Lastseason I gave up golf forever two days before our course opened in May, on the evenings of June 17th and July 4th, at noon on July 27th, on the evenings of August 2nd, 9th, 15th, and 21st, at 11:15A.M.on Labor Day, again Labor Day evening, on September 19th, 23rd, 30th, and October 3rd, 11th and 18th. I am writing this in mid-January, when the drifts are piled five feet deep over our bunkers, and the water-carries are frozen solid. I have played my last game of golf. The coming season I shall devote to the intensive cultivation of my garden. The links have no allure for me.
“And if,” says my wife, “I could believe that, I should be happier than ever before in the long years of my golf widowhood.”
“But you can,” I answer, with grieved surprise.
She looks at me, with that superior and tolerant smile women know so well how to assume.
“You men are all such children!” is her, it seems to me, somewhat irrelevant retort.
I fell to musing on my friend, the noted war correspondent (now a Major in the United States Army in France). All things considered, he was the most consistent, or perhaps I should say persistent, quitter the game of golf has ever known. He used to quit forever on an average of three times a week, and I have known him to abandon the game twice during a round, which is something of a record. He played every summer on our beautiful Berkshire course, which crosses and recrosses the winding Housatonic, not to mention sundry swamps, and boasts the most luxuriant fairway, and by the same token the rankest rough, in all America. It is the course Owen Johnson once immortalized in his story,Even Threes.
How well I remember that peaceful, happy May, back in 1914! Our course had emerged from its annual spring flood, newly top-dressed with rich river silt, and a few warm days brought the turf through the scars and made the whole glorious expanse of fairway, winding through the silver willows, a velvet carpet. I had given my orders to the greens-keepers, and gone to New York for a day or two—reluctantly, of course—and there met the famous war correspondent, in those peaceful times out of a regular job and turned novelistpro tem. He had just relieved himself of his final chapter, and readily yielded to my persuasions to return withme to the velvet field and the whistling drive. We “entrained,” as he would say in one of his military dispatches.
As far as the Massachusetts-Connecticut state-line he talked of Mexican revolutions, Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese art,vers libre, mushrooms, and such other topics as were of interest in the spring of 1914. But at the state-line, chancing a look out of the window, he saw the doming billow of blue mountains which marks the entrance to our Berkshire intervales, and a strange gleam came into his eyes. His square jaws set. His whole countenance was transformed. Turning back to me, he half hissed, grimly,—
“I amnotgoing to press this season!”
I knew he was fairly on his way to giving up golf forever.
Of course, when a man hasn't played all winter, but has been engaged in the mild and harmless exercise of writing a novel, his hands become soft. Then, when he suddenly begins to play thirty-six holes a day, and takes a lock-grip on his clubs as tightly as if he supposed somebody was trying to snatch them away from him, he is apt to develop certain blisters. To a war correspondent and traveler over the Dawson Trail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player they are of profound importance. The next day, in our foursome, they affected the war correspondent's game. He became softly querulous.
“I wish you wouldn't talk when I am about to drive,” he complained to a caddie.
“This mashie is too heavy for me,” he muttered to himself.
“Every time I make a stroke, that crack on the third finger of my left hand, above the top joint, opens and pains me,” he declared to anybody who would listen.
His drive from the eighteenth tee went kerplunk into the mud, and buried itself like a startled woodchuck. He said nothing, but took a left-handed club from his bag—for he began the game left-handed, and had switched over the year before, upon hearing our professional say that no left-handed player could ever become a great golfer. With this fresh implement, he began to dig. He finished the hole left-handed, with three perfect shots! We tried to cheer him up, but he was not to be cheered.
“What's the use!” he wailed. “Here I've spent a year and a fortune unlearning how to play left-handed. I'm never going to play the confounded game again!”
And, by way of token, he began to talk about Theodore Roosevelt.
That was his first renunciation for 1914. The next few days the game went well, and so did work on a new novel he had commenced, fired by his success in getting off seventeen perfect tee-shots. But he reached his fourth chapter and anoff afternoon on the same fair Saturday. What a lovely day it was!—you know, one of those early June days that invariably causes some woman to quote Lowell. But the famous war correspondent saw no charm in the leafy luxury around him, in the blue sky, the lush grass. He heard no pipe of birds nor whisper of the breeze. His driver wasn't working right. Then his over-worked mashie went back on him. By the fourth green he was taking three putts, and by the eighth he was picking up. His face was a thundercloud; his vocabulary disclosed a richness gleaned from camp and field which was a revelation even to our caddies; and that is no insignificant accomplishment.
