Shandygaff
by Christopher Morley · English · Gutenberg #13739 · 415,774 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Shandygaff
Author: Christopher Morley
Release date: October 13, 2004 [eBook #13739]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13739
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF ***
SHANDYGAFF
by
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
1918
A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters,
interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to
the Reader
[Illustration: Photo by Charles H. Davis
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS, THUNDER
ON THE LEFT, ETC.]
TITLES AND DEDICATIONS
I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the
immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of
elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and
penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum
Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted
trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry,
were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice
+----------------------------+
| |
| THESE BASINS ARE FOR |
| CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY |
| |
+----------------------------+
I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these
fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters,
must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow
O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso.
The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of dedicating
them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have
occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance.
I thought of dedicating the book to
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER
The Laird of Westcolang
I thought of dedicating to the
TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE WORLD
Blackwell's in Oxford and
Leary's in Philadelphia
I thought of dedicating to
THE 8:13 TRAIN
I thought of dedicating to
EDWARD PAGE ALLINSON
The Squire of Town's End Farm
Better known as Mifflin McGill
In affectionate memory of
Many unseasonable jests
I thought of dedicating to
PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. GUMMERE
From an erring pupil
I thought of dedicating to
FRANCIS R. BELLAMY
Author of "The Balance"
Whose Talent I Revere,
But Whose Syntax I Deplore
I thought of dedicating to
JOHN N. BEFFEL
My First Editor
Who insisted on taking me seriously
I thought of dedicating to
GUY S.K. WHEELER
The Lion Cub
I thought of dedicating to
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
The Urbanolater
I thought of dedicating to
SILAS ORRIN HOWES
Faithful Servant of Letters
But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedicate this book to
THE MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS
More Sinned Against Than Sinning
* * * * *
For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York _Evening Post_, The
Boston _Transcript_, The _Bellman_, The _Smart Set_, The New York _Sun_,
The New York _Evening Sun_, The _American Oxonian_, _Collier's_, and The
_Ladies' Home Journal_.
Wyncote, Pa.
November. 1917.
SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or
beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England,
and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men,
journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII
as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a
continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the
resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide
no other tipple.
John Mistletoe: _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_.
CONTENTS
The Song of Shandygaff
Titles and Dedications
A Question of Plumage
Don Marquis
The Art of Walking
Rupert Brooke
The Man
The Head of the Firm
17 Heriot Row
Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader
William McFee
Rhubarb
The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine
Ingo
Housebroken
The Hilarity of Hilaire
A Casual of the Sea
The Last Pipe
Time to Light the Furnace
My Friend
A Poet of Sad Vigils
Trivia
Prefaces
The Skipper
A Friend of FitzGerald
A Venture in Mysticism
An Oxford Landlady
"Peacock Pie"
The Literary Pawnshop
A Morning in Marathon
The American House of Lords
Cotswold Winds
Clouds
Unhealthy
Confessions of a Smoker
Hay Febrifuge
Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers.
A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE
Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He was
the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only
netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The
owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done
by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those
publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike
view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so
the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue.
But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht,
that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to
a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty
dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to
be done. The house was still being paid for on the installment plan.
There were plumbers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for
the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and
the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club--his only extravagance. A simple
middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a
treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To
accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends,
Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below
that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the
Elizabethan song naïvely puts it.
There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama.
Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his
fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote
painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on
Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the proprietor ordered. Though he
did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book
publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest
thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells
in _Harper's Magazine_ for the honourable quality of his criticisms.
But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and
enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used up the first
fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current
poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The
preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty
journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him
only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a
Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of
intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had
time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates,
which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged
about six dollars a week.
That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the
limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars or so needed
for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways.
Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far
into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote
"Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting
lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on
poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in
the same place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy
he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first
year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30--not one-third as much,
he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short
story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the
sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature.
It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were
wrong when they wrote to him admiringly--as they did twice a
year--asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man
of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr.
Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for
membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and
so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called
on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hôte, with an
apologetic murmur.
But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or
discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the
existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again,
with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that
there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters
in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton
rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he was one of those
estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their
wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous
and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books,
and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a
corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in
New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was
when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary
essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous
sign in the British Museum washroom.
It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn
bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row.
Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of
traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as
becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind,
and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work
until one o'clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their
tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then
be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven,
and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof
until past midnight.
One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for
to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across
the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on
the shining river and consider his course.
A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry
articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an
English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time
he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at
length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened
that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and
to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from
the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism.
Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in
the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter
prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a
remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men,
although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they
would ever meet, he had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever
visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on
this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying
that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon.
The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature
it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but
little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to
Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was
small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop
for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure
pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an
enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance
she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the
drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of
the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for
several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How
like a poet!
In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they
would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of
evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things
that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the
hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour?
This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to
Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk,
Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary
club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of
Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings
all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New
Utrecht!
Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but
the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of
out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby,
makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much
explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the
fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and
slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds
or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously.
English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American
reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have
bought books on Paternoster Row, have drunk half-and-half and eaten
pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with
laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton.
Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean,
bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios.
What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a
mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco!
Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all
in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they
had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to
grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the
poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for
dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as
ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tenderness. They would send the
three younger children to their grandmother, to be interned there until
the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she
could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the
boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had
children of his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by
the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet
was aver here for a lecture tour--he would be entertained and fêted
everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had
started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad.
He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple routine
of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three
o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious
habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office
on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doctor's assistant call
for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he
called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a
moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his
playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman,
and undoubtedly he knew all about wines.
Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that
all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had
planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from
doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles,
the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair,"
the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's
"contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good
humour for a humourist.
"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? Or has
George Moore sent in a new novel?"
Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he
confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who wore life
lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis,
with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful
comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the
reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist
was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a
married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble.
"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of
year."
"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and
have some ale. That'll put you on your feet."
"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to
make up my page. I tell you what, though--"
He hesitated, and flushed a little.
"Say it," said Bolles kindly.
"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old
Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him
around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet
some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time,
and I--I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I
were a member, you know."
"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle Light'? And
you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than
Masefield. Take him to lunch--I should say I will; Why, I'll put him in
the colyum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an
orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you
knew him."
"I don't--yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this
afternoon."
"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran
downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never
read.
The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that
he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had done duty for three
winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he
blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried
outdoors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to
draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first
clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street.
Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was
compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for usually Mrs.
Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky star was in the
zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he
might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste,
and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the
humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted
with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely
improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut
that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was
unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly
transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the
purchase price and fled to the subway.
When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw that
the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes
before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship
office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the official admitted him
to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling
a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no
less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and
wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet
the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache
looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible
that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of
Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring
outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight.
What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to
stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the
mustard-coloured trousers one more round--they were much too long for
him--and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a
peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his
wedding.
He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he was very
familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured down the
slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of
superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of
England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his
surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells
and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to
the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after
traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage;
gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save
for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by
nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne.
Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that--the second class?
His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther
down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking.
There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still thronged.
Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green
ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four
children in single file, each holding fast to the one in front like
Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous
care not to slip on the cleated boards. To his amazement the reviewer
recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet.
Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a
wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin.
The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the
skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in
which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children
watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets.
"Daddy, look out for Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the
poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two
smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party.
"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and
promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file.
Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself
known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving
the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they
waited for the customs examination. With mingled feelings he saw that
Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself,
indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic
cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood
in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around
him. He shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home
with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and
introduced himself.
Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he
presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two
girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately uttered
cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to him.
"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit.
"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath.
Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the
throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created
two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now
their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing
that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you
must consider yourself a citizen of that nation."
Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the
poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your
telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have you."
"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact
we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has
some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children
are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some
lectures."
A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow.
"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs.
Stockton and I were hoping--"
"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your
hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some quiet
hotel where we can stay the night."
Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any
hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, and then
remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he
recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the
Obelisk.
After the customs formalities were over--not without embarrassment, as
Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red
union suits and a half-empty bottle of brandy--Stockton convoyed them to
a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite
ashamed of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors
whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the
spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward
the nearest telephone booth.
As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the
Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful
to spend a few days with the Stocktons."
"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how
shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and
your clothes--well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know
if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bankrupt."
The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the
country near New York," he said.
"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes?
He looked like a canary."
DON MARQUIS
There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the
victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of
your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be
considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war
and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew
with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly
misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be
offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn
Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives
in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout....
Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well,
call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob
pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and
Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening
Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists
and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is
far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian
Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a
novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes
the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in
his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk
he is a dramatist.
He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre
Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting
satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only
"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:
A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other
evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time
to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair
broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us
sad.
The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul
into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in
the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more
than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral
chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or
flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its
heart and soul.
Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as
a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well
known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier.
Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing
sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done.
The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to
look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship.
The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill
Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially
warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged
from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to
transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his
best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on
an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a
picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_
got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy
race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would
dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_
building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle.
"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like
dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the
echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come.
Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading
their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for
that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses,
fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into
circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published
October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a
blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this
man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question
the answerless face of life--
Still mounts the dream on shining pinion,
Still broods the dull distrust;
Which shall have ultimate dominion,
Dream, or dust?
Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble
verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of
Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can
turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll
Durham cigarettes.
How neat this is:
TO A DANCING DOLL
Formal, quaint, precise, and trim,
You begin your steps demurely--
There's a spirit almost prim
In the feet that move so surely.
So discreetly, to the chime
Of the music that so sweetly
Marks the time.
But the chords begin to tinkle
Quicker,
And your feet they flash and flicker--
Twinkle!--
Flash and flutter to a tricksy
Fickle meter;
And you foot it like a pixie--
Only fleeter!
Not our current, dowdy
Things--
"Turkey trots" and rowdy
Flings--
For they made you overseas
In politer times than these
In an age when grace could please,
Ere St. Vitus
Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;
Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!
But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he
sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the
slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is
a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from
Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious
inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his
brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real
earnestness that underlies his chaff.
I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the
hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a
submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by
Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in
his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of
letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some
contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but
nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six
times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret
compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:
MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)
TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea.
(COLD ROAST BEEF.)
WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF
STEW.)
THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)
FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued,
sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main
business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR
CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)
SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself
for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.)
SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we
have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.
But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always
tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry
battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real
voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach,
the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular
Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an
Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of
Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling
has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them
between book-covers.
One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a
number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms
and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly
envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They
had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists,
and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where
they could find more.
I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether
they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any
pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do
more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.
By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
you are loafing?
Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that
minorities are always right.
Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware.
The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.
I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising
young man for twenty years.
In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the
mirthquake:
If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.
If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the
little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper
colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry,
Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its
revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will
find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your
ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever
carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best
trousers.
But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite
denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the
gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a
clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this,
just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:
This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...
As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb--
Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
Of fire and steel and stone and war:
She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth
Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ...
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.
Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.
Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest.
We have been slow as doom. Our dead
Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed--
We have denied each pleading ghost--
We have been slow: God, make us sure.
We have been slow. Grant we endure
Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.
Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord?
Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,
Into one single swinging sword.
I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is
disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this
sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives
of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the
press:
Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be
disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has
swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up
again.
Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all
its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of
more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that
furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!
There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than
the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or
three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper
some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad
to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to
give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton
Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia
Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.
