ever says that his house is his castle. On the contrary it is his
point of vantage--his outlook--his prospect. His house front never
dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look out of--not openings
for household exhibits--ornamental lamps or china things--at every
window there is a head--somebody looking on the world. There is a
pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes--a recipe for onions--a hint
of fashion--a cure for rheumatism. The street bears the general life.
The home is the street, not merely the crowded space within four
walls. The street is the playground and the club--the common stage,
and these are the galleries and boxes. We come again close to the
beginning of the modern theatre--an innyard with windows round about.
The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders come and go, selling fruit
and red suspenders. An ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen
children on its tailboard."
Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," he said at length,
"that those persons who try to tempt these people out of the congested
city to farms, don't see how falsely they go about it. They should
reproduce the city in miniature--a dozen farmhouses must be huddled
together to make a snug little town, where all the children may play
and where the women, as they work, may talk across the windows. They
must build villages like the farming towns of France.
"But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? From here even the
narrowest fancy reaches out to the four watery corners of the earth.
No nose is so green and country-bred that it doesn't sniff the spices
of India. Great ships lie in the channel camouflaged with war. If we
could forget the terror of the submarine, would not these lines and
stars and colors appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of the
far-off seas?
"Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand barrels, oil
maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing at fat attention to go aboard.
Except for numbers it might appear--although I am rusty at the
legend--that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves for
roguery when the ship is out to sea. Doubtless if one knocked upon a
top and put his ear close upon a barrel, he would hear a villain's
guttural voice inside, asking if the time were come.
"Then there are the theatres and parks, great caverns where a subway
is being built. There are geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on
dizzy lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus), a roar of
traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating--always eating.
There has been nothing like this in all the ages. Babylon and Nineveh
were only villages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though all the
cities of antiquity had packed their bags and moved here to a common
spot."
"Please, Flint," this from Colum, "but you forget that the faces of
those who live in the country are happier. That's all that counts."
"Not happier--less alert, that's all--duller. For contentment, I'll
wager against any farmhand the old woman who sells apples at the
corner. She polishes them on her apron with--with spit. There is an
Italian who peddles ice from a handcart on our street, and he never
sees me without a grin. The folk who run our grocery, a man and his
wife, seem happy all the day. No! we misjudge the city and we have
done so since the days of Wordsworth. If we prized the city rightly,
we would be at more pains to make it better--to lessen its suffering.
We ought to go into the crowded parts with an eye not only for the
poverty, but also with sympathy for its beauty--its love of
sunshine--the tenderness with which the elder children guard the
younger--its love of music--its dancing--its naturalness. If we had
this sympathy we could help--_ourselves_, first--and after that,
maybe, the East Side."
Flint arose and leaned against the chimney. He shook an accusing
finger at the company. "You, Colum, ruin fifty weeks for the sake of
two. You, Quill, hypnotize yourself into a frazzle by Saturday noon
with unnecessary fret. You peck over your food too much. A little
clear unmuddled thinking would straighten you out, even if you didn't
let the ants crawl over you on Sunday afternoon. Old Flannel Shirt is
blinded by his spleen against society. As for Wurm, he doesn't count.
He's only a harmless bit of mummy-wrapping."
"And what are you, Flint?" asked Quill.
"Me? A rational man, I hope."
"You--you are an egotist. That's what you are."
"Very well," said Flint. "It's just as you say."
There was a red flash from the top of the Metropolitan Tower. Flint
looked at his watch. "So?" he said, "I must be going."
And now that our party is over and I am home at last, I put out the
light and draw open the curtains. Tomorrow--it is to be a holiday--I
had planned to climb in the Highlands, for I, too, am addicted to the
country. But perhaps--perhaps I'll change my plan and stay in town.
I'll take a hint from Flint. I'll go down to Delancey Street and watch
the chaffering and buying. What he said was true. He overstated his
position, of course. Most propagandists do, being swept off in the
current of their swift conviction. One should like both the city and
the country; and the liking for one should heighten the liking for the
other. Any particular receptiveness must grow to be a general
receptiveness. Yet, in the main, certainly, Flint was right. I'll try
Delancey Street, I concluded, just this once.
Thousands of roofs lie below me, for I live in a tower as of
Teufelsdroeckh. And many of them shield a bit of grief--darkened rooms
where sick folk lie--rooms where hope is faint. And yet, as I believe,
under these roofs there is more joy than grief--more contentment and
happiness than despair, even in these grievous times of war. If Quill
here frets himself into wakefulness and Colum chafes for the coming of
the summer, also let us remember that in the murk and shadows of these
rooms there are, at the least, thirty sailors from Central Park--one
old fellow in particular who, although the hour is late, still putters
with his boat in the litter of his dining-room. Glue-pots on the
sideboard! Clamps among the china, and lumber on the hearth! And down
on Grand Street, snug abed, dreaming of pleasant conquest, sleeps the
dark-eyed Italian girl. On a chair beside her are her champagne boots,
with stockings to match hung across the back.