Our tenth hole in those days was close to the club-house, and the tee was but 195 yards away—a good iron to the green. By the time we reached this tee, the war correspondent had very nearly exhausted even the stock of expletives he had acquired on the Dawson Trail, and had declared seven times that he wasthrough, yes,forever!
“Oh, come on and play just this hole—keep going to the club-house anyway,” we pleaded.
“Well,” he said, “I'll take one more shot—it's my last—positively. I'm going back to New York to-morrow.”
He tossed a scarred, cut, battered ball on the turf, scorning to make a tee. Yanking a cleek from his bag, he stepped up with the speed ofDuncan and swung. To our amazement, the ball flew like a bullet to the mark and disappeared over the lip of the green, headed straight for the pin. But he never saw it. He wasn't watching.
“Good shot!” we cried, with real enthusiasm.
“I wasn't looking, where'd it go?” he asked, with an attempt at scorn, which, however, was manifestly weakening.
“Got a putt fer a two,” said his caddie.
The noted man cast a withering look at this object of his previous invective. He still suspected something. We backed the caddie up, and he strode down the fairway with a certain reviving spring in his step.
There on the green, not six inches from the cup, reposed his battered ball!
“Been anybody else it would have gone in!” he muttered, as he sank it for a two.
That was his proud surrender. He said no more. He strode ahead to the next tee, and tore out a long, straight drive. Then he lit a cigarette and remarked that he had never seen the willows more beautiful, more silvery in the afternoon light.
Ah, well, poor chap, he did give up golf on the first of August, if not forever at least for the longest period of abstinence in his career on the links. On our last afternoon over the velvet together, before he left for the steamer that was to take him into the maelstrom, he paid littleattention to his game, and a surprised and, I fancied, even a slightly disappointed caddie followed him. (He was always most generous to his caddie when he had most abused him, like the hero of Goldoni's comedy.)
“I sha'n't see nice, sweet, unscarred green sod again for a long time,” he said, digging up a huge divot with unconscious irony. “I'm going to my last war, though.”
“Gracious,” said I, “are you going to give up War forever, too?”
“The world is going to give it up forever, after this one,” he replied.
I have seen him twice since, once when he was still a correspondent, once more recently when he came back in the uniform of Uncle Sam. And each time his greeting has been the same:—
“Have you got rid of that hook yet?”
Then he smiled—a wistful, tragic smile, and asked where all the new traps and bunkers are, how we contrived to lengthen the course, whether the new sixth green is in play yet, all the pathetically unimportant little gossip of our eighty acres of green meadow.
“Ah,” he said the last time we parted, “some day I'm coming back and make that 79 at last! Anybody can go over the top, but to break 80 at Stockbridge—!”
Then he left for the trenches of France.
I have another good friend who, unlike the Major, has never given up golf forever. This, as he himself admits (or I should not dare offer the explanation), is because he has never yet really played it. He, too, is rather well known at his avocation of play-writing; but golf is his real business in life when the season once gets under way. He has enabled several professionals to buy motor-cars, he has sent numerous fore-caddies through the high school, he has practised by the hour with individual clubs, but still, after almost a quarter of a century, he has never broken 90 on a first-class course. From my superior position (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten occasions broken 80, one of them at Manchester!), I sometimes wonder what keeps him at the game. Then I play with him, and realize. He has the divine, inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a round, of tearing off an astounding drive of 300 yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, which after hours of rolling finally comes to rest far out beyond any other ball in the foursome, or even the professional's drive. What does it matter if he scruffs his approach? What does it matter if he takes three putts? He has the memory of that drive, the unexpected, thrilling feel of it in arms and body, the tingling vision of the day when he will find out how he did it, and be able to repeat at will! That keeps him going—that, and a trophy he once achieved by winningthe beaten eight division of the sixth sixteen. It was a little pocket match-safe, but it is more precious in his eyes than pearls, aye, than much fine gold or his reputation as perhaps the deftest writer of dialogue on the American stage. It represents definite achievement in the game of Golf.
