soldiers appealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battledore and
shuttlecock. Through tag, fire-engine, pom-pom-pull-away,
hide-and-seek, baseball, and boxing, I came to tennis, which I knew
instinctively was to be my athletic _grand passion_. Perhaps I was
first attracted by the game's constant humor which was forever making
the ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players to
act like solemn automata. For children are usually quicker than
grown-ups to see these droll resemblances. I came by degrees to like
the game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture and
curve. And before long I vaguely felt what I later learned
consciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three sets
with a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moral
equipment; six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, of that most
important, and usually veiled part of him, his subconscious
personality. Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled to
take a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonial
merger. But I would respectfully advise them rather to play "singles"
with each other before venturing upon a continuous game of doubles.
The collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I first
collected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gave
way to discrimination, which led to picking out a favorite fern. This
was chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. I
called it "The Alligator" from its fancied resemblance to my brother's
alligator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of this fern brought a
dawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable to
others. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting
impressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of
nature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic
thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or
best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in
each department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial
incense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those of
Capri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis as
seen at dawn from the depths of the Grand Cañon.
II
Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary to-day
for writers to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgotten
its variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makes
history and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into the
mysteries of the currency of all nations. Then what a tonic it is for
the memory! Only think of the implications of the annual
price-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collector
worthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the
current market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell you
offhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled
condition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled,
unperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged with all manner of
initials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, or
water-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of
Egypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for the
enthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that its
proprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work.
We often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions. This
depends entirely upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy their
treasures giddily, madly, my own experience proves. For, as youthful
stamp-collectors went in those days, I was a philatelic magnate. By
inheritance, by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates, by
rummaging in every available attic, by correspondence with a wide
circle of foreign missionaries, and by delivering up my whole
allowance, to the dealers, I had amassed a collection of several
thousand varieties. Among these were such gems as all of the
triangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of the early Persians, and
our own spectacular issue of 1869 unused, including the one on which
the silk-stockinged fathers are signing the Declaration of
Independence. Such possessions as these I well-nigh worshiped.
Even to-day, after having collected no stamps for a generation, the
chance sight of an "approval sheet," with its paper-hinged reminders
of every land, gives me a curious sensation. There visit my spine
echoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions in
boyhood. These were the days when my stamps had formed for me mental
pictures--more or less accurate--of each country from Angola to
Zululand, its history, climate, scenery, inhabitants, and rulers. To
possess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind with
being given the freedom of the land itself, and introduced with warm
recommendations to its _genius loci_.
Even old circulars issued by dealers, now long gone to stampless
climes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. I
prefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint,
other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. The other day I found in
an old scrapbook a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score of
years with its very first words:
CLEARING
OF A LARGE PART OF MY RETAIL DEPOSITORY
Being lately so much engaged into my wholesale business ... I
have made up my mind to sell out a large post of my
retail-stamps at under-prices. They are rests of larger
collections containing for the most, only older marks and
not thrash possibly put together purposedly as they used to
be composed by the other dealers and containing therefore
mostly but worthless and useless nouveautés of Central
America.
Before continuing this persuasive flow, the dealer inserts a number of
testimonials like the following. He calls them:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sent package having surpassed my expectations I beg to remit
by to-days post-office-ordres Mk. 100. Kindly please send me
by return of post offered album wanted for retail sale.
G. B.--HANNOVER.
The dealer now comes to his peroration:
I beg to call the kind of attention of every buyer to the
fact of my selling all these packages and albums with my own
loss merely for clearings sake of my retail business and in
order to get rid of them as much and as soon as possible.
With 25-60 % abatement I give stamps and whole things to
societies against four weeks calculation.
All collectors are bound to oblige themselves by writing
contemporaneously with sending in the depository amount to
make calculation within a week as latest term.
It is enough! As I read, the old magic enfolds me, and I am seized
with longing to turn myself into a society of collectors and to
implore the altruistic dealer "kindly please" to send me, at a
prodigious "abatement," "stamps and whole things against four weeks
calculation."
III
The youngest children of large families are apt to be lonely folk,
somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was such
a child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather
inclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage of
evolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits
of his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the more
sophisticated forms natural to a lonely young city-dweller.
