With Pictures by
Florence Minard
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN:
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON:HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXI
Copyright, 1921, by
Yale University Press.
Publisher's Note:
The Yale University Press makes grateful
acknowledgment to the Editors of _The
Century Magazine_, _The Yale Review_, _The
Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Literary Review_
for permission to include in the present
volume essays of which they were the
original publishers.
To Edward B. Greene,
as witness of our long friendship and my high regard.
Contents.
I. Hints to Pilgrims 11
II. I Plan a Vacation 27
III. At a Toy-Shop Window 42
IV. Sic Transit-- 55
V. The Posture of Authors 59
VI. After-Dinner Pleasantries 77
VII. Little Candles 86
VIII. A Visit to a Poet 92
IX. Autumn Days 103
X. On Finding a Plot 107
XI. Circus Days 122
XII. In Praise of a Lawn-Mower 133
XIII. On Dropping Off to Sleep 138
XIV. Who Was Jeremy? 147
XV. A Chapter for Children 153
XVI. The Crowded Curb 171
XVII. A Corner for Echoes 178
Hints to Pilgrims.
When a man's thoughts in older time were set on pilgrimage, his
neighbors came forward with suggestions. One of them saw that his boots
were freshly tapped. Another was careful that his hose were darned with
honest wool--an oldish aunt, no doubt, with beeswax and thimble and
glasses forward on her nose. A third sly creature fetched in an
embroidered wallet to hold an extra shift, and hinted in return for a
true nail from the holy cross. If he were a bachelor, a tender garter
was offered him by a lonely maiden of the village, and was acknowledged
beneath the moon. But the older folk who had made the pilgrimage took
the settle and fell to argument on the merit of the inns. They scrawled
maps for his guidance on the hearth, and told him the sights that must
not be missed. Here he must veer off for a holy well. Here he must
beware a treacherous bog. Here he must ascend a steeple for the view.
They cautioned him to keep upon the highway. Was it not Christian, they
urged, who was lost in By-path Meadow? Again they talked of thieves and
warned him to lay a chair against the door. Then a honey syllabub was
drunk in clinking cups, and they made a night of it.
Or perhaps our pilgrim belonged to a guild which--by an agreeable
precedent--voted that its members walk with him to the city's gate and
present from each a half-penny to support him on the journey. The greasy
pockets yield their treasure. He rattles on both sides with generous
copper. Here, also, is a salve for man and beast--a receipt for a
fever-draught. We may fancy now the pilgrim's mule plowing up the lazy
dust at the turn of the road as he waves his last farewell. His thoughts
already have leaped the valley to the misty country beyond the hills.
And now above his dusty road the sun climbs the exultant noon. It whips
its flaming chariot to the west. On the rim of twilight, like a traveler
who departs, it throws a golden offering to the world.
But there are pilgrims in these later days, also,--strangers to our own
fair city, script in wallet and staff in hand,--who come to place their
heavy tribute on our shrine. And to them I offer these few suggestions.
The double stars of importance--as in Baedeker--mark our restaurants and
theatres. Dear pilgrim, put money in thy purse! Persuade your guild to
advance you to a penny! They mark the bridges, the shipping, the sharp
canyons of the lower city, the parks--limousines where silk and lace
play nurse to lap dogs--Bufo on an airing, the precious spitz upon a
scarlet cushion. They mark the parade of wealth, the shops and glitter
of Fifth Avenue on a winter afternoon. "If this is Fifth Avenue,"--as I
heard a dazzled stranger comment lately on a bus-top,--"my God! what
must First Avenue be like!"
And then there are the electric signs--the mammoth kitten rolling its
ball of silk, ginger-ale that forever issues from a bottle, a fiery
motor with a flame of dust, the Wrigley triplets correcting their
sluggish livers by exercise alongside the Astor roof. Surely letters
despatched home to Kalamazoo deal excitedly with these flashing
portents. And of the railroad stations and the Woolworth Tower with its
gothic pinnacles questing into heaven, what pilgrim words are adequate!
Here, certainly, Kalamazoo is baffled and must halt and bite its pen.
