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There are a number of very odd features about our neighbourhood. There is a large schoolhouse at the next corner, but as far as I can see, it is not used as a school, not for children, at any rate. Sometimes, about 8 o'clock in the evening, I see the building gloriously illuminated, and a lonely lady stooped andassiduous at a table. She seems quite solitary. Perhaps her researches are so poignant that the school board has prescribed entire silence. But midway down the block is a very jolly little private school, to which very genteel children may be seen approaching early in the morning. The little girls come with a bustle of starch, on foot, accompanied by governesses; the small boys arrive in limousines. They are small boys dressed very much in the English manner, with heavy woollen stockings ending just below the knee. They probably do not realize that their tailor has carefully planned them to look like dear little English boys. Then there is a very mysterious small theatre near by. If it were a movie theatre, what a boon it would be! But no, it is devoted to a strange cult called the Religion ofBusiness, which meets there on Sundays. Before that, there was a Korean congress there. There is a lovely green room in this theatre, but not much long green in the box office. Philadelphia prefers Al Jolson to Hank Ibsen.
We have our tincture of vie de Bohème, though, in our little French table d'hôte, a thoroughly atmospheric place. Delightful Madame B., with her racy philosophy of life, what delicious soups and salads she serves! Happy indeed are those who have learned the way to her little tables, and heard her cheerful cry “À la cuisine!” when one of her small dogs prowls into the dining room. Equally unique is the old curiosity shop near by, one of the few genuine “notion” shops left in the city (though there is a delightful one on Market Street near Seventeenth, to enter which is to step into a country village). This is just the kind of shop bought by the old gentleman in one of Frank Stockton's agreeable tales, “Mr. Tolman,” in the volume called “The Magic Egg”. The proprietress, charming and conversable lady, will sell you anything in the “notions” line, from a paper of pins to garter elastic. Then there is the laundry, whose patrons carry on a jovial game known as “Looking for Your Own.” Every week, by some cheery habit of confusion, the lists are lost, and one hunts through shelves of neatly piled and crisply laundered garments to pick out one's own collars, pyjamas, or whatever it may be. The amusinghumour of this pastime must be experienced to be understood.
The little cigar and magazine shop on the corner is the political and social focus of the neighbourhood. I shall never forget the pallid and ghastly countenance of the newsdealer when the rumour first went the rounds that “Hampy” was elected. Every evening a little gathering of local sages meets in the shop; on tilted chairs, in a haze of tobacco, they while the hours away. In tobacco the host adheres to the standard blends, but in literature he is enterprising. Until recently this was the only place I know in Philadelphia where one could get theIllustrated London Newsevery week.
There are twinges of modernity going on along our street. Some of the old houses have been remodeled into apartments. There is an “electric shoe repairer” just round the corner. But the antique dealers and plumbers for which the street is famous still hold sway; the fine old brick pavement still collects rain water in its numerous dimpled hollows, and the yellowish marble horse-blocks adorn the curb. The nice shabby stables in the little side streets have not yet been turned into studios by artists, and the neighbourhood's youngest urchins set sail for Rittenhouse Square every morning on their fleet of “kiddie-cars.” Their small stout legs, twinkling along the pavements in white gaiters on a wintry day, are a pleasant sight. Even our urchins are notably genteel. Surrounded on all sides by the medical profession, they are reared on registered milk and educator crackers. If Philadelphia ever betrays its soul, it does so on this delightful, bland, and genteel highway.
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The pavement in front of Independence Hall was a gorgeous jumble of colours. The great silken flags of the Allies, carried by vividly costumed ladies, burned and flapped in the wind. On a pedestal stood the Goddess of Liberty, in rich white draperies that seemed fortunately of sufficient texture to afford some warmth, for the air was cool. She graciously turned round for Walter Crail, the photographer of our contemporary, theEvening Public Ledger, to take a shot at her.
Down Chestnut Street came a rising tide of cheers. A squadron of mounted police galloped by. Then the First City Troop, with shining swords.Fred Eckersburg, the State House engineer, was fidgeting excitedly inside the hall, in a new uniform. This was Fred's greatest day, but we saw that he was worried about Martha Washington, the Independence Hall cat. He was apprehensive lest the excitement should give her a fit or a palsy. Independence Hall is no longer the quiet old place Martha used to enjoy before the war.