When stamps had passed their zenith I was filled with a lust for
slaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat
watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of
the muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping
against hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive
beneath the surface of things, into touch with the great living
realities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by
vanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulled
in hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest
old and strong as the race.
But presently I myself was drawn, like the cork, beneath the
superficial surface of the angler's art. For in the public library I
chanced on a shelf of books, that told about fishing of a nobler,
jollier, more seductive sort. At once I was consumed with a passion
for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal leaders, double-tapered
casting-lines of braided silk, and artificial flies more fair than
birds of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, I waded the
streams of England with kindly old Isaak Walton, and ranged the
Restigouche with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. These dreams
brought with them a certain amount of satisfaction--about as much
satisfaction as if they had come as guests to a surprise party, each
equipped with a small sandwich and a large appetite. The visions were
pleasant, of course, but they cried out, and made me cry out, for
action. There were no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, and
there was no way of getting to any trouty realm of delight. But I did
what I could to be prepared for the blessed hour when we should meet.
I secured five new subscriptions or so to "The Boys' Chronicle" (let
us call it), and received in return a fly-rod so flimsy that it would
have resolved itself into its elements at sight of a half-pound
trout. It was destined, though, never to meet with this embarrassment.
My casting-line bore a family resemblance to grocery string. My leader
was a piece of gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an old
wallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond my means; and it was
perplexing to know what to do, until I found a book which said that it
was better by far to tie your own flies. With joyful relief I acted on
this counsel. Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White Millers
with shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. One of these I stained and streaked
with my heart's blood into the semblance of a Parmacheene Belle. The
canary furnished materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard English
sparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My masterpiece, the beautiful,
parti-colored fly known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my sister's
Easter bonnet.
I covered the points of the hooks with pieces of cork, and fished on
the front lawn from morning to night, leaning with difficulty against
the thrust of an imaginary torrent. And I never ceased striving to
make the three flies straighten out properly as the books directed,
and fall like thistledown upon the strategic spot where the empty
tomato can was anchored, and then jiggle appetizingly down over the
four-pounder, where he sulked in the deep hole just beyond the
hydrant.
The hunting fever was wakened by the need for the Brown Hackle already
mentioned. But as the choice of weapons and of victims culminated in
the air-gun and the sparrow, respectively, my earliest hunting was
confined even more closely than my fishing to the library and the
dense and teeming forests of the imagination.
But while somewhat handicapped here by the scarcity of ferocious game,
I was more fortunate in another enthusiasm which attacked me at almost
the same time. For however unpropitious the hunting is on any given
part of the earth's surface, there is everywhere and always an
abundance of good hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The garden, the
attic, the tennis lawn all suffered. And my initiative was
strengthened by the discovery of an incomparable book all about a dead
man's chest, and not only digging for gold in a secret island, but
finding it, too, by jingo! and fighting off the mutineers.
These aspirations naturally led to games of Pirate, or Outlaw, which
were handicapped, however, by the scarcity of playmates, and their
curious hesitation to serve as victims. As pirates and outlaws are
well known to be the most superstitious of creatures, inclining to the
primitive in their religious views, we were naturally led into a sort
of dread enthusiasm for--or enthusiastic dread of--the whole pantheon
of spooks, sprites, and bugaboos to which savages and children, great
and small, bow the knee. My dreams at that time ran something like
this:
PARADISE REVISED
Playing hymn-tunes day and night
On a harp _may_ be all right
For the grown-ups; but for me,
I do wish that heaven could be
Sort o' like a circus, run
So a kid could have some fun!
There I'd not play harps, but horns
When I chased the unicorns--
Magic tubes with pistons greasy,
Slides that pushed and pulled out easy,
Cylinders of snaky brass
Where the fingers like to fuss,
Polished like a looking-glass,
Ending in a blunderbuss.
I would ride a horse of steel
Wound up with a ratchet-wheel.
Every beast I'd put to rout
Like the man I read about.
I would singe the leopard's hair,
Stalk the vampire and the adder,
Drive the werewolf from his lair,
Make the mad gorilla madder.
Needle-guns my work should do.
But, if beasts got closer to,
I would pierce them to the marrow
With a barbed and poisoned arrow,
Or I'd whack 'em on the skull
Till my scimiter was dull.
