Shandygaff Part 18

The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with Mr. Williams," I said.

"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I think he wrote it 'imself."

"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a book.

"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?"

asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he knew."

"We might send him a telegram," I said.

"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning,"

she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find 'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly.

"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to p.a.w.n 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once that p.a.w.ned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus gentleman 'e was.)

"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three b.a.l.l.s on a p.a.w.nbroker's sign mean?'

"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never gets 'em back."

Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey.

_October, 1912._

"PEAc.o.c.k PIE"

Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of all, in 1913 I read "Peac.o.c.k Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la Mare.

"Peac.o.c.k Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all shot through with a phosph.o.r.escent sparkle of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peac.o.c.k Pie"

is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and fames are not wholly pa.s.sed away. Emily d.i.c.kinson and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with "Peac.o.c.k Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clas.h.i.+ng crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coa.r.s.ening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.

To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the subway, drops his gla.s.ses in the trolley car, and is found wandering blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order of poets who do not wear rubbers.

One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a book of poetry that way?) is that "Peac.o.c.k Pie" is a collection of poems for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Ma.s.ses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:

Three jolly Farmers Once bet a pound Each dance the others would Off the ground.

Out of their coats They slipped right soon, And neat and nicesome, Put each his shoon.

One--Two--Three-- And away they go, Not too fast, And not too slow; Out from the elm-tree's Noonday shadow, Into the sun And across the meadow.

Past the schoolroom, With knees well bent Fingers a-flicking, They dancing went....

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?

The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist journals please copy.

One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and aesopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.

THE LITTLE BIRD

My dear Daddie bought a mansion For to bring my Mammie to, In a hat with a long feather, And a trailing gown of blue; And a company of fiddlers And a rout of maids and men Danced the clock round to the morning, In a gay house-warming then.

And when all the guests were gone, and All was still as still can be, In from the dark ivy hopped a Wee small bird: and that was Me.

"Peac.o.c.k Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous.

It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of outlets of sky.

As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is forty-four, and has been publis.h.i.+ng for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful hardiness.

THE LITERARY p.a.w.nSHOP

Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a ma.n.u.script for immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in ma.n.u.script, "as well worth a hundred pounds as a s.h.i.+lling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though n.o.body called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his neck."

As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with life.

Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these will find willing purchasers. But a ma.n.u.script which happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it in p.a.w.n, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.

This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days.

There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that would acc.u.mulate in the shop of a literary p.a.w.nbroker. The early work of famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such fict.i.tious value as ma.n.u.script.

Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's a.s.sistant in Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His early poems were scribbled on sc.r.a.ps of old account books and wrapping paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few s.h.i.+llings. Or Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would offer to the enterprising buyer of ma.n.u.scripts!

Be it understood, of course, that the p.a.w.nbroker must be himself an appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our p.a.w.nbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.

The idea of the literary p.a.w.nbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that tragic life may be told, and the ma.n.u.scripts still cherished by his executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in 1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted genius:

"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of 'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to tickle the prurient. I had a vile p.o.r.nographic publisher after me the other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking bounder!

"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting for the cafes to open (I was too done to walk half a dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.

"Why isn't there a p.a.w.nshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary mount of piety--a sort of Parna.s.sus of piety as it were--the uncle in charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This cancer is getting me surely.

"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a gla.s.s of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber.

I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.'

"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to give me money, you d.a.m.ned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one...."

It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter.

Will not some literary agent think over this idea?