doubt, absurd and incommunicable. I mean, for instance, that I know all
about their fussy, tedious, proper, little childhoods, and that they do
not know, and never will know, anything about mine. In my opinion, their
childhood was a decorous tragedy; in their opinion, if they learned
about it, mine would be a sensational scandal. In New York it always
gives me a queer, asphyxiated feeling when I see pretty, expensively
dressed little boys walking for exercise on upper Fifth avenue in charge
of a maid or a footman, or being transported in an automobile or a
victoria for an hour’s “romp” in the park. And here at Newport I have
overheard little girls discussing with acuteness and authority the
probable length of time it would take the lady who has rented the palace
next door to arrive at the goal of her social ambitions.
My own childhood was so wonderfully casual and different! We lived on
the outskirts of a small northwestern city--not in the country exactly,
and not exactly in the slums. In those days the place had no slums, but
it had outlying, semi-rural tracts where poor people built shanties and
“squatted.” My parents neither built a shanty nor squatted, but they
built a house that from time to time grew and rambled, and they lived
there. They were able to live where they pleased, because in the
community they were persons of importance. I, however, was not, and as
children, especially boys, always play with the most available other
children, unless they are told not to (and even then sometimes), and as
I was never told not to, my only boy companions and intimate friends,
until I was fourteen, were the boys of our neighborhood. At that time
they were known to the élite as “the Elm street gang.” The ungraded road
on which our house was situated had been named, with the usual subtlety
of municipal authorities, “Elm Street,” because all of its trees were
either scrub oak or maple. They were “the Elm street gang” in those
days; to-day they would merely be known as “muckers.” It was with them
that all my early years were spent, both in school and out. For at that
time, if I remember rightly, the parochial schools (all my friends were
Irish Roman Catholics) did not catch their pupils as young as they do
now, and we all went to a yellow brick schoolhouse named after a
Democratic president.
To you it may not seem to be a matter of importance that until I was
fourteen my only playmates and dearest friends were Irish muckers. To me
it is of a significance that I could scarcely explain. For at an
impressionable age I not only lived my own life--the life I was born
to--in my own house and family, but quite as naturally and sincerely I
lived the life of an Irish mucker. (This, to me, sounds like an
unappreciative, a clumsy, almost a brutal way of stating it, but if I
expressed it otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand.) I knew their
families and loved them. I used to share not only their meals when I
felt like it (they always tasted much better than our own), but their
sorrows and their joys. Elm street and vicinity in those days was a
little segment lifted in its entirety from the bogs of Ireland and set
down in the Northwest, and, as I lived there, I very early in life
became intimate with poverty, drunkenness and death. Before I was twelve
I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his
family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay
for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm
street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place only in Irish
fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons
I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years
I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces,
and white, crossed, emaciated hands. They used to “keen,” just as they
do, no doubt, in some parts of Ireland to-day, and it was Mrs. Smith who
always started it. To you “Mrs. Smith” may sound somewhat vague, but
there was only one Mrs. Smith at that time. She was a supernaturally old
woman, who always wore a kind of semi-sunbonnet of frilled white linen
and devoted most of her time to a flock of geese. Through her the torch,
so to speak, had been handed down. After her death there was no more
keening.
But, of course, it wasn’t all wakes. On Sunday morning I used to go up
to the Hogans where Mame was preparing dinner while the rest of the
family were at mass. At that time I looked upon Mame as grown up, even
old; but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Hogans had a
wonderful vegetable garden, and while the family was at church, Mame
and I would pull up carrots and beets, pick peas and beans, gather ears
of corn, snip off sprigs of parsley, prepare them all, and then dump
them into a rotund iron pot on the stove with a chunk of meat. After
that we would sit down outside of the shanty and talk. I forget now what
we talked about, but it must have been absorbing to me, because I was
always still there when Mrs. Hogan creaked up the hill in her Sunday
black, and I usually stayed for the soup. Never in this world will soup
again taste like that.
