I was too young to know my grandfather in his active days when he was prominent in public matters. His broader abilities are known to others. But though more than twenty years have passed since his death, I remember his tone of voice, his walk, his way of handling a crutch, all his tricks of speech and conduct as though he had just left the room. And I can think of nothing more beautiful than that a useful man who has faced the world for seventy years and has done his part, should come back in his old age to the nursery and be the playfellow of his grandchildren.
But the best holiday was a trip to the farm.
This farm—to which in our slow trot we have been so long a time in coming—lay for a mile on the upper land, and its grain fields and pastures looked down into the valley. The buildings, however, were set close to the road and fixed their interest on such occasional wagons as creaked by. A Switzer occupied the farm, who owned, in addition to the more immediate members of his family, a cuckoo clock whose weights hung on long cords which by Saturday night reached almost to the floor. When I have sat at his table, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, when the hour came near, in order not to miss the cuckoo's popping out. And in the duller spaces, when the door was shut, I have fancied it sitting in the dark and counting the minutes to itself.
The Switzer's specialty was the making of a kind of rubber cheese which one could learn to like in time. Of the processes of its composition, I can remember nothing except that when it was in the great press the whey ran from its sides, but this may be common to all cheeses. I was once given a cup of this whey to drink and I brightened, for until it was in my mouth, I thought it was buttermilk. Beyond was the spring-house with cans of milk set in the cool water and with a trickling sound beneath the boards. From the spring-house there started those mysterious cow-paths that led down into the great gorge that cut the farm. Here were places so deep that only a bit of the sky showed and here the stones were damp. It was a place that seemed to lie nearer to the confusion when the world was made, and rocks lay piled as though a first purpose had been broken off. And to follow a cow-path, regardless of where it led, was, in those days, the essence of hazard; though all the while from the pastures up above there came the flat safe tinkling of the bells.
The apple orchard—where Dolly was stung by the bee—was set on a fine breezy place at the brow of the hill with the valley in full sight. The trees themselves were old and decayed, but they were gnarled and crotched for easy climbing. And the apples—in particular a russet—mounted to a delicacy. On the other side of the valley, a half mile off as a bird would fly, were the buildings of a convent, and if you waited you might hear the twilight bell. To this day all distant bells come to my ears with a pleasing softness, as though they had been cast in a quieter world. Stone arrow-heads were found in a near-by field as often as the farmer turned up the soil in plowing. And because of this, a long finger of land that put off to the valley, was called Indian Point. Here, with an arm for pillow, one might lie for a long hour on a sunny morning and watch the shadows of clouds move across the lowland. A rooster crows somewhere far off—surely of all sounds the drowsiest. A horse in a field below lifts up its head and neighs. The leaves practice a sleepy tune. If one has the fortune to keep awake, here he may lie and think the thoughts that are born of sun and wind.
And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comforting sniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the farmer's wife. There is as yet not a faintest gurgle in the kettle.
To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall out of one. Is twelve o'clock never to come? Have Time and the Hour grown stagnant? We eat apples and throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt. Is the great round sun stuck? Have the days of Joshua come again? We walk a rail fence. Is it not yet noon? Shrewsbury clock itself—reputed by scholars the slowest of all possible clocks—could not so hold off. I snag myself—but it is nothing that shows when I sit.
Ah! At last! My grandfather is calling from the house. We run back and find that the lunch is ready and is laid upon a table with a red oil-cloth cover. We apply ourselves. Silence….
The journey home started about five o'clock. There was one game we always played. Each of us, having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning and guessed where we would be when the sun set. My grandfather might say the high bridge. I named the Sherman House. But my brother, being precise, judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole. Beyond a certain turn—did we remember?—well, it would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on. What an excitement there was when the sun's lower rim was already below the horizon! We stood on our knees and looked through the little window at the back of the phaeton. With what suspicion we regarded my grandfather's driving! Or if Dolly lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, was in the plot against us? The sun sets. We cry out the victor.
The sky flames with color. Then deadens in the east. The dusk is falling. The roads grow dark. Where run the roads of night? While there is light, you can see the course they keep across the country—the dust of horses' feet—a bridge—a vagrant winding on a hill beyond. All day long they are busy with the feet of men and women and children shouting. Then twilight comes, and the roads lead home to supper and the curling smoke above the roof. But at night where run the roads? It's dark beyond the candle's flare—where run the roads of night.
My brother and I have become sleepy. We lop over against my grandfather—
We awake with a start. There is a gayly lighted horse-car jingling beside us. The street lights show us into harbor. We are home at last.
The Man Of Grub Street Comes From His Garret
I have come to live this winter in New York City and by good fortune I have found rooms on a pleasant park. This park, which is but one block in extent, is so set off from the thoroughfares that it bears chiefly the traffic that is proper to the place itself. Grocery carts jog around and throw out their wares. Laundry wagons are astir. A little fat tailor on an occasion carries in an armful of newly pressed clothing with suspenders hanging. Dogs are taken out to walk but are held in leash, lest a taste of liberty spoil them for an indoor life. The center of the park is laid out with grass and trees and pebbled paths, and about it is a high iron fence. Each house has a key to the enclosure. Such social infection, therefore, as gets inside the gates is of our own breeding. In the sunny hours nurses and children air themselves in this grass plot. Here a gayly painted wooden velocipede is in fashion. At this minute there are several pairs of fat legs a-straddle this contrivance. It is a velocipede as it was first made, without pedals. Beau Brummel—for the velocipede dates back to him—may have walked forth to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells on a vehicle not far different, but built to his greater stature. There is also a trickle of drays and wagons across the park—a mere leakage from the streets, as though the near-by traffic in the pressure had burst its pipes. But only at morning and night when the city collects or discharges its people, are the sidewalks filled. Then for a half hour the nozzle of the city plays a full stream on us.
The park seems to be freer and more natural than the streets outside. A man goes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts her stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a country road. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit the quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement in the privilege of a playground.
