her."
Against this let us set what Johnson wrote in his notebook on March 28,
1770:
This is the day on which, in 1752, I was deprived of poor dear
Tetty. When I recollect the time in which we lived together, my
grief of her departure is not abated; and I have less pleasure in
any good that befalls me, because she does not partake it. On many
occasions, I think what she would have said or done. When I saw the
sea at Brighthelmstone, I wished for her to have seen it with me.
But with respect to her, no rational wish is now left but that we
may meet at last where the mercy of God shall make us happy, and
perhaps make us instrumental to the happiness of each other. It is
now 18 years.
Let us end the memorandum with a less solemn note. On Good Friday, 1779,
he and Boswell went to church together. When they returned the good old
doctor sat down to read the Bible, and he says, "I gave Boswell Les
Pensées de Pascal, that he might not interrupt me." Of this very copy
Boswell says: "I preserve the book with reverence." I wonder who has it
now?
So let us wish Doctor Johnson many happy returns of the day, sure that
as long as paper and ink and eyesight preserve their virtue he will bide
among us, real and living and endlessly loved.
THE URCHIN AT THE ZOO
I don't know just what urchins think about; neither do they, perhaps;
but presumably by the time they're twenty-eight months old they must
have formed some ideas as to what is possible and what isn't. And
therefore it seemed to the Urchin's curators sound and advisable to take
him out to the Zoo one Sunday afternoon just to suggest to his
delightful mind that nothing is impossible in this curious world.
Of course, the amusing feature of such expeditions is that it is always
the adult who is astounded, while the child takes things blandly for
granted. You or I can watch a tiger for hours and not make head or tail
of it--in a spiritual sense, that is--whereas an urchin simply smiles
with rapture, isn't the least amazed, and wants to stroke the "nice
pussy."
It was a soft spring afternoon, the garden was thronged with visitors
and all the indoor animals seemed to be wondering how soon they would be
let out into their open-air inclosures. We filed through the wicket gate
and the Urchin disdained the little green go-carts ranked for hire. He
preferred to navigate the Zoo on his own white-gaitered legs. You might
as well have expected Adam on his first tour of Eden to ride in a
palanquin.
The Urchin entered the Zoo much in the frame of mind that must have been
Adam's on that original tour of inspection. He had been told he was
going to the Zoo, but that meant nothing to him. He saw by the aspect of
his curators that he was to have a good time, and loyally he was
prepared to exult over whatever might come his way. The first thing he
saw was a large boulder--it is set up as a memorial to a former curator
of the garden. "Ah," thought the Urchin, "this is what I have been
brought here to admire." With a shout of glee he ran to it. "See stone,"
he cried. He is an enthusiast concerning stones. He has a small
cardboard box of pebbles, gathered from the walks of a city square,
which is very precious to him. And this magnificent big pebble, he
evidently thought, was the marvelous thing he had come to examine. His
custodians, far more anxious than he to feast their eyes upon lions and
tigers, had hard work to lure him away. He crouched by the boulder,
appraising its hugeness, and left it with the gratified air of one who
has extracted the heart out of a surprising and significant experience.
The next adventure was a robin, hopping on the lawn. Every child is
familiar with robins which play a leading part in so much Mother Goose
mythology, so the Urchin felt himself greeting an old friend. "See Robin
Red-breast!" he exclaimed, and tried to climb the low wire fence that
bordered the path. The robin hopped discreetly underneath a bush,
uncertain of our motives.