I knew these people intimately, and in a queer sort of way felt that I
was one of them. The opulent and well-dressed boys of the place always
avoided Elm street. They were desperately afraid of the locality, and
with reason. For there was a perpetual rumor abroad that the elm street
gang hated the “Yanks,”--as the nicely dressed, male offspring of the
fashionable districts were called by us. As I look back on it all I
think we did hate them--I, almost as heartily as the rest. Then arrived
the inevitable time when I acquired a bicycle, and the “Yanks” (I can’t
imagine why) invited me to become a member of their bicycle club. I
accepted, and from that time on I was “in society.” But I shall never
forget the first meeting of the bicycle club in front of our house when
my old friends gathered to see the start, and I felt like a renegade, a
sneak and a traitor. Even now I can remember some of the scathing and
picturesquely blasphemous comments made on that occasion by the gang.
My old friends have never forgotten me and I have never forgotten them.
Some of them are far from being desirable citizens, and spend much of
their time in the workhouse. Others of them have become part of the
valuable thing we call “the backbone of the nation.” In this they all do
not differ very widely from some of my acquaintances more recently
acquired, except that whereas the former _are_ in the workhouse, the
latter merely ought to be.
But I don’t see why I should be bombarding you with these reminiscences.
Perhaps, after all, you won’t see what they always mean to me, and
particularly here, in this wondrously unreal environment, where the
“other half” is something one merely subscribes to, or occasionally
reads about in a magazine. But, you see, I _know_ the other half; at one
period of my life I actually _was_ the other half. And when I confess to
my skinny old dinner companion that I don’t like truffles and loathe
champagne, I have the most irrelevant visions. They make a snob of me,
these visions; not a snob in the general acceptation of the term, but a
snob, none the less. For I continually feel that I know more about life
than these people know, or ever will know. It is a source of
satisfaction that I can see all around them while they are able to see
only the particular front I, for the moment, wish to display. If I could
choose between millions and my memories of Elm street, I think I should
cling to Elm street.
* * * * *
That, practically, was the letter. It was pleasant in spots. I have
tried, as I said, to extract some of the spots.
IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP
Some time ago I went down town to buy a coffin. No, I didn’t say that to
be startling; it is merely a bald, literal statement of fact. Now and
then one goes down town to buy a book, or a pair of gloves, or some
postage stamps. On this occasion I went to buy a coffin.
The conventional idea of grief is that it is an exclusive emotion; that
it leaves no room in the mind, for the time being, for any other. Like
most of our beliefs, and most of them are erroneous, we have derived
this one from books and newspapers. “Mrs. So-and-so bore up bravely to
the end, but is now under the care of a physician, and is completely
prostrated by grief,” one almost always reads in a newspaper account of
the last hours of that altogether estimable citizen, her husband. And
she sincerely believes this--believes it even while she stands in front
of the glass, telling the young woman from the dry-goods shop that the
veil hasn’t been pinned on straight and that the skirt is at least three
inches too long in the back. There is no hypocrisy here; she does feel
acutely and deeply bereaved. But she is by no means completely
prostrated, and there is plenty of place in her intelligence for a
variety of sensations that have little or nothing to do with her sorrow.
In fact, physicians tell me that persons in ordinary “good health” are
very rarely prostrated by grief; that when they are, complete
prostration, on the part of gentlemen, is generally traceable to too
many drinks of whisky, and on the part of ladies, to the morphine pill
of the family doctor.
Some persons are so constituted that even in the case of their own
trouble they can appreciate this; other persons can’t. I happen to be
one of the kind who can, so when I went into the undertaker’s shop, it
was, after the first rather dreadful moment, easy and natural for me to
regard the place and what I saw and heard there impersonally and with
interest.