My work—if anything so pleasant and unforced can carry the name—is done at a window that overlooks this park. Were it not for several high buildings in my sight I might fancy that I lived in one of the older squares of London. There is a look of Thackeray about the place as though the Osbornes might be my neighbors. A fat man who waddles off his steps opposite, if he would submit to a change of coat, might be Jos Sedley starting for his club to eat his chutney. If only there were a crest above my bell-pull I might even expect Becky Sharp in for tea. Or occasionally I divert myself with the fancy that I am of a still older day and that I have walked in from Lichfield—I choose the name at hazard—with a tragedy in my pocket, to try my fortune. Were it not for the fashion of dress in the park below and some remnant of reason in myself, I could, in a winking moment, persuade myself that my room is a garret and my pen a quill. On such delusion, before I issued on the street to seek my coffee-house, I would adjust my wig and dust myself of snuff.
But for my exercise and recreation—which for a man of Grub Street is necessary in the early hours of afternoon when the morning fires have fallen—I go outside the park. I have a wide choice for my wanderings. I may go into the district to the east and watch the children play against the curb. If they pitch pennies on the walk I am careful to go about, for fear that I distract the throw. Or if the stones are marked for hop-scotch, I squeeze along the wall. It is my intention—from which as yet my diffidence withholds me—to present to the winner of one of these contests a red apple which I shall select at a corner stand. Or an ice wagon pauses in its round, and while the man is gone there is a pleasant thieving of bits of ice. Each dirty cheek is stuffed as though a plague of mumps had fallen on the street. Or there may be a game of baseball—a scampering on the bases, a home-run down the gutter—to engage me for an inning. Or shinny grips the street. But if a street organ comes—not a mournful one-legged box eked out with a monkey, but a big machine with an extra man to pull—the children leave their games. It was but the other day that I saw six of them together dancing on the pavement to the music, with skirts and pigtails flying. There was such gladness in their faces that the musician, although he already had his nickel, gave them an extra tune. It was of such persuasive gayety that the number of dancers at once went up to ten and others wiggled to the rhythm. And for myself, although I am past my sportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, would inflame me to a fox-trot. Even a surly tune—if the handle be quickened—comes from the box with a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would fret until it came out a dancing measure.
In this part of town, on the better streets, I sometimes study the fashions as I see them in the shops and I compare them with those of uptown stores. Nor is there the difference one might suppose. The small round muff that sprang up this winter in the smarter shops won by only a week over the cheaper stores. Tan gaiters ran a pretty race. And I am now witness to a dead heat in a certain kind of fluffy rosebud dress. The fabrics are probably different, but no matter how you deny it, they are cut to a common pattern.
In a poorer part of the city still nearer to the East River, where smells of garlic and worse issue from cellarways, I came recently on a considerable park. It was supplied with swings and teeters and drew children on its four fronts. Of a consequence the children of many races played together. I caught a Yiddish answer to an Italian question. I fancy that a child here could go forth at breakfast wholly a Hungarian and come home with a smack of Russian or Armenian added. The general games that merged the smaller groups, aided in the fusion. If this park is not already named—a small chance, for it shows the marks of age—it might properly be calledThe Park of the Thirty Nations.
Or my inclination may take me to the lower city. Like a poor starveling I wander in the haunts of wealth where the buildings are piled to forty stories, and I spin out the ciphers in my brain in an endeavor to compute the amount that is laid up inside. Also, lest I become discontented with my poverty, I note the strain and worry of the faces that I meet. There is a story of Tolstoi in which a man is whispered by his god that he may possess such land as he can circle in a day. Until that time he had been living on a fertile slope of sun and shadow, with fields ample for his needs. But when the whisper came, at a flash, he pelted off across the hills. He ran all morning, but as the day advanced his sordid ambition broadened and he turned his course into a wider and still wider circle. Here a pleasant valley tempted him and he bent his path to bring it inside his mark. Here a fruitful upland led him off. As the day wore on he ran with a greater fierceness, because he knew he would lose everything if he did not reach his starting place before the sun went down. The sun was coming near the rim of earth when he toiled up the last hill. His feet were cut by stones, his face pinched with agony. He staggered toward the goal and fell across it while as yet there was a glint of light. But his effort burst his heart. Does the analogy hold on these narrow streets? To a few who sit in an inner office, Mammon has made a promise of wealth and domination. These few run breathless to gain a mountain. But what have the gods whispered to the ten thousand who sit in the outer office, that they bend and blink upon their ledgers? Have the gods whispered to them the promise of great wealth? Alas, before them there lies only the dust and heat of a level road, yet they too are broken at the sunset.
Less oppressive are the streets where commerce is more apparent. Here, unless you would be smirched, it is necessary to walk fast and hold your coat-tails in. Packing cases are going down slides. Bales are coming up in hoists. Barrels are rolling out of wagons. Crates are being lifted in. Is the exchange never to stop? Is no warehouse satisfied with what it has? English, which until now you judged a soft concordant language, shows here its range and mastery of epithet. And all about, moving and jostling the boxes, are men with hooks. One might think that in a former day Captain Cuttle had settled here to live and that his numerous progeny had kept the place.
Often I ride on a bus top like a maharajah on an elephant, up near the tusks, as it were, where the view is unbroken. I plan this trip so that I move counter to the procession that goes uptown in the late afternoon. Is there a scene like it in the world? The boulevards of Paris in times of peace are hardly so gay. Fifth Avenue is blocked with motor cars. Fashion has gone forth to select a feather. A ringlet has gone awry and must be mended. The Pomeranian's health is served by sunlight. The Spitz must have an airing. Fashion has wagged its head upon a Chinese vase—has indeed squinted at it through a lorgnette against a fleck—and now lolls home to dinner. Or style has veered an inch, and it has been a day of fitting. At restaurant windows one may see the feeding of the over-fed. Men sit in club windows and still wear their silk hats as though there was no glass between them and the windy world. Footmen in boots and breeches sit as stiffly as though they were toys grown large and had metal spikes below to hold them to their boxes. They look like the iron firemen that ride on nursery fire-engines. For all these sights the bus top is the best place.
And although we sit on a modest roof, the shopkeepers cater to us. For in many of the stores, is there not an upper tier of windows for our use? The commodities of this second story are quite as fine as those below. And the waxen beauties who display the frocks greet us in true democracy with as sweet a simper.