Now, as I have no motive but to attempt to record the truth, it is my
duty to set down quite frankly that I believe the Urchin showed more
enthusiasm over the stone and the robin than over any of the amazements
that succeeded them. I suppose the reason for that is plain. These two
objects had some understandable relation with his daily life. His small
mind--we call a child's mind "small" simply by habit; perhaps it is
larger than ours, for it can take in almost anything without
effort--possessed well-known classifications into which the big stone
and the robin fitted comfortably and naturally. But what can a child say
to an ostrich or an elephant? It simply smiles and passes on. Thereby
showing its superiority to some of our most eminent thinkers. They,
confronted by something the like of which they have never seen
before--shall we say a League of Nations or Bolshevism?--burst into
shrill screams of panic abuse and flee the precinct! How much wiser the
level-headed Urchin! Confronting the elephant, certainly an appalling
sight to so small a mortal, he looked at the curator, who was carrying
him on one shoulder, and said with an air of one seeking gently to
reassure himself, "Elphunt won't come after Junior." Which is something
of the mood to which the Senate is moving.
It was delightful to see the Urchin endeavor to bring some sense of
order into this amazing place by his classification of the strange
sights that surrounded him. He would not confess himself staggered by
anything. At his first glimpse of the emu he cried ecstatic, "Look,
there's a--," and paused, not knowing what on earth to call it. Then
rapidly to cover up his ignorance he pointed confidently to a somewhat
similar fowl and said sagely, "And there's another!" The curious
moth-eaten and shabby appearance that captive camels always exhibit was
accurately recorded in his addressing one of them as "poor old horsie."
And after watching the llamas in silence, when he saw them nibble at
some grass he was satisfied. "Moo-cow," he stated positively, and turned
away. The bears did not seem to interest him until he was reminded of
Goldylocks. Then he remembered the pictures of the bears in that story
and began to take stock of them.
The Zoo is a pleasant place to wander on a Sunday afternoon. The willow
trees, down by the brook where the otters were plunging, were a cloud of
delicate green. Shrubs everywhere were bursting into bud. The Tasmanian
devils those odd little swine that look like small pigs in a high fever,
were lying sprawled out, belly to the sun-warmed earth, in the same
whimsical posture that dogs adopt when trying to express how jolly they
feel. The Urchin's curators were at a loss to know what the Tasmanian
devils were and at first were led astray by a sign on a tree in the
devils' inclosure. "Look, they're Norway maples," cried one curator. In
the same way we thought at first that a llama was a Chinese ginkgo.
These errors lead to a decent humility.
There is something about a Zoo that always makes one hungry, so we sat
on a bench in the sun, watched the stately swans ruffling like
square-rigged ships on the sparkling pond, and ate biscuits, while the
Urchin was given a mandate over some very small morsels. He was much
entertained by the monkeys in the open-air cages. In the upper story of
one cage a lady baboon was embracing an urchin of her own, while
underneath her husband was turning over a pile of straw in a persistent
search for small deer. It was a sad day for the monkeys at the Zoo when
the rule was made that no peanuts can be brought into the park. I should
have thought that peanuts were an inalienable right for captive monkeys.
The order posted everywhere that one must not give the animals tobacco
seems almost unnecessary nowadays, with the weed at present prices. The
Urchin was greatly interested in the baboon rummaging in his straw.
"Mokey kicking the grass away," he observed thoughtfully.
Down in the grizzly-bear pit one of the bears squatted himself in the
pool and sat there, grinning complacently at the crowd. We explained
that the bear was taking a bath. This presented a familiar train of
thought to the Urchin and he watched the grizzly climb out of his tank
and scatter the water over the stone floor. As we walked away the Urchin
observed thoughtfully, "He's dying." This somewhat shocked the curators,
who did not know that their offspring had even heard of death. "What
does he mean?" we asked ourselves. "He's dying," repeated the Urchin in
a tone of happy conviction. Then the explanation struck us. "He's
drying!" "Quite right," we said. "After his bath he has to dry himself."
We went home on a crowded Girard Avenue car, thinking impatiently that
it will be some time before we can read "The Jungle Book" to the Urchin.
In the summer, when the elephants take their bath outdoors, we'll go
again. And the last thing the Urchin said that night as he fell asleep
was, "Mokey kicking the grass away."