But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it
the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day
long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope
of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down
on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his
queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his
only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the
street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write
his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in
the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I
have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in
that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben
Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and
set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a
kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the
tavernacular.
He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic,
and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is
best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky,
and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this
country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel
Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benét
in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and
mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army.
Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the
dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's
Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the
azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more
publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's
drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach,
endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers
libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for
quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter,
opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if
Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something
thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine
him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of
the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I
feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who
lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell?
Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to
punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the
fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his
typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many
devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach
himself.
The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with
whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask
a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter.
Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through
an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler
takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the
portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British
cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in
neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case
agate:
it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for
said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the
captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was
fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where
the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and
serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if
there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me
the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs
to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert
said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top
crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right
under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that
noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking
off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert
said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush
upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i
am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships
surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy
that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the
false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this
pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a
port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling
off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as
he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god
said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered
the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the
hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the
mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust
gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw
the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the
starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant
cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british
navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the
strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would
start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my
forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the
first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said
the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian
drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and
hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every
afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach
even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must
stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me
another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had
been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be
inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh
exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and
here i am.
archy
So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original
contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These
are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust
repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is
compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured
with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product.
Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and
superscription of America.
And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is
unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation
suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great
Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But
Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out
Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society
or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt
away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the
scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true
in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx.
He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some
quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness,
Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea
spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner,
he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates;
faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few
spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until,
chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top
speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly
revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins,
the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as
anywhere else.
What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the
young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of
literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don
Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying
at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a
dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle
Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words:
Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the
Republican party.
My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time
and place free of charge.
Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left
the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat.
In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in
the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for
some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power.
It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening,
after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late
President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed
through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had
heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of
showing me how greatly he appreciated it.
Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public
tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the
Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a
position as reporter on a Washington paper.
Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier
years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented,
peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since.
There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the
Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting
against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the
Republican party again.
This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which
I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more
particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself.
It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person:
Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little
finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good
hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200
pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in
type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears
No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of
trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for
the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw
missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from
possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with
respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates
undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on
little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to
psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his
verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in
possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek
bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a
thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story
writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your
business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of
painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors,
publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in
insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers
as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on
right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of
room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese,
"Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical
comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam
heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized
charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses
on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot;
belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy
eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in
teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn,
with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside;
voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly
wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes
prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose
over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested.
I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that
Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a
cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick
Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not
infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_
comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or
drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment
on some bolshevictory in Russia:
A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of
Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip.
For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a
very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is
purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a
ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and
fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have
made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss
the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of
his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of
the machine:
I pray Thee, make my colyum read,
And give me thus my daily bread.
Endow me, if Thou grant me wit,
Likewise with sense to mellow it.
Save me from feeling so much hate
My food will not assimilate;
Open mine eyes that I may see
Thy world with more of charity,
And lesson me in good intents
And make me friend of innocence ...
Make me (sometimes at least) discreet;
Help me to hide my self-conceit,
And give me courage now and then
To be as dull as are most men.
And give me readers quick to see
When I am satirizing Me....
Grant that my virtues may atone
For some small vices of mine own.
And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his
prayer with this comment:
People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really
want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think
the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be
sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of
affectation crept in.
THE ART OF WALKING
Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries!
He is as old as his calves--his garteries....
--_Meditations of Andrew McGill_.
"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea."
This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of
William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near
Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in
any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that
the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by
all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps
arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are
barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth
would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic
pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have
traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of
exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other
stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was
indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is
most excellent in his writings."
A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost
heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous
precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one
sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a
gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life":
Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the
streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to
go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was
carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon
earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.
Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes
upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When
he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of
sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He
writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are
often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because
walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to
that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.
Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking.
The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether
Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road)
to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically
from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was
Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that
spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends,
and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy
the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of
their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little
walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient
Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the
adventure.
De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth
and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile
all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first
meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement
of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself
with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind
hastening to decay.
I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised
before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's
famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth
century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving
meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days
and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary
travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any
of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up.
Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century
earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many
lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads.
It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of
his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it
over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than
a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long
before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that
cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one
foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him
as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.
After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you
paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On
Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than
the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October,
1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He
must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on
Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know
that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the
financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to
better purpose!
There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker:
get these by rote in some membrane of memory:
The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky
sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of
state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel
playing before it.
The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns
were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of
Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith,
Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first
read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August,
1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George
Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of
the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom
Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to
that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous
half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not
dominate the conversation.
There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the
Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on
the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed
in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for
the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them."
There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One
could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though
literature were a co-product of legs and head.
Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due
course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall
Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight
the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious
as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one
goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the
country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the
harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and
muscle exercised alike.
Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no
soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who
salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to
grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are
his months:
For love we Earth then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the
bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary
of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's
"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals
from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay,
and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands
"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to
utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education,"
by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in
1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious
essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert
Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has
beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who
has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in
walking tours:
No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should
ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in
arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of
men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall
be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and
two, since the world began, there have always been young men who
have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still
one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for
him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys.
Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so
ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be
taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now,
one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake
before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be
confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they
fill.
They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey.
They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with
them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters;
and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they
would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or
yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot
rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of
going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape
from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in
yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to
that great order called society that you have for a period got away
from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a
vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with
him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of
etiquette.
He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has
fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment,
to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which
he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on
earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a
breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of
course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural
instinct of women.
Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of
locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be
admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make
memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published.
Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an
itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed
stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he
proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know
he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives
and deacons tremble!
Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems
at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their
eating; but despite the naïveté of his eagerness to sing, there is a
plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to
know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote
a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at
all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know
that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been
fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a
year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but
he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the
local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will
be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore
spats in his life.
But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets
at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut
carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers
and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday
night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least
two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising
humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the
full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming
measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence
of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty
of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and
celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream
soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark
Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he
finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and
beauty.
This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has
scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and
puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping
when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging
his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any
American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little
pamphlet used on many a road:
RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD
Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois,
June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money.
This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a
tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West and back,
during which he will observe the following rules:
(1) Keep away from the cities.
(2) Keep away from the railroads.
(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.
(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.
(5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five.
(6) Travel alone.
(7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square.
(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.
In order to carry out the last rule there will be three exceptions
to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief
printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry
this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry a small
portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view
of the history of art, especially as it applies to America.
Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his
theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting.
"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the
exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this
decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and
well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil"
figure from Springfield, Illinois.
A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a
lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in
"The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best
friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget it!
The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have made the
highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and
private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the
footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven
there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the
limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick,
we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the
ways of God to man.
And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells come most
often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination
lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When
a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most
vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending
to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card
index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail
me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce,
who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye,
even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the
endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the
wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is scouring the
hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road
to walk to Royston in the rain....
Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of
a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills
in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to
some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a
table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an
elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our
Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words:
"Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity,
rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." _Haec studio,
pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur_.
RUPERT BROOKE
Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born
of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin,
golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham,
in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at
Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.
In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge,
England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_.
This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at
Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to
time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own
small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing.
His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's
_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14.
Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows
along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the
Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country
is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields
bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard
willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of
the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top
with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the
favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and
monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.
But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café des Westens in
Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed.
Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam,
and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages,
Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang
of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the
verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that
neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with
painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which
I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the
way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the
recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being
famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate
devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final
expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal
questions of youth which have no country and no clime--
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to
forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may
perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of
young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past
decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he
tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily
observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and
flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War;
he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in
training for the Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled
"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first
published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's
quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as
the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called
forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London
_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I
sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This
was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the
biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did:
wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had
sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from
London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23,
1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on
Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of
the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due
to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous
touch of sunstroke.
A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who
Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to
the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited.
The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been
killed in action:
We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the
valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now,
but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and
Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely
grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen
trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an
olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth.
About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their
way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave.
The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with
lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty
officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was
not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave.
We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the
coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined
the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive
wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read
the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and
the bugles sounded the "Last Post."
And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards
those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet
towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to
be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than
Skyros, and no quieter resting place.
On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his
company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon
it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of
the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the
servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the
deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."
The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his
grave.
It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke.
The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful
of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden
cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any
laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may
say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray
is quoted:
"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of
one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of
youth and poetry."
In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found
at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He
would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph.
His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty
of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in
1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of
24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly
youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and
Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism,
bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot
on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a
part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he
says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.
And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise.
Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's
undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of
sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his
introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may
well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in
the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day
That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross
and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in
Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's
poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily
put, in _Grantchester_.)
This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and
there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all
young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our
humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a
young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his
day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many
vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few
touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part
of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he
did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his
poems of 1905-08 are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet,"
and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in
the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and
yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
--"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said:
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the
"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been
separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate
beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems,"
containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England
and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to
save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the
complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first
American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought
after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth
of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting
flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study.
From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or
_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to
sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the
form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song:
"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,
And Triumph is his crown.
Earth fades in flame before his wings,
And Sun and Moon bow down."
But that, I knew, would never do;
And Heaven is all too high.
So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,
I will not catch her eye.
"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said,
"The Gift of Love is this;
A crown of thorns about thy head,
And vinegar to thy kiss!"--
But Tragedy is not for me;
And I'm content to be gay.
So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,
I went another way.
And so I never feared to see
You wander down the street,
Or come across the fields to me
On ordinary feet.
For what they'd never told me of,
And what I never knew;
It was that all the time, my love,
Love would be merely you.
We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing
of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the
throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of
Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and
yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of
doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here
is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to
England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of
the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on
the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those
white Greek bodies against the green!
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the
answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the
farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in
surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet,
which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words
all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make
Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In
his hands the thing became a trumpet"--
THE DEAD
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a King, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo
of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete
without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all
the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious
details of existence must be his poem _The Great Lover_ where he
catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines
speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he
holds dear--
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such--
...All these have been my loves.
Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to speak;
but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than
_Heaven_ where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a
future life.
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry
The future is not Wholly Dry....
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that
exquisite bit of fooling.
Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke,
"the latest and greatest of young Englishmen."
THE MAN
The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold drizzle, the
first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were
beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the
long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was
a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It was the end of March.
In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was
on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare
shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were
gray--a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue
eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow
in the padded chair. His right hand--the long, firm, nervous hand of a
scholar--rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his
fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he
was revising.
Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two
and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure showed some
trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of
modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the
bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had
been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do
certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a
lifelong student of history, he had surprised his associates by the
clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in
the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than
he--save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney
piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for
his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the
picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender,
pain-wrenched mouth.
This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor
student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning visions of
great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of positions to guide his
country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher,
idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes
steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism
that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt him,
but had never abated his purpose. In a world reeling and smoking with
the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message
of the spirit, for the glory of humanity; for the settlement of disputes
by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To
that he had clung.
He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen.
What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the
golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announcing that
the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered
the first meeting thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious
faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in
the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully
planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation.
In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could
have believed that great nations would discard without compunction all
the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in
the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the
highest military honours? That a supposedly friendly nation would fill
another land with spies--even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy?
Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one
nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour
to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still
different. That his country, disregarding the old fetishes of honour and
insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things,
suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the
wounds and fill the starving mouths. That one nation--not because she
was weak, but because she was strong--should, with God's help, make a
firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never
conquer force.
"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight."
Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as
the utterance of a man years in advance of his time--but what rolling
thunders of vituperation they had cost him! _Too proud to fight_!... If
only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from
Judea!
But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the
nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies
of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeakable horror on
non-combatants, women and children, he had realized that his cherished
dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great
nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and--with bleeding heart--even
the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With
face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on
the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. _Arabic_,
_Lusitania_, _Persia_, _Laconia_, _Falaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_,
_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief.
And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ...
He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped
from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal
typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed
into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and
university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his
theses on the church door at Wittenberg:
"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_."
They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet
of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing....
"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the
step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it
involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of
the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war
against the Government and people of the United States_...."
The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the
keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of
his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer
divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in
one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind.
"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht
anders_...."
"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward
them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse
that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their
previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill
their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to
bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an
opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for
peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic
nations_....
"_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to
a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow
interest of their own_."
With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his
chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a
faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star.
Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing
heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to
feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning
breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky,
spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of
little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the
footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags
leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with
gunners at their sterns--in one aching synthesis the vastness and
dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of
various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold!
Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he
returned quietly to the typewriter:
"_We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for
the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.... The world
must be made safe for democracy_."
_The world must be made safe for democracy_! As the wires leaped and the
little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes
passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander
days, years before.
He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the
German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness
of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving
rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the
Moselle. And England--dear green England, fairest of all--the rich blue
line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and
yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had
bicycled for tea, and the naïve rustic folk who had made him welcome.
What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and
maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children,
millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness
of life--where were they now? Life, innocent human life--the most
precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and
win our own joys of home and love and food--what Black Death had
maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be
free and sweet again?
The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of
anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men
now living. But for the sake of the generations to come--he thought of
his own tiny grandchildren--for the love of God and the mercy of
mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war
let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful
thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace."
Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off
the closing words:
"_To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything
that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who
know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood
and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and
the peace which she has treasured_."
He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With
elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All
the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him,
but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "_Ich kann
nicht anders_," he whispered.
Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly:
"_God helping her, she can do no other_."
THE HEAD OF THE FIRM
He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting in his
private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and
yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and
other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers
and magazines. He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would
skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk
angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips.
For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons
that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of
his firm.
His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he
was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the
same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead
would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes
would flash--and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk.
When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not
well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he had
always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes remembered what
a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He
who loses his temper will lose everything."
But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties
to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in
childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an
infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous
swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than
most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the
army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family
business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight.
No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the
affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn,
pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a
successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the
confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and
grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new
executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding
criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread
the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have
our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine
instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly
plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the
firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself
as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of
the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but
he paid little heed.
The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen
in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe.
Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He
himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the
interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey,
the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He
sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and
other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram
after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed
congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to
foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He employed
famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his
factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him.
This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty
years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all
written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go
by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His
temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had
the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch,
sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of
energy in him often showed signs of overstress.
It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last
months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of
business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his
old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them
the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted
from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the
commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was
out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The
strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and
unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own
family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to
resign by bankruptcy:
"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common
enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your
deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid
from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by
right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have
dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to
welcome you at the earliest opportunity."
The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it
is worth while to remember what it was that killed it--and him. While
the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would
bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that
would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more
startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may
be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth
away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed
word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer
the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him
cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted
into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge
organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in
Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had
cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had
them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of
free communities to live their own lives.
Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that
perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him.
He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud,
was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of
the business to save and some of the goodwill intact.
It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the
world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful
toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and
yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring
in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on
his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a
mocking cartoon.
I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with
embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from
over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might
of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public opinion, that hung
like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word
incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt.
Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together
like beads of mercury on a plate, quivering into rhythm and concord,
become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires
to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when
once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end,
it moves onward like the tide up a harbour.
The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such
colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy
known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His
managers had foreseen every phase of this unprecedented competition, and
his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents
began to focus themselves.
Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents,
solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized that
one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric
of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the
executors, pending a reorganization.
17 HERIOT ROW
There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year
to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to Edinburgh,
made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of
1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the
unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would
that one might again steer _Shotover_ (dearest of pushbikes) along the
Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way
to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English
landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me.
That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and perchance may
serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of
wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more
interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him.
Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions.
For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the only time
in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during
nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional
Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no
excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one
take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot
month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon
exchange at two cents per penny.
£ | s. | d
July 16 pint cider | | 4
½ pint cider | | 1½
lunch at Banbury | 2 | 2
pint cider at Ettington | | 3
supper at Stratford | 1 | 3
stamp and postcard | | 2
____ _____ _____
| 4 | 3½
July 17 Postcards and stamps | | 9
pencil | | 1
Warwick Castle | 2 | -
cider at the _Bear and Baculus_ | |
(which Mifflin _would_ call the | |
_Bear and Bacillus) _ | | 2½
_Bowling Green Inn, _bed and | |
breakfast | 3 | 2
Puncture | 1 | -
Lunch, Kenilworth | 1 | 6
Kenilworth Castle | | 6
Postcards | | 4
Lemonade, Coventry | | 4
Cider | | 2½
Supper, Tamworth, _The Castle Hotel_ | 2 | 1
____ _____ _____
| 16 | 5½
July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield | | 3
cider at _The Three Crowns_ | | 4
postcard and shave | | 4
_The King's Head_, bed and breakfast | 3 | 7
cider | | 2
tip on road[A] | | 1½
lunch, Uttoxeter | 1 | 3
cider, Ashbourne, _The Green | |
Man_ | | 3
landlord's drink, Ashbourne[B] | | 1
supper, _Newhaven House_, | 1 | -
lemonade, Buxton | | 3
____ _____ _____
TOTAL £1 4 1
($5.78)
[Footnote A: As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather
tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway
crossing.]