The Police Band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Yells and cheers burst upward from the ground like an explosion. Here he was, standing in the car. There was the famous chin, the Sam Browne belt, the high laced boots with spurs. Even the tan gloves carried in the left hand. There was the smile, without which no famous man is properly equipped for public life. There was Governor Sproul's placid smile, too, but the Mayor seemed too excited to smile. Rattle, rattle, rattle went the shutters of the photographers. Up the scarlet lane of carpet came the general. His manner has a charming, easy grace. He saluted each one of the fair ladies garbed in costumes of our Allies, but taking care not to linger too long in front of any one of them lest any embracing should get started. A pattering of tiger lilies or some such things came dropping down from above. He passed into the hall, which was cool and smelt like a wedding with a musk of flowers.
While the Big Chief was having a medal presented to him inside the hall we managed to scuttle roundunderneath the grand stand and take up a pencil of vantage just below the little pulpit where the general was to speak. Here the crowd groaned against a bulwark of stout policemen. Philadelphia cops, bless them, are the best tempered in the world. (How Boston must envy us.) Genially two gigantic bluecoats made room against the straining hawser for young John Fisher, aged eleven, of 332 Greenwich Street. John is a small, freckle-faced urchin. It was amusing to see him thrusting his eager little beezer between the vast, soft, plushy flanks of two patrolmen. He had been there over two hours waiting for just this adventure. Then, to assert the equality of the sexes, Mildred Dubivitch, aged eleven, and Eva Ciplet, aged nine, managed to insert themselves between the chinks in the line of cops. An old lady more than eighty years old was sitting placidly in a small chair just inside the ropes. She had been in the square more than five hours, and the police had found her a seat. “Are you going to put Pershing's name in, too?” asked John as we noted his address.
Independence Square never knew a more thrilling fifteen minutes. The trees were tossing and bending in the thrilling blue air. There was a bronzy tint in their foliage, as though they were putting on olive drab in honour of the general. Great balloons of silver clouds scoured across the cobalt sky. At one minute to 11 Pershing appeared at the top of thestand. The whole square, massed with people, shook with cheers.
Had it been any other man we would have said the general was frightened. He came down the aisle of the stand with his delightful, easy, smiling swing; but he looked shrewdly about, with a narrow-eyed, puckered gaze. He was plainly a little flabbergasted. He seemed taken aback by the greatness of Philadelphia's voice. He said something to himself. On his lips it looked like “What the deuce,” or something of similar purport. He sat down on a chair beside Governor Sproul. Not more than four feet away, amazed at our own audacity, we peered over the floor of the stand.
He was paler than we expected. He looked a bit tired. Speaking as a father, we were pleased to note the absence of Warren, who was (we hope) getting a good sleep somewhere. We had a good look at the renowned chin, which is well worth study. It must be a hard chin to shave. It juts upward, reaching a line exactly below the brim of his cap. Below his crescent moustache there is no lower lip visible: it is tucked and folded in by the rising thrust of the jaw. It is this which gives him the “grim” aspect which every reader of the papers hears about. He is grim, there's no doubt about it, with the grimness of a man going through a tough ordeal. “I can see him all right,” squeaked little John Fisher, “but he doesn't see me.” The first two rows of seats atthe right of the aisle were crammed with generals, two-star and three-star. From our lowly station we could see a grand panorama of mahogany leather boots and the flaring curves of riding breeches. It was a great day for Sam Browne. The thought came to us that has reached us before. The higher you go in the A. E. F. the more the officers are tailored after the English manner. It is the finest proof of international cousinship. When England and America wear the same kind of clothes, alliance is knit solid.
Pershing sat with his palms on his knees. He looked worried. There was a wavering crease down his lean cheeks. The plumply genial countenance of Governor Sproul next to him was an odd contrast to that dry, hard face. The bell in the tower tolled eleven times. He stood up for the photographers. Walter Crail, appearing from somewhere, sprang up on the parapet facing the general. “Look this way!” he shouted as the general turned toward some movie men. That will be Walter's first cry when he gets to heaven, or wherever. Mayor Smith's face was pallid with excitement. His nicely draped trouserings, which were only six inches from our notebook, quivered slightly as he said fifteen words of introduction.
As Pershing stood up to speak the crowd surged forward. The general was worried. “Don't, don't! Somebody will get hurt!” he called sharply. Then Mayor Smith surged forward also and said something to the police about watching the crowd.