FELLOW CRAFTSMEN
Robert Urwick, the author, was not yet so calloused by success that he
was immune from flattery. And so when he received the following letter
he was rather pleased:
Mr. Robt. Urwick, dear sir I seen your story in this weeks Saturday Evn
Cudgel, not that I can afford to buy journals of that stamp but I pick
up the copy on a bench in the park. Now Mr. Urwick I am a poor man but I
was brought up a patron of the arts and I am bound to say that story of
yours called Brass Nuckles was a fine story and I am proud to compliment
you upon it. Mr. Urwick that brings me to another matter upon which I
have been intending to write you upon for a long time but did not like
to risk an intrusion. I used to dable in literature to some little
extent myself if that will lend a fellow feeling for a craftsman in
distress. I am a poor man, out of work through no fault of mine but on
account of the illness of my wife and my sitting up with her at nights
for weeks and weeks I could not hold my job whch required mentle
concentration of a vigorous sort. Now Mr. Urwick I have a sick wife and
seven children to support, and the rent shortly due and the landlord
threatens to eject us if I don't pay what I owe. As it happens my wife
and I are hoping to be blessed again soon, with our eighth. Owing to my
love and devotion for the fine arts we have named all the earlier
children for noted authors or writers Rudyard Kipling, W.J. Bryan, Mark
Twain, Debs, Irvin Cobb, Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Now Mr.
Urwick I thought that I would name the next one after you, seeing you
have done so much for literature Robert if a boy or Roberta if a girl
with Urwick for a middle name thus making you a godfather in a manner of
speaking. I was wondering whether you would not feel like making a
little godfathers gift for this innocent babe now about to come into the
world and to bare your name. Say twenty dollars, but not a check if it
can be avoided as owing to tempry ambarrassment I am not holding any
bank account, and currency would be easier for me to convert into the
necesity of life.
I wrote this letter once before but tore it up fearing to intrude, but
now my need compels me to be frank. I hope you will adorn our
literature with many more beautiful compositions similiar to Brass
Nuckles.
Yours truly
Mr Henry Phillips 454 East 34 St.
Mr. Urwick, after reading this remarkable tribute twice, laughed
heartily and looked in his bill-folder. Finding there a crisp ten-dollar
note, he folded it into an envelope and mailed it to his admirer,
inclosing with it a friendly letter wishing success to the coming infant
who was to carry his name.
A fortnight later he found on his breakfast table a very soiled postal
card with this message:
Dear and kind friend, the babe arrived and to the joy of all is a boy
and has been cristened Robert Urwick Phillips. Unfortunately he is a
sicly infant and the doctor says he must have port wine at once or he
may not survive. His mother and I were overjoyed at your munificant gift
and hope some day to tell the boy of his beanefactor, Mr. Kipling only
sent five spot to his namesake. Do you think you could spare five
dollars to help pay for port wine Yours gratefully
Henry Phillips?
Mr. Urwick was a little surprised at the thought of port wine for one so
young, but happening to be bound down town that morning he thought it
might be interesting to look in at Mr. Phillips' residence and find out
how his godchild was faring. If the child were really in distress he
might perhaps contribute a small sum to insure proper medical care.
The address proved to be a shabby tenement house hedged by saloons. A
ragged little girl (he wondered whether she were Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Phillips) pointed him to Mr. Phillips's door. Meeting no answer, he
entered.
The room was empty--a single room, with a cot bed, an oil stove and a
table littered with stationery and stamps. Of Mrs. Phillips, his
namesake or the other seven he saw no signs. He advanced to the table.
Evidently Mr. Phillips was not a ready writer and his letters cost him
some pains. Several lay open on the table in different stages of
composition. They were all exactly the same in wording as the first one
Urwick had received. They were addressed to Booth Tarkington, Don
Marquis, Ellen Glasgow, Edna Ferber, Agnes Repplier, Holworthy Hall and
Fannie Hurst. Each letter offered to name some coming child after these
Parnassians. Near by lay a pile of old magazines from which the
industrious Mr. Phillips evidently culled the names of his literary
favorites.