Runaway Studies.
In my edition of "Elia," illustrated by Brock, whose sympathetic pen,
surely, was nibbed in days contemporary with Lamb, there is a sketch
of a youth reclining on a window-seat with a book fallen open on his
knees. He is clad in a long plain garment folded to his heels which
carries a hint of a cathedral choir but which, doubtless, is the
prescribed costume of an English public school. This lad is gazing
through the casement into a sunny garden--for the artist's vague
stippling invites the suspicion of grass and trees. Or rather, does
not the intensity of his regard attest that his nimble thoughts have
jumped the outmost wall? Already he journeys to those peaks and lofty
towers that fringe the world of youth--a dizzy range that casts a
magic border on his first wide thoughts, to be overleaped if he seek
to tread the stars.
And yet it seems a sleepy afternoon. Flowers nod upon a shelf in the
idle breeze from the open casement. On the warm sill a drowsy sunlight
falls, as if the great round orb of day, having labored to the top of
noon, now dawdled idly on the farther slope. A cat dozes with lazy
comfort on the window-seat. Surely, this is the cat--if the old story
be believed--the sleepiest of all her race, in whose dull ear the
mouse dared to nest and breed.
This lad, who is so lost in thought, is none other than Charles Lamb,
a mere stripling, not yet grown to his black small-clothes and sober
gaiters, a shrill squeak of a boy scarcely done with his battledore.
And here he sits, his cheek upon his palm, and dreams of the future.
But Lamb himself has written of this window-seat. Journeying northward
out of London--in that wonderful middle age of his in which the Elia
papers were composed--journeying northward he came once on the great
country house where a part of his boyhood had been spent. It had been
but lately given to the wreckers, "and the demolition of a few weeks,"
he writes, "had reduced it to--an antiquity."
"Had I seen those brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction," he continues, "at the plucking of every pannel I should
have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to
spare a plank at least out of that cheerful storeroom, in whose hot
window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before,
and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted
it about me--it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns...."
I confess to a particular enjoyment of this essay, with its memory of
tapestried bedrooms setting forth upon their walls "the unappeasable
prudery of Diana" under the peeping eye of Actaeon; its echoing
galleries once so dreadful when the night wind caught the candle at
the turn; its hall of family portraits. But chiefly it is this
window-seat that holds me--the casement looking on the garden and its
southern sun-baked wall--the lad dreaming on his volume of Cowley, and
leaping the garden border for the stars. These are the things that I
admit most warmly to my affection.
It is not in the least that I am a lover of Cowley, who seems an
unpleasantly antiquated author. I would choose, instead, that the
youthful Elia were busy so early with one of his favorite
Elizabethans. He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of
Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from a circulating
library, yet I would willingly move the occasion forward, coincident
to this. And I suspect that the artist Brock is also indifferent to
Cowley: for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the shelf for
the sure time when Cowley shall grow dull? Has he not even put Cowley
flat down upon his face, as if, already neglected, he had slipped from
the lad's negligent fingers--as if, indeed, Elia's far-striding
meditation were to him of higher interest than the stiff measure of
any poet?
I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay upon the rug
before the fire to read his book, with his chin resting on both his
hands. His favorite hour was the winter twilight before the family
came together for their supper, for at that hour the lamplighter went
his rounds and threw a golden string of dots upon the street. He drove
an old thin horse and he stood on the seat of the cart with
up-stretched taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of the fire
was enough for the child to read, for he lay close against the hearth.
And as the shadows gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly,
of such intensity that the excitement of it swept through his body and
out into his waving legs. Perhaps its last copy has now vanished off
the earth. It dealt with a deserted house on a lonely road, where
chains clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of earth,
glimmered at the windows, while groans--such was the dark fancy of the
author--issued from a windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter
in which the hero was locked in a haunted room and saw a candle at a
chink of the wall. It belonged to the villain, who nightly played
there a ghostly antic to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure.
And in summer the child read on the casement of the dining-room with
the window up. It was the height of a tall man from the ground, and
this gave it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This sill
could be dully reached from inside, but the approach from the outside
was riskiest and best. For an adventuring mood this window was a kind
of postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond the eye of both
the sitting-room and cook. Sometimes it was the bridge of a lofty
ship with a pilot going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a
channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step-ladder which--on
Thursday afternoons when the cook was out--unbent from its sober
household duties and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill
the child read his books on summer days. His cousins sat inside on
chairs, starched for company, and read safe and dimpled authors, but
his were of a vagrant kind. There was one book, especially, in which a
lad not much bigger than himself ran from home and joined a circus. A
scolding aunt was his excuse. And the child on the sill chafed at his
own happy circumstance which denied him these adventures.