This was the less difficult, perhaps, from the fact that for several
minutes I was alone, there was no one to attend to me and I had time to
sit down and look about me--to collect myself and begin to wonder why
the person whose establishment it was, was called an “undertaker,” in
the first place. It is really a comic, a grotesque word, whether it
means that the man to whom it applies merely “undertakes” in a general
sense, or more specifically, undertakes to take one under. I decided to
look this matter up in a dictionary when I went home, but I neglected
to, of course, and it is still one of those philological mysteries
through which we write and speak and have our being. I had time also to
discover just why these places, quite aside from their associations, are
in themselves always so hideous, so offensive, so utterly repellent. It
is simply because they express in terms of furniture the characteristics
and point of view of the always very unpleasant persons who conduct
them. A being from another planet ought to be able to reconstruct an
American undertaker merely by examining the furniture of the front room
in which he transacts his business.
The locale of other trades and professions usually expresses some one
thing, and nothing else. The offices of lawyers, stockbrokers and
architects, for instance, suggest only the law, finance and
construction. There is about them an intelligible directness, an
admirable singleness of purpose. You know just where you are, and they
admit of no emotional intricacies between you and the men you consult
there. An undertaker’s office, on the other hand, is a piece of
elaborate hypocrisy. It deprecatingly shrinks from admitting that it is
one thing or the other. Over one of the most rapacious trades in all
this sad world it seeks to draw a veil of domesticity and religion. One
is repelled by the place because it is so deliberately false.
In it there is always the apparatus of business--telephones and a
roll-top desk full of billheads and ledgers and writing materials. That
corner of the room is practical to a degree. But there are always, as
well, several rocking-chairs with “tidies,” half a dozen dreary palms
and ferns, a few pictures of a semi-devotional nature in somber frames,
and, if it can possibly be managed, an imitation stained-glass window.
The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures,
the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of
mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are
not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but
lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it
is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper,
of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all
very insulting.
So, also, was the manner of the abhorrent young man who presently
appeared through a curtained doorway in the rear of the particular
establishment I happened to be visiting. In the room beyond he had been
whistling, as he approached, a popular two-step, but he instantly ceased
when he saw me and unconsciously drawing his face into a wan, smitten
smile, came forward noiselessly, almost on tiptoe. He would have shaken
hands with a slight, prolonged pressure full of regret and comprehension
if I had let him, but I saw it coming and putting my hand in my pocket
allowed his to drop back with a sad gesture that sought to say:
“Yes--yes, I understand.”
“I should like to look at coffins,” I remarked, and then coldly eyed his
discomfiture. For it was clearly not the sort of beginning he had
expected. I had been prosaic and unmoved, and the fact left him for a
moment with his trained sympathy, his professional manner, on his hands
so to speak. He didn’t exactly know what to do with it, and he couldn’t
quite bring himself, all at once, to risk anything else. In the meantime
I merely looked at him.
“Mr. Murksom” (Mr. Murksom was the proprietor; they always have names
like that) “has stepped out for a few minutes, but he’s coming right
back,” the young man at last explained in tones that tried to be
commonplace like my own. But I could see how difficult it was for him to
_be_ commonplace under the circumstances. Separated from its
traditional and odious technique, the pursuit of his vocation plainly
seemed to him neither legitimate nor altogether decent. “Mr. Murksom is
very helpful,” he added in a refined whisper, delicately averting his
eyes. He had relapsed again into the “manner”; he just couldn’t help it.
It was as if he had said: “Even if for some perverse reason _you_ refuse
to act your part, it will never be said of me that I have failed in
mine.”
“Won’t you--rest,” he then suggested, indicating one of the
rocking-chairs; and I realized, with an all but uncontrollable desire to
laugh aloud, that the slight hesitation followed by the mortuary word
“rest,” was his tribute to my presumable and complete prostration. I
took possession of the rocking-chair, but he sat down on an angular
piece of “mission” work, with a straight back, and then brought the tips
of his fingers together in a fashion that positively murmured, but
without the crudity of words: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh
away.”