Urwick smiled grimly and tiptoed from the room. On the stairs he met a
fat charwoman. He asked her if Mr. Phillips were married. "Whisky is his
wife and child," she replied.
A month later Urwick put Phillips into a story which he sold to the
_Saturday Evening Cudgel_ for $500. When it was published he sent a
marked copy of the magazine to the father of Robert Urwick Phillips with
the following note:
"Dear Mr. Phillips--I owe you about $490. Come around some day and I'll
blow you to lunch."
THE KEY RING
[Illustration]
I know a man who carries in his left-leg trouser pocket a large heavy
key ring, on which there are a dozen or more keys of all shapes and
sizes. There is a latchkey, and the key of his private office, and the
key of his roll-top desk, and the key of his safe deposit box, and a key
to the little mail box at the front door of his flat (he lives in what
is known as a pushbutton apartment house), and a key that does something
to his motor car (not being an automobilist, I don't know just what),
and a key to his locker at the golf club, and keys of various traveling
bags and trunks and filing cases, and all the other keys with which a
busy man burdens himself. They make a noble clanking against his thigh
when he walks (he is usually in a hurry), and he draws them out of his
pocket with something of an imposing gesture when he approaches the
ground glass door of his office at ten past nine every morning. Yet
sometimes he takes them out and looks at them sadly. They are a mark and
symbol of servitude, just as surely as if they had been heated red-hot
and branded on his skin.
Not necessarily an unhappy servitude, I hasten to remark, for servitude
is not always an unhappy condition. It may be the happiest of
conditions, and each of those little metal strips may be regarded as a
medal of honor. In fact, my friend does so regard them. He does not
think of the key of his roll-top desk as a reminder of hateful tasks
that must be done willy-nilly, but rather as an emblem of hard work that
he enjoys and that is worth doing. He does not think of the latchkey as
a mandate that he must be home by seven o'clock, rain or shine; nor does
he think of it as a souvenir of the landlord who must be infallibly paid
on the first of the month next ensuing. No, he thinks of the latchkey as
a magic wand that admits him to a realm of kindness "whose service is
perfect freedom," as say the fine old words in the prayer book. And he
does not think of his safe deposit box as a hateful little casket of
leases and life insurance policies and contracts and wills, but rather
as the place where he has put some of his own past life into voluntary
bondage--into Liberty Bondage--at four and a quarter per cent. Yet,
however blithely he may psychologize these matters, he is wise enough to
know that he is not a free man. However content in servitude, he does
not blink the fact that it is servitude.
"Upon his will he binds a radiant chain," said Joyce Kilmer in a fine
sonnet. However radiant, it is still a chain.
So it is that sometimes, in the lulls of telephoning and signing
contracts and talking to salesmen and preparing estimates and dictating
letters "that must get off to-night" and trying to wriggle out of
serving on the golf club's house committee, my friend flings away his
cigar, gets a corncob pipe out of his desk drawer, and contemplates his
key ring a trifle wistfully. This nubby little tyrant that he carries
about with him always makes him think of a river in the far Canadian
north, a river that he visited once, long ago, before he had built up
all the barbed wire of life about his spirit. It was a green lucid river
that ran in a purposeful way between long fringes of pine trees. There
were sandy shelves where he and a fellow canoeist with the good gift of
silence built campfires and fried bacon, or fish of their own wooing.
The name of that little river (his voice is grave as he recalls it), was
the Peace; and it was not necessary to paddle if you didn't feel like
it. "The current ran" (it is pathetic to hear him say it) "from four to
seven miles an hour."
