will be out to dry. Observe her gaunt replica, _cap-a-pie_, as immodest as
an advertisement! In her proper person she is prodigal if she unmask her
beauty to the moon. And in company with this, is the woolen semblance of
her plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for sportive tricks: But look
upon them when the music starts! Hand in hand upon the line, as is proper
for married folk, heel and toe together, one, two, and a one, two, three.
It is the hurdy-gurdy that calls to life such revelry. The polka has come
to its own again.
Yet despite this evidence that the hurdy-gurdy sets the world to
dancing--like the fiddle in the Turkish tale where even the headsman
forgot his business--despite such evidence there are persons who affect to
despise its melody. These claim such perceptivity of the outer ear and
such fineness of the channels that the tune is but a clack when it gets
inside. God pity such! I'll not write a word of them.
A spring day is at its best about noon. I thrust this in the teeth of
those who prefer the dawn or the coming on of night. At noon there are
more yellow wheels upon the street. The hammering on sheds is at its
loudest as the time for lunch comes near. More grocers' carts are rattling
on their business. There is a better chance that a load of green
wheelbarrows may go by, or a wagon of red rhubarb. Then, too, the air is
so warm that even decrepitude fumbles on the porch and down the steps,
with a cane to poke the weeds.
If you have luck, you may see a "cullud pusson" pushing a whitewash cart
with altruistic intent toward all dusky surfaces except his own. Or maybe
he has nice appreciation of what color contrasts he himself presents when
the work is midway. If he wear the faded memory of a silk hat, it's the
better picture.
But also the schools are out and the joy of life is hissing up a hundred
gullets. Baseball has now a fierceness it lacks at the end of day. There
is wild demand that "Shorty, soak 'er home!" "Butter-fingers!" is a harder
insult. And meanwhile a pop-corn wagon will be whistling a blithe if
monotonous tune in trial if there be pennies in the crowd. Or a waffle may
be purchased if you be a Croesus, ladled exclusively for you and dropped
on the gridiron with a splutter. It is a sweet reward after you have
knocked a three-bagger and stolen home, and is worth a search in all your
eleven pockets for any last penny that may be skulking in the fuzz.
Or perhaps there is such wealth upon your person that there is still a
restless jingle. In such case you will cross the street to a shop that
ministers to the wants of youth. In the window is displayed a box of
marbles--glassies, commonies, and a larger browny adapted to the purpose
of "pugging," by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to
the impact of your thumb. Then there are baseballs of graded excellence
and seduction. And tops. Time is needed for the choosing of a top. First
you stand tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your trial
selection. Pay no attention to the color, for that's the way a girl
chooses! Black is good, without womanish taint. Then you wiggle the peg
for its tightness and demand whether it be screwed in like an honest top.
And finally, before putting your money down, you will squint upon its
roundness. Then slam the door and yell your presence to the street!
Or do you come on softer errand? In the rear of the shop is a parlor with
a base-burner and virtuous mottoes on the walls--a cosy room with vases.
And here it is they serve cream-puffs.... For safe transfer you balance
the puff in your fingers and take an enveloping bite, emerging with a
prolonged suck for such particles as may not have come safely across, and
bending forward with stomach held in. I'll leave you in this refreshment;
for if the money hold, you will gobble until the ringing of the bell.
By this time, as you may imagine, the person with the sagging pockets whom
I told you of, has arrived in the center of the city where already he is
practicing such device of penny-picking as he may be master of.
[Illustration]
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED
TO A MOURNFUL AIR
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED
TO A MOURNFUL AIR
_To any one of several editors._
Dear Sir: I paid a visit to your city several days since and humored
myself with ambitious thoughts in the contemplation of your editorial
windows. I was tempted to rap at your door and request an audience but
modesty held me off. Once by appointment I passed an hour in your office
pleasantly and profitably and even so tardily do I acknowledge your
courtesy and good-nature. But a beggar must choose his streets carefully
and must not be seen too often in a neighborhood as the same door does not
always offer pie. So this time your brass knocker shows no finger-marks of
mine.
You did not accept for publication the last paper I sent to you. (You
spread an infinite deal of sorrow in your path.) On its return I re-read
it and now confess to concurrence with your judgment. Something had gone
wrong. It was not as intended. Unlike Cleopatra, age had withered it. Was
I not like a cook whose dinner has been sent back untasted? The best
available ingredients were put into that confection and if it did not
issue from the oven with those savory whiffs that compel appetite, my
stove is at fault. Perhaps some good old literary housewife will tell me,
disconsolate among my pots and pans, how long an idea must be boiled to be
tender and how best to garnish a thought to an editor's taste? And yet,
sir, your manners are excellent. It was Petruchio who cried:
What's this? Mutton?--
'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat.