“Will you have a cigarette?” I brutally inquired, for I was about to
smoke one myself. And this, I saw with relief, for the time being,
definitely broke the spell. With a cigarette in his mouth, or between
his fingers, it was impossible, even for him, to produce any of his
effects. He gave up trying to, and we talked. Among other things, I
asked him, while I waited for the return of Mr. Murksom, how he had come
to choose his occupation. All my life I had wanted to ask an undertaker
that, but I never before had been given so good an opening. His reply
was interesting, as, indeed, I knew it would be, or I shouldn’t have
asked the question.
“I didn’t exactly choose it,” he replied. “I don’t think anybody ever
does. It isn’t the kind of a job a person really chooses. I just drifted
into it, little by little. That’s what they all do, I think. I had a
friend who used to drive the wagon, and sometimes when he had to go very
far, I’d go along with him to keep him company and hold the horses while
he was inside. You get to talking, sometimes, and when you talk about
things you kind of get used to them. After awhile they seem natural.
Sometimes, when my friend had things to do here at the office, I used to
help him; you might just as well, as to sit around doing nothing. And
then someone offers you a job, and as you know a good deal about it by
that time, and don’t mind, you take it. You kind of get into it by
degrees.”
Just here Mr. Murksom appeared, and I saw at a glance that beneath _his_
spurious melancholy one might never penetrate. He had been at it for too
many years. The professional manner, thick and unctuous, enveloped him.
He couldn’t have abandoned it had he wanted to. It clung to him, I was
sure, at the lightest moments of his life. Of course, it was impossible
to imagine his life as having any light moments, but assuming that such
a thing could be, I felt that gayety with him would vaguely approximate
only the gayety of a flag at half-mast. He would have approached the
back platform of a street car in precisely the same soundless,
sympathetic, discreetly afflicted way in which he approached a sobbing
widow. It was the way, moreover, in which he at once approached me. I
had craftily evaded the hand of his assistant, but there was no escaping
the condoling pressure of Mr. Murksom. It had sought my own and gently,
lugubriously squeezed it before I had been able to take defensive
measures, and it did not, although I tried to drop it, immediately
relax. In fact, it held on, and, with a kind of ghoulish authority, led
me across the room and through the curtained doorway in the rear. The
creature had divined everything; he knew exactly why I had come long
before I had arrived to tell him. As I was drawn into the inner room I
recalled the phrase “hand in glove,” and it occurred to me that Mr.
Murksom was quite unavoidably the glove upon the hand of God. I heard
him sigh most convincingly on two notes, and although he didn’t say
anything continuous or even very coherent, I seemed to catch the words
“very sad,” and “always a shock, even when expected.”
Once beyond the curtained doorway, I disengaged myself and again
declared that I wished to look at coffins; but the manner in which Mr.
Murksom, from then on, combined the shrewd salesman with the spiritual
consoler is something my feeble pen altogether balks at recording. As
far as I could see, there were no coffins in the room in which I had
expected to find an embarrassment of choice, but, resting a protecting
palm upon my shoulder as if to shield me from a sudden shock, Mr.
Murksom pressed a button in the room’s white paneling, and lo! a natty
three hundred and fifty-dollar receptacle turned a sort of somersault
and landed, so to speak, at our feet. It was exactly like opening, or
letting down, the upper berth in a sleeping car, except that these
berths were on end instead of on their sides. Before I had made up my
mind, we had pressed buttons and lowered upper berths all around three
sides of the room.
“Now, just what is the difference between this one, which costs two
hundred, and that one, which is only ninety-eight?” I inquired, for to
me they both looked very much alike.