The tobacco smoke sifts and eddies into the carefully labeled
pigeonholes of his desk, and his stenographer wonders whether she dare
interrupt him to ask whether that word was "priority" or "minority" in
the second paragraph of the memo to Mr. Ebbsmith. He smells that bacon
again; he remembers stretching out on the cool sand to watch the dusk
seep up from the valley and flood the great clear arch of green-blue
sky. He remembers that there were no key rings in his pocket then, no
papers, no letters, no engagements to meet Mr. Fonseca at a luncheon of
the Rotary Club to discuss demurrage. He remembers the clear sparkle of
the Peace water in the sunshine, its downward swell and slant over many
a boulder, its milky vexation where it slid among stones. He remembers
what he had said to himself then, but had since forgotten, that no
matter what wounds and perplexities the world offers, it also offers a
cure for each one if we know where to seek it. Suddenly he gets a vision
of the whole race of men, campers out on a swinging ball, brothers in
the common motherhood of earth. Born out of the same inexplicable soil
bred to the same problems of star and wind and sun, what absurdity of
civilization is it that has robbed men of this sense of kinship? Why he
himself, he feels, could enter a Bedouin tent or an Eskimo snow-hut and
find some bond of union with the inmates. The other night, he reflects,
he saw moving pictures of some Fiji natives, and could read in their
genial grinning faces the same human impulses he knew in himself. What
have men done to cheat themselves of the enjoyment of this amazing
world? "We've been cheated!" he cries, to the stenographer's horror.
He thinks of his friends, his partners, his employees, of conductors on
trains and waiters in lunchrooms and drivers of taxicabs. He thinks, in
one amazing flash of realization, of all the men and women he has ever
seen or heard of--how each one nourishes secretly some little rebellion,
some dream of a wider, freer life, a life less hampered, less mean, less
material. He thinks how all men yearn to cross salt water, to scale
peaks, to tramp until weary under a hot sun. He hears the Peace, in its
far northern valley, brawling among stones, and his heart is very low.
"Mr. Edwards to see you," says the stenographer.
"I'm sorry, sir," says Edwards, "but I've had the offer of another job
and I think I shall accept it. It's a good thing for a chap to get a
chance----"
My friend slips the key ring back in his pocket.
"What's this?" he says. "Nonsense! When you've got a good job, the thing
to do is to keep it. Stick to it, my boy. There's a great future for you
here. Don't get any of those fool ideas about changing around from one
thing to another."
"OWD BOB"
CHAPTER I
(INTRODUCES OUR HERO)
Loitering perchance on the western pavement of Madison avenue, between
the streets numbered 38 and 39, and gazing with an observant eye upon
the pedestrians passing southward, you would be likely to see, about
8:40 o'clock of the morning, a gentleman of remarkable presence
approaching with no bird-like tread. This creature, clad in a suit of
subfuse respectable weave, bearing in his hand a cane of stout timber
with a right-angled hornblende grip, and upon his head a hat of rich
texture, would probably also carry in one hand (the left) a leather case
filled with valuable papers, and in the other hand (the right, which
also held the cane) a cigarette, lit upon leaving the Grand Central
subway station. This cigarette the person of our tale would
frequentatively apply to his lips, and then withdraw with a quick,
swooping motion. With a rapid, somewhat sidelong gait (at first somehow
clumsy, yet upon closer observation a mode of motion seen to embrace
certain elements of harmony) this gentleman would converge upon the
southwest corner of Madison avenue and 38th street; and the intent
observer, noting the menacing contours of the face, would conclude that
he was going to work.
[Illustration]
This gentleman, beneath his sober but excellently haberdashered surtout,
was plainly a man of large frame, of a Sam Johnsonian mould, but, to the
surprise of the calculating observer, it would be noted that his volume
(or mass) was not what his bony structure implied. Spiritually, in deed,
this interesting individual conveyed to the world a sensation of
stoutness, of bulk and solidity, which (upon scrutiny) was not (or would
not be) verified by measurement. Evidently, you will conclude, a stout
man grown thin; or, at any rate, grown less stout. His molded depth,
one might assess at 20 inches between the eaves; his longitude, say,
five feet eleven; his registered tonnage, 170; his cargo, literary; and
his destination, the editorial sancta of a well-known publishing house.
This gentleman, in brief, is Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday (but not the
"stout Cortes" of the poet), the editor of _The Bookman_.