The general took off his cap. Holding it in his left hand (with the gloves) he patted his close-cropped hair nervously. He frowned. He began to speak.
The speech has already been covered by our hated rivals. We will not repeat it, save to say that it was as crisp, clean-cut, and pointed as his chin. He was nervous, as we could see by the clenching and unclenching of his hands. His voice is rather high. We liked him for not being a suave and polished speaker. He gestured briskly with a pointing forefinger, and pronounced the wordpatrioticwith a short A—“pattriotic.” Later he stumbled over it again and got it out aspatterotism. We liked him again for that. He doesn't have to pronounce it, anyway. We liked him best of all for the unconscious slip he made. “This reception,” he said, “I understand is for the splendid soldiery of America that played such an important part in the war with our Allies.” A respectful ripple of laughter passed over the stand at this, but he did not notice it. He was fighting too hard to think what to say next. We liked him, too, for saying “such an important part.” A man who had been further away from the fighting would have said that it was America, alone and unaided, that won the war. He is just as we have hoped he would be: a plain, blunt man. We have heard that he is going to enter the banking business. We'd like to have an account at that bank.
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About this time of year, when the mellow air swoons (as the poets say) with golden languor and the landscape is tinged a soft brown like a piece of toast, we feel the onset and soft impeachment of fall fever.
Fall fever is (in our case at any rate) more insidious than the familiar disease of spring. Spring fever impels us to get out in the country; to seize a knotted cudgel and a pouchful of tobacco and agitate our limbs over the landscape. But the drowsiness of autumn is a lethargy in the true sense of that word—a forgetfulness. A forgetfulness of past discontents and future joys; a forgetfulness of toil that is gone and leisure to come; a mere breathing existence in which one stands vacantly eyeing the human scene, living in a gentle simmer of the faculties like a boiling kettle when the gas is turned low.
Fall fever, one supposes, is our inheritance from the cave man, who (like the bear and the—well, someother animal, whatever it is) went into hibernation about the first of November. Autumn with its soft inertia lulled him to sleep. He ate a hearty meal, raked together some dry leaves, curled up and slid off until the alarm clock of April.
This agreeable disease does not last very long with the modern man. He fights bravely against it; then the frost comes along, or the coal bill, and stings him into activity. But for a few days its genial torpor may be seen (by the observant) even in our bustling modern career. When we read yesterday that Judge Audenried's court clerks had fallen asleep during ballot-counting proceedings we knew that the microbe was among us again. Keats, in his lovely Ode, describes the figure of Autumn as stretched out “on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep.” Unhappily the conventions forbid city dwellers from curling up on the pavements for a cheerful nap. If one were brave enough to do so, unquestionably many would follow his example. But the urbanite has taught himself to doze upright. You may see many of us, standing dreamily before Chestnut Street show windows in the lunch hour, to all intents and purposes in a state of slumber. Yesterday, in that lucid shimmer of warmth and light, a group stood in front of a doughnut window near Ninth Street: not one of them was more than half awake. Similarly a gathering watched the three small birds who have become a traditional window ornament onChestnut Street (they have recently moved from an oculist to a correspondence course office) and a faint whisper of snoring arose on the sultry air. The customs of city life permit a man to stand still as long as he likes if he will only pretend to be watching something. We saw a substantial burgher pivoted by the window of Mr. Albert, the violin maker, on Ninth Street. Apparently he was studying the fine autographed photo of Patti there displayed; but when we sidled near we saw that his eyes were closed; this admirable person, who seemed to be what is known as a “busy executive,” and whose desk undoubtedly carries a plate-glass sheet with the orisons of Swett Marden under it, was in a blissful doze.
Modern life (as we say) struggles against this sweet enchantment of autumn, but Nature is too strong for us. Why is it that all these strikes occur just at this time of year? The old hibernating instinct again, perhaps. The workman has a subconscious yearning to scratch together a nice soft heap of manila envelopes and lie down on that couch for a six months' ear-pounding. There are all sorts of excuses that one can make to one's self for waving farewell to toil. Only last Sunday we saw this ad in a paper:
HEIRS WANTED. The war is over and has made many new heirs. You may be one of them. Investigate. Many now living in poverty are rich, but don't know it.
HEIRS WANTED. The war is over and has made many new heirs. You may be one of them. Investigate. Many now living in poverty are rich, but don't know it.