Nor can the hotels be described--toppling structures that run up to
thirty stories--at night a clatter in the basement and a clatter on the
roof--sons of Belial and rich folk from Akron who are spending the
profit on a few thousand hot-water bottles and inner tubes--what mad
pursuit! what pipes and timbrels! what wild ecstasy! Do we set a noisy
bard upon our towers in the hope that our merriment will sound to Mars?
Do we persuade them that jazz is the music of the spheres? But at
morning in these hotels are thirty stories of snoring bipeds--exhausted
trousers across the bed-post, frocks that have been rumpled in the
hubbub--tier on tier of bipeds, with sleepy curtains drawn against the
light. Boniface, in the olden time, sunning himself beneath his bush and
swinging dragon, watching the dust for travelers, how would he be amazed
at the advancement of the inn! Dear pilgrim, you must sag and clink for
entrance to the temples of our joyous gods. Put money in thy purse and
wire ahead!
On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Babylon never heard.
Nineveh in its golden age could have packed itself with all its splendid
luggage in a single building. Athens could have mustered in a street.
Our block-parties that are now the fashion--neighborhood affairs in
fancy costumes, with a hot trombone, and banners stretched from house to
house--produce as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. And
lately, when our troops returned from overseas and marched beneath our
plaster arches, Rome itself could not have matched the largeness of our
triumph. Here, also, men have climbed up to walls and battlements--but
to what far dizzier heights!--to towers and windows, and to
chimney-tops, to see great Pompey pass the streets.
And by what contrast shall we measure our tall buildings? Otus and
Ephialtes, who contracted once to pile Pelion on top of Ossa, were
evidently builders who touched only the larger jobs. They did not stoop
to a cottage or a bungalow, but figured entirely on such things as arks
and the towers of Jericho. When old Cheops sickened, it is said, and
thought of death, they offered a bid upon his pyramid. Noah, if he was
indeed their customer, as seems likely, must have fretted them as their
work went forward. Whenever a cloud appeared in the rainy east he nagged
them for better speed. He prowled around on Sunday mornings with his
cubit measure to detect any shortness in the beam. Or he looked for
knot-holes in the gopher wood. But Otus and Ephialtes could not, with
all their sweating workmen, have fetched enough stones for even the
foundations of one of our loftier structures.
The Tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, would squat as low as
Trinity: for its top, when confusion broke off the work, had advanced
scarcely more than seven stories from the pavement. My own windows,
dwarfed by my surroundings, look down from as great a height. Indeed, I
fancy that if the famous tower were my neighbor to the rear--on Ninth
Street, just off the L--its whiskered masons on the upmost platform
could have scraped acquaintance with our cook. They could have gossiped
at the noon hour from gutter to sink, and eaten the crullers that the
kind creature tossed across. Our whistling grocery-man would have found
a rival. And yet the good folk of the older Testament, ignorant of our
accomplishment to come, were in amazement at the tower, and strangers
came in from Gilead and Beersheba. Trippers, as it were, upon a
holiday--staff in hand and pomegranates in a papyrus bag--locusts and
wild honey, or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on their
return--trippers, I repeat, cocked back their heads, and they counted
the rows of windows to the top and went off to their far land marveling.
The Bankers Trust Building culminates in a pyramid. Where this narrows
to a point there issues a streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this
pyramid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a storage room
for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that inside, upon this unsunned
heap of metal, there is concealed an altar of Mammon with priests to
feed the fire, and that this smoke, rising in the lazy air, is sweet in
the nostrils of the greedy god?
There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of the Bush Terminal.
Gothic decoration marks our buildings--the pointed arch, mullions and
gargoyles. There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of the
church, but its symbol is at least a pretty ornament on our commercial
towers.
Nor in the general muster of our sights must I forget the magic view
from across the river, in the end of a winter afternoon, when the lower
city is still lighted. The clustered windows shine as if a larger
constellation of stars had met in thick convention. But it is to the eye
of one who travels in the evening mist from Staten Island that towers of
finest gossamer arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. The
architect of the summer clouds has tried here his finer hand.
It was only lately when our ferry-boat came around the point of
Governor's Island, that I noticed how sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts
the city. It was the twilight of a winter's day. A rack of sullen clouds
lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the water was black
with wind. In the threatening obscurity the whole island seemed a
mightier House of Usher, intricate of many buildings, cleft by Broadway
in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark waters of the
tarn. But until the gathering tempest rises and an evil moon peers
through the crevice, as in the story, we must judge the city to be safe.