You may suppose, dear Reader, if by some miracle you are not a golfer, that I have been pressing the essayist's privilege and indulging in an attempt at whimsicality. Nothing, I assure you, could be farther from the fact. I am, in this chapter, a realist. All I have here set down is a record of actuality. Nay, I have erred on the other side. I have said nothing whatever about my own reasons for giving up golf forever. Nor have I told the story of the elderly gentlemen at a course near Boston, whom I once observed in an exhibition of renunciation that perhaps deserved recording.
This course was of nine holes (it is now the site of several apartment houses), and the last hole called for a carry over a little pond, to a green immediately in front of the club-house. The somewhat elderly and irascible gentleman in question, playing in a foursome, had reached this ninth tee on the shore of the pond, and even from the club veranda it was evident that his temper was not of the best. Things had not been going right for him. His three companionscarried the pond. Then he teed up, and drove—splash!—into the water. A remark was wafted through the still air. He teed again—another splash. Then followed an exhibition which I fear my wife would describe as childish. First this elderly gentleman spoke, in a loud, vexed voice. Then he hurled his driver into the pond. Then he snatched his bag of clubs from the caddie's shoulder, seized a stone from the pond side, stuffed it into the bag, grasped the strap as a hammer-thrower the handle of his weight, swung the bag three times around his head, and let it fly far out over the water. It hit with a great splash, and sank from sight. His three companions, respecting his mood, discreetly continued their game, while he came up to the club-house, sought a far corner of the veranda, and with a face closely resembling a Greek mask of Tragedy, sank down huddled into a chair.
On the veranda, too, his grief was respected. No one spoke to him. In fact, I think no one dared. We were careful that even our mirth did not reach his ears. He was alone with his thoughts. The afternoon waned. His three companions again reached the ninth tee, drove the pond, and came into the club-house to dress. The caddies were about to depart. Then a strange thing happened; at its first intimation we tiptoed to a window to observe. He roused himself, leaned over the rail, and called a caddie.
“Boy,” we heard him say, in a deep, tragic voice, “can you swim?”
“Yes, sir,” the caddie replied.
“All right. About thirty feet out in front of the ninth tee there's a bag at the bottom of the pond. Go get it for me, and I'll give you five dollars.”
The caddie ran, peeling his garments as he went. Modestly retaining his tattered underclothes, he splashed in from the tee, while the somewhat elderly golf player gesticulated directions on the bank. Presently the boy's toes detected something, and he did a pretty surface dive, emerging with the bag strap in his right hand. He also rescued the floating driver, and we saw the promised bill passed to him, and watched him drag on his clothes over his wet undergarments. Slowly, even tenderly, the somewhat elderly gentleman emptied the water and the stone from his bag, and wiped the clubs on his handkerchief. With the wet, dripping burden over his shoulder he came across the foot-bridge and into the locker room, while we hastened to remove our faces from the door and windows, and attempted to appear casual.
He entered in silence, and strode to his locker. The silence grew painful. Somebody simply had to speak, or laugh. Finally somebody did speak, which was probably the safer alternative.
“Decided to try again, eh?”
The somewhat elderly gentleman wheeled upon the assemblage, his dripping bag still hanging from his shoulder.
“Yes, damn it!” he thundered.
Well, I have never thrown my clubs into a pond, and I am sure you have never done anything so childish, either. But how many times have you and I both given up golf forever, and then returned to links the following day—“damn it”! We do not play for the exercise, we do not play because it “keeps us out in the open air.” Neither motive would hold a man for a week to the tantalizing, costly, soul-racking, nerve- and temper-destroying game. We play it because there is some diabolical—or celestial—fascination about the thing; some will-o'-the-wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale, through pit and pasture, toward the smooth haven of the putting green; some subtle, mysterious power every now and then coördinates our muscles and lets us achieve perfection for a single stroke, whereafter we tingle with remembrance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is the quest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation of the Divine Unrest, it spreads before us the soft green pathway down which we follow the Gleam. That is why you and I shall be giving it up forever on our eightieth birthday.
Youmay recall that Mr. Ezra Barkley acquired a great reputation for learning by imparting to the spinsters of Old Chester such astonishing facts as the approximate number of roe contained in a shad. His sister-in-law, in her ignorance, supposed there were only two hundred! Ezra also knew who first kept bees, and many other important things, usually of a statistical nature. I cannot recall that Mrs. Deland has told us where Ezra acquired his erudition, and I used at one time to wonder. But now I know. He read the “grape-vine” in the first editions of our daily papers.