My friend G—— while riding recently on a bus top met with an experience for which he still blushes.
There was a young woman sitting directly in front of him, and when he came to leave, a sudden lurch threw him against her. When he recovered his footing, which was a business of some difficulty, for the bus pitched upon a broken pavement, what was his chagrin to find that a front button of his coat had hooked in her back hair! Luckily G—— was not seized with a panic. Rather, he labored cautiously—but without result. Nor could she help in the disentanglement. Their embarrassment might have been indefinitely prolonged—indeed, G—— was several blocks already down the street—when he bethought him of his knife and so cut off the button. As he pleasantly expressed it to the young woman, he would give her the choice of the button or the coat entire.
Reader, are you inclined toward ferry boats? I cannot include those persons who journey on them night and morning perfunctorily. These persons keep their noses in their papers or sit snugly in the cabin. If the market is up, they can hardly be conscious even that they are crossing a river. Nor do I entirely blame them. If one kept shop on a breezy tip of the Delectable Mountains with all the regions of the world laid out below, he could not be expected to climb up for the hundredth time with a first exhilaration, or to swing his alpenstock as though he were on a rare holiday. If one had business across the Styx too often—although the scenery on its banks is reputed to be unusual—he might in time sit below and take to yawning. Father Charon might have to jog his shoulder to rouse him when the boat came between the further piers.
But are you one of those persons who, not being under a daily compulsion, rides upon a ferry boat for the love of the trip? Being in this class myself, I laid my case the other night before the gateman, and asked his advice regarding routes. He at once entered sympathetically into my distemper and gave me a plan whereby with but a single change of piers I might at an expense of fourteen cents cross the river four times at different angles.
It was at the end of day and a light fog rested on the water. Nothing was entirely lost, yet a gray mystery wrapped the ships and buildings. If New Jersey still existed it was dim and shadowy as though its real life had gone and but a ghost remained. Ferry boats were lighted in defiance of the murk, and darted here and there at reckless angles. An ocean liner was putting out, and several tugs had rammed their noses against her sides. There is something engaging about a tug. It snorts with eagerness. It kicks and splashes. It bursts itself to lend a hand. And how it butts with its nose! Surely its forward cartilages are of triple strength, else in its zest it would jam its nasal passages.
Presently we came opposite lower New York. Although the fog concealed the outlines of the buildings, their lights showed through. This first hour of dark is best, before the day's work is done and while as yet all of the windows are lighted. The Woolworth Tower was suffused in a soft and shadowy light. The other buildings showed like mountains of magic pin-pricks. It was as though all the constellations of heaven on a general bidding had met for conference.
The man of Grub Street, having by this time somewhat dispelled the fumes of dullness from his head, descends from his ferry boat and walks to his quiet park. There is a dull roar from the elevated railway on Third Avenue where the last of the day's crowd goes home. The sidewalks are becoming empty. There is a sheen of water on the pavement. In the winter murk there is a look of Thackeray about the place as though the Sedleys or the Osbornes might be his neighbors. If there were a crest above his bell-pull he might even expect Becky Sharp in for tea.
Now that Spring is here
When the sun set last night it was still winter. The persons who passed northward in the dusk from the city's tumult thrust their hands deep into their pockets and walked to a sharp measure. But a change came in the night. The north wind fell off and a breeze blew up from the south. Such stars as were abroad at dawn left off their shrill winter piping—if it be true that stars really sing in their courses—and pitched their voices to April tunes. One star in particular that hung low in the west until the day was up, knew surely that the Spring had come and sang in concert with the earliest birds. There is a dull belief that these early birds shake off their sleep to get the worm. Rather, they come forth at this hour to cock their ears upon the general heavens for such new tunes as the unfaded stars still sing. If an ear is turned down to the rummage of worms in the earth—for to the superficial, so does the attitude attest—it is only that the other ear may be turned upward to catch the celestial harmonies; for birds know that if there is an untried melody in heaven it will sound first across the clear pastures of the dawn. All the chirping and whistling from the fields and trees are then but the practice of the hour. When the meadowlark sings on a fence-rail she but cons her lesson from the stars.
It is on such a bright Spring morning that the housewife, duster in hand, throws open her parlor window and looks upon the street. A pleasant park is below, of the size of a city square, and already it stirs with the day's activity. The housewife beats her cloth upon the sill and as the dust flies off, she hears the cries and noises of the place. In a clear tenor she is admonished that there is an expert hereabouts to grind her knives. A swarthy baritone on a wagon lifts up his voice in praise of radishes and carrots. His eye roves along the windows. The crook of a hungry finger will bring him to a stand. Or a junkman is below upon his business. Yesterday the bells upon his cart would have sounded sour, but this morning they rattle agreeably, as though a brisker cow than common, springtime in her hoofs, were jangling to her pasture. At the sound—if you are of country training—you see yourself, somewhat misty through the years, barefoot in a grassy lane, with stick in hand, urging the gentle beast. There is a subtle persuasion in the junkman's call. In these tones did the magician, bawling for old lamps, beguile Aladdin. If there were this morning in my lodging an unrubbed lamp, I would toss it from the window for such magic as he might extract from it. And if a fair Princess should be missing at the noon and her palace be skipped from sight, it will follow on the rubbing of it.
The call of red cherries in the park—as you might guess from its Italian source—is set to an amorous tune. What lady, smocked in morning cambric, would not be wooed by such a voice? The gay fellow tempts her to a purchase. It is but a decent caution—now that Spring is here—that the rascal does not call his wares by moonlight. As for early peas this morning, it is Pan himself who peddles them—disguised and smirched lest he be caught in the deception—Pan who stamps his foot and shakes the thicket—whose habit is to sing with reedy voice of the green willows that dip in sunny waters. Although he now clatters his tins and baskets and cries out like a merchant, his thoughts run to the black earth and the shady hollows and the sound of little streams.