Now what could be simpler (we said to ourself as we stood contemplating those doughnuts) than to forsake our jolly old typewriter and spend a few months in “investigating” whether any one had made us his heir? It might be. Odd things have happened. Down in Washington Square, for instance (we thought), are a number of sun-warmed benches, very reposeful to the sedentary parts, on which we might recline and think over the possibility of our being rich unawares. We hastened thither, but apparently many had had the same idea. There was not a bench vacant. The same was true in Independence Square and in Franklin Square. We will never make a good loafer. There is too much competition.
So we came back, sadly, to our rolltop and fell to musing. We picked up a magazine and found some pictures showing how Mary Pickford washes her hair. “If I am sun-drying my hair,” said Mary (under a photo showing her reclining in a lovely garden doing just that), “I usually have the opportunity to read a scenario or do some other duty which requires concentration.” And it occurred to us that if a strain like that is put upon a weak woman we surely ought to be able to go on moiling for a while, Indian summer or not. And then we found some pictures by our favourite artist, Coles Phillips, with that lovely shimmer around the ankles, and we resolved to be strong and brave and havepointed finger-nails. But still, in the back of our mind, the debilitating influence of fall fever was at work. We said to ourself, without the slightest thought of printing it (for it seemed to put us in a false light), that the one triumphant and unanswerable epigram of mankind, the grandest and most resolute utterance in the face of implacable fate, is the snore.
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Will the hand-organ man please call? Our wife has dug up our old overcoat and insists on giving it to him. We intended to give it to the Honolulu Girls around at the Walnut Theatre, they looked a bit goose-fleshed last week, but we always have hay fever when we get near those grass skirts. Grass widows is what the profession calls the Hawaiian ladies. Hope the temperature isn't going up again. We love the old-fashioned Christmas and all that sort of thing. Nipping air makes cheeks pink; we love to see them nestled in fur coats on Chestnut Street. This is the time of year to do unexpected kindnesses. We know one man who stands in line for hours in front of movie theatres just in order to shoutMerry Christmasthrough the little hole in the glass. Shaving seems less of a bore. Newspapers are supposed to be heartless, but they all take a hand in trying to help poor children. Find ourselves humming hymn tunes. Very odd, haven't been to a church for years. Great fun surprising people. We've been reading the new phone book; noticed several ways in which people might surprise each other by calling up and wishing many happyreturns of the day. Why doesn't Beulah R. Wine ring up Mrs. Louis F. Beer, for instance? Or, A. D. Smoker and Burton J. Puffer might go around to W. C. Matchett, tobacconist, at 1635 South Second Street, and buy their Christmas cigars. George Wharton Pepper might give Mayme Salt a ring (on the phone, that is). What a pleasant voice that telephone operatrix has. Here's to you, child, and many of them. Grand time, Christmas.
Fine old Anglo-Saxon festival, Christmas. A time of jovial cheer and bracing mirth. Must be so, because Doctor Frank Crane and Ralph Waldo Trine have often said so. Christmas hard on people like that, however: they are bursting with the Christmas spirit all the year round; very trying when the real occasion comes. That's the beauty of having a peevish and surly disposition: when one softens up at Christmas everybody notices it and is pleased. Chaucer, fine old English poet, first English humorist, gave good picture of Christmas cheer more than five hundred years ago. Never quoted on Christmas cards, why not copy it here? Chaucer's spelling very like Ring Lardner's, but good sort just the same. Says he:
And this was, as thise bookes me remembre,The colde, frosty sesoun of Decembre....The bittre frostes with the sleet and reynDestroyed hath the grene in every yard;Janus sit by the fyre with double beard,And drynketh of his bugle horn the wyn;Biforn hym stant brawn of the tusked swyn,And “Nowel” crieth every lusty man.
And this was, as thise bookes me remembre,The colde, frosty sesoun of Decembre....The bittre frostes with the sleet and reynDestroyed hath the grene in every yard;Janus sit by the fyre with double beard,And drynketh of his bugle horn the wyn;Biforn hym stant brawn of the tusked swyn,And “Nowel” crieth every lusty man.
Janus, god of doors, what we call nowadays a janitor. Had two faces so he could watch the front and back door at once and get a double tip at Christmas time. Also, that was why he wore a beard; too much trouble to shave. We don't cryNowelany more; instead we petition the janitor to send up a little more steam. But what a jolly picture Chaucer gives of Christmas! Wine to drink (fine ruddy wine, as red as the holly berries), crackling flitch of pig to eat, and a merry cry of welcome sounding at the threshold as your friends come stamping in through the snow.