In a dark room in an upper story of the house there was a great box
where old books and periodicals were stored. No place this side of
Cimmeria had deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of the
neighbor's cow, which showed a gloomy window on the garden, gave quite
the chill. It was only on the brightest days that the child dared to
rummage in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind fumbling
unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent over, jack-knife fashion,
until the upper part of him--all above the legs--disappeared. In the
obscurity--his head being gone--it must have seemed that Solomon lived
upon the premises and had carried out his ugly threat in that old
affair of the disputed child. Then he lifted out the papers--in
particular a set of _Leslie's Weekly_ with battle pictures of the
Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules Verne--a journey to the
center of the earth--and he spread its chapters before the window in
the dusty light.
But the view was high across the houses of the city to a range of
hills where tall trees grew as a hedge upon the world. And it was the
hours when his book lay fallen that counted most, for then he built
poems in his fancy of ships at sea and far-off countries.
It is by a fine instinct that children thus neglect their books,
whether it be Cowley or Circus Dick. When they seem most truant they
are the closest rapt. A book at its best starts the thought and sends
it off as a happy vagrant. It is the thought that runs away across the
margin that brings back the richest treasure.
But all reading in childhood is not happy. It chanced that lately in
the long vacation I explored a country school for boys. It stood on
the shaded street of a pretty New England village, so perched on a
hilltop that it looked over a wide stretch of lower country. There
were many marks of a healthful outdoor life--a football field and
tennis courts, broad lawns and a prospect of distant woodland for a
holiday excursion. It was on the steps of one of the buildings used
for recitation that I found a tattered dog-eared remnant of _The
Merchant of Venice_. So much of its front was gone that at the very
first of it Shylock had advanced far into his unworthy schemes.
Evidently the book, by its position at the corner of the steps, had
been thrown out immediately at the close of the final class, as if
already it had been endured too long.
In the stillness of the abandoned school I sat for an hour and read
about the choosing of the caskets. The margins were filled with
drawings--one possibly a likeness of the teacher. Once there was a
figure in a skirt--straight, single lines for legs--_Jack's
girl_--scrawled in evident derision of a neighbor student's amatory
weakness. There were records of baseball scores. Railroads were drawn
obliquely across the pages, bending about in order not to touch the
words, with a rare tunnel where some word stood out too long. Here and
there were stealthy games of tit-tat-toe, practiced, doubtless, behind
the teacher's back. Everything showed boredom with the play. What
mattered it which casket was selected! Let Shylock take his pound of
flesh! Only let him whet his knife and be quick about it! All's one.
It's at best a sad and sleepy story suited only for a winter's day.
But now spring is here--spring that is the king of all the seasons.
A bee comes buzzing on the pane. It flies off in careless truantry.
The clock ticks slowly like a lazy partner in the teacher's dull
conspiracy. Outside stretches the green world with its trees and
hills and moving clouds. There is a river yonder with swimming-holes.
A dog barks on a distant road.
Presently the lad's book slips from his negligent fingers. He places
it face down upon the desk. It lies disregarded like that volume of
old Cowley one hundred years ago. His eyes wander from the black-board
where the _Merchant's_ dry lines are scanned and marked.
' ' ' ' '
_In sooth, I know not why I am so sad._
And then ... his thoughts have clambered through the window. They have
leaped across the schoolyard wall. Still in his ears he hears the
jogging of the _Merchant_--but the sound grows dim. Like that other
lad of long ago, his thoughts have jumped the hills. Already, with
giddy stride, they are journeying to the profound region of the stars.
[Illustration]
On Turning Into Forty.
The other day, without any bells or whistles, I slipped off from the
thirties. I felt the same sleepiness that morning. There was no
apparent shifting of the grade.
I am conscious, maybe, that my agility is not what it was fifteen
years ago. I do not leap across the fences. But I am not yet comic.
Yonder stout man waddles as if he were a precious bombard. He strains
at his forward buttons. Unless he mend his appetite, his shoes will be
lost below his waistcoat. Already their tops and hulls, like battered
caravels, disappear beneath his fat horizon. With him I bear no
fellowship. But although nature has not stuffed me with her sweets to
this thick rotundity; alas, despite of tubes and bottles, no shadowy
garden flourishes on my top--waving capillary grasses and a prim path
between the bush. Rather, I bear a general parade and smooth pleasance
open to the glimpses of the moon.
And so at last I have turned into the forties. I remember now how
heedlessly I had remarked a small brisk clock ticking upon the shelf
as it counted the seconds--paying out to me, as it were, for my
pleasure and expense, the brief coinage of my life. I had heard, also,
unmindful of the warning, a tall and solemn clock as I lay awake,
marking regretfully the progress of the night. And I had been told
that water runs always beneath the bridge, that the deepest roses
fade, that Time's white beard keeps growing to his knee. These phrases
of wisdom I had heard and others. But what mattered them to me when my
long young life lay stretched before me? Nor did the revolving stars
concern me--nor the moon, spring with its gaudy brush, nor gray-clad
winter. Nor did I care how the wind blew the swift seasons across the
earth. Let Time's horses gallop, I cried. Speed! The bewildering peaks
of youth are forward. The inn for the night lies far across the
mountains.