Where is the rascal cook?
Manners have improved. In pleasant contrast is your courteous note,
signifying the excellence of my proffered pastry, your delight that you
are allowed to sniff and your regret for lack of appetite and abdominal
capacity. Nevertheless, the food came back and I poked at the broken
pieces mournfully. It is a witch's business presiding at the caldron of
these things and there is no magic pottage above my fire.
And yet, kind sir, with your permission I shall continue in my ways and
offer to you from time to time such messes as I have, hoping that some day
your taste will deteriorate to my level or that I shall myself learn the
witchcraft and enter your regard.
Up to this present time only a few of my papers have been asked to stay.
The rest have gone the downward tread of your stair carpet and have passed
into the night. My desk has become a kind of mausoleum of such as have
come home to die, and when I raise its lid a silence falls on me as on one
who visits sacred places.
There is, however, another side of this. Certain it is that thousands of
us who write seek your recognition and regard. Certain it is that your
favorable judgment moves us to elation, and your silence to our merits
urges us to harder endeavors. But for all this, dear sir, and despite your
continued neglect, we are a tolerably happy crew. It may be that our best
things were never published--best, because we enjoyed them most, because
they recall the happiest hours and the finest moods. They bring most
freshly to our memories the influences of books and friends and the
circumstances under which they were written. It is because we lacked the
skill to tame our sensations to our uses, the patience to do well what we
wished to do fast, that you rightly judged them unavailable. We do not
feel rebellious and we admit that you are right. Only we do not care as
much as we did, for most of us are learning to write for the love of the
writing and without an eye on the medal. With no livelihood depending,
with no compulsion of hours or subject, under the free anonymity of sure
rejection, we have worked. It has been a fine world, these hours of study
and reflection, and when we assert that one essay is our best, we are
right, for it has led us to happiness and pleasant thoughts and to an
interpretation of ourselves and the world that moves about us. In these
best moods of ours, we live and think beyond our normal powers and even
come to a distant kinship with men far greater than ourselves. Knowing
this, prudence only keeps us from snapping our fingers at you and marking
each paper, as we finish it, "rejected," without the formality of a trip
to you, and then happily beginning the next. We are learning to be
amateurs and although our names shall never be shouted from the housetops,
we shall be almost as content. Still will there be the morning hours of
study with sunlight across the floor, the winding country roads of autumn
with smells of corn-stacks and burdened vineyards, the fire-lit hours of
evening. Still shall we write in our gardens of a summer afternoon or
change the winter snowstorm that drives against our windows into the
coinage of our thoughts.
[Illustration]
We shall be independent and think and write as we please. And although we
enclose stamps for a mournful recessional, please know, dear sir, that
even as you dictate your polite note of refusal, we are hard at it with
another paper.
[Illustration]
THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS
THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS
It is rash business scuttling your own ship. Now as I am in a way a
practical person, which is, I take it, a diminutive state of
hard-headedness, any detraction against hard-headedness must appear as
leveled against myself. Gimlet in hand, deep down amidships, it would look
as if I were squatted and set on my own destruction.
But by hard-headed persons I mean those beyond the ordinary, those so far
gone that a pin-prick through the skull would yield not so much as a drop
of ooze; persons whose brain convolutions did they appear in fright at the
aperture on the insertion of the pin--like a head at a window when there
is a fire on the street--would betray themselves as but a kind of cordage.
Such hard-headedness, you will admit, is of a tougher substance than that
which may beset any of us on an occasion at the price of meat, or on the
recurrent obligations of the too-constant moon.
I am reasonably free from colds. I do not fret myself into a congestion if
a breath comes at me from an open window; or if a swirl of wind puts its
cold fingers down my neck do I lift my collar. Yet the presence of a
thoroughly hard-headed person provokes a sneeze. There is a chilly vapor
off him--a swampish miasma--that puts me in a snuffling state, beyond
poultice and mustard footbaths. No matter how I huddle to the fire, my
thoughts will congeal and my purpose cramp and stiffen. My conceit too
will be but a shriveled bladder.
Several years ago I knew a man of extreme hard-headedness. As I recall, I
was afflicted at the time--indeed, the malady co-existed with his
acquaintance--with a sorry catarrh of the nasal passages. I can remember
still the clearings and snufflings that obtruded in my conversation. For
two winters my complaint was beyond the cunning of the doctors. Despite
local applications and such pills as they thought fit to administer, still
did the snuffling continue. Then on a sudden my friend left town.
Consequent to which and to the amazement of the profession, the springs of
my disease dried up. As this happened at the beginning of the warm days of
summer, I am loath to lay my cure entirely to his withdrawal, yet there
was a nice jointry of time. My acquaintance thereafter dropped to an
infrequent, statistical letter, against which I have in time proofed
myself. But the catarrh has ceased except when some faint thought echoes
from the past, at which again, as in the older days, I am forced to blow a
passage in the channel for verbal navigation.
