Mince Pie Part 10

Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea.

My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn, 1914, to February, 1916, I don't know. Was it then that he held the fish reporter job? Come to think of it, I believe it was. Anyway, in February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first had the excitement of clapping eyes on him. Some of the adventures of that spring and summer may be inferred from "Memories of a Ma.n.u.script."

Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of Doubleday, Page & Company as the "garage," or on walks that summer between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of Hempstead. The full story of the Porrier's Corner Club, of which Mr.

Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told. As far as I was concerned it was love at first sight. This burly soul, rumbling Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes, gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles--well, on Friday, June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only instance this to show how fast pa.s.sion proceeded.

It would not surprise me if at some future time Mrs. Bedell's boarding house, on Jackson Street in Hempstead, becomes a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the essay. They will want to see the dark little front room on the ground floor where Owd Bob used to scatter the sheets of his essays as he was retyping them from a huge sc.r.a.pbook and grooming them for a canter among publishers' sanhedrim. They will want to see (but will not, I fear) the cool barrel-room at the back of George D. Smith's tavern, an ale-house that was blithe to our fancy because the publican bore the same name as that of a very famous dealer in rare books. Along that pleasant bar, with its s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s scuppers, Bob and I consumed many beakers of well-chilled amber during that warm summer. His urbanolatrous soul pined for the city, and he used in those days to expound the doctrine that the suburbanite really has to go to town in order to get fresh air.

In September, 1916, Holliday's health broke down. He had been feeling poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest.

After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick Papers" began to go the rounds.

I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington. This original, mellow, convivial, informal and yet soundly argued critique has been overlooked by many who have delighted to honor Holliday as an essayist. But it is vastly worth reading. It is a brilliant study, full of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it merrily in the face of those who are frequently c.r.a.pehanging and dirging that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C.

Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr.

Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire, also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical commonwealth of Indiana. Mr.

Holliday traces with a good deal of humor and circ.u.mstance the various ways in which the G.o.ds gave Mr. Tarkington just the right kind of ancestry, upbringing, boyhood and college career to produce a talented writer. But the fates that catered to Tarkington with such generous hand never dealt him a better run of cards than when Holliday wrote this book.

The study is one of surpa.s.sing interest, not merely as a service to native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself within Tarkington's das.h.i.+ng checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine coast and a few tw.a.n.ging chords from the Princeton Glee Club.

Fourth Memo--Mr. Holliday is critic as well as essayist.

CHAPTER VI

(OUR HERO FINDS A STEADY JOB)

It was the summer of 1917 when Owd Bob came back to New York. Just at that juncture I happened to hear that a certain publisher needed an editorial man, and when Bob and I were at Browne's discussing the fate of "Walking-Stick Papers" over a jug of shandygaff, I told him this news. He hurried to the office in question through a drenching rain-gust, and has been there ever since. The publisher performed an act of perspicuity rare indeed. He not only accepted the ma.n.u.script, but its author as well.

So that is the story of "Walking-Stick Papers," and it does not cause me to droop if you say I talk of matters of not such great moment. What a joy it would have been if some friend had jotted down memoranda of this sort concerning some of Elia's doings. The book is a garner of some of the most racy, vigorous and genuinely flavored essays that this country has produced for some time. Dear to me, every one of them, as clean-cut blazes by a sincere workman along a trail full of perplexity and struggle, as Grub Street always will be for the man who dips an honest pen that will not stoop to conquer. And if you should require an accurate portrait of their author I cannot do better than quote what Grote said of Socrates:

Nothing could be more public, perpetual, and indiscriminate as to persons than his conversation. But as it was engaging, curious, and instructive to hear, certain persons made it their habit to attend him as companions and listeners.

Owd Bob has long been the object of extreme attachment and high spirits among his intimates. The earlier books have been followed by "Broome Street Straws" and "Peeps at People," vividly personal collections that will arouse immediate affection and amus.e.m.e.nt among his readers. And of these books will be said (once more in Grote's words about Socrates):

Not only his conversation reached the minds of a much wider circle, but he became more abundantly known as a person.

Let us add, then, our final memorandum:

Fifth Memo--These essays are the sort of thing you cannot afford to miss. In them you sit down to warm your wits at the glow of a droll, delightful, unique mind.

So much (at the moment) for Bob Holliday.

THE APPLE THAT NO ONE ATE

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The other evening we went to dinner with a gentleman whom it pleases our fancy to call the Caliph.

Now a Caliph, according to our notion, is a Haroun-al-Raschid kind of person; one who governs a large empire of hearts with a genial and whimsical sway; circulating secretly among his fellow-men, doing kindnesses often not even suspected by their beneficiaries. He is the sort of person of whom the trained observer may think, when he hears an unexpected kindness-grenade exploding somewhere down the line, "I'll bet that came from the Caliph's dugout!" A Caliph's heart is not surrounded by barbed wire entanglements or a strip of No Man's Land. Also, and rightly, he is stern to malefactors and fakers of all sorts.