If these weapons didn't work,
With a kris or bowie-knife,
Poniard, assegai, or dirk,
I would make them beg for life;--
Spare them, though, if they'd be good
And guard me from what haunts the wood--
From those creepy, shuddery sights
That come round a fellow nights--
Imps that squeak and trolls that prowl,
Ghouls, the slimy devil-fowl,
Headless goblins with lassoes,
Scarlet witches worse than those,
Flying dragon-fish that bellow
So as most to scare a fellow....
There, as nearly as I could,
I would live like Robin Hood,
Taking down the mean and haughty,
Getting plunder from the naughty
To reward all honest men
Who should seek my outlaw's den.
When I'd wearied of these pleasures
I'd go hunt for hidden treasures--
In no ordinary way,
Pirates' luggers I'd waylay;
Board them from my sinking dory,
Wade through decks of gore and glory,
Drive the fiends, with blazing matchlock,
Down below, and snap the hatch-lock.
Next, I'd scud beneath the sky-land,
Sight the hills of Treasure Island,
Prowl and peer and prod and prise,
Till there burst upon my eyes
Just the proper pirate's freight:
Gold doubloons and pieces of eight!
Then--the very best of all--
Suddenly a stranger tall
Would appear, and I'd forget
That we hadn't ever met.
And with cap upthrown I'd greet him
(Turning from the plunder, yellow)
And I'd hurry fast to meet him,
For he'd be the very fellow
Who, I think, invented fun--
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died. They grew up,
instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now
the high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the
inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten
psychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered
and begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze--why, my
life-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuables
in the cellars and attics, the chimney-pieces and desert islands of
the mind, and secret attempts to coin them into currency.
And so I might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of other
things like reading, modeling, folk-lore, cathedrals, writing,
pictures, and the theater. Then there is the long story of that
enthusiasm called Love, of Friendship its twin, and their elder
brother, Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. And travel and
adventure and so on. But no! It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtain
attention under false pretenses. If I have caught the reader's eye by
promising to illustrate in outline a new method of writing
autobiography, I must not abuse his confidence by putting that method
into practice. So, with a regret almost equal to that of Lewis
Carroll's famous Bellman--
I skip twenty years--
and close with my latest enthusiasm.
IV
Confirmed wanderers that we were, my wife and I had rented a house for
the winter in a Massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhat
under the spell of the place. Nevertheless, we had decided to move on
soon--to try, in fact, another trip through Italy. Our friendly
neighbors urged us to buy land up the "back lane" instead, and build
and settle down. We knew nothing of this region, however, and scarcely
heard them.
But they were so insistent that one day we ventured up the back lane
at dusk and began to explore the woods. It grew dark and we thought of
turning back. Then it began to grow light again. A full moon was
climbing up through the maples, inviting further explorations. We
pushed through a dense undergrowth and presently were in a grove of
great white pines. There was a faint sound of running water, and
suddenly we came upon an astonishing brook--wide, swift, and musical.
We had not suspected the existence of such a brook within a dozen
leagues. It was over-arched by tall oaks and elms, beeches, tupelos,
and maples. The moonbeams were dancing in the ripples and on the
floating castles of foam.
"What a place for a study!"
"Yes; a log cabin with a big stone fireplace."
The remarks came idly, but our eyes met and held. Moved by one impulse
we turned from the stream and remarked what bosh people will sometimes
talk, and discussed the coming Italian trip as we moved cautiously
among the briers. But when we came once more to the veteran pines,
they seemed more glamorous than ever in the moonlight, especially one
that stood near a large holly, apart from the rest--a three-prong
lyrical fellow--and his opposite, a burly, thickset archer, bending
his long-bow into a most exquisite curve. The fragrant pine needles
whispered. The brook lent its faint music.
"Quick! We had better get away!"
A forgotten lumber road led us safe from briers up a hill. Out of a
dense oak grove we suddenly emerged upon the more open crest. Our feet
sank deep in moss.
"Look," I said.
Over the heads of the high forest trees below shimmered a mile of
moonlit marshes, and beyond them a gleam--perhaps from some vessel far
at sea, perhaps even from a Provincetown lighthouse.
"Yes, but look!"