Perhaps you don't know what “grape-vine” is? I rejoice in my ability to tell you. It is the name given by newspaper men to the jokes and squibs and bits of information clipped by the busy exchange reader, and put into type, making short paragraphs of varying lengths, which are dropped in at the bottom of a column to fill up the vacant space when the need arises. This need most often arises in preparing the first edition, the one which catches the early trains for the country.By the time the city edition goes to press sufficient news of battles, carnage, and sudden death, of politics and stock exchanges, has been prepared to fill every inch of available space. The city reader, therefore, sees little of this “grape-vine.” Thus we have a new argument for country life.
I am now a resident of the country, one hundred and fifty miles removed from New York and as far from Boston; and I am by way of becoming nearly as erudite as Ezra Barkley. I am, indeed, almost bewildered with the mass of information I am acquiring. This morning I read a column about the European war, all of which I have now forgotten. But how can I ever forget the two lines of “grape-vine” at the very bottom which filled out an otherwise vacant quarter inch? I am permanently a wiser man.
“Many Filipino women catch and sell fish for a living.”
Amid a world at war, too, how peaceful and soothing is this tabloid idyl of piscatorial toil!
After the acquisition of this morsel of learning I set diligently to work on the day's papers, both the morning editions and those “evening” editions which come to us here by a train leaving the city early in the afternoon, to see how much erudition I could accumulate in one sun's span. I think you of the cities will be astonished. I was myself. In a few weeks I shall read the encyclopædia advertisements with scorn insteadof longing. For instance, I have learned that “A new tooth-brush is cylindrical and is revolved against the teeth by a plunger working through its spirally grooved handle.” Obviously, just the implement for boys interested in motor-cars (as all boys are). They will play they are grinding valves and run joyously to brush their teeth.
I have learned that “In the last five years our national and state lawmaking bodies have passed 62,550 laws.” The surprising thing about this information is that the number is so small!
I have learned that “Russia has ten thousand lepers, taken care of by twenty-one institutions.”
I have acquired these valuable bits of ornithological lore: “The frigate-bird is capable of getting up a speed of ninety-six miles an hour with hardly a movement of its wings. The greater part of its life is spent in the air.” “The swallow has a larger mouth in proportion to its size than any other bird.”
I have, from the bottom of a single column, gleaned these three items of incalculable value: “By harnessing a fly to a tiny wagon an English scientist found it could draw one hundred and seventy times its own weight over smooth surfaces.”
“Missouri last year produced 195,634 tons of lead, a fairly heavy output.”
“The United States has five hundred and seventeen button-factories.”
The New YorkTimesstaggers me with this statistical line: “One Paris motion-picture plant produces an average of three million feet of films weekly.” (This strikes me as a kind of “French frightfulness.”)
The New YorkEvening Postcontributes to my welfare and domestic comfort this item: “Both an electric range and a refrigerator are included in a new kitchen cabinet, but are hidden from view by doors when not in use.”
I am certainly a wiser man for knowing that “The Mexican seacoast on the Pacific and the Gulf of California is 4,575 miles.” And I am at least interested in the fact that “An Englishman has invented a cover for hatchways on vessels that operates on the principle of a roll-top desk.” If this hatchway operates on the principle of the only roll-top desk I ever possessed, God help the poor sailors when the storm breaks!
Such items as these disclose to me the extent of my previous ignorance:—
“Bolivia is producing about one-third of the world's output of tin.”
“Records disclose that for several centuries an infusion of nutgalls treated with sulphate of iron composed the only known ink.”
“The first job held by William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, was that of a newsboy selling the MaconMorning Telegraph. His next job was that of a farm laborer.”
“There are 2,500,000 freight-cars in the country, and their average life is somewhere about twenty years.”
“Since gold was discovered in the Auckland province, in 1852, there has been exported from that district gold to the value of $116,796,000.”
I should, to be sure, be more completely educated if I could find somewhere, under the sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries, a statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps that information will come to-morrow.
Well, I have presented here only a tithe of the knowledge I have to-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least) underestimated institution. I haven't stated that I now know who first used anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I am sure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted in England and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employees there were in France before the war, nor that “A bundle of fine glass threads forms a new ink-eraser.”