Grand time, Christmas! No one is really a Philadelphian until he has waited for a Pine Street car on a snowy night. Please have my seat, madam, there's plenty of room on the strap. Wonder why the pavement on Chestnut Street is the slipperiest in the world? Always fall down just in front of our bank; most embarrassing; hope the paying teller doesn't see us. Very annoying to lose our balance just there. Awfully nice little girl in there who balances the books. Has a kind heart. The countless gold of a merry heart, as William Blake said. She looks awfully downcast when our balance gets the way it is now. Hate to disappoint her. Won'thave our book balanced again for a devil of a while. Even the most surly is full of smiles nowadays. Most of us when we fall on the pavement (did you ever try it on Chestnut between Sixth and Seventh on a slippery day?) curse the granolithic trust and wamble there groaning. But not nowadays. Make the best of things. Fine panorama of spats.
Association of ideas. Everybody wears silk stockings at Christmas time. Excessive geniality of the ad-writers. Uproarious good cheer. Makes one almost ashamed to notice the high price of everything. Radicals being deported. Why not deport Santa Claus, too? Very radical notion that, love your neighbour better than yourself. Easy to do; very few of us such dam fools as to love ourselves, but so often when you love your neighbour she doesn't return it. Nice little boxes they have at the ten-cent stores, all covered with poinsettia flowers, to put presents in. Wonder when poinsettia began to be used as a Christmas decoration and why? Everyone in ten-cent store calls them “poinsettias,” but named after J. R. Poinsett. Encyclopedia very handy at times; makes a good Christmas present, one dollar down and a dollar a month for life. Nobody can tell the difference between real pearls and imitation; somebody ought to put the oysters wise. Save them a lot of trouble and anxiety. Don't know just what duvetyne is, but there seems to be alot of it drunk nowadays. Hope that clockwork train for the Urchin will arrive soon; we were hoping to have three happy evenings playing with it before he sees it. Fine to have children; lots of fun playing with their presents. We are sure that life after death is really so, because children always kick the blankets off at night. Fine bit of symbolism that; put it in a sermon, unless Doctor Conwell gets there first.
Grand time, Christmas! We vowed to try to take down our weight this winter, and then they put sugar back on the menu, and doughnut shops spring up on every street, and Charles F. Jenkins sent us a big sack of Pocono buckwheat flour and we're eating a basketful of griddle cakes every morning for breakfast. Terrible to be a coward; we always turn on the hot water first in the shower bath, except the first morning we used it. The plumber got the indicator on the wrong way round, and when you turn to the place marked HOT it comes down like ice. Our idea of a really happy man is the fellow driving a wagonload of truck just in front of a trolley car, holding it back all the way downtown; when he hears the motorman clanging away he pretends he thinks it's the Christmas chimes and sings “Hark the Herald Angels.”
Speaking of Herald Angels reminds us of a good story about James Gordon Bennett; we'll spring it one of these days when we're hard up for copy.Jack Frost must be a married man, did you see him try to cover up the show windows with his little traceries the other day when the shopping was at its height? There was a pert little hat in a window on Walnut Street we were very much afraid someone might see; the frost saved us. Don't forget to put Red Cross seals on your letters. Delightful to watch the faces on the streets at Christmas time. Everybody trying hard to be pleasant; sometimes rather a strain. Curious things faces—some of them seem almost human; queer to think that each belongs to someone and no chance to get rid of it; sorry we're not in the mirror industry; never thought of it before, but it ought to be profitable. Happier most of us, if mirrors never had been invented. Hope all our nice-natured clients will have the best kind of a time; forgive us for not answering letters; we are too disillusioned about ourself to make any resolutions to do better. We're going home now; on the way we'll think of a lot of nice things we might have said, write them down and use them to-morrow. Hope Dorothy Gish will get something nice in her stocking. Don't make the obvious retort. Grand time, Christmas!