[Footnote B: This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a
ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us
excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that
neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and
he agreed.]
That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that
ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and
emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reckoning shillings
and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a
firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over
the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the
swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in
his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself,
"Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something
that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke--"Four and
eleven pence half-penny so far to-day!"
Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The
McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the
afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's
Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight!
There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since the days
when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud to one
another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A
score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew
them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes
Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of
Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills--O my friends, do those
names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the
brotherhood--what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world!
In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a
large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city
was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King
and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our
satisfaction we were known as "the smoking-room gentlemen" throughout
our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the
Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and
coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that
somewhere in his letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew
Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there.
Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out
above all others of his youth--Rutland Square. And while that was of
course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad to
know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we
were on ground well loved by Tusitala.
The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in Auld
Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row--famous address, which had
long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a
tablet on the house commemorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our
surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign TO SELL was
prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought
struck us. Could we not go over the house in the character of
prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and
concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the
Signet.
Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once).
16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh.
26th July, 1911
DEAR SIR,
17 HERIOT ROW
We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be
seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view
it we shall arrange to have it opened.
We are,
Yours faithfully,
GUILD AND SHEPHERD.
Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the
figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember
that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling
with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was
in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and
subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always
take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of
amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if
you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman.
The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show
that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attachés,
appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric
young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes,
each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the
attaché in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We
explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was
alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had
presence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs,
and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was
quoted.
He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped
softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very track of the
Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined
R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie
light the street-lamps outside--a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining
brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn
heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street
gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette,
returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling
mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining
room facing the street--and we imagined Louis and his parents at
breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a
spacious and attractive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and
opening off it the little room where faithful Cummie slept. But in vain
we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room
that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the
endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded
and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and
forlorn.
With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, seeing
everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous
young agent. And what was it he said?--"This was the house of Lord
So-and-so" (I forget the name)--"and incidentally, Robert Louis
Stevenson lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the
deeds."
_Incidentally_!...
Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant
of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than
the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other
"offices" with care, imagining that little "Smoutie" may have run here
and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that
childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed
to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the
Stevensons for thirty years (1857-1887)--surely even the thirty years
that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those
dear ghosts we conjured up!
We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and
Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent
deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one has yet put a
tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day.
In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern
dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come
and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of
the dining-room windows:
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!
But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting
up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame
cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911
("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in
Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have
a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R.L.S., of whom
he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular
lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were
Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn
Street." He seemed to think Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned
that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well,
and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you
still light the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder
beacons on Flanders fields?
One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was
still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were down on hands and
knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light
in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man
passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin,
never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as
the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we
followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy
shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze.
Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces prom
No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin
and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the
adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once described when setting
down some recollections of childhood.
In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame
boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much
shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence,
like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and
_goody_ story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after many
days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted
him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to
play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like
a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the
venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, for it was
a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was
the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate
aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into
talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular
may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and
knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling
along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on
his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great
affair to me.
We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's
Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the
Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an
exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend
in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter
flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one
yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the
Edinburgh street lamps," says R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all
shines on Heriot Row.
The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the
dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to
go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more
enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him.
FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER
[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the
extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the
head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know
him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable
manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very
good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia
was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre
books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and
unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read
MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet
in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last
wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here
in memory of my very dear friend_.]
In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself.
Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal
trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never
did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I
am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy.
My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other
more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to
speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is
interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a
symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while
reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing.
My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world.
Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter
my message without fear or favour.
As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and
nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff,
poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and
strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they
beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most
preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful
authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid
blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly
sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is
in the blood.
Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible.
George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas
and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is
still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many
unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he
said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety."
But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as
publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did
they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich
garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and
younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on
into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.
But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true
specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is
content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican
that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of
good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some
winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular
conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his
thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et
dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing
terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the
publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I
believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully
when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote
an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a
week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the
head reader of a large publishing house.
One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the
profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will
rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration;
only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the
others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away
their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript
which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it
betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable
to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere
in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into
her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his
ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a
score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me
once, containing this immortal couplet:
She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
on the air,
A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
to set it there.
Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral
ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when
one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs'
trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert
Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity.
Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are
repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its
absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack
of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords
to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in
many cantos, beginning
Our heart is but a bundle of muscle
In which our passions tumble and tussle.
Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis:
"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual
circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being
a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the
day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a
paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced
case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by
a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been
bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles
and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female,
under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well
as in large cities and fashionable watering places.
But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition,
let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a
manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one
publisher's office.
She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant
figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca.
Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured
like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and
combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing
tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful
crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and
tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its
own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of
the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering
strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of
the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was
destined to be pushed forward by sighs.
Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such
plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero
in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently:
For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah
Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the
appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases.
His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close
together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in
many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his
lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper
lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across
his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and
expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine
proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges
there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show
unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in
the kindest advances one would wish to see.
It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley.
I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the
A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read
too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output
of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional
reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which
distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history,
poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes
a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of
things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is
fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable
treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on
using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And
with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of
writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.
Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is
all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for
the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on
foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging
anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of
intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and
talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of
substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts
all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week?
Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the
authors!
WILLIAM McFEE
M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a
cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it,
and half the ship has to clean up the mess.
--RUDYARD KIPLING.
The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they
would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and
William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck
steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at
Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages!