However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seems little less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world at large, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of the first edition of the SpringfieldRepublican. So I rewrite it here. For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom I particularly desire to impress. Then,with all the Old-World courtesy of Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do so I shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite: “Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred and fifty men.”
We havejust been perusing a copy of a certain magazine which proclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twenty months. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be the reasons for this gratifying growth. “The magazine accepts man as he is—and helps him,” says the editor. “The magazine is edited to answer the questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head. It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the average man's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for and cannot make use of.”
Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pages hopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we had never “hankered” for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, how to become the biggest “buyer” in the universe, or how a certain theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world (there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interest here), or how to remember the names of a hundredthousand people—dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, an average man, and shifted to the fiction.
There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not one of them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English. Some of the stories confined their assaults upon our mother tongue to the dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much, in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what we presume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have since been informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now the necessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, as the bathing-girl on the August cover.
“'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's beensomeafternoon, Mr. Bentley!'”
“'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's beensomeafternoon, Mr. Bentley!'”
—This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the “business woman,” whose motto seems to be, “Business Before Grammar,” even as it is the motto of the editor. The other “business woman” was not quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the author could let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts.
But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the literary Boweryese. A lack of acquaintance with past performances by our author prevented us from feeling quite sure who the supposed narrator might be, without reading the entire story, but we gathered from early paragraphs and from the illustrations that the guy was a pug. (You see, it's contagious.) At any rate, this is how the story began:—
“The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin' for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh!“When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But there's alwayssomethin'there—just like they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle reader, there's a reason!“But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you. I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't carewhatthey married me for, as long as they did!”
“The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin' for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh!
“When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But there's alwayssomethin'there—just like they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle reader, there's a reason!
“But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you. I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't carewhatthey married me for, as long as they did!”
Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to the table of contents for affirmation of what wevaguely remembered to have read there. Yes, wehadread it! The tale was labeled by the editor, “A funny story.”
So this is fiction for “the average man,” and on this spiritual fare his cravings for literature are fed! So this is the sort of thing which doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in twenty months! Such melancholy reflections crossed our mind, coupled with the thought that with no speech at all in the movies, and such speech as this in his magazines, the “average man” will either have to read his Bible every day or soon forget that there was once such a thing as the beautiful English language. And alas, the circulation of the Bible hasn't doubled in the past twenty months! “This magazine accepts man as he is—and helps him”—so reads the editor's self-puffery. What an indictment of man—and what an idea of help! We would hate to go to bed with his conscience,—if editors have such old-fashioned impediments.
But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid the encircling gloom. The editor hadn't stated what his circulation was twenty months ago! We recalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that the attendance at his musical comedy had doubled the previous evening—the usher had brought his sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't more than a million,—and what is a mere million nowadays?
“Onceman defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home and radiator.” The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page with startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a “criticism of life,” in the waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless paid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. The Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knob which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.
“It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end,” he said aloud.
Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walked over to the windows to pull down the shades. But before hedid so he looked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on the pane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under the arc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belated pedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross on the Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars, and deep in the cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining in the bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and body through the window chinks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulled the heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Then he turned and faced his room.
A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set low on his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. It sent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light of the picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn in the corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but told nothing of their contents; it made dark the spaces where the alcoves were, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded by an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfort which were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly into this charmed radius and sank again into the chair. “And some people insist on steam heat!” he said.
Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep. When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. He stumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room might be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber.
“After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes,” he growled, as he crawled sleepily into bed.
Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was ready to rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumping it against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer and the noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed. The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon the next report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleep again. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later in ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold as an ice-box.
“Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?” he shouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation. He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery whiteashes which topped the pile in the fireplace like snow—“the fall of last night” he called it—he laid a fire of pine and maple. In three minutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and good nature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay.
“Modern conveniences would be all right,” he chuckled, looking from the merry fire to the ugly radiator, “if they were ever convenient!”
Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into a cold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.
But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and sad desecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another modern inconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; and even at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under the supervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they have their own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be a mistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvement of her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor the chambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have of necessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presided over by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but that does not prove progress, none the less. Butthe Man Above the Square was not of this class. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place, which is to signify that he was a “good house-keeper,” as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the æsthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, “I am here, as you left me; I am home.”