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Climbing aboard car No. 13—ominously labelled “Mt. Moriah”—I voyaged toward West Philadelphia. It was a keen day, the first snow of winter had fallen, and sparkling gushes of chill swept inward every time the side doors opened. The conductor, who gets the full benefit of this ventilation, was feeling cynical, and seeing his blue hands I didn't blame him. Long lines of ladies, fumbling with their little bags and waiting for change, stepped off one by one into the windy eddies of the street corners. One came up to pay her fare ten blocks or so before her destination, and then retired to her seat again. This puzzled the conductor and he rebuked her. The argument grew busy. To the amazement of the passengers this richly dressed female brandished lusty epithets. “You Irishmick!” she said. (One would not have believed it possible if he had not heard it.) “That's what I am, and proud of it,” said he. The shopping solstice is not all fur coats and pink cheeks. If you watch the conductors in the blizzard season, and see the slings and arrows they have to bear, you will coin a new maxim. The conductor is always right.
It is always entertaining to move for a little in a college atmosphere. I stopped at College Hall at the University and seriously contemplated slipping in to a lecture. The hallways were crowded with earnest youths of both sexes—I was a bit surprised at the number of co-eds, particularly the number with red hair—discussing the tribulations of their lot. “Think of it,” said one man, “I'm a senior, and carrying twenty-three hours. Got a thesis to do, 20,000 words.” On a bulletin board I observed the results of a “General Intelligence Exam.” It appears that 1,770 students took part. They were listed by numbers, not by names. It was not stated what the perfect mark would have been; the highest grade attained was 159, by Mr. (or Miss?) 735. The lowest mark was 23. I saw that both 440 and 1124 got the mark of 149. If these gentlemen (or ladies) are eager to play off the tie, it would be a pleasure to arrange a deciding competition for them. The elaborate care with which the boys and girls ignore one another as they pass in the halls was highly delightful, and reminded me of exactly the samething at Oxford. But I saw the possible beginning of true romance in the following notice on one of the boards:
WANTED: Names and addresses of ten nice American university students who must remain in Philadelphia over Christmas, away from home, to be invited to a Christmas Eve party to help entertain some Bryn Mawr College girls in one of the nicest homes in a suburb of Philadelphia.
WANTED: Names and addresses of ten nice American university students who must remain in Philadelphia over Christmas, away from home, to be invited to a Christmas Eve party to help entertain some Bryn Mawr College girls in one of the nicest homes in a suburb of Philadelphia.
Certainly there is the stage set for a short story. Perhaps not such a short one, either.
Naturally I could not resist a visit to the library, where most of the readers seemed wholly absorbed, though one student was gaping forlornly over a volume of Tennyson. I found an intensely amusing book, “Who's Who in Japan,” a copy of which would be a valuable standby to a newspaper paragrapher in his bad moments. For instance:
Sasaki, Tetsutaro: One of the highest taxpayers of Fukushima-ken, President of the Hongu Reeling Partnership, Director of the Dai Nippon Radium Water Co.; brewer, reeler; born Aug., 1860.Sakurai, Ichisaku: Member of the Niigata City Council; Director of the Niigata Gas Co., Niigata Savings Bank. Born June, 1872, Studied Japanese and Chinese classics and arithmetic. At present also he connects with the Niigata Orphanage and various other philanthropic bodies. Was imprisoned by acting contrary to the act of explosive compound for seven years. Recreations: reading, Western wine.
Sasaki, Tetsutaro: One of the highest taxpayers of Fukushima-ken, President of the Hongu Reeling Partnership, Director of the Dai Nippon Radium Water Co.; brewer, reeler; born Aug., 1860.
Sakurai, Ichisaku: Member of the Niigata City Council; Director of the Niigata Gas Co., Niigata Savings Bank. Born June, 1872, Studied Japanese and Chinese classics and arithmetic. At present also he connects with the Niigata Orphanage and various other philanthropic bodies. Was imprisoned by acting contrary to the act of explosive compound for seven years. Recreations: reading, Western wine.
Relying on my apparent similarity to the average undergrad, I plunged into the sancta of Houston Hall and bought a copy of thePunch Bowl. What that sprightly journal calls “A little group of Syria's thinkers” was shooting pool. The big fireplaces, like most fireplaces in American colleges, don't seem to be used. They don't even show any traces of ever having been used, a curious contrast to the always blazing hearths of English colleges. The latter, however, are more necessary, as in England there is usually no other source of warmth. A bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his “snappy styles” in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out those who may be of some value to the community in future—the scientists, poets, and teachers of the next generation. The well-dressed youths one sees in the varsity drug stores are not generally of this type.