This man's interest in life was oil. It oozed from the ventages of his
talk. If he looked on the map of this fair world, with its mountains like
caterpillars dozing on the page--for so do maps present themselves to my
fancy--_he_ would see merely the blueprint and huge specification of oil
production and consumption. The dotted cities would suggest no more than
agencies in its distribution, and they would be pegged in many colors--as
is the custom of our business efficiency--by way of base symbolism of
their rank and pretense; the wide oceans themselves would be merely
courses for his tank ships to bustle on and leave a greasy trail. Really,
contrary to my own experience and sudden cure, one might think that such
an oleaginous stream of talk, if directed in atomizer fashion against the
nostrils of the listener, would serve as a healing emulsion for the
complaint I then suffered with.
Be these things as they may, what I can actually vouch for is that when
this fellow had set himself and opened a volley of facts on me, I was
shamed to silence. There was a spaciousness, a planetary sweep and
glittering breadth that shriveled me. The commodity which I dispensed was
but used around the corner, with a key turned upon it at the shadowy end
of day against its intrusion on the night. But his oil, all day long and
all night too, was swishing in its tanks on the course to Zanzibar. And
all the fretted activity of the earth was tributary to his purpose. How
like an untrimmed smoky night-candle did my ambition burn! If I chanced to
think in thousands it was a strain upon me. My cerebrum must have throbbed
itself to pieces upon the addition of another cypher. But he marshaled his
legions and led them up and down, until it dazed me. I was no better than
some cobbler with a fiddle, crooked and intent to the twanging of his E
string, while the great Napoleon thundered by.
The secret channels of the earth and the fullness thereof made a joyful
gurgle in his thoughts. And if he ever wandered in the country and ever
saw a primrose on the river's brim--which I consider unlikely, his
attention being engaged at the moment on figuring the cost of oil barrels,
with special consideration for the price of bungs--if this man ever did
see a primrose, would it have been a yellow primrose to him and nothing
more? Bless your dear eyes, it would have been a compound of
by-products--parafine, wax-candles, cup-grease, lamp-black, beeswax and
peppermint drops--not to mention its proper distillation into such rare
odors as might be sold at so much a bottle to jobbers, and a set price at
retail, with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman Act.
This man has lived--my spleen rises at the thought--in many of the
capitals of Europe. For six months at a time he has walked around one
end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his
head inside. Indeed, it is probable he hasn't noticed the building,
or if he has, thinks it is an arsenal. Now in all humility, and
unbuttoned, as it were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give
it, I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre,
regarding it somewhat as an endurance test for tired tourists, a kind
of blow-in-the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, as at a
country fair. And so I am not sure but that the band playing in the
gardens is a better amusement for a bright afternoon, and that a
nursemaid in uniform with her children--bare-legged tots with fingers
in the sand--that such sight is more worthy of respect than a dead
Duchess painted on the wall. It is but a ritualistic obeisance I have paid
the gods inside. My finer reverence has been for benches in the sun and
the vagabondage of a bus-top.
If ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but another point for
exportation. How closely he will listen for any squeaking of the Pearly
Gates, with a nostrum ready for their dry complaint! When he is once
through and safe (the other pilgrims still coming up the hill--for heaven,
I'm sure, will be set on some wind-swept ridge, with purple distance in
the valleys--) how he will put his ear against the hinge for nice
diagnosis as to the weight of oil that will give best result! How he will
wink upon the gateman that he write his order large!
Reader, I have sent you off upon a wrong direction. I have twisted the
wooden finger at the crossroads. The man of oil does not exist. He is a
piece of fiction with which to point a moral. Pig-iron or cotton-cloth
would have served as well; anything, in fact, whereon, by too close
squinting, one may blunt his sight.
We have all observed a growing tendency in many persons to put, as it
were, electric lights in all the corners and attics of their brains, until
it is too much a rarity to find any one who will admit a twilight in his
whole establishment. This is carrying mental housekeeping too far. I will
confess that I prefer a light at the foot of the back stairs, where the
steps are narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess,
also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in
the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the
evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go
darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light
from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental
concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well
that a man should always flare himself like a lighted ballroom.
Much of our best mental stuff--if you exclude the harsher grindings of our
business hours--fades in too coarse a light. 'Tis a brocade that for best
preservation must not be hung always in the sun. There must be regions in
you unguessed at--cornered and shadowed places--recesses to be shown at
peep of finger width, yielding only to the knock of fancy, dim
sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the world, where one
must be taken by the hand and led--dusky closets beyond the common use. It
is in such places--your finger on your lips and your feet a-tiptoe on the
stairs--that you will hide away from baser uses the stowage of moonlight
stuff and such other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in your
inheritance.