Northward are nests of streets, thick with children. One might think
that the old woman who lived in a shoe dwelt hard by, with all of her
married sisters roundabout. Children scurry under foot, oblivious of
contact. They shoot their marbles between our feet, and we are the
moving hazard of their score. They chalk their games upon the pavement.
Baseball is played, long and thin, between the gutters. Peddlers' carts
line the curb--carrots, shoes and small hardware--and there is shrill
chaffering all the day. Here are dim restaurants, with truant smells for
their advertisement. In one of these I was served unleavened bread. Folk
from Damascus would have felt at home, and yet the shadow of the
Woolworth Tower was across the roof. The loaf was rolled thin, like a
chair-pad that a monstrous fat man habitually sits upon. Indeed, I
looked sharply at my ample waiter on the chance that it was he who had
taken his ease upon my bread. If Kalamazoo would tire for a night of the
Beauty Chorus and the Wrigley triplets, and would walk these streets of
foreign population, how amazing would be its letters home!
Our Greenwich Village, also, has its sights. Time was when we were
really a village beyond the city. Even more remotely there were farms
upon us and comfortable burghers jogged up from town to find the peace
of country. There was once a swamp where Washington Square now is, and,
quite lately, masons in demolishing a foundation struck into a conduit
of running water that still drains our pleasant park. When Broadway was
a muddy post-road, stretching for a weary week to Albany, ducks quacked
about us and were shot with blunderbuss. Yes, and they were doubtless
roasted, with apple-sauce upon the side. And then a hundred years went
by, and the breathless city jumped to the north and left us a village in
its midst.
It really is a village. The grocer gives you credit without question.
Further north, where fashion shops, he would inspect you up and down
with a cruel eye and ask a reference. He would linger on any patch or
shiny spot to trip your credit. But here he wets his pencil and writes
down the order without question. His friendly cat rubs against your
bundles on the counter. The shoemaker inquires how your tapped soles are
wearing. The bootblack, without lifting his eyes, knows you by the knots
in your shoe-strings. I fear he beats his wife, for he has a great red
nose which even prohibition has failed to cool. The little woman at the
corner offers you the _Times_ before you speak. The cigar man tosses you
a package of Camels as you enter. Even the four-corners beyond
Berea--unknown, remote, quite off the general travel--could hardly be
more familiar with the preference of its oldest citizen. We need only a
pump, and a pig and chickens in the street.
Our gossip is smaller than is found in cities. If we had yards and
gardens we would talk across the fence on Monday like any village, with
clothes-pins in our mouths, and pass our ailments down the street.
But we are crowded close, wall to wall. I see my neighbor cooking across
the street. Each morning she jolts her dust-mop out of the window. I see
shadows on a curtain as a family sits before the fire. A novelist is
down below. By the frenzy of his fingers on the typewriter it must be a
tale of great excitement. He never pauses or looks at the ceiling for a
plot. At night he reads his pages to his patient wife, when they
together have cleared away the dishes. In another window a girl lies
abed each morning. Exactly at 7.45, after a few minutes of sleepy
stretching, I see her slim legs come from the coverlet. Once she caught
my eye. She stuck out her tongue. Your stockings, my dear, hang across
the radiator.
We have odd characters, too, known to everybody, just as small towns
have, who, in country circumstance, would whittle on the bench outside
the village store. The father of a famous poet, but himself unknown
except hereabouts, has his chair in the corner of a certain restaurant,
and he offers wisdom and reminiscence to a coterie. He is our Johnson at
the Mitre. Old M----, who lives in the Alley in what was once a
hayloft--now a studio,--is known from Fourth to Twelfth Street for his
Indian curry and his knowledge of the older poets. It is his pleasant
custom to drop in on his friends from time to time and cook their
dinner. He tosses you an ancient sonnet as he stirs the pot, or he beats
time with his iron spoon to a melody of the Pathetique. He knows
Shakespeare to a comma, and discourses so agreeably that the Madison
Square clock fairly races up to midnight. Every morning, it is said--but
I doubt the truth of this, for a gossiping lady told me--every morning
until the general drouth set in, he issued from the Alley for a toddy to
sustain his seventy years. Sometimes, she says, old M---- went without
tie or collar on these quick excursions, yet with the manners of the
Empire and a sweeping bow, if he met any lady of his acquaintance.