The Evans School of Dentistry at Fortieth and Spruce is a surprising place. Its grotesque gargoyles, showing (with true medieval humour) the sufferings of tooth patients, are the first thing onenotices. Then one finds the museum, in which is housed Doctor Thomas W. Evans's collection of paintings and curios brought back from France. Unfortunately there seems to be no catalogue of the items, so that there is no way of knowing what interesting associations belong to them. But most surprising of all is to find the travelling carriage of the Empress Eugenie in which she fled from France in the fatal September days of 1870. She spent her last night in France at the home of Doctor Evans, and there is a spirited painting by Dupray showing her leaving his house the next morning, ushered into the carriage by the courtly doctor. The old black barouche, or whatever one calls it, seems in perfect condition still, with the empress's monogram on the door panel. Only the other day we read in the papers that the remarkable old lady (now in her ninety-fourth year) has been walking about Paris, revisiting well-known scenes. How it would surprise her to see her carriage again here in this University building in West Philadelphia. The whole museum is delightfully French in flavour; as soon as one enters one seems to step back into the curiously bizarre and tragic extravagance of the Second Empire.
One passes into the dignified and placid residence section of Spruce and Pine streets, with its distinctly academic air. Behind those quiet walls one suspects bookcases and studious professors and all the delightful passions of the mind. On Baltimore Avenue the wintry sun shone white and cold; in Clark Park, Charles Dickens wore a little cap of snow, and Little Nell looked more pathetic than ever. There is a breath of mystery about Baltimore Avenue. What does that large sign mean, in front of a house near Clark Park—THE EASTERN TRAVELLERS? Then one comes to the famous shop of S. F. Hiram, the Dodoneaean Shoemaker he calls himself. This wise coloured man has learned the advertising advantages of the unusual. His placard reads:
Originator of that famous Dobrupolyi System of repairing.
Originator of that famous Dobrupolyi System of repairing.
When one enters and asks to know more about this system, he points to another placard, which says:
It assumes the nature and character of an appellative noun, and carries the article The System.
It assumes the nature and character of an appellative noun, and carries the article The System.
His shop contains odd curios as well as the usual traffic of a cobbler. “The public loves to be hood-winked,” he adds sagely.
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We wait with particular interest to hear what Philadelphia will have to say about the passing of Horace Traubel. Traubel was the official echo of the Great Voice of Camden, and in his obituary one may discern the vivacity of the Whitman tradition. This is a matter of no small concern to the curators of the Whitman cult. The soul of Philadelphia cannot be kept alive by conventions and statistics alone. Such men as Traubel have helped.
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There are two kinds of rebels. By their neckties you may know them. Walt Whitman was of the kind that wears no necktie at all. Then there is the lesser sort, of which Traubel was one—the rebel who wears a flowing black bow tie with long trailers. Elbert Hubbard wore one of these. It is a mild rebellion of which this is symbol. It often goes with shell spectacles.
We never knew Horace Traubel, though he was the man we most wanted to meet when we came toPhiladelphia. We have heard men of all conditions speak of him with affection and respect. He was dedicated from boyhood to the Whitman cause. From Walt himself he caught the habit of talking about Walt, and he carried it on with as much gusto and happiness as Walt did. Only recently he said in his little magazineThe Conservator:
When I was quite small I used to want to be a great man. But in my observations of the old man's better than great way of meeting the gifts as well as the reverses of fate I didn't want to be a great man. I only wanted to stay unannexed to any institution as he was. No college ever decorated him. For the best of reasons. No college could. He could decorate them.
When I was quite small I used to want to be a great man. But in my observations of the old man's better than great way of meeting the gifts as well as the reverses of fate I didn't want to be a great man. I only wanted to stay unannexed to any institution as he was. No college ever decorated him. For the best of reasons. No college could. He could decorate them.
So Traubel remained unannexed. He was fired from a bank because he happened to take issue in public with one of the bank's chief depositors. He floated about happily, surrounded by young Whitman disciples, carrying on his guerrilla for what his leader called the “peerless, passionate, good cause” of human democracy. His little magazine led a precarious life, supported by good friends. His protest against iniquities was an honest, good-humoured protest.
Horace Traubel will be remembered, as he wished to be remembered, as the biographer of Whitman. Whitman also, we may add, wished Traubel to be so remembered. In his careful record of the Camdensage's utterances and pulse-beats he approached (as nearly as any one) the devoted dignity of Boswell. We were about to say the self-effacing devotion of Boswell; but the beauty of biography is that the biographer cannot wholly delete himself from the book. One is always curious about the recording instrument. When we see a particularly fine photograph our first question is always, “What kind of camera was it taken with?”
