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About this time of year, when the mellow air swoons (as the poets say)
with golden languor and the landscape is tinged a soft brown like a
piece of toast, we feel the onset and soft impeachment of fall fever.
Fall fever is (in our case at any rate) more insidious than the familiar
disease of spring. Spring fever impels us to get out in the country; to
seize a knotted cudgel and a pouchful of tobacco and agitate our limbs
over the landscape. But the drowsiness of autumn is a lethargy in the
true sense of that word--a forgetfulness. A forgetfulness of past
discontents and future joys; a forgetfulness of toil that is gone and
leisure to come; a mere breathing existence in which one stands vacantly
eyeing the human scene, living in a gentle simmer of the faculties like
a boiling kettle when the gas is turned low.
Fall fever, one supposes, is our inheritance from the cave man, who
(like the bear and the--well, some other animal, whatever it is) went
into hibernation about the first of November. Autumn with its soft
inertia lulled him to sleep. He ate a hearty meal, raked together some
dry leaves, curled up and slid off until the alarm clock of April.
This agreeable disease does not last very long with the modern man. He
fights bravely against it; then the frost comes along, or the coal bill,
and stings him into activity. But for a few days its genial torpor may
be seen (by the observant) even in our bustling modern career. When we
read yesterday that Judge Audenried's court clerks had fallen asleep
during ballot-counting proceedings we knew that the microbe was among us
again. Keats, in his lovely Ode, describes the figure of Autumn as
stretched out "on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep." Unhappily the
conventions forbid city dwellers from curling up on the pavements for a
cheerful nap. If one were brave enough to do so, unquestionably many
would follow his example. But the urbanite has taught himself to doze
upright. You may see many of us, standing dreamily before Chestnut
Street show windows in the lunch hour, to all intents and purposes in a
state of slumber. Yesterday, in that lucid shimmer of warmth and light,
a group stood in front of a doughnut window near Ninth Street: not one
of them was more than half awake. Similarly a gathering watched the
three small birds who have become a traditional window ornament on
Chestnut Street (they have recently moved from an oculist to a
correspondence course office) and a faint whisper of snoring arose on
the sultry air. The customs of city life permit a man to stand still as
long as he likes if he will only pretend to be watching something. We
saw a substantial burgher pivoted by the window of Mr. Albert, the
violin maker, on Ninth Street. Apparently he was studying the fine
autographed photo of Patti there displayed; but when we sidled near we
saw that his eyes were closed; this admirable person, who seemed to be
what is known as a "busy executive," and whose desk undoubtedly carries
a plate-glass sheet with the orisons of Swett Marden under it, was in a
blissful doze.
Modern life (as we say) struggles against this sweet enchantment of
autumn, but Nature is too strong for us. Why is it that all these
strikes occur just at this time of year? The old hibernating instinct
again, perhaps. The workman has a subconscious yearning to scratch
together a nice soft heap of manila envelopes and lie down on that couch
for a six months' ear-pounding. There are all sorts of excuses that one
can make to one's self for waving farewell to toil. Only last Sunday we
saw this ad in a paper:
HEIRS WANTED. The war is over and has made many new heirs. You
may be one of them. Investigate. Many now living in poverty are
rich, but don't know it.
Now what could be simpler (we said to ourself as we stood contemplating
those doughnuts) than to forsake our jolly old typewriter and spend a
few months in "investigating" whether any one had made us his heir? It
might be. Odd things have happened. Down in Washington Square, for
instance (we thought), are a number of sun-warmed benches, very
reposeful to the sedentary parts, on which we might recline and think
over the possibility of our being rich unawares. We hastened thither,
but apparently many had had the same idea. There was not a bench vacant.
The same was true in Independence Square and in Franklin Square. We will
never make a good loafer. There is too much competition.
So we came back, sadly, to our rolltop and fell to musing. We picked up
a magazine and found some pictures showing how Mary Pickford washes her
hair. "If I am sun-drying my hair," said Mary (under a photo showing her
reclining in a lovely garden doing just that), "I usually have the
opportunity to read a scenario or do some other duty which requires
concentration." And it occurred to us that if a strain like that is put
upon a weak woman we surely ought to be able to go on moiling for a
while, Indian summer or not. And then we found some pictures by our
favourite artist, Coles Phillips, with that lovely shimmer around the
ankles, and we resolved to be strong and brave and have pointed
finger-nails. But still, in the back of our mind, the debilitating
influence of fall fever was at work. We said to ourself, without the
slightest thought of printing it (for it seemed to put us in a false
light), that the one triumphant and unanswerable epigram of mankind, the
grandest and most resolute utterance in the face of implacable fate, is
the snore.