At a touch I faced around and beheld, crowning the hill, a stately
company of red cedars, comely and dense and mysterious as the
cypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched in moonlight.
"But what a place for a house!"
"Let's give up Italy," was the answer, "and make this wood our home."
By instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers. Never had
we possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. But the
nest-building enthusiasm had us at last. Our hands met in compact. As
we strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten-o'clock dinner we talked of
road-making, swamps, pneumatic water-systems, the nimbleness of
dollars, and mountains of other difficulties. And we agreed that the
only kind of faith which can easily remove mountains is the faith of
the enthusiast.
V
THE AUTO-COMRADE
Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer
the ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and he will look as
though you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing.
"There are," as Ruth Cameron truly observes, "a great many people to
whom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours
with only their own selves for company. To escape that terrible
catastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read
the most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not
only without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine
with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are
fairly frantic."
If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he
has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a
condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife
and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this
epitaph:
"Here lies the pod.
The Pease are shelled and gone to God."
Now, pod-like people such as he are always solitary wherever other
people are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressing
than solitariness. These people, however, fall through sheer ignorance
into a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude and
solitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life--to the wise
keeper of the joyful heart--there is just one difference between these
two: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, to
the artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-Comrade.
As it is the Auto-Comrade who makes all the difference, I shall try to
describe his appearance. His eyes are the most arresting part of him.
They never peer stupidly through great, thick spectacles of others'
making. They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and sometimes make
their happiest discoveries during the small hours. These hours are
truly small because the Auto-Comrade often turns his eyes into the
lenses of a moving-picture machine--such an entertaining one that it
compresses the hours to seconds. It is through constant, alert use
that his eyes have become sharp. They can pierce through the rinds of
the toughest personalities, and even penetrate on occasion into the
future. They can also take in whole panoramas of the past in one
sweeping look. For they are of that "inner" variety through which
Wordsworth, winter after winter, used to survey his daffodil-fields.
"The bliss of solitude," he called them.
The Auto-Comrade has an adjustable brow. It can be raised high enough
to hold and reverberate and add rich overtones to, the grandest
chords of thought ever struck by a Plato, a Buddha, or a Kant. The
next instant it may easily be lowered to the point where the ordinary
cartoon of commerce or the tiny cachinnation of a machine-made
Chesterton paradox will not ring entirely hollow. As for his voice, it
can at times be more musical than Melba's or Caruso's. Without being
raised above a whisper, it can girdle the globe. It can barely breathe
some delicious new melody; yet the thing will float forth not only
undiminished, but gathering beauty, significance, and incisiveness in
every land it passes through.
The Auto-Comrade is an erect, wiry young figure of an athlete. As he
trades at the Seven-League Boot and Shoe Concern, it never bothers him
to accompany you on the longest tramps. His feet simply cannot be
tired out. As for his hands, they are always alert to give you a lift
up the rough places on the mountain-side. He has remarkable presence
of body. In any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot. He
is at once seer, creator, accomplisher, and present help in time of
trouble. But his everyday occupation is that of entertainer. He is the
joy-bringer--the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicinity there is no
such thing as ennui or lonesomeness. Emerson wrote:
"When I would spend a lonely day
Sun and moon are in my way."
But for pals of the Auto-Comrade, not only sun, moon, etc., are in the
way, but all of his own unlimited resources. For every time and season
he has a fittingly varied repertory of entertainment.
Now and again he startles you by the legerdemain feat of snatching
brand-new ideas out of the blue, like rabbits out of a hat. While you
stand at the port-hole of your cabin and watch the rollers rushing
back to the beloved home-land you are quitting, he marshals your
friends and acquaintances into a long line for a word of greeting or a
rapid-fire chat, just as though you were some idol of the people, and
were steaming in past the Statue of Liberty on your way home from
lionizing and being lionized abroad, and the Auto-Comrade were the
factotum at your elbow who asks, "What name, please?"
After the friends and acquaintances, he even brings up your _bêtes
noires_ and dearest enemies for inspection and comment. Strangely
enough, viewed in this way, these persons no longer seem so
contemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did. At this point
your factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief he
always carries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and lo! you even
begin to discover good points about the chaps, hitherto unsuspected.