William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer
in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude
toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not
know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his
feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his
disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the
purveyors of publicity, you may know him.
One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the
open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young
man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to
Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker,
like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the
titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned
to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was
about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve
months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when
I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a
telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him
Casuals_!"
It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16
that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the
not-to-be-forgotten words.
MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA.
Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a
copy.
My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this
note:
"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up
with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before
the open fire."
My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are
interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike
County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly
readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her
first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings
she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was
our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for
her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee.
_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in
America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a
popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents
that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who
regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the
seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections,
indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the
first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened
to with respect.
Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at
that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were
_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has
been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very
singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on
human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for
himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well
take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this
generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the
artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of
a paragraph:--
Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I
suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the
sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine
artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live
like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the
artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with
irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my
living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their
ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my
theme, the problem of human folly.
Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he
has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of
it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London
twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful
machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering.
And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have
cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers
at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how
delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes
for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude
toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own
phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has
hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but
not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on
a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in
the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the
desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and
a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft
to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the
man who really has something to say.
Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How
the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell
Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W.
Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets
does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only
raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the
raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these
States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing
paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as
is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller?
Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the
stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me
quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot
refuse facts."
William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English
skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long
voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New
Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was
educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the
Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar
school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a
high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.
At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.
This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse,
Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office
of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His
father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an
apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred
pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the
money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else
is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at
the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will
find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out
in _Aliens_.
After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on
various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at
Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile
verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time
of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either
imitating Kipling or reacting from him.
His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives
and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by
socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to
live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at
first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic
Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum
reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he
attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent
engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As
early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.
In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room
of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance.
Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year
(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The
reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he
reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain
liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of
his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain
how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley
(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)
The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair
prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time
monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I
speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's
certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A
small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting
study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only
diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do
not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies
of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour.
I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his
induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour
of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable
weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing
suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a
seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating
things about the life of an engineer:
It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of
work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help
wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick.
Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the
R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean,
when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as
my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my
friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or
the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty
toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the
naval auxiliary are the same.
I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment
of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession
have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to
toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet
auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of
his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to
superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the
navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an
architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not
expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts
door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you
do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer
has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding
precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in
other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind.
I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which
to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the
peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of
it, and I know what I am talking about.
_The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the
responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He,
the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest
and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port.
Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge
instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board.
When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described.
The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these
laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as
well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea
have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university.
The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his
acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target.
He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the
University of the Seven Seas.
If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem
that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a
man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has
worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When
his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the
bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or
reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no
gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from
some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most
engineers:
As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool)
the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the
pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores
dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie
were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up
writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend
more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door.
I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish
them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that
character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_
character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it,
can you?
I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst
of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people
live, of ordinary human possibilities.
A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap
stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I
don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse
what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big
name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as
well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To
hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_!
I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the
amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort
who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter
him!
His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the
hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging
from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to
be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of
"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in
the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London
journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time
to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that
make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written
weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a
humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern
cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor
on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.
When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his
engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was
interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too.
And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board
of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to
rest on his gauges.
In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local
colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the
United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither
_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for
years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his
manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the
United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he
was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war.
Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a
vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my
proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all
three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two
magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to
every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of
letters. They can never be quoted too often:
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs
deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin."
That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich
family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered
the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps
cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the
cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in
store for us.
And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers
with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth
remembering, and I leave it with you:
"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such,
instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing
murderous blows."
RHUBARB
We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which
we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them,
imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche
Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.
The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable
Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting
way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic
corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and
as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store,
no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty
trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine,
so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of
an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the
Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten
Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a year. People who
find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The
only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of
Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read.
Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little
German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a
man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all
expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent
_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the
stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and
dream of Stuttgart.
It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an
educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was
very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the
other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire,
dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it
more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop
into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell
into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her
shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their
pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she
so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive.
It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that
he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We
sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little
sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was
over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes
would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of
a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life.
What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the
rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin
abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang
Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's
Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream,
marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of
paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy
trousers--infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say.
I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first
impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always
in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back;
his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He
had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a
decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx.
Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some
harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave.
"I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong.
It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong
like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his
broad, thick hand.
Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche
Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda
fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked
for anything more complex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake
his head solemnly and say: "That I have not got." Motorists sometimes
turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for
banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But
they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit
of absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged
water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag his
beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when
the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and
rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue.
At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it
high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna
entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed
and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. This
she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on
top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in
stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black
bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on
Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense
carnation" bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics
of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naïve
pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he,"
which amused us.
On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and
during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog
which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. Sometimes we met
him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to
himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black
dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down,
pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past.
As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war.
Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the
shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat
upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for converting the
old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected
them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the
spine of his contention was that the German army was unbeatable. He got
out his faded discharge ticket from the Würtemberger Landsturm to show
the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at
the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and
over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard
aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came
in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped.
But often the glass top of the perfume counter was requisitioned as a
large-scale battleground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to
represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was
Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty
completely on the perfume counter. "_Warte doch_!" he would cry. "Just
wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!"
Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew
well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our
arguments were wholly lacking in personal animus. When I told him of the
Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing
me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes"
made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the
British; he would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his
conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he
would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a
panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin
at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good
night.
How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a
true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all
that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal
simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt
for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the
men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of
the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans
_en masse_, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the
drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue
it out.
But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German sentiment in
the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried
over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would
explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more surprised to meet
her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, sloshing along the road in the
liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black
paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing
outdoors on a day like this?" I said.
"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen
didn't get her airing."
"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said
severely.
Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was snowbound in
Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent
business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away,
so we had no news from Kings.