A famous lecturer in a fur collar sweeps by me often, with his eyes on
the poetic stars. As he takes the air this sunny morning he thinks of
new paradoxes to startle the ladies at his matinee. How they love to be
shocked by his wicked speech! He is such a daring, handsome fellow--so
like a god of ancient Greece! And of course most of us know T----, who
gives a yearly dinner at an Assyrian restaurant--sixty cents a plate,
with a near-beer extra from a saloon across the way. Any guest may bring
a friend, but he must give ample warning in order that the table may be
stretched.
The chief poet of our village wears a corduroy suit and goes without his
hat, even in winter. If a comedy of his happens to be playing at a
little theatre, he himself rings a bell in his favorite restaurant and
makes the announcement in true Elizabethan fashion. "Know ye, one and
all, there is a conceited comedy this night--" His hair is always
tousled. But, as its confusion continues from March into the quieter
months, the disarrangement springs not so much from the outer tempest as
from the poetic storms inside.
Then we have a kind of Peter Pan grown to shiny middle life, who makes
ukuleles for a living. On any night of special celebration he is
prevailed upon to mount a table and sing one of his own songs to this
accompaniment. These songs tell what a merry, wicked crew we are. He
sings of the artists' balls that ape the Bohemia of Paris, of our
genius, our unrestraint, our scorn of all convention. What is morality
but a suit to be discarded when it is old? What is life, he sings, but a
mad jester with tinkling bells? Youth is brief, and when dead we're
buried deep. So let's romp and drink and kiss. It is a pagan song that
has lasted through the centuries. If it happens that any folk are down
from the uptown hotels, Peter Pan consents to sell a ukulele between his
encores. Here, my dear pilgrims, is an entertainment to be squeezed
between Ziegfeld's and the Winter Garden.
You are welcome at all of our restaurants--our Samovars, the Pig and
Whistle, the Three Steps Down (a crowded room, where you spill your soup
as you carry it to a table, but a cheap, honest place in which to eat),
the Green Witch, the Simple Simon. The food is good at all of these
places. Grope your way into a basement--wherever one of our fantastic
signs hangs out--or climb broken stairs into a dusty garret--over a
contractor's storage of old lumber and bath-tubs--over the litter of the
roofs--and you will find artistic folk with flowing ties, spreading
their elbows at bare tables with unkept, dripping candles.
Here is youth that is blown hither from distant villages--youth that was
misunderstood at home--youth that looks from its poor valley to the
heights and follows a flame across the darkness--youth whose eyes are a
window on the stars. Here also, alas, are slim white moths about a
candle. And here wrinkled children play at life and art.
Here are radicals who plot the reformation of the world. They hope it
may come by peaceful means, but if necessary will welcome revolution and
machine-guns. They demand free speech, but put to silence any utterance
less red than their own.
Here are seething sonneteers, playwrights bulging with rejected
manuscript, young women with bobbed hair and with cigarettes lolling
limply at their mouths. For a cigarette, I have observed, that hangs
loosely from the teeth shows an artistic temperament, just as in
business circles a cigar that is tilted up until it warms the nose marks
a sharp commercial nature.
But business counts for little with us. Recently, to make a purchase, I
ventured of an evening into one of our many small shops of fancy wares.
Judge my embarrassment to see that the salesman was entertaining a young
lady on his knee. I was too far inside to retreat. Presently the
salesman shifted the lady to his other knee and, brushing a lock of her
hair off his nose, asked me what I wanted. But I was unwilling to
disturb his hospitality. I begged him not to lay down his pleasant
burden, but rather to neglect my presence. He thanked me for my
courtesy, and made his guest comfortable once more while I fumbled along
the shelves. By good luck the price was marked upon my purchase. I laid
down the exact change and tip-toed out.