“This one,” Mr. Murksom replied, and I could see he thought me a
haggling, heartless person, “is something more--more permanent. That one
won’t--well, that one is, as one might say, less able to withstand
the--the inevitable conditions. Personally,” he, to my surprise,
hastened to add, “I don’t wish for anything _too_ permanent. ‘Dust to
dust,’ you know,” he murmured, as he pressed another button. This, I
confess, surprised me very much, for it seemed to me that anyone who,
for years and years, had buried several persons a day would necessarily
fall into the habit of considering himself immortal. For a moment I
thought of drawing him out on the subject; it occurred to me that a man
whose whole life consisted of death ought to have made some illuminating
reflections. Indeed, after I finally accomplished what I had come for, I
did begin to ask a question, but was interrupted in the middle of it.
For the young man suddenly appeared in the curtained doorway with
something wrapped in brown paper and tied with a pink string. He was not
exactly excited, he never could have been that, but he was, at least,
natural. After our little conversation, I think he had concluded that
there wasn’t much point in keeping it up any longer with me. This, at
any rate, is the only way in which I could account for his ignoring my
presence to the extent of making, in a moment, a most extraordinary and
startling announcement. He held the brown paper parcel toward Mr.
Murksom, who had turned inquiringly toward him, and then exclaimed, with
a pleased smile:
“They’ve found those legs.”
“Ah,” sighed Mr. Murksom, “and where were they?”
“In the wagon all the time. The horses just walked away from the house
and a policeman stopped them as they were trying to get into a vacant
lot to eat grass. Well,” he ended, in a gratified tone, “I’m glad they
found those legs.”
At this, I somewhat hurriedly said good afternoon, and withdrew. They
were very little legs. I read about them in the paper the next day.
WRITERS
I can never decide which is the more annoying to a writer: to have
people elaborately ignore the fact that he writes and has written, or to
have them assume that he can’t talk about, and isn’t interested in,
anything but books in general and his own in particular. The happy
medium is conversationally discovered by only a very few, but this no
doubt is the case with almost all happy mediums. It isn’t in the least
disconcerting to meet a person who is quite unaware of the fact that you
are the clever Mr. Snooks, author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of
To-day.” Indeed, when your new acquaintance has not even heard of either
you or your latest work, you may be able to have with him a perfectly
rational and agreeable conversation. But there is a type of person who
has read “The Swill Barrel” with interest, who knows you wrote it, and
who for some cryptic reason never alludes to it or betrays the fact that
he realizes you are the clever Mr. Snooks. This is really most trying.
You know that he knows; he knows that you know that he knows, and you
both somewhat consciously talk about other things--he, because of an
utterly misguided idea that it is “in better taste” not to speak of a
book to its author, and you, because, under the circumstances, you would
rather die than admit you recognized a pen when you saw it reposing on a
desk.
To refrain from speaking to a writer of his books because you think it
in better taste not to, because “he must be so tired of having people
talk to him about that book,” is to display a not particularly keen or
sympathetic understanding of human nature. A writer, whether he be a
novelist, a historian, a writer of essays, a writer of editorials, a
poet, a reporter, a message indicting President of the United States, or
the secretary of a charitable organization, invariably hopes that what
he writes will be read; that it will please, amuse, instruct, inform,
divert,--that, in a word, it will _interest_ somebody, or rather, a
group of somebodies. With many writers the commercial aspect of the
transaction is, of course, always prominent, but their commercial
success depends, after all, upon their ability to charm. Once having
grasped the pen and set out to do any of these things, it is only human
and natural to be gratified on learning that you have succeeded, and if
the people you from time to time meet don’t tell you that you have, you
remain in dreadful doubt. To the ears of a writer no music on earth is
sweeter than intelligent praise, and even praise that is not intelligent
is sweet if it has the ring of sincerity. I remember once taking in to
dinner a young girl who assured me that she had very much enjoyed a
certain story of mine because it had made her “cry and cry and cry.”
Most insincerely, as I knew which story it must have been, I asked her
the name of it. She thereupon adorably declared that she didn’t remember
the name, she couldn’t recall where she had come across it, and she had
forgotten what it was about, but she had “cried and cried and cried.”