Chimney-Pot Papers Part 4

But when darkness thickens and the sunlight has vanished from the floor, then comes the magic hour. The garret then tears from its eyes the blind bandage of the day. Strange creatures lift their heads. And now, as you wait expectant, there comes a mysterious sound from the darkest corner. Is it a mouse that stirs? Rather, it seems a far-off sound, as though a blind man, tapping with his stick, walked on the margin of the world. The noise comes near. It gains in volume. It is close at hand. Dear lad, you have come upon the magic hour. It is the tread of the friendly giants that is sounding in the dark....

On Spending a Holiday.

At a party lately a worn subject came under discussion.

Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved courtyard tucked off from the thoroughfare but with the rattle of the elevated railway close at hand. The building is of decent brick, three stories in height, and it exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical doorsteps. The entrance to the courtyard is a swinging shutter between buildings facing on the street, and it might seem a mystery--like the apple in the dumpling--how the building inside squeezed through so narrow an entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber plant in one corner and a trellis for imaginary vines in the other.

In this courtyard, _Pomander Walk_ might be acted along the stoops.

For a necessary stage property--you recall, of course, the lamplighter with his ladder in the second act!--there is a gas lamp of old design in the middle of the enclosure, up near the footlights, as it were.

From the stoops the main comedy might proceed, with certain business at the upper windows--the profane Admiral with the timber leg popping his head out of one, the mysterious fat man--in some sort the villain of the piece--putting his head out of another to woo the buxom widow at a third. And then the m.u.f.fin man! In the twilight when the lamp is lighted and the heroine at last is in the hero's arms, there would be a pleasant crunching of m.u.f.fins at all the windows as the curtain falls.

But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location of this courtyard.

Many persons think that New York City is but a ma.s.sive gridiron, and they are ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the lower town. Enough that the Indian of a modest tobacconist guards the swinging shutter of the entrance to the courtyard.

Here we sat in the very window I had designed for the profane Admiral, and talked in the quiet interval between trains.

One of our company--a man whom I shall call Flint--was hardy enough to say that he never employed his leisure in going to the country--that a walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. Flint's livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort of person who looks as if he needed exercise, but he has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark fell on us as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a humorous whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously to his opinion, urging smooth pavements against mud, the study of countless faces against the song of birds and great buildings against cliffs.

Another of our company opposed him in this--Colum, who chafes as an accountant. Colum is a gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. All winter he saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks' vacation in the country, he sets up in trees as birdhouses. He confesses that he took up with a certain brand of tobacco because its receptacle is popular with wrens. Also he cultivated a taste for waffles--which at first by a sad distortion of nature he lacked--for no other reason except that syrup may be bought in pretty log-cabin tins particularly suited for bluebirds. If you chance to breakfast with him, he urges the syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. With satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has a dozen of these empty cabins on the shelf alongside his country boots. Time was when he was lean of girth--as becomes an accountant, who is hinged dyspeptically all day across his desk--but by this agreeable stowage he has now grown to plumpness. When in the country Colum rises early in order to stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about before breakfast from tree to tree to view his feathered tenants. He has even acquired, after much practice, the knack of chirping--a hissing conjunction of the lips and teeth--which he is confident wins the friendly attention of the birds.

Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted before he was done.

"Pooh!" he said. "There's mud in the country, and not much of any plumbing, and in the morning it's cold until you light a fire."

"Of course," said Colum. "But I love it. Perhaps you remember, Flint, the old willow stump out near the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of it, and now there's a family of wrens inside."

"Nonsense," said Flint. "There is too much climate in the country--much more than in town. It's either too hot or too cold. And it's lonely. As for you, Colum, you're sentimental about your birdhouses. And you dislike your job. You like the country merely because it is a symbol of a holiday. It is freedom from an irksome task. It means a closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the country, you would grumble in a month's time. Even a bullfrog--and he is brought up to it, poor wretch--croaks at night."

Colum interrupted. "That's not true, Flint. I know I'd like it--to live on a farm and keep chickens. Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look out of the window and I see a mirage--trees and hills." Colum sighed.

"It's quite wonderful, that view, but it unsettles me for my ledger."

"That's it," broke in Flint. "Your sentimentality spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. It's immoral."

Colum was about to retort, when he was antic.i.p.ated by a new speaker.

It was Quill, the journalist, who has long thin fingers and indigestion. At meals he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats food subst.i.tutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or something of that kind, to a daily paper. He always knows whether Steel is strong and whether Copper is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he glances at you for a moment before he knows you. Yet in his slippers he grows human.

"I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no one ever said that I am sentimental." He tapped his head. "I'm as hard as nails up here."

Quill cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, and continued: "I have a shack on the West Sh.o.r.e, and I go there week-ends. My work is so confining that if I didn't get to the country once in a while, I would play out in a jiffy. I'm a nervous frazzle--a nervous frazzle--by Sat.u.r.day noon. But I lie on the gra.s.s all Sunday, and if n.o.body snaps at me and I am let alone, by Monday morning I am fit again."

"You must be like Antaeus."