The peddlers of our village, our street musicians, our apple men, belong
to us. They may wander now and then to the outside world for a silver
tribute, yet they smile at us on their return as at their truest
friends. Ice creaks up the street in a little cart and trickles at the
cracks. Rags and bottles go by with a familiar, jangling bell. Scissors
grinders have a bell, also, with a flat, tinny sound, like a cow that
forever jerks its head with flies. But it was only the other day that
two fellows went by selling brooms. These were interlopers from a
noisier district, and they raised up such a clamor that one would have
thought that the Armistice had been signed again. The clatter was so
unusual--our own merchants are of quieter voice--that a dozen of us
thrust our heads from our windows. Perhaps another German government had
fallen. The novelist below me put out his shaggy beard. The girl with
the slim legs was craned out of the sill with excitement. My pretty
neighbor below, who is immaculate when I meet her on the stairs, was in
her mob-cap.
My dear pilgrim from the West, with your ample house and woodshed, your
yard with its croquet set and hammock between the wash-poles, you have
no notion how we are crowded on the island. Laundry tubs are concealed
beneath kitchen tables. Boxes for clothes and linen are ambushed under
our beds. Any burglar hiding there would have to snuggle among the moth
balls. Sitting-room tables are swept of books for dinner. Bookcases are
desks. Desks are beds. Beds are couches. Couches are--bless you! all the
furniture is at masquerade. Kitchen chairs turn upside down and become
step-ladders. If anything does not serve at least two uses it is a
slacker. Beds tumble out of closets. Fire escapes are nurseries. A patch
of roof is a pleasant garden. A bathroom becomes a kitchen, with a lid
upon the tub for groceries, and the milk cooling below with the cold
faucet drawn.
A room's use changes with the clock. That girl who lives opposite, when
she is dressed in the morning, puts a Bagdad stripe across her couch.
She punches a row of colored pillows against the wall. Her bedroom is
now ready for callers. It was only the other day that I read of a new
invention by which a single room becomes four rooms simply by pressing a
button. This is the manner of the magic. In a corner, let us say, of a
rectangular room there is set into the floor a turntable ten feet
across. On this are built four compartments, shaped like pieces of pie.
In one of these is placed a bath-tub and stand, in another a folding-bed
and wardrobe, in a third is a kitchen range and cupboard, and in the
fourth a bookcase and piano. Must I explain the mystery? On rising you
fold away your bed and spin the circle for your tub. And then in turn
your stove appears. At last, when you have whirled your dishes to
retirement, the piano comes in sight. It is as easy as spinning the
caster for the oil and vinegar. A whirling Susan on the supper table is
not more nimble. With this device it is estimated that the population of
our snug island can be quadruplicated, and that landlords can double
their rents with untroubled conscience. Or, by swinging a fifth piece of
pie out of the window, a sleeping-porch could be added. When the morning
alarm goes off you have only to spin the disk and dress in comfort
beside the radiator. Or you could--but possibilities are countless.
Tom Paine died on Grove Street. O. Henry lived on Irving Place and ate
at Allaire's on Third Avenue. The Aquarium was once a fort on an island
in the river. Later Lafayette was welcomed there. And Jenny Lind sang
there. John Masefield swept out a saloon, it's said, on Sixth Avenue
near the Jefferson Market, and, for all I know, his very broom may be
still standing behind the door. The Bowery was once a post-road up
toward Boston. In the stream that flowed down Maiden Lane, Dutch girls
did the family washing. In William Street, not long ago, they were
tearing down the house in which Alexander Hamilton lived. These are
facts at random.
But Captain Kidd lived at 119 Pearl Street. Dear me, I had thought that
he was a creature of a nursery book--one of the pirates whom Sinbad
fought. And here on Pearl Street, in our own city, he was arrested and
taken to hang in chains in London. A restaurant now stands at 119. A
bucket of oyster shells is at the door, and, inside, a clatter of hungry
spoons.
But the crowd thickens on these narrow streets. Work is done for the day
and tired folk hurry home. Crowds flow into the subway entrances. The
streets are flushed, as it were, with people, and the flood drains to
the rushing sewers. Now the lights go out one by one. The great
buildings, that glistened but a moment since at every window, are now
dark cliffs above us in the wintry mist.
It is time, dear pilgrim, to seek your hotel or favorite cabaret.
The Wrigley triplets once more correct by exercise their sluggish
livers. The kitten rolls its ball of fiery silk. Times Square flashes
with entertainment. It stretches its glittering web across the night.
Dear pilgrim, a last important word! Put money in thy purse!