shadows of the twilight--which too long have been chased like common
miscreants with lamp and candle--are really friendly beings and they
wait to romp with you. Because thieves have walked in darkness, shall
darkness be called a thief? Rather, let the dark hours take their
repute from the countless gracious spirits that are abroad--the
quieter fancies that flourish when the light has gone--the gentle
creatures that leave their hiding when the sun has set. When a rug
lies roughened at close of day, it is said truly that a fairy peeps
from under to learn if at last the house is safe. And they hide in the
hallway for the signal of your coming, yet so timid that if the fire
is stirred they scamper beyond the turn. They huddle close beneath the
stairs that they may listen to your voice. They come and go on tiptoe
when the curtain sways, in the hope that you will follow. With their
long thin shadowy fingers they beckon for you beneath the sofa.
The time is coming when you can no longer resist their invitation,
when you will leave your woolly lamb and your roaring lion on this
dull safe hearth and will go on pilgrimage. The back stairs sit
patient in the dark for your hand upon the door. The great dim garret
that has sat nodding for so many years will smile at last at your
coming. It has been lonely so long for the glad sound of running feet
and laughter. It has been childless so many years.
But once children's feet played there and romped through the short
winter afternoons. A rope hung from post to post and furnished forth a
circus. Here giant swings were hazarded. Here children hung from the
knees until their marbles and other wealth dropped from their pockets.
And for less ambitious moments there were toys--
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.
And now Little Boy Blue again climbs the long stairs. He stretches up
on tiptoe to turn the door-knob at the top. He listens as a prudent
explorer should. Cook rattles her tins below, but it is a far-off
sound as from another world. Somewhere, doubtless, the friendly
milkman's bell goes jingling up the street. There is a distant barking
of familiar dogs. Will it not be better to return to the safe regions
and watch the traffic from the window? But here, beckoning, is the
great adventure.
The brave die is cast. He advances with outstretched arms into the
darkness. Suddenly, behind him, the door swings shut. The sound of
cooking-tins is lost. Silence. Silence, except for branches scratching
on the roof. But the garret hears the sound of feet, and it rouses
itself and rubs its dusky eyes.
But when darkness thickens and the sunlight has vanished from the
floor, then comes the magic hour. The garret then tears from its eyes
the blind bandage of the day. Strange creatures lift their heads. And
now, as you wait expectant, there comes a mysterious sound from the
darkest corner. Is it a mouse that stirs? Rather, it seems a far-off
sound, as though a blind man, tapping with his stick, walked on the
margin of the world. The noise comes near. It gains in volume. It is
close at hand. Dear lad, you have come upon the magic hour. It is the
tread of the friendly giants that is sounding in the dark....
On Spending a Holiday.
At a party lately a worn subject came under discussion.
Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved courtyard tucked off from
the thoroughfare but with the rattle of the elevated railway close at
hand. The building is of decent brick, three stories in height, and it
exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical doorsteps. The entrance
to the courtyard is a swinging shutter between buildings facing on the
street, and it might seem a mystery--like the apple in the
dumpling--how the building inside squeezed through so narrow an
entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber plant in one corner and a
trellis for imaginary vines in the other.
In this courtyard, _Pomander Walk_ might be acted along the stoops.
For a necessary stage property--you recall, of course, the lamplighter
with his ladder in the second act!--there is a gas lamp of old design
in the middle of the enclosure, up near the footlights, as it were.
From the stoops the main comedy might proceed, with certain business
at the upper windows--the profane Admiral with the timber leg popping
his head out of one, the mysterious fat man--in some sort the villain
of the piece--putting his head out of another to woo the buxom widow
at a third. And then the muffin man! In the twilight when the lamp is
lighted and the heroine at last is in the hero's arms, there would be
a pleasant crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain
falls.
But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location of this courtyard.
Many persons think that New York City is but a massive gridiron, and
they are ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the lower
town. Enough that the Indian of a modest tobacconist guards the
swinging shutter of the entrance to the courtyard.
Here we sat in the very window I had designed for the profane Admiral,
and talked in the quiet interval between trains.
One of our company--a man whom I shall call Flint--was hardy enough to
say that he never employed his leisure in going to the country--that a
walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. Flint's
livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort of person who looks as if
he needed exercise, but he has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark
fell on us as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a humorous
whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously to his opinion, urging smooth
pavements against mud, the study of countless faces against the song
of birds and great buildings against cliffs.