This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm is a bookish fellow who wears great rimmed gla.s.ses. He spends much of his time in company thinking up apposite quotations and verifying them. He has worn out two Bartlett's. Wurm is also addicted to maps and dictionaries, and is a great reader of special articles. Consequently his mind is a pound for stray collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, it more closely resembles a building contractor's back yard--odd salvage--rejected doors--a job of window-frames--a pile of bricks for chipping--discarded plumbing--broken junk gathered here and there.

Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who once lived on our street--a man of no broad fame--quite local--surely unknown to you--did not collect so wide a rubbish.

However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather a pleasant and harmless bit of cobweb. For a livelihood, he sits in a bank behind a grill. At noon he eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting season he kills in a day as many as a dozen of these pests' and ranges them in his pen tray. On Sat.u.r.day afternoon he rummages in Malkan's and the second-hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see Wurm in his most characteristic pose, is to see him on a ladder, with one leg outstretched, far off his balance, fumbling for a t.i.tle with his finger tips. Surely, in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job.

Then he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home to dinner.

This is served him on a tin tray by his stout landlady who comes puffing up the stairs. It is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever dish is served happens to be the very one of which he was thinking as he came out of the bank. By this innocent device he is popular with his landlady and she skims the milk for him.

Wurm rapped his pipe bowl on the arm of his chair. "You must be like Antaeus," he replied.

"Like what?" asked Flint.

"Antaeus--the fellow who wrestled with Hercules. Each time that Antaeus was thrown against the earth his strength was doubled. He was finally in the way of overcoming Hercules, when Hercules by seizing him around the middle lifted him off the ground. By this strategy he deprived him of all contact with the earth, and presently Antaeus weakened and was vanquished."

"That's me," said Quill, the journalist. "If I can't get back to my shack on Sunday, I feel that Hercules has me, too, around the middle."

"Perhaps I can find the story," said Wurm, his eye running toward the bookshelves.

"Don't bother," said Flint.

There was now another speaker--Flannel s.h.i.+rt, as we called him--who had once been sated with formal dinners and society, and is now inclined to cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and free verse. He was about to praise the country for its freedom from sordidness and artificiality, when Flint, who had heard him before, interrupted.

"Rubbis.h.!.+" he cried out. "All of you, but in different ways, are slaves to an old tradition kept up by Wordsworth, who would himself, doubtless, have moved to London except for the steepness of the rents.

You all maintain that you like the country, yet on one excuse or another you live in the city and growl about it. There isn't a commuter among you. Honest folk, these commuters, with marrow in their bones--a steak in a paper bag--the sleet in their faces on the ferryboat. I am the only one who admits that he lives in the city because he prefers it. The country is good enough to read about--I like it in books--but I choose to sit meantime with my feet on a city fender."

Here Wurm broke in again. "I see, Flint," he said, "that you have been reading Leslie Stephen."

Flint denied it.

"Well, anyway, you have quoted him. Let me read you a bit of his essay on 'Country Books.'"

Flint made a grimace. "Wurm always has a favorite pa.s.sage."

Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. He blew off the dust and smoothed its sides. "Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume at Schulte's, on the twenty-five cent table. 'A love of the country is taken,'" he read, "'I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues.... We a.s.sert a taste for sweet and innocent pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excitements of artificial society. I, too, like the country,...' (you'll like this, Flint) 'but I confess--to be duly modest--that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best.... Though a c.o.c.kney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs.

Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's parlour ... or to drop into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams.'"

"You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And now as I was saying--"

Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You think that that quotation supports your side of the discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that sometimes we get greater reality from books than we get from life.

Leslie Stephen liked the real country, also. In his holidays he climbed the Swiss mountains--wrote a book about them--it's on that top shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll stones off a cliff? And as a pedestrian he was almost as famous as George Borrow--walked the s.h.i.+rt off his back before his college trustees and all that sort of thing. But he got an even sharper reality from books. He liked the city, too, but in many a mood, there's no doubt about it, he preferred to walk to Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, rather than to jostle on the actual pavement outside his door."

"Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the journalist. "Inch along, old caterpillar!"

"As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I would rather go with Charles and Mary Lamb to see _The Battle of Hexham_ in their gallery than to any show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine old pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, lest they tread on a neighbor's heels. Then the pleasant gallery, with its great lantern to light their expectant faces!"

Wurm's eyes strayed again wistfully to his shelves. Flint stayed him.

"And so you think that it is possible to see life completely in a mirror."

"By no means," Wurm returned. "We must see it both ways. Nor am I, as you infer, in any sense like the Lady of Shalott. A great book cannot be compared to a mirror. There is no genius in a mirror. It merely reflects the actual, and slightly darkened. A great book shows life through the medium of an individuality. The actual has been lifted into truth. Divinity has pa.s.sed into it through the un.o.bstructed channel of genius."

Here Flint broke in. "Divinity--genius--the Swiss Alps--_The Battle of Hexham_--what have they to do with Quill's shack out in Jersey or Colum's dirty birdhouses? You jump the track, Wurm. When everybody is heading for the main tent, you keep running to the side-shows."

Quill, the journalist, joined the banter. "You remind me, Wurm--I hate to say it--of what a sea captain once said to me when I tried to loan him a book. 'Readin',' he said, 'readin' rots the mind.'"

It was Colum's turn to ask a question. "What do _you_ do, Flint," he asked, "when you have a holiday?"