We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our
absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an
hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe
and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped
at the drugstore on my way to the train to get some iodine.
Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone of white
powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from well. There were
great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat
spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and
went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands.
"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that
the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week?
Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his
heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze
seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At
last he turned round. His broad, naïve face was quivering like
blanc-mange.
"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more?
Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia."
As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor.
The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my
feet.
THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE
A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY
Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint
little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the
_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the
others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish
din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your
eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag.
Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above
the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the
famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio
Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down
your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in
Strychnine.
Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press
agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and
untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an
unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among
physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful
ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with
innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the
contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept
away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end
that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find
himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at
length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells
clanging in your ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag
soaring behind the jade canal.
The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into
the curious seven-wheeled _sforza_ lettered _Hôtel Decameron_. We
rumbled _andante espressivo_ over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussée
d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of
the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of
lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what
quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes in a
strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the _markt-platz_
where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are
delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese
cathedral) on the cliff.
The Hôtel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender
there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche
overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory
of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch
is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after
which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French
frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer
without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The _haut ton_ of
the section in which the Hôtel Decameron finds itself can readily be
seen by the fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on
the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hôtel. The
antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the two.
The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak
heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the
terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a
bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my
time exploring the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which
stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and
vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing
than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the
Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts
of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some
particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will
some day make Strychnine a place of _pélérinage_ for all the world. _Pay
homage to the fromage_ is a rough translation of the motto of the town,
which is carved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself.
Limberg, Gruyère, Alkmaar, Neufchâtel, Camembert and Hoboken--all these
famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the
Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the
burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' Guild at
the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by the town
council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and
a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial
cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present
donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat
the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by
the workmen in the quarries to prevent prostration.
It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would
gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and
sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping
my _verre_ of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of
travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned ambulance to catch my
even more old-fashioned train. The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine
when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese
carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some
day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them
to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then
Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance
that way, a fragrant memory.
And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal
and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys.
INGO
"ZUM ANDENKEN"
The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart
to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of
blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown
calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the
German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good
fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque
German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the
absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was!
Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call
memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black
Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and
asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen
in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn")
found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern
in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low
building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering
little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in
winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely
aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a
door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the
haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the
summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery
under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow
coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the
valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the
dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that
summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of
cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining
table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's
niece when they essayed the native idiom. "_Sie arbeiten immer_!" she
used to say; "_Sie werden krank_!" ("You're always working; you'll be
ill!")
There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days
two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there
more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans.
On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the
military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the
Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful
organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every
village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in
those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in
waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met,
and played games with Ingo.
Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent,
self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature.
His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a
corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk
along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by
the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations
for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the
immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a
muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he
was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing
smile: "_Von den Sternen_!" ("Of the stars.")
The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's
smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes
were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous
amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple
pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy
days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and
sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task
of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet
one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the
word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every
time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of
a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to
guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game
entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent
over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little
brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task.
"Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would
laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning
a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo.
The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of
winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to
construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way
out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the
room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages,
then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the
other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity
to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his
sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous
places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly,
and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to
make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless
despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom.
After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come
trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony
under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book _Till
Eulenspiegel_, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that
immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every
paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something.
Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear
Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright
boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What
a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with
deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest
transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely
ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth.
His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive
stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way,
"_Gott! wie er freut sich_!" The progress of our reading was held up by
these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo
explaining.
Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to
reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and
there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure
Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the
tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's
eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's
sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn
we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read
of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall
when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the
quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses.
I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those
hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty,
sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus
zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect
and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight
with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric
American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons
with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as
often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a
child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen,
and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me
my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me
was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one
afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.
And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Märchen" that
I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to
learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them,
they ran like this:
For Ingo to learn English will very easy be
If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me;
Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,
And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes--
Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend:
To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend.
If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot
get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.
HOUSEBROKEN
After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he
needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew
his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening
spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no
two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for
something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and
smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous
evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the
click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after
glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at
night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their
pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight--these were the things that
made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in
the suburbs like a tame cat!
Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last
he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp
retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to
his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took
it quite calmly.
"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an
evening with your friends."
A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go.
"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be
lonely."
This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting
the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the
evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow
of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the
pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars
who never stir from the house at night.
On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to
shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very
cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room
shining with firelight and the shabby armchair.
"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.
"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak
in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you."
He kissed her and went off.
When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired
and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of
drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face
bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway.
At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing,
shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran.
He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force
seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering
how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly.
At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street
and had almost entered his gate when he paused.
Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably
by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart
leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely
eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and
masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and
tiptoed away.
That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a
little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he
sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again
returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced
his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped,
biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a
box of crackers.
At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the
lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more
trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering
with weariness and cold, he went home.
He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned
over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.
"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?"
"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock
struck half-past ten and supported him.
"Did you have a good time?"
"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with
the boys now and then."
THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE
I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to
Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar,
seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about
to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine.
He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of
laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed,
labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young
visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising
verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost
inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as
one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the
bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a
swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.
I
That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with
energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters
for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's
verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of
an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that
Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too
some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has
heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but
there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful
tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how
engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.
[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce
Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.]
Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of
his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his
grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother
was wounded at Waterloo.
His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in
France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of
Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and
Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are
in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Père la
Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an
English wife.
The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at
Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was
called--until 1914.
Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to
live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling
have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel,
became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque
villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.
In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas
Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of
biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period:
"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in
'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a
clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his
instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and
this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure,
he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of
him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the
old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was
calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which
he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I
understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it
would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In
those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a
certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was
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