I have wondered as I have observed the housewives lingering at their windows—for my window also looks upon the park—I have wondered that these melodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares of wider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, there might be a lilt devised in praise of other pleasing merceries—a tripping pizzicato for laces and frippery—a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. And should not the latest book—if it be a tale of love, for these I am told are best offered to the public in the Spring (sad tales are best for winter)—should not a tale of love be heralded through the city by the singing of a ballad, with a melting tenor in the part? In old days a gaudy rogue cried out upon the broader streets that jugglers had stretched their rope in the market-place, but when the bears came to town, the news was piped even to the narrowest lanes that house-folk might bring their pennies.
With my thoughts set on the Spring I chanced to walk recently where the theatres are thickest. It was on a Saturday afternoon and the walk was crowded with amusement seekers. Presently in the press I observed a queer old fellow carrying on his back a monstrous pack of umbrellas. He rang a bell monotonously and professed himself a mender of umbrellas. He can hardly have expected to find a customer in the crowd. Even a blinking eye—and these street merchants are shrewd in these matters—must have told him that in all this hurrying mass of people, the thoughts of no one ran toward umbrellas. Rather, I think that he was taking an hour from the routine of the day. He had trod the profitable side streets until truantry had taken him. But he still made a pretext of working at his job and called his wares to ease his conscience from idleness. Once when an unusually bright beam of sunlight fell from between the clouds, he tilted up his hat to get the warmth and I thought him guilty of a skip and syncopation in the ringing of his bell, as if he too twitched pleasantly with the Spring and his old sap was stirred.
I like these persons who ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter—the fellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring—is a partner of a bootblack. Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rusty sign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. He is so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he really can read the sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, he is not squeamish at the praise. As I have not previously been aware that any of his profession ever came to general fame except the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, I have squinted sharply at him to see if by chance it might be he, but there are no marks even of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring my hat to a marvellous whiteness and it may be true that he has really tended heads that are now gone beyond Constantinople.
Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. Of this the long rag is their instrument. They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the key and then they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there is an unusual genius in the bootblack—some remnant of ancient Greece—he plays such a lively tune that one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or other such nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as though Orpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northern feet.
Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our hearts go out to Adam in the hour of his temptation. I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who even leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart. "Those dear dirty dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten. They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I do not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets up kinship with an author.
The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but sure that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. When else could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the returning year—the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? If such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even of travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the first fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even though the jest be plain?
I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day of April fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his finger at your hat, humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for a supposed defect! His glad shout will be your reward. Or if you are begged piteously to lift a stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even though you sniff the imposture, seize upon it with a will! It is thus, beneath these April skies, that you play your part in the pageantry that marks the day.
The Friendly Genii
Do you not confess yourself to be several years past that time of greenest youth when burnt cork holds its greatest charm? Although not fallen to a crippled state, are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip and stalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with back humped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? But doubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights—when Kazrac the magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let us hope that you played the villain with a swagger, or being cast in a softer role, that you won a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done. Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the parlor hangings as a curtain with brown string from the pantry and safety pins. Although you had no show to offer, you said "ding" three times—as is the ancient custom of the stage when the actors are ready—and drew them wide apart. The cat was the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward your activity. A complaint that springs up in youth and is known as "snuffles" had kept you out of school. It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were sunk in fear of your lessons, but had abated at nine o'clock. Whether the cure came with a proper healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the ringing of the school bell, must be left to a cool judgment.
Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie came on her quest for dust, you tooted once upon your nose, just to show that a remnant of your infirmity persisted, then put your golden convalescence on the making of your curtain.
But in the early hours of afternoon when the children are once more upon the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or step carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil their suppers. Ah!—a bat goes by—a glove—a ball! And now from a vacant lot there comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention to be made of you—you, "molasses fingers"—the star left fielder—the timely batter? What would you not give now for a clean bill of health? You rub your offending nose upon the glass. What matters it with what deep rascality in black mustachios you once strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you?
My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of squeaks and shadows to all except the valiant. In it were low, dark corners where the night crawled in and slept. But in the open part where the roof was highest, there was the theatre. Its walls were made of a red cambric of a flowered pattern that still lingers with me, and was bought with a clatter of pennies on the counter, together with nickels that had escaped my extravagance at the soda fountain.
A cousin and I were joint proprietors. In the making of it, the hammer and nails were mine by right of sex, while she stitched in womanish fashion on the fabrics. She was leading woman and I was either the hero or the villain as fitted to my mood. My younger cousin—although we scorned her for her youth—was admitted to the slighter parts. She might daub herself with cork, but it must be only when we were done. Nor did we allow her to carry the paper knife—shaped like a dagger—which figured hugely in our plots. If we gave her any word to speak, it was as taffy to keep her silent about some iniquity that we had worked against her. In general, we judged her to be too green and giddy for the heavy parts. At the most, she might take pins at the door—for at such a trifle we displayed our talents—or play upon the comb as orchestra before the rising of the curtain.
The usual approach to this theatre was the kitchen door, and those who came to enjoy the drama sniffed at their very entrance the new-baked bread. A pan of cookies was set upon a shelf and a row of apples was ranged along the window sill. Of the ice-box around the corner, not a word, lest hunger lead you off! As for the cook, although her tongue was tart upon a just occasion and although she shooed the children with her apron, secretly she liked to have them crowding through her kitchen.
Now if you, reader—for I assume you to be one of the gathering audience—were of the kind careful on scrubbing days to scrape your feet upon the iron outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed parts, then it is likely that you stood in the good graces of the cook. Mark your reward! As you journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and bit scallops in its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was in you—as commonly comes up in the middle afternoon—you waived this slower method and crammed yourself with a recklessness that bestrewed the purlieus of your mouth. If your ears lay beyond the muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order.
Is there not a story in which children are tracked by an ogre through the perilous wood by the crumbs they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogre lurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It would be near the top, farthest from the friendly kitchen, that the attack might come, for there the stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it was best to look sharp and to turn the corners wide. A brave whistling kept out the other noises.
It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us. My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb within my fist. We were frequent companions. Together we had sat on benches in the park and poked the gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. Although his eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equal age.
The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried a bag of candy against a sudden appetite—colt's foot, a penny to the stick. Here and there ushers were clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first corn within a popper. Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the day would have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It was as though a thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make his cover. The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Stratford Church and we dimly saw its spire.
Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scampering to get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waiting on the stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lost mountaineers—for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the Public Library, that had come last beneath my thumb—ghostly heads looked down upon us across the gallery rail.
And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger—whose Adam's apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation—you will see in the center of the murk above you a single point of light. It is the spark that will ignite the great gas chandelier. I strain my neck to the point of breaking. My grandfather strains his too, for it is a game between us which shall announce the first spurting of the light. At last! We cry out together. The spark catches the vent next to it. It runs around the circle of glass pendants. The whole blazes up. The mountaineers come to life. They lean forward on their elbows.
From the wings comes the tuning of the violins. A flute ripples up and down in a care-free manner as though the villain Kazrac were already dead and virtue had come into its own. The orchestra emerges from below. Their calmness is but a pretense. Having looked on such sights as lie behind the curtain, having trod such ways, they should be bubbling with excitement. Yet observe the bass viol! How sodden is his eye! How sunken is his gaze! With what dull routine he draws his bow, as though he knew naught but sleepy tunes! If there be any genie in the place, as the program says, let him first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy!
We consult our programs. The first scene is the magician's cave where he plans his evil schemes. The second is the Chinese city where he pretends to be Aladdin's uncle. And for myself, did a friendly old gentleman offer me lollypops and all-day-suckers—for so did the glittering baubles present themselves across the footlights—like Aladdin I, too, would not have squinted too closely on his claim. Gladly I would have gone off with him on an all-day picnic toward the Chinese mountains.
We see a lonely pass in the hills, the cave of jewels (splendid to the eye of childhood) where the slave of the lamp first appears, and finally the throne-room with Aladdin seated safely beside his princess.
Who knows how to dip a pen within the twilight? Who shall trace the figures of the mist? The play is done. We come out in silence. Our candy is but a remnant. Darkness has fallen. The pavements are wet and shining, so that the night might see his face, if by chance the old fellow looked our way.
All about there are persons hurrying home with dinner-pails, who, by their dull eyes, seem never to have heard what wonders follow on the rubbing of a lamp.
But how the fires leaped up—how ambition beat within us—how our attic theatre was wrought to perfection—how the play came off and wracked the neighborhood of its pins—with what grace I myself acted Aladdin—these things must be written by a vain and braggart pen.
Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit
When it happens that a man has risen to be a member of Parliament, the Secretary of the British Navy and the President of the Royal Society, when he has become the adviser of the King and is moreover the one really bright spot in that King's reign, it is amazing that considerably more than one hundred years after his death, when the navy that he nurtured dominates the seven seas, that he himself on a sudden should be known, not for his larger accomplishments, but as a kind of tavern crony and pot-companion. When he should be standing with fame secure in a solemn though dusty niche in the Temple of Time, it is amazing that he should be remembered chiefly for certain quarrels with his wife and as a frequenter of plays and summer gardens.
Yet this is the fate of Samuel Pepys. Before the return of the Stuarts he held a poor clerkship in the Navy Office and cut his quill obscurely at the common desk. At the Restoration, partly by the boost of influence, but chiefly by his substantial merit, he mounted to several successively higher posts. The Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and when he became Lord High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684, Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later victories that were to sweep the seas may be traced in part to him. Nelson rides upon his shoulders. These achievements should have made his fame secure. But on a sudden he gained for posterity a less dignified although a more interesting and enduring renown.
In life, Samuel Pepys walked gravely in majestical robe with full-bottomed wig and with ceremonial lace flapping at his wrists. Every step, if his portrait is to be believed, was a bit of pageantry. Such was his fame, that if his sword but clacked a warning on the pavement, it must have brought the apprentices to the windows. Tradesmen laid down their wares to get a look at him. Fat men puffed and strained to gain the advantage of a sill. Fashionable ladies peeped from brocaded curtains and ogled for his regard. Or if he went by chair, the carriers held their noses up as though offended by the common air. When he spoke before the Commons, the galleries were hushed. He gave his days to the signing of stiff parchments—Admiralty Orders or what not. He checked the King himself at the council table. In short, he was not only a great personage, but also he was quite well aware of the fact and held himself accordingly.
But now many years have passed, and Time, that has so long been at bowls with reputations, has acquired a moderate skill in knocking them down. Let us see how it fares with Pepys! Some men who have been roguish in their lives have been remembered by their higher accomplishments. A string of sonnets or a novel or two, if it catches the fancy, has wiped out a tap-room record. The winning of a battle has obliterated a meanly spent youth. It is true that for a while an old housewife who once lived on the hero's street will shake a dubious finger on his early pranks. Stolen apples or cigarettes behind the barn cram her recollection. But even a village reputation fades. In time the sonnets and glorious battle have the upper place. But things went the other way with Pepys. Rather, his fate is like that of Zeus, who—if legend is to be trusted—was in his life a person of some importance whose nod stirred society on Olympus, but who is now remembered largely for his flirtations and his braggart conduct. A not unlike evil has fallen on the magnificent Mr. Pepys.
This fate came to him because—as the world knows—it happened that for a period of ten years in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting and honest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he was still a poor clerk living with his wife in a garret, and ended it in 1669, when, although he had emerged from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been set on him. All the facts of his life during this period are put down, whether good or bad, small or large, generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent in work at his office, of his consultations with higher officials. There is much running to and fro of business. The Dutch war bulks to a proper length. Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys goes upon the streets in the days of the plague and writes the horror of it—the houses marked with red crosses and with prayers scratched beneath—the stench and the carrying of dead bodies. He sees the great fire of London from his window on the night it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen. He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, and afterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and the crowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper. He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at an ale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Retire," a song of his own making, and tells how his listeners "cried it up."
In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for his attentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne in her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" Mrs. Knipp, for his love of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry late at night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps we recall him best for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the time of the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a "camlett cloak with gold buttons," or for sitting for his portrait in an Indian gown which he "hired to be drawn in." Who shall say that this is not the very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons? Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked, would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their dusky fingers at him?
Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, "poor wretch," was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she washed his "foul clothes"—that by degrees he came to be wealthy and rode in his own yellow coach—that his wife went abroad in society "in a flowered tabby gown"—that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the pit—and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box.
Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepys chiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. If only the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting of the Committee for Tangier—when the Prince of Wales was present and such smaller fry as Chancellors—is dull and is matter for a skipping eye.
If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens that there is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page—maybe no more than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's name pops in sight)—bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chance of roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiralty business, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs. Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that the start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandal about Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart came to court—such things tease one from the sterner business.
And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the importance of Pepys' diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in reality the diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface, he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture to write of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote in a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had reason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825, when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequent editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final. But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.
If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data. Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.
More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was that was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different from the Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. It no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the rain. The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit. They were ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like congenial neighbors. But these days are past. Let Bartholomew Fair be as rowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark, the theatre has risen in the world! It has put on a wig, as it were, it has tied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable. And although it has taken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind and will make it feel at home in the upper circles.
But also the theatre introduced movable scenery. There is an attempt toward elaboration of stage effect. "To the King's playhouse—" says Pepys, "a good scene of a town on fire." Women take parts. An avalanche of new plays descends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a change of taste.
But if you would really know what kind of theatre it was that sprang up with the Stuarts and what the audiences looked like and how they behaved, you must read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you can set out with him in his yellow coach for the King's house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hunger nips you at the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts it, for a "barrel of oysters." Then, having dusted yourself of crumbs, you take the road again. Presently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches are before you. There is a show of foppery on the curb and an odor of smoking links. A powdered beauty minces to the door. Once past the doorkeeper, you hear the cries of the orange women going up and down the aisles. There is a shuffling of apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a box with a silken leg across the rail, scrawls a message to an actress and sends it off by Orange Moll. Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with the King. There is a craning of necks, for with her the King openly "do discover a great deal of familiarity." In other boxes are other fine ladies wearing vizards to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board breaks in the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in the men's hair and the ladies' necks, which, writes Pepys, "made good sport." Or again, "A gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; being choked, but with much ado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him to life again." Or perhaps, "I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all."
At a change of scenes, Mrs. Knipp spies Pepys and comes to the pit door. He goes with her to the tiring-room. "To the women's shift," he writes, "where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier than I thought…. But to see how Nell cursed for having so few people in the pit, was pretty."—"But Lord! their confidence! and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk!" Or he is whispered a bit of gossip, how Castlemaine is much in love with Hart, an actor of the house. Then Pepys goes back into the pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the play nears its end, footmen crowd forward at the doors. The epilogue is spoken. The fiddles squeak their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches.
"Would it fit your humor," asks Mr. Pepys, when we have been handed to our seats, "would it fit your humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern for some burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It's sure that some brave company will fall in, and we can have a tune. We'll not heed the bellman. We'll sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning."
To an Unknown Reader
Once in a while I dream that I come upon a person who is reading a book that I have written. In my pleasant dreams these persons do not nod sleepily upon my pages, and sometimes I fall in talk with them. Although they do not know who I am, they praise the book and name me warmly among my betters. In such circumstance my happy nightmare mounts until I ride foremost with the giants. If I could think that this disturbance of my sleep came from my diet and that these agreeable persons arose from a lobster or a pie, nightly at supper I would ply my fork recklessly among the platters.
But in a waking state these meetings never come. If an article of mine is ever read at all, it is read in secret like the Bible. Once, indeed, in a friend's house I saw my book upon the table, but I suspect that it had been dusted and laid out for my coming. I request my hostess that next time, for my vanity, she lay the book face down upon a chair, as though the grocer's knock intruded. Or perhaps a huckster's cart broke upon her enjoyment. Let it be thought that a rare bargain—tender asparagus or the first strawberries of the summer—tempted her off my pages! Or maybe there was red rhubarb in the cart and the jolly farmer, as he journeyed up the street, pitched it to a pleasing melody. Dear lady, I forgive you. But let us hope no laundryman led you off! Such discord would have marred my book.
I saw once in a public library, as I went along the shelves, a volume of mine which gave evidence to have been really read. The record in front showed that it had been withdrawn one time only. The card was blank below—but once certainly it had been read. I hope that the book went out on a Saturday noon when the spirits rise for the holiday to come, and that a rainy Sunday followed, so that my single reader was kept before his fire. A dull patter on the window—if one sits unbuttoned on the hearth—gives a zest to a languid chapter. The rattle of a storm—if only the room be snug—fixes the attention fast. Therefore, let the rain descend as though the heavens rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Let the chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, let it hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip his glasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when the earth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book off the library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder for fear that some one might catch me, I looked along the pages. There was a thumb mark in a margin, and presently appeared a kindly stickiness on the paper as though an orange had squirted on it. Surely there had been a human being hereabouts. It was as certain as when Crusoe found the footprints in the sand. Ah, I thought, this fellow who sits in the firelight has caught an appetite. Perhaps he bit a hole and sucked the fruit, and the skin has burst behind. Or I wave the theory and now conceive that the volume was read at breakfast. If so, it is my comfort that in those dim hours it stood propped against his coffee cup.
But the trail ended with the turning of the page. There were, indeed, further on, pencil checks against one of the paragraphs as if here the book had raised a faint excitement, but I could not tell whether they sprang up in derision or in approval. Toward the end there were uncut leaves, as though even my single reader had failed in his persistence.
Being swept once beyond a usual caution, I lamented to my friend F—— of the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in a library was a rare exception. F—— offered me such consolation as he could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of the pictures was pointed out to him as the artist who had painted it. At once F—— saw his opportunity to confer a pleasure, but as there is a touch of humor in him, he first played off a jest. Lounging forward, he dropped his head to one side as artistic folk do when they look at color. He made a knot-hole of his fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated across the room and stood with his legs apart in the very attitude of wisdom. He cast a stern eye upon the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when the artist was fretted to an extremity, F—— came forward and so cordially praised the picture that the artist, being now warmed and comforted, presently excused himself in a high excitement and rushed away to start another picture while the pleasant spell was on him.