Another of our company opposed him in this--Colum, who chafes as an
accountant. Colum is a gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. All
winter he saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks' vacation in
the country, he sets up in trees as birdhouses. He confesses that he
took up with a certain brand of tobacco because its receptacle is
popular with wrens. Also he cultivated a taste for waffles--which at
first by a sad distortion of nature he lacked--for no other reason
except that syrup may be bought in pretty log-cabin tins particularly
suited for bluebirds. If you chance to breakfast with him, he urges
the syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. With
satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has a dozen of these empty
cabins on the shelf alongside his country boots. Time was when he was
lean of girth--as becomes an accountant, who is hinged dyspeptically
all day across his desk--but by this agreeable stowage he has now
grown to plumpness. When in the country Colum rises early in order to
stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about before breakfast
from tree to tree to view his feathered tenants. He has even acquired,
after much practice, the knack of chirping--a hissing conjunction of
the lips and teeth--which he is confident wins the friendly attention
of the birds.
Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted before he was done.
"Pooh!" he said. "There's mud in the country, and not much of any
plumbing, and in the morning it's cold until you light a fire."
"Of course," said Colum. "But I love it. Perhaps you remember, Flint,
the old willow stump out near the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of
it, and now there's a family of wrens inside."
"Nonsense," said Flint. "There is too much climate in the
country--much more than in town. It's either too hot or too cold. And
it's lonely. As for you, Colum, you're sentimental about your
birdhouses. And you dislike your job. You like the country merely
because it is a symbol of a holiday. It is freedom from an irksome
task. It means a closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the
country, you would grumble in a month's time. Even a bullfrog--and he
is brought up to it, poor wretch--croaks at night."
Colum interrupted. "That's not true, Flint. I know I'd like it--to
live on a farm and keep chickens. Sometimes in winter, or more often
in spring, I can hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look out
of the window and I see a mirage--trees and hills." Colum sighed.
"It's quite wonderful, that view, but it unsettles me for my ledger."
"That's it," broke in Flint. "Your sentimentality spoils your
happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. It's immoral."
Colum was about to retort, when he was anticipated by a new speaker.
It was Quill, the journalist, who has long thin fingers and
indigestion. At meals he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats
food substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or something of
that kind, to a daily paper. He always knows whether Steel is strong
and whether Copper is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he
glances at you for a moment before he knows you. Yet in his slippers
he grows human.
"I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no one ever said that I
am sentimental." He tapped his head. "I'm as hard as nails up here."
Quill cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, and
continued: "I have a shack on the West Shore, and I go there
week-ends. My work is so confining that if I didn't get to the country
once in a while, I would play out in a jiffy. I'm a nervous frazzle--a
nervous frazzle--by Saturday noon. But I lie on the grass all Sunday,
and if nobody snaps at me and I am let alone, by Monday morning I am
fit again."
"You must be like Antaeus."
This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm is a bookish fellow who
wears great rimmed glasses. He spends much of his time in company
thinking up apposite quotations and verifying them. He has worn out
two Bartlett's. Wurm is also addicted to maps and dictionaries, and is
a great reader of special articles. Consequently his mind is a pound
for stray collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, it
more closely resembles a building contractor's back yard--odd
salvage--rejected doors--a job of window-frames--a pile of bricks for
chipping--discarded plumbing--broken junk gathered here and there.
Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who once lived on our
street--a man of no broad fame--quite local--surely unknown to
you--did not collect so wide a rubbish.
However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather a pleasant and
harmless bit of cobweb. For a livelihood, he sits in a bank behind a
grill. At noon he eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a
rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting season he kills in a
day as many as a dozen of these pests' and ranges them in his pen
tray. On Saturday afternoon he rummages in Malkan's and the
second-hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see Wurm in his most
characteristic pose, is to see him on a ladder, with one leg
outstretched, far off his balance, fumbling for a title with his
finger tips. Surely, in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job.
Then he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home to dinner.
This is served him on a tin tray by his stout landlady who comes
puffing up the stairs. It is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever
dish is served happens to be the very one of which he was thinking as
he came out of the bank. By this innocent device he is popular with
his landlady and she skims the milk for him.
Wurm rapped his pipe bowl on the arm of his chair. "You must be like
Antaeus," he replied.
"Like what?" asked Flint.
"Antaeus--the fellow who wrestled with Hercules. Each time that Antaeus
was thrown against the earth his strength was doubled. He was finally
in the way of overcoming Hercules, when Hercules by seizing him around
the middle lifted him off the ground. By this strategy he deprived him
of all contact with the earth, and presently Antaeus weakened and was
vanquished."
"That's me," said Quill, the journalist. "If I can't get back to my
shack on Sunday, I feel that Hercules has me, too, around the middle."
"Perhaps I can find the story," said Wurm, his eye running toward the
bookshelves.
"Don't bother," said Flint.
There was now another speaker--Flannel Shirt, as we called him--who
had once been sated with formal dinners and society, and is now
inclined to cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and free
verse. He was about to praise the country for its freedom from
sordidness and artificiality, when Flint, who had heard him before,
interrupted.
"Rubbish!" he cried out. "All of you, but in different ways, are
slaves to an old tradition kept up by Wordsworth, who would himself,
doubtless, have moved to London except for the steepness of the rents.
You all maintain that you like the country, yet on one excuse or
another you live in the city and growl about it. There isn't a
commuter among you. Honest folk, these commuters, with marrow in their
bones--a steak in a paper bag--the sleet in their faces on the
ferryboat. I am the only one who admits that he lives in the city
because he prefers it. The country is good enough to read about--I
like it in books--but I choose to sit meantime with my feet on a city
fender."
Here Wurm broke in again. "I see, Flint," he said, "that you have been
reading Leslie Stephen."
Flint denied it.
"Well, anyway, you have quoted him. Let me read you a bit of his essay
on 'Country Books.'"
Flint made a grimace. "Wurm always has a favorite passage."
Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. He blew off the dust and
smoothed its sides. "Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume
at Schulte's, on the twenty-five cent table. 'A love of the country is
taken,'" he read, "'I know not why, to indicate the presence of all
the cardinal virtues.... We assert a taste for sweet and innocent
pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excitements of
artificial society. I, too, like the country,...' (you'll like this,
Flint) 'but I confess--to be duly modest--that I love it best in
books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and
rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best.... Though a
cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs.
Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a
placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie
Dinmont's parlour ... or to drop into the kitchen of a good old
country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the
simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams.'"
"You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And now as I was saying--"
Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You think that that quotation
supports your side of the discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that
sometimes we get greater reality from books than we get from life.
Leslie Stephen liked the real country, also. In his holidays he
climbed the Swiss mountains--wrote a book about them--it's on that top
shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll stones off a cliff? And
as a pedestrian he was almost as famous as George Borrow--walked the
shirt off his back before his college trustees and all that sort of
thing. But he got an even sharper reality from books. He liked the
city, too, but in many a mood, there's no doubt about it, he preferred
to walk to Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, rather than to
jostle on the actual pavement outside his door."
"Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the journalist. "Inch along, old
caterpillar!"
"As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I would rather go with
Charles and Mary Lamb to see _The Battle of Hexham_ in their gallery
than to any show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine old
pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, lest they tread on
a neighbor's heels. Then the pleasant gallery, with its great lantern
to light their expectant faces!"
Wurm's eyes strayed again wistfully to his shelves. Flint stayed him.
"And so you think that it is possible to see life completely in a
mirror."
"By no means," Wurm returned. "We must see it both ways. Nor am I, as
you infer, in any sense like the Lady of Shalott. A great book cannot
be compared to a mirror. There is no genius in a mirror. It merely
reflects the actual, and slightly darkened. A great book shows life
through the medium of an individuality. The actual has been lifted
into truth. Divinity has passed into it through the unobstructed
channel of genius."
Here Flint broke in. "Divinity--genius--the Swiss Alps--_The Battle of
Hexham_--what have they to do with Quill's shack out in Jersey or
Colum's dirty birdhouses? You jump the track, Wurm. When everybody is
heading for the main tent, you keep running to the side-shows."
Quill, the journalist, joined the banter. "You remind me, Wurm--I hate
to say it--of what a sea captain once said to me when I tried to loan
him a book. 'Readin',' he said, 'readin' rots the mind.'"
It was Colum's turn to ask a question. "What do _you_ do, Flint," he
asked, "when you have a holiday?"
"Me? Well, I don't run off to the country as if the city were afire
and my coat-tails smoked. And I don't sentimentalize on the evils of
society. And I don't sit and blink in the dark, and moon around on a
shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I walk around and look at
things--shop windows and all that, when the merchants leave their
curtains up. I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there's the
Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one may make acquaintances.
People are always more communicative when they look out on the water.
The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about himself, his
wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk to a good many persons,
first and last, or I stand around until they talk to me. So many
persons wear blinders in the city. They don't know how wonderful it
is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop on Fourteenth Street,
just to listen to the crowd on its final round--mother's carpet
sweeper, you understand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas
is different--it's gayer--reckless--it's an exalted Saturday night.