So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas, his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction. To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in trying to tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out of plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course,the photographs on the piano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alone have prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object was just far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorative scheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent friends that are so companionable when an understanding hand places them in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, “Sit in me.”
But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the Man Above the Square looked in and groaned.
“She's done it again!” he cried. “I'd move out of this flat to-night if I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of the middle of last century.”
It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray and white wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the arms of the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out upon the hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept into the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removed and the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left.
“I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!” he muttered aloud, storming about the room. “Here I've been since Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid disobeys me—distinctly disobeys me—and shovels it all out!”
He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.
“Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my ashes?” he demanded.
“But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty,” she protested.
“Then don't sweep the room again!” he interposed. “I want the ashes left hereafter.”
“But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it,” said Eliza. “Most people like 'em cleaned out every week.”
“Most people are fools,” said the Man Above the Square. “You may go now.”
The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest autobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and still his mind would not settle to restfulness andcontent. Then suddenly he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire. Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.
The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask it to-night.
“Yes, it was ages long ago,” he said at length. “Ages long ago!”
Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added: “Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have been just such another fire as this!”
And was it a sudden thought, “like a full-blown rose,” making “purple riot” in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?
“I wonder where they are now?” he whispered. “'They are together in the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still.”
Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks roared merrily.
The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, “I brought Alice to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long honeymoon.”
Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.
The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from his grasp. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “her name was really Madeline!”
Again he looked into the fire. “Could the ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had trusted to a housemaid?” he thought. What further reflections this question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.
But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the mood.
Iamcontent to let Mr. John Corbin sing the praises of the stage without scenery; I prefer to sing the praises of the stage without actors. Ever since I was a little boy, nothing in the world has been for me so full of charm and suggestiveness as an empty room. I remember as vividly as though it were week before last being brought home from a visit somewhere, when I was four years old, and arriving after dark. My mother had difficulty in finding the latch-key in her bag (I have since noted that this is a common trait of women), and while the search was going on I ran around the corner of the house and peered in one of the low windows of the library. The moonlight lay in two oblong patches on the floor; and as I pressed my nose against the pane and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually emerged from the gloom, as if a faint, invisible light were being turned slowly up by an invisible hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did by day, but everything took on a new and mysterious significance that bewildered me. I think it must also have terrified me, for I recall myfather's carrying me suddenly into the glare of the hall, and saying, “What's the matter with the boy?” And to-day I cannot enter a theatre, even at the prosaic hour of ten in the morning, when the chairs are covered with cloths and maids are dusting, when the house looks very small and the unlit and unadorned stage very like a barn, without a thrill of imaginative pleasure. I have even mounted the stage of an empty theatre and addressed with impassioned, soundless words the deeply stirred, invisible, great audience, rising row on row to the roof. At such moments I have experienced the creative joy of a mighty orator or a sublime actor; I have actually felt my pulses leap. And then the entrance of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter the illusion!
But it is when I am one of a real audience, and the stage is disclosed set with scenery but barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, the keenest pleasure. A few playwrights have recognized the power of the vacant room in drama, but on the whole the opportunities for such enjoyment are far too rare. This is odd, too, with such convincing examples at hand. There is, for instance, the close of the second act ofDie Meistersinger, when the watchman passes through the sleepy town after the street brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathed street lies quiet for a time, before the curtaincloses. Of course, here there is music to aid in creating the poetic charm and soothing repose of that moment. But at the end ofShore Acresthere was no such aid. Who that saw it, however, can forget that final picture? After Nat Berry—played by Mr. Herne, the author—had scratched a bit of frost off the window-pane to peer out into the night, locked the door, and banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged footsteps up the stairs to bed. At the landing he turned to survey the old kitchen below, that lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of his eye. Then he disappeared with his candle, and the stage grew quite dim, save for the red glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall; and through a mist of tears, tears it cleansed one's soul to shed, the audience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now familiar room where so much of joy and grief had happened,—deserted, tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to be how vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play! It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full reality until the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus spoken the epilogue.
It is strange to me that more playwrights have not profited by such examples. The cry of the average playgoer is for “action,” to be sure; but even “action” may be heightened bycontrast, by peace and serenity. Certainly the vitality, the illusion, of a scenic background on the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain amount of attention to it alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, inThe Return of the Native, paints Egdon Heath—“Haggard Egdon”—in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant stage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities.