The Soul of a Button
Long ago, when I had just reached the age of walking and talking, a young lady friend of my own age was called by the curious name of “Buttons”. Possibly the additional touch that her father was the author of this, that he also called her “Butterball”, and that she was plump as all properly healthy young ladies of that age should be, will seem proper explanation for such a christening. But mere physical attributes can scarcely be hoped to give complete satisfaction, for the subject is one so much of the spirit that we might almost call it intangible. Little did I know in those younger years why my lady was called “Buttons”; little, likewise, did I care; for the name seemed quite suited to her. “Buttons” and the more formal, less Christian title which a minister had pronounced over her fitted this childish personality equally well. Indeed, how remarkable an artistic sense the girl’s father must have been blessed with, in order to bestow on his daughter such a charmingsobriquet! How he could have thought of the romance in the conceptionbuttonsembodied so delightfully in his child I could never tell. A happy creative gift he must have had indeed, since meditation on this whim has inspired in no small measure the following remarks.
During the period when I thus heard the wordbuttonsfor the first time, my mother habitually dressed me in a white suit, white stockings and shoes. However much ridicule the white shoes themselves may have occasioned as I and my fellows more nearly approached the state of manhood, the buttons on the white shoes made amends. Occasionally, when my nurse was with a large button-hook “squeezing tight” a powdery shoe, one of these pearly buttons would pop off. She was in such a case forced to search out another one, for I at once engaged the attentions of the stray sheep. Have you ever imagined a pearly thing more beautiful, and therefore more precious, than a pearl? Perhaps on account of a semi-opacity and semi-transparency and yet a transcendencyof translucency—or perhaps it was the slippery smugness of these little objects that attracted me. At any rate, I was brought to wonder why father did not have one mounted to wear instead of his pearl scarf-pin. Possibly it would be too expensive, I thought. For long—I dare not say how long—they became of an afternoon the center of my observation. I would watch rather than look at their round surface backed up by a little metal ring. They seemed to live. But in the midst of such reveries one of the little things would slip from my fingers and, rolling along the edge of the carpet, disappear, for all I knew, in the way most fairies did.
Buttons were kept in abutton-house—that is, the buttons which were not in contemporary use. The button-house on the outside was brown and oblong and said “Huyler’s Chocolates, New York” in black script on the top. But, though this might have at first furnished an allurement to the house, the shining interior sides and a sea of buttons—white, black, grey, yellow, blue, and green—surging over the bottom, invited continual revisitations which in the end caused a far firmer friendship, or love, to be formed between me and this object than any mere acquaintance could have brought about. As a violinist flees in dark moments to expression through his violin, a painter through his pictures, and a writer through his pen, so might you have seen a child poring over his little button-house, poking in a finger once in a while to stir the occupants to life, entirely absorbed. But had you peered in, you would not have seen what he saw in the little tin box. And I doubt if anyone ever will know what he saw. For I have forgotten.
With the discarding of childish thoughts and childish ways, one acquires boyish successors to these respective qualities. And so, after learning to dress myself, I came to the struggle of buttoning up clothes. My underwear gave me the most trouble. For who can hope, except by dint of great practicing, to engineer in a controlled manner a whole row of buttons up one’s back when, in the hurry of getting up, a trying task is presented even by the side ones. Although the appearance of these buttons fell short of attaining a standard of beauty worthy of present description, the sight of one (say a side one) at last becoming visible through anobstinate buttonhole inspired me with no less joy than that felt by children at a puppet show when they see Humpty Dumpty suddenly burst forth from a covered box.
Aye! The struggle with these buttons gave them their meaning. Perhaps we may rather call them villains than heroes. Or perhaps big, plain-faced dubs with vacant eyes, hard to shove out of the way because of their very clumsiness. Yet in a temper one way remained—the sinful, easy road to Hell—the last resort—tearing them off.
A young man does not need to wait till his brass wedding anniversary (if there be such a one) for his first dealing with that deceptive, goldlike metal. He owns it first on his blue coat. Supposing the whole coat not to be brass, we will by elimination and hypothesis proceed to the buttons. A correct supposition—and more, for the brass is embossed with an anchor and chain, together with a crest or other insignia of the kind. These have the virtue (a) of shininess, and (b) of being like a policeman’s—or a trolley car conductor’s, bellboy’s, naval officer’s, etc.,—all of whom, finally, are pretty much policemen. Elders may presume such a coat—or such buttons—to be unhealthy since they tend to make the wearer stick out his stomach, to show them off. But critics must as well realize that this attitude increases the morale, and while mortifying the flesh, tends to exalt the spirit. Possibly the spirit in this case is not of the purely heavenly quality that some would-be angels might desire,—yet it is higher and more serene than the majority of sensualists would admit.
When Chris, the coachman (pardon me, the chauffeur) stalks into the kitchen of a wintry evening, mayhap to see Marie,—how could a person of the brass-button age be expected to conceive of the use of those great orbs stationed at intervals along the front of Chris’s great, fuzzy coat. They are mammoth. Their very size confounds one, especially since, in common with many great objects, preciousness of detail or surface and delicacy of effect have declined their rightful position in favor of a world of thegigantesque, to be widely wondered at. Even thus Chris’s buttons. But wonderful to say, theyareuseful. For after Marie had helped him off with his greatcoat, I tried to lift it slightly from the backof the chair in the corner. My wonder henceforth was not that the buttons were so big, but that such a great mountain of heavy stuff as this could be held together by anything at all!
How broadly the influence of the button world is felt you have had as yet, dear reader, but little indication. In matters great as the height and age of a child and in the relations which, physically, at any rate, he may bear to his father, buttons are most subtle indicators. Thus when one morning my parents asked me to stand up beside my father to see how tall I was, we found among us that my topmost crest of hair reached the second button of his waistcoat. Feet and inches were no longer needed in the mathematical scale:—their place was superseded by buttons and buttonholes. “How tall are you, my boy?” I might be asked. With romantic evasion of the point and still with a certain exactitude I answered, “Well, I come up as far as the second button on father’s vest.”
Some day I hope to writeAn Historie on the Romance of Buttonholes. Buttonholes, however, are such unbodied beings and taken on the whole without their buttons, are such lonely objects that I fear lest the ambitious author should, in entertaining a morbid affinity for the Universal Desolate, fall a prey to his own affections and die of an heavenly grief. Have you never felt the pitiful sentiments put forward at the mere suggestion ofthe lost buttonhole? The classic illustration of this type is, of course, the one on the lapel of a coat. Perhaps the scholar will here accuse me of having incorrectly used the wordbuttonholefor a little slit fashioned to receive no button. In reality this is a buttonhole of many buttons. At the age when one is just too old to be spanked the aperture first becomes fully a buttonhole—it accommodates a youth with provision for his innumerable colored, enamelled buttons emblazoned with advertisements of charity drives, political campaigns, circus days, wholesale houses, and the like. The only visible regret on these occasions is that there is but one of its kind. In necessity invention presses even normal ones into service. Later on, this receptacle receives buttonhole bouquets from frail lady-fingers—fragrant forget-me-nots, spring flowers, or dainty garden nosegays. And in empty decliningyears it may clasp only an infrequent bachelor’s button or an onion blossom.
About two years after the father-vest-second-button age, which would land me in the father-vest-third-and-a-half-button stage, I fell to wondering about buttons in a scientific way. Buttons were awkward. The world, I knew, had been going on for hundreds of centuries and men had discovered no more graceful fashion of fastening their clothes together than by these round discs, dangling ridiculously from clothes and yet anchored there with an amount of pains out of all proportion to the achievement. Furthermore the cloth was sloppy. The combination sufficed, you may judge, to drive any young neurotic into a very unenviable state. I fell to inventing. Pins would not do (this was an instinct). Hooks and eyes were worse still (I had experienced all too intense agony at the canniness of “doing up” mother’s dress). Sewing in for the winter was obviously unchristian. In a desperate, fevered condition of mind clothes pins, railroad spikes, patent clasps, a series of bands like a Michelin man’s, box fasteners, padlocks, rings, thongs, strings, and lobster claws whirled by as a giddy panorama of substitutes, leaving me at last faint and content necessarily with the extant order of things, yet peaked at the impotency of my inventive genius. After carefully revolving the matter in my mind, picturing many modes of clothes and corresponding sorts of buttons, I finally concluded that this whole section of the world—buttons—instead of falling under the rule of science, was an art.
In this manner I became artistic—such mammoth results do transpire from buttons. Whether this be the cause, or whether the grey years are dulling with their sepulchral dust the gloss of my golden hair, I know not. But I am now largely unconscious of buttons. They are only miserable little nuisances flying off and rolling across the floor at the most inconvenient moments. They are intensely realistic. How in truth could anyone, save a fool, suck romance from their marrow? Fie upon you!—collar buttons—but tread softly,—we will not embark there. One exception only to this indifference do I know—the comfort of sitting in an easy-chair andunbuttoninga tight vest. This sensation isthe most agreeable immediately after a large meal—say, an over-large meal. And however gross the indulgence, it causes buttons again to swim into my ken—this time on the side of mine enemies;—and as great ones indeed do they loom over me when I, by yielding to the order of unbuttoned vests, am constrained to think—
“... now ’tis little joyTo know I’m farther off from heavenThan when I was a boy.”
“... now ’tis little joyTo know I’m farther off from heavenThan when I was a boy.”
“... now ’tis little joyTo know I’m farther off from heavenThan when I was a boy.”
“... now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.”
L. HYDE.