Afterwards I heard Midnight Mass at the Russian Cathedral. Then there
are always ferryboats--the band on the boat to Staten Island--God!
What music! Tugs and lights. I would like to know a tug--intimately.
If more people were like tugs we'd have less rotten politics. Wall
Street on a holiday is fascinating. No one about. Desolate. But full
of spirits."
Flint took a fresh cigar. "Last Sunday morning I walked in Central
Park. There were all manner of toy sailboats on the pond--big and
little--thirty of them at the least--tipping and running in the
breeze. Grown men sail them. They set them on a course, and then they
trot around the pond and wait for them. Presently I was curious. A man
upward of fifty had his boat out on the grass and was adjusting the
rigging.
"'That's quite a boat,' I began.
"'It's not a bad tub,' he answered.
"'Do you hire it from the park department?' I asked.
"'No!' with some scorn.
"'Where do you buy them?'
"'We don't buy them.'
"'Then how--?' I started.
"'We make 'em--nights.'
"He resumed his work. The boat was accurately and beautifully
turned--hollow inside--with a deck of glossy wood. The rudder was
controlled by finest tackle and hardware. Altogether, it was as
delicately wrought as a violin.
"'It's this way!'--its builder and skipper laid down his pipe--'There
are about thirty of us boys who are dippy about boats. We can't afford
real boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am an interior
decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next winter--if my wife will stand
the muss (My God! How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to
build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new boat each spring!'
The old fellow squinted at his mast and tightened a cord. Then he
continued. 'If you are interested, come around any Sunday morning
until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try your hand at a boat
this winter, just ask any of us boys and we will help you. Your first
boat or two will be sad--_Ju-das!_ But you will learn.'"
Flint was interrupted by Quill. "Isn't that rather a silly occupation
for grown men?"
"It's not an occupation," said Flint. "It's an avocation, and it isn't
silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren't so self-conscious.
And it's more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what
courtesy! These men form what is really a club--a club in its
primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be one of them."
Flannel Shirt broke in. "By George, that _was_ courtesy. If you had
happened on a polo player at his club--a man not known to you--he
wouldn't have invited you to come around and bring your pony for
instruction."
"It's not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel Shirt?"
"No, maybe not."
There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. "I rather like to think
of that interior decorator littering up his dining-room every
night--clamps and glue-pots on the sideboard--hardly room for the
sugar-bowl--lumber underneath--and then bringing out a new boat in
the spring."
Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," he said, "should have
known that fellow. He would have found him a place among his Lantern
Bearers."
Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down Fifth Avenue."
"It's Fifth Avenue," said Flannel Shirt, "everything up above
Fifty-ninth Street--and what it stands for, that I want to get away
from."
"Easy, Flannel Shirt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue doesn't interest me
much either. It's too lonely. Everybody is always away. The big stone
buildings aren't homes: they are points of departure, as somebody
called them. And they were built for kings and persons of spacious
lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live
inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a
window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon
had gone riding on a 'bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the
house fronts." Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these
folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even a crustacean
sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a wonderful street
it would be if persons really lived there, and looked out of their
windows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their tapestries and rugs
across the outer walls. Actually," added Flint, "I prefer to walk on
the East Side. It is gayer."
"There is poverty, of course," he went on after a moment, "and
suffering. But the streets are not depressing. They have fun on the
East Side. There are so many children and there is no loneliness. If
the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems designed as a post
for leaping. Any vacant wall--if the street is so lucky--serves for a
game. There is baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece
of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch--not stretched out, for
there isn't room, but rolled up like a jelly cake. One must hop to the
middle and out again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon he
spends his grudge upon an enemy--these drawings can be no likeness of
a friend. Or love guides the chalky fingers. And all the time
slim-legged girls sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the
younger fry."
"But, my word, what smells!"
"Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. Down on these streets
we can learn what dogs think of us. But every Saturday night on Grand
Street there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts from an
old woman. They aren't much good to eat--wee nuts, all shell--and they
still sit in the kitchen getting dusty. It was raining when I bought
them and the woman's hair was streaked in her face, but she didn't
mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. Everything on God's
earth was for sale. On the cart next to my old woman's, there was
hardware--sieves, cullenders--kitchen stuff. And on the next, wearing
gear, with women's stockings hung on a rope at the back. A girl came
along carrying a pair of champagne-colored shoes, looking for
stockings to match. Quite a belle. Somebody's girl. Quill, go down
there on a Saturday night. It will make a column for your paper. I
wonder if that girl found her stockings. A black-eyed Italian.