[Illustration]
HOOPSKIRTS & OTHER LIVELY MATTER
[Illustration]
HOOPSKIRTS & OTHER LIVELY MATTER
Several months ago I had occasion to go through a deserted "mansion." It
was a gaunt building with long windows and it sat in a great yard. Over
the windows were painted scrolls, like eyebrows lifted in astonishment.
Whatever was the cause of this, it has long since departed, for it is
thirty years since the building was tenanted. It would seem as if it fell
asleep--for so the blinds and the drawn curtains attest--before the lines
of this first astonishment were off its face. I am told that the faces of
men dead in battle show in similar fashion the marks of conflict. But
there is a shocked expression on the face of this house as if a scandal
were on the street. It is crying, as it were, "Fie, shame!" upon its
neighbors.
Inside there are old carpets and curtains which spit dust at you if you
touch them. (Is there not some fabulous animal which does the same,
thereby to escape in the mirk it has itself created?) Most of the
furniture has been removed, but here and there bulky pieces remain, an
antique sideboard, maybe too large to be taken away; like Robinson
Crusoe's boat, too heavy to be launched. In each room is a chandelier for
gas, resplendent as though Louis XV had come again to life, with tinkling
glass pendants and globules interlinked, like enormous Kohinoors.
Down in the kitchen--which is below stairs as in an old English
comedy--you can see the place where the range stood. And there are smoky
streaks upon the walls that may have come from the coals of ancient
feasts. If you sniff, and put your fancy in it--it is an unsavory
thought--it is likely even that you can get the stale smell from such
hospitable preparation.
From the first floor to the second is a flaring staircase with a landing
where opulence can get its breath. And then there is a choice of upward
steps, either to the right or left as your wish shall direct. And on each
side is a balustrade unbroken by posts from top to bottom. Now the first
excitement of my own life was on such a rail, which seemed a funicular
made for my special benefit. The seats of all my early breeches, I have
been told, were worn shiny thereon, like a rubbed apple. These descents
were executed slowly at the turn, but gathered wild speed on the
straight-away. There was slight need for Annie to dust the "balusters."
An old house is strong in its class distinctions. There is a front part
and a back part. To know the front part is to know it in its spacious and
generous moods. But somewhere you will find a door and there will be three
steps behind it, and poof!--you will be prying into the darker life of the
place. In this particular house of which I write, it was as if the back
rooms, the back halls and the innumerable closets had been playing at hide
and seek and had not been told when the game was over, and so still kept
to their hiding places. It is in such obscure closets that a family
skeleton, if it be kept at all, might be kept most safely. There would be
slight hazard of its discovery if the skeleton restrained itself from
clanking, as is the whim of skeletons.
It was in the back part of this house that I came on a closet, where,
after all these years, women's garments were still hanging. A lighted
match--for I am no burglar with a bull's-eye as you might
suspect--displayed to me an array of petticoats--the flounced kind that
gladdened the eye of woman in those remote days--also certain gauzy
matters which the writers of the eighteenth century called by the name of
smocks. Besides these, there were suspended from hooks those sartorial
deceits, those lying mounds of fashion, that false incrustation on the
surface of nature, known as "bustles." Also, there was a hoopskirt curled
upon the floor, and an open barrel with a stowage of books--a novel or two
of E. P. Roe, the poems of John Saxe, a table copy of Whittier in padded
leather, an album with a flourish on the cover--these at the top of the
heap.
I choose to trace the connection between the styles of dress and books,
and--where my knowledge serves--to show the effect of political change on
both. For it is written that when Constantinople fell in the fifteenth
century Turkish costumes became the fashion through western Europe--maybe
a flash of eastern color across the shoulders or an oriental buckle for
the shoes. Similarly the Balkan War gave us hints for dress. Many styles
to-day are marks of our kinship with the East. These are mere broken
promptings for your own elaboration. And it seems to sort with this theory
of close relation, that the generation which flared and flounced its
person until nature was no more than a kernel in the midst, which puffed
itself like a muffin with but a finger-point of dough within, should be
the generation that particularly delighted in romantic literature, in
which likewise nature is so prudently wrapped that scarce an ankle can
show itself. It would be a nice inquiry whether the hoopskirt was not
introduced--it was midway in the eighteenth century, I think--at the time
of the first budding of romantic sentiment. The "Man of Feeling" came
after and Anne Radcliffe's novels. Is it not significant also, in these
present days of Russian novels and naked realism, that costume should
advance sympathetically to the edge of modesty?
[Illustration]