Shandygaff Part 19

A MORNING IN MARATHON

One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the moons.h.i.+ne without a qualm.

There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs. Then the big agate kettle must be set over the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa.

Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.

But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four.

I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in "Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night receded into infinite s.p.a.ce as the sun waved his radiant arms over the horizon.

But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just before departing.

The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious.

Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of s.h.i.+vering nausea.

I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light s.h.i.+ning upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross, Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about.

It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains?

No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run.

In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting by the baggage room s.h.i.+ning his morning face. Up at the marble lunch counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and garnished. As I pa.s.sed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to translate "a litter of puppies."

My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning.

The day was begun.

THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS

I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords.

Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.

But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape, condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear shoes with fawn-coloured tops.

Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pa.s.s to the bra.s.s veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere.

And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me at least a whiskey and soda to get them out.

It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am cigarless and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white margins inside my vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in which I was married (I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I look up from Emily d.i.c.kinson's poems with a trembling thrill of painful ecstasy, I am frightened by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes opposite me.

The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order a bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that nauseates me? At any rate, I want to get home--home to that star-sown meadow and the two brown arms at the journey's end.

_December, 1914._

COTSWOLD WINDS

Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still sits close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over the sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an adventure. I am not one of those who s.h.i.+rk bicycling in a wind. Give me a two-mile spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the muscles and sweep the morning's books and tobacco from the brain--and then turn and at it! It is like swimming against a great crystal river. Cap off, head up--no crouching over the handle-bars like the Sat.u.r.day afternoon shopmen! Wind in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of leg-drive straining on the pedals--three minutes of it intoxicates you.

You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and exultation into the face of the blast.

I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before "Schools." In mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide we scatter. The Prince to Germany--the dons to Devon--the reading parties to quiet country inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are in those glorious dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" as a viatic.u.m. Others are among the tulips in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and solitude.

There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a green valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There is a well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But I am not for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious business, these last two months before Schools, and I and my books are camped in a "pensive citadel" up on the hill, where the postman's wife cares for me and worries because I do not eat more than two normal men. There is a low-ceilinged sitting room with a blazing fire. From one corner a winding stair climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes and tobacco, pens and a pot of ink. There are books--all historical volumes, the only evidence of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one of Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three hours' bicycling--that leaves four hours for eating and other emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, and turn a probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible Third.

And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? The valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in England, I think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the stream, now and then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from most of the things one likes to leave behind. There are lambs, little black fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing with a flirt of white hindquarters into their wayside burrows; in Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in the upper blue--and these are all your company. Now and then a great yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in corduroys--but no one else. That is the kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted better than this, stretched on the warm gra.s.s watching the green water dimpling over the stones. That same water pa.s.ses the Houses of Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth Woods if it could--and so would I.

But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting Shotover is pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye.

Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old village well; back to four cups of tea and hot b.u.t.tered toast; and then for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_

And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels, and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now.

There are the Schools....

_Bibury, April, 1913_.

CLOUDS

Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell, perhaps? George Meredith? Sh.e.l.ley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling amongst the stars?" Henry Van d.y.k.e has sung of "The heavenly hills of Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of those piled-up mysteries of heaven!

We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg.

That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!) converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a mountain creek down through that matchless pa.s.sway. Over the hills which tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture clothes itself!

Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons.

Unconscious of their own beauty, they pa.s.s in dissolving shapes--now scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of our visible world? Watch them as they s.h.i.+mmer down toward the Water Gap in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has wors.h.i.+pped sticks and stones and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high G.o.ds of the clouds?

There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding within their billowed ma.s.ses the healing punishments of the rain, chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as the face of G.o.d--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the bright mountains of the sky!

At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County, fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in the shadow of dusk.

We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play.

Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of pure and unspeakable brightness fled pa.s.sionately to earth. This happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our cloud drifted gently away.

Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who knows?

UNHEALTHY