But the seconds were entered on the ledger. At last the gray penman
has made his footing. The great page turns. I have passed out of the
thirties.
I am not given to brooding on my age. It is only by checking the years
on my fingers that I am able to reckon the time of my birth. In the
election booth, under a hard eye, I fumble the years and invite
suspicion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think it was. But
even this salient fact--this milepost on my eternity--I remember most
quickly by the recollection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth
birthday. By way of celebration on that day, having selected the
longest blade, I cut the date--1888--in the kitchen woodwork with
rather a pretty flourish when the cook was out. The swift events that
followed the discovery--the dear woman paddled me with a great spoon
through the door--fastened the occurrence in my memory.
It was about the year of the jack-knife that there lived in our
neighborhood a bad boy whose name was Elmer. I would have quite
forgotten him except that I met him on the pavement a few weeks ago.
He was the bully of our street--a towering rogue with red hair and one
suspender. I remember a chrome bandage which he shifted from toe to
toe. This lad was of larger speech than the rest of us and he could
spit between his teeth. He used to snatch the caps of the younger boys
and went off with our baseball across the fences. He was wrapped, too,
in mystery, and it was rumored--softly from ear to ear--that once he
had been arrested and taken to the station-house.
And yet here he was, after all these years, not a bearded brigand with
a knife sticking from his boot, but a mild undersized man, hat in
hand, smiling at me with pleasant cordiality. His red hair had faded
to a harmless carrot. From an overtopping rascal he had dwindled to my
shoulder. It was as strange and incomprehensible as if the broken
middle-aged gentleman, my familiar neighbor across the street who nods
all day upon his step, were pointed out to me as Captain Kidd retired.
Can it be that all villains come at last to a slippered state? Does
Dick Turpin of the King's highway now falter with crutch along a
garden path? And Captain Singleton, now that his last victim has
walked the plank--does he doze on a sunny bench beneath his pear tree?
Is no blood or treasure left upon the earth? Do all rascals lose their
teeth? "Good evening, Elmer," I said, "it has been a long time since
we have met." And I left him agreeable and smiling.
No, certainly I do not brood upon my age. Except for a gift I forget
my birthday. It is only by an effort that I can think of myself as
running toward middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a
pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and because of an
old-fashioned deference for age I bow and scrape in the doorway for
his passage.
Of course I admit a suckling to be my junior. A few days since I
happened to dine at one of the Purple Pups of our Greenwich Village.
At my table, which was slashed with yellow and blue in the fashion of
these places, sat a youth of seventeen who engaged me in conversation.
Plainly, even to my blindness, he was younger than myself. The milk
was scarcely dry upon his mouth. He was, by his admission across the
soup, a writer of plays and he had received already as many as three
pleasant letters of rejection. He flared with youth. Strange gases and
opinion burned in his speech. His breast pocket bulged with
manuscript, for reading at a hint.
I was poking at my dumpling when he asked me if I were a socialist.
No, I replied. Then perhaps I was an anarchist or a Bolshevist, he
persisted. N-no, I answered him, sadly and slowly, for I foresaw his
scorn. He leaned forward across the table. Begging my pardon for an
intrusion in my affairs, he asked me if I were not aware that the
world was slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I had come
frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken and decrepit. The
youngster had his manuscripts and his anarchy. He held the wriggling
world by its futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but it
was a gay world and daubed with color.
And yet, despite this humiliating encounter, I feel quite young.
Something has passed before me that may be Time. The summers have come
and gone. There is snow on the pavement where I remember rain. I see,
if I choose, the long vista of the years, with diminishing figures,
and tin soldiers at the start. Yet I doubt if I am growing older. To
myself I seem younger than in my twenties. In the twenties we are
quite commonly old. We bear the whole weight of society. The world has
been waiting so long for us and our remedies. In the twenties we scorn
old authority. We let Titian and Keats go drown themselves. We are
skeptical in religion, and before our unrelenting iron throne
immortality and all things of faith plead in vain. Although I can show
still only a shabby inventory, certainly I would not exchange myself
for that other self in the twenties. I have acquired in these last few
years a less narrow sympathy and a belief that some of my colder
reasons may be wrong. Nor would I barter certain knacks of
thoughts--serious and humorous--for the renewed ability to leap across
a five-foot bar. I am less fearful of the world and its accidents. I
have less embarrassment before people. I am less moody. I tack and
veer less among my betters for some meaner profit. Surely I am growing
younger.