It seems to us—speaking only by intuition, for we never knew him—that Traubel was a happy man. He was untouched by many of the harassing ambitions that make the lives of prosperous men miserable. He was touched in boyhood by one simple and overmastering motive—to carry on the Whitman message and spread it out for the younger world. Much of the dunnage of life he cast overboard. He was too good a Whitman disciple to estimate success in the customary terms. When he left his job in the bank he opened an account in the Walt Whitman philosophy—and he kept a healthy balance there to the end.
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She is the only city whose lovers live always in a mood of wonder and expectancy. There are others where one may sink peacefully, contentedly into the life of the town, affectionate and understanding of its ways. But she, the woman city, who is bold enough to say he understands her? The secret of her thrilling and inscrutable appeal has never been told. How could it be? She has always been so much greater than any one who has lived with her. (Shall we mention Walt Whitman as the only possible exception? O. Henry came very near to her, but did he not melodramatize her a little, sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic appraisal, fit her too neatly into his plot? Kipling seemed to see her only as the brutal, heedless wanton.) Truly the magic of her spell can never be exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. Realism, as they call it, can never catch the boundaries of her pearly beauty. She needs a mystic.
No city so challenges and debilitates the imagination. Here, where wonder is a daily companion, desire to tell her our ecstasy becomes at last only a faint pain in the mind. If you would mute a poet'slyre, put him on a ferry from Jersey City some silver April morning; or send him aboard at Liberty Street in an October dusk. Poor soul, his mind will buzz (for years to come) after adequate speech to tell those cliffs and scarps, amethyst and lilac in the mingled light; the clear topaz chequer of window panes; the dull bluish olive of the river, streaked and crinkled with the churn of the screw! Many a poet has come to her in the wooing passion. Give him six months, he is merely her Platonist. He lives content with placid companionship. Where are his adjectives, his verbs? That inward knot of amazement, what speech can unravel it?
Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is pale, it is faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. Heaven is unbelievably remote; the city itself daring so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and patchworked among her cavern streets; a cool, deep gloom is cut across with fierce jags and blinks of brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his ease in her colossal companionship. Her clean soaring perpendiculars call the eye upward. One wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That great smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station train shed: is it not the arching fronds of iron palm trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid jungle, spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins that run from the great backbone of Broadway!
To love her, one thinks, is to love one's fellows; each of them having some unknown share in her loveliness. Any one of her streets would be the study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, we think of that little world of brightness and sound bourgeois cheer that spreads around the homely Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons of our own. Within a radius, thereabouts, of a quarter-mile each way, we could live a year and learn new matters every day. They call us a hustling folk. Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those brownstone byways. Pass along leisurely Amsterdam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops, Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the children trooping upstairs to their own room at the St. Agnes branch of the Public Library. See the taxi drivers, sitting in their cars alongside the Verdi grass plot (a rural breath of new-mown turf sweetening the warm, crisp air) and smoking pipes. Every one of them is to us as fascinating as a detective story. What a hand they have had in ten thousand romances. At this very moment, what quaint and many-stranded destinies may hail them and drive off? But there they sit, placid enough, with a pipe and the afternoon paper. The light, fluttering dresses of enigmatic fair ones pass gayly on the pavement. Traffic flows, divides, and flows on, a sparkling river. Here is that mystery, a humanbeing, buying a cigar. Here is another mystery asking for a glass of frosted chocolate. Why is it that we cannot accost that tempting riddle and ask him to give us an accurate précis of his life to date? And that red-haired burly sage, he who used to bake the bran muffins in the little lunchroom near by, and who lent us his Robby Burns one night—what has become of him?
So she teases us, so she allures. Sometimes, on the L, as one passes along that winding channel where the walls and windows come so close, there is a felicitous sense of being immersed, surrounded, drowned in a great, generous ocean of humanity. It is a fine feeling. All life presses around one, the throb and the problem are close, are close. Who could be weary, who could be at odds with life, in such an embrace of destiny? The great tall sides of buildings fly open, the human hive is there, beautiful and arduous beyond belief. Here is our worship and here our lasting joy, here is our immortality of encouragement. Yes, perhaps O. Henry did say the secret after all: “He saw no longer a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal.”