Had I been the artist, I would have run from either F——'s praise or disapproval. As an instance, I saw a friend on a late occasion coming from a bookstore with a volume of suspicious color beneath his arm. I had been avoiding that particular bookstore for a week because my book lay for sale on a forward table. And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic seized me and I plunged into the first doorway to escape. I found myself facing a soda fountain. For a moment, in my blur, I could not account for the soda fountain, or know quite how it had come into my life. Presently an interne—for he was jacketted as if he walked a hospital—asked me what I'd have.
Still somewhat dazed, in my discomposure, having no answer ready, my startled fancy ran among the signs and labels of the counter until I recalled that a bearded man once, unblushing in my presence, had ordered a banana flip. I got the fellow's ear and named it softly. Whereupon he placed a dead-looking banana across a mound of ice-cream, poured on colored juices as though to mark the fatal wound and offered it to me. I ate a few bites of the sickish mixture until the streets were safe.
I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity. Possibly it arises from the fact that until recently my writing met with uniform rejection and failure. For years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might know how miserably I failed. I answered upon a question that I had given up the practice, that I now had no time for it, that I scribbled now and then but always burned it. All that while I gave my rare leisure and my stolen afternoons—the hours that other men give to golf and sleep and sitting together—these hours I gave to writing. On a holiday I was at it early. On Saturday when other folks were abroad, I sat at my desk. It was my grief that I was so poor a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on my papers if I sat beyond the usual hour. Writing was my obsession. I need no pity for my failures, for although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance, my deeper joy was in the writing. That joy repeated failures could not blunt.
There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my desk with their former meaning faded, that still recall as I think of them the first exaltation when I wrote them—feverishly in a hot emotion. In those days I thought that I had caught the sunlight on my pen, and the wind and the moon and the spinning earth. I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose from the mist obedient to me. If I splashed my pen, in my warm regard it was the roar and fury of the sea. It was really no more than my youth crying out. And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped me when I tried to put them down on paper, although I did not know it then. Perhaps they were too vagrant to be held. And yet these paragraphs that might be mournful records of failure, fill me with no more than a tender recollection for the boy who wrote them. The worn phrases now beg their way with broken steps. Like shrill and piping minstrels they whine and crack a melody that I still remember in its freshness.
But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these regards. Perhaps you, too, have faded papers. Or possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soul into an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manuscript which you would like to sell. Do not mistake me! I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for these wares. Rather I speak as a friend who, having many such hidden sorrows, offers you a word of comfort. To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, "'Tis common, my Lord." I have so many friends that have had an unproductive fling toward letters, that I think the malady is general. So many books are published and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yours and theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy.
I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks—a federal matter as though Capital were under fire—would betray thousands of abandoned novels. There may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with price-sheets and stock-lists that they cannot offer harborage to a love tale. Standing desks in particular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always chinked with these softer plots. And rarely there is a desk so smothered in learning—reeking so of scholarship—as not to admit a lighter nook for the tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to me lately that Professor B——, whose word shakes the continent, holds in a lower drawer no fewer than three unpublished historical novels, each set up with a full quota of smugglers and red bandits. One of these stories deals scandalously with the abduction of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. The professor is a stoic before his class, but there's blood in the fellow.
There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. You will recall that once, when taken to a ruined castle, you brooded on the dungeons until a plot popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint phrasing from the chroniclers. You stuffed it with soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord," you wrote gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God pity the poor sailors that take the sea this night!" And on you pelted with your plot to such conflicts and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance.
These things you have committed. Good sir, we are of a common piece. Let us salute as brothers! And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue in your ways. And that you may not lack matter for your pen, I warmly urge you, when by shrewdest computation you have exhausted the plots of adventure and have worn your villains thin, that you proceed in quieter vein. I urge you to an April mood, for the winds of Spring are up and daffodils nod across the garden. There is black earth in the Spring and green hilltops, and there is also the breath of flowers along the fences and the sound of water for your pen to prattle of.
A Plague of All Cowards
Having written lately against the dog, several acquaintances have asked me to turn upon the cat, and they have been good enough to furnish me with instances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with whom I recently sat at dinner, inquired of me on the passing of the fish, whether I had ever properly considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mischievous animal. One of them had mooed at her as she crossed a pasture and she had hastily climbed a fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. I was once taken to a Turkish bath for no other reason—as I was afterwards told—than that it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way. A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that I direct my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged to go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received a paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whose company I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it. We were abroad upon a lake in the full moon—we were lost upon a mountain—twice a canoe upset—there were the usual jests about cooking. These things might have filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only a paragraph.
But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat, upon which I look—despite the coldness of her nature—as a harmless and comforting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no more prey upon her morals than I would the morals of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slip to another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, among whom I have already confessed that I number myself.
In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader—if he is swept off in the general opinion—will expect under such a title something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the sharp-toothed locust—for in the days that bordered so close upon the mastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we know today—even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not now add to the grief of a coward.
And yet—really I hesitate. I blush. My attack will be too intimate; for I have confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery. I have indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving him because of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as though his legs were not well socketed and might fall out on a change of gaits. I have ridden on a camel in a side-show, but have found my only comfort in his hump. I have stroked the elephant. In a solemn hour of night I have gone downstairs to face a burglar. But I do not run singing to these dangers. While your really brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase to the moon—I write in figure—I would shake with fear upon a lower platform.
Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays. "Tipp," says his pleasant biographer, "never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun." I cannot follow Tipp, it may be, to his extreme tremors—my hair will not rise to so close a likeness of the fretful porcupine—yet in a measure we are in agreement. We are, as it were, cousins, with the mark of our common family strong on both of us.
There are persons who, when in your company on a country walk, will steal apples, not with a decent caution from a tree along the fence, but far afield. If there are grapes, they will not wait for a turn of the road, but will pluck them in the open. Or maybe in your wandering you come on a half-built house. You climb in through a window to look about. Here the stairs will go. The ice-box will be set against this wall. But if your companion is one of valor's minions, he will not be satisfied with this safe and agreeable research—this mild speculation on bath-rooms—this innocent placing of a stove. He must go aloft. He has seen a ladder and yearns to climb it. The footing on the second story is bad enough. If you fall between the joists, you will clatter to the basement. It is hard to realize that such an open breezy place will ever be cosy and warm with fires, and that sleepy folk will here lie snugly a-bed on frosty mornings. But still the brazen fellow is not content. A ladder leads horribly to the roof. For myself I will climb until the tip of my nose juts out upon the world—until it sprouts forth to the air from the topmost timbers: But I will go no farther. But if your companion sees a scaffold around a chimney, he must perch on it. For him, a dizzy plank is a pleasant belvedere from which to view the world.
The bravery of this kind of person is not confined to these few matters. If you happen to go driving with him, he will—if the horse is of the kind that distends his nostrils—on a sudden toss you the reins and leave you to guard him while he dispatches an errand. If it were a motor car there would be a brake to hold it. If it were a boat, you might throw out an anchor. A butcher's cart would have a metal drag. But here you sit defenseless—tied to the whim of a horse—greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin turns his head and holds you with his hard eye. There is a convulsive movement along his back, a preface, it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend would have loosed the straps that run along the horse's flanks. Then, if any deviltry take him, he might go off alone and have it out.
I have in mind a livery stable in Kalamazoo. Myself and another man of equal equestrianism were sent once to bring out a thing called a surrey and a pair of horses. Do you happen to be acquainted with Blat's Horse Food? If your way lies among the smaller towns, you must know its merits. They are proclaimed along the fences and up the telegraph poles. Drinking-troughs speak its virtues. Horses thrive on Blat's Food. They neigh for it. A flashing lithograph is set by way of testament wherever traffic turns or lingers. Do you not recall the picture? A great red horse rears himself on his hind legs. His forward hoofs are extended. He is about to trample someone under foot. His nostrils are wide. He is unduly excited. It cannot be food, it must be drink that stirs him. He is a fearful spectacle.
There was such a picture on the wall of the stable.
"Have you any horses," I asked nervously, jerking my thumb toward the wall, "any horses that have been fed on just ordinary food? Some that are a little tired?"
For I remembered how Mr. Winkle once engaged horses to take thePickwickians out to Manor Farm and what mishaps befell them on the way.
"'He don't shy, does he?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.
"'Shy, sir?—He wouldn't shy if he was to meet a vagginload of monkeys with their tails burnt off.'"
But how Mr. Pickwick dropped his whip, how Mr. Winkle got off his tall horse to pick it up, how he tried in vain to remount while his horse went round and round, how they were all spilt out upon the bridge and how finally they walked to Manor Farm—these things are known to everybody with an inch of reading.
"'How far is it to Dingley Dell?' they asked.
"'Better er seven mile.'
"'Is it a good road?'
"'No, t'ant.'…
"The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall quadruped, for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly at their heels."
"Have you any horses," I repeated, "that have not been fed on Blat'sFood—horses that are, so to speak, on a diet?"
In the farthest stalls, hidden from the sunlight and the invigorating infection of the day, two beasts were found with sunken chests and hollow eyes, who took us safely to our destination on their hands and knees.
As you may suspect, I do not enjoy riding. There is, it is true, one saddle horse in North Carolina that fears me. If time still spares him, that horse I could ride with content. But I would rather trust myself on the top of a wobbly step-ladder than up the sides of most horses. I am not quite of a mind, however, with Samuel Richardson who owned a hobby-horse and rode on his hearth-rug in the intervals of writing "Pamela." It is likely that when he had rescued her from an adventure of more than usual danger—perhaps her villainous master has been concealed in her closet—perhaps he has been hiding beneath her bed—it is likely, having brought her safely off, the author locked her in the buttery against a fresh attack. Then he felt, good man, in need of exercise. So while he waits for tea and muffins, he leaps upon his rocking-horse and prances off. As for the hobby-horse itself, I have not heard whether it was of the usual nursery type, or whether it was built in the likeness of the leather camels of a German steamship.
I need hardly say that these confessions of my cowardice are for your ear alone. They must not get abroad to smirch me. If on a country walk I have taken to my heels, you must not twit me with poltroonery. If you charge me with such faint-heartedness while other persons are present, I'll deny it flat. When I sit in the company of ladies at dinner, I dissemble my true nature, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat. If then, you taunt me, for want of a better escape, I shall turn it to a jest. I shall engage the table flippantly: Hear how preposterously the fellow talks!—he jests to satisfy a grudge. In appearance I am whole as the marble, founded as a rock.
But really some of us cowards are diverting persons. The lady who directed me against the cow is a most delightful woman with whom I hope I shall again sit at dinner. A witty lady of my acquaintance shivers when a cat walks in the room. A man with whom I pass the time pleasantly and profitably, although he will not admit a fear of ghosts, still will not sleep in an empty house because of possible noises. I would rather spend a Saturday evening in the company of the cowardly Falstaff than of the bold Hotspur. If it were not for sack, villainous sack, and a few spots upon his front, you would go far to find a better companion than the fat old Knight. Bob Acres was not much for valor and he made an ass of himself when he went to fight a duel, yet one could have sat agreeably at mutton with him.
But these things are slight. It matters little whether or not one can mount a ladder comfortably. Now that motors have come in, horses stand remotely in our lives. Nor is it of great moment whether or not we fear to be out of fashion—whether we halt in the wearing of a wrong-shaped hat, or glance fearfully around when we choose from a line of forks. Superstitions rest mostly on the surface and are not deadly in themselves. A man can be true of heart even if he will not sit thirteen at table. But there is a kind of fear that is disastrous to them that have it. It is the fear of the material universe in all its manifestations. There are persons, stout both of chest and limb, who fear drafts and wet feet. A man who is an elephant of valor and who has been feeling this long while a gentle contempt for such as myself, will cry out if a soft breeze strikes against his neck. If a foot slips to the gutter and becomes wet, he will dose himself. Achilles did not more carefully nurse his heel. For him the lofty dome of air is packed with malignant germs. The round world is bottled with contagion. A strong man who, in his time, might have slain the Sofi, is as fearful of his health as though the plague were up the street. Calamities beset him. The slightest sniffling in his nose is the trumpet for a deep disorder. Existence is but a moving hazard. Life for him, poor fellow, is but a room with a window on the night and a storm beating on the casement. God knows, it is better to grow giddy on a ladder than to think that this majestic earth is such an universal pestilence.