It would have been sad if any one so un-Caliphlike as William Hohenzollern had got his eisenbahn through to Bagdad, the city sacred to the memory of a genial despot who spent his cabarabian nights in an excellent fas.h.i.+on. That, however, has nothing to do with the story.

Mr. and Mrs. Caliph are people so delightful that they leave in one's mind a warm afterglow of benevolent sociability. They have an infinite interest and curiosity in the hubbub of human moods and crotchets that surrounds us all. And when one leaves their doorsill one has a genial momentum of the spirit that carries one on rapidly and cheerfully. One has an irresistible impulse to give something away, to stroke the noses of horses, to write a kind letter to the fuel administrator or do almost anything gentle and gratuitous. The Caliphs of the world don't know it, but that is the effect they produce on their subjects.

As we left, Mr. and Mrs. Caliph pressed upon us an apple. One of those gorgeous apples that seem to grow wrapped up in tissue paper, and are displayed behind plate gla.s.s windows. A huge apple, tinted with gold and crimson and pale yellow shading off to pink. The kind of apple whose colors are overlaid with a curious mist until you polish it on your coat, when it gleams like a decanter of claret. An apple so large and weighty that if it had dropped on Sir Isaac Newton it would have fractured his skull. The kind of apple that would have made the garden of Eden safe for democracy, because it is so beautiful no one would have thought of eating it.

That was the kind of apple the Caliph gave us.

It was a cold night, and we walked down Chestnut street dangling that apple, rubbing it on our sleeve, throwing it up and down and catching it again. We stopped at a cigar store to buy some pipe tobacco. Still running on Caliph, by which we mean still beguiled by his geniality, we fell into talk with the tobacconist. "That's a fine apple you have there," said he. For an instant we thought of giving it to him, but then we reflected that a man whose days are spent surrounded by rich cigars and smokables is dangerously felicitous already, and a sudden joy might blast his blood vessels.

The s.h.i.+ning of the street lamps was reflected on the polished skin of our fruit as we went our way. As we held it in our arms it glowed like a huge ruby. We pa.s.sed a blind man selling pencils, and thought of giving it to him. Then we reflected that a blind man would lose half the pleasure of the adventure because he couldn't see the colors. We bought a pencil instead. Still running on Caliph, you see.

In our excitement we did what we always do in moments of stress--went into a restaurant and ordered a piece of hot mince pie. Then we remembered that we had just dined. Never mind, we sat there and contemplated the apple as it lay ruddily on the white porcelain tabletop. Should we give it to the waitress? No, because apples were a commonplace to her. The window of the restaurant held a great pyramid of beauties. To her, an apple was merely something to be eaten, instead of the symbol of a grand escapade. Instead, we gave her a little medallion of a buffalo that happened to be in our pocket.

Already the best possible destination for that apple had come to our mind. Hastening zealously up a long flight of stairs in a certain large building we went to a corner where sits a friend of ours, a night watchman. Under a drop light he sits through long and tedious hours, beguiling his vigil with a book. He is a great reader. He eats books alive. Lately he has become much absorbed in Saint Francis of a.s.sisi, and was deep in the "Little Flowers" when we found him.

"We've brought you something," we said, and held the apple where the electric light brought out all its brilliance.

He was delighted and his gentle elderly face shone with awe at the amazing vividness of the fruit.

"I tell you what I'll do," he said. "That apple's much too fine for me.

I'll take it home to the wife."

Of course his wife will say the same thing. She will be embarra.s.sed by the surpa.s.sing splendor of that apple and will give it to some friend of hers whom she thinks more worthy than herself. And that friend will give it to some one else, and so it will go rolling on down the ages, pa.s.sing from hand to hand, conferring delight, and never getting eaten.

Ultimately some one, trying to think of a recipient really worthy of its deliciousness, will give it to Mr. and Mrs. Caliph. And they, blessed innocents, will innocently exclaim, "Why we never saw such a magnificent apple in all our lives."

And it will be true, for by that time the apple will gleam with an unearthly brightness, enhanced and burnished by all the kind thoughts that have surrounded it for so long.

As we walked homeward under a frosty sparkle of sky we mused upon all the different kinds of apples we have encountered. There are big glossy green apples and bright red apples and yellow apples and also that particularly delicious kind (whose name we forget) that is the palest possible cream color--almost white. We have seen apples of strange shapes, something like a pear (sheepnoses, they call them), and the Maiden Blush apples with their delicate shading of yellow and debutante pink. And what a poetry in the names--Winesap, Pippin, Northern Spy, Baldwin, Ben Davis, York Imperial, Wolf River, Jonathan, Smokehouse, Summer Rambo, Rome Beauty, Golden Grimes, Shenango Strawberry, Benoni!

We suppose there is hardly a man who has not an apple orchard tucked away in his heart somewhere. There must be some deep reason for the old suspicion that the Garden of Eden was an apple orchard. Why is it that a man can sleep and smoke better under an apple tree than in any other kind of shade? Sir Isaac Newton was a wise man, and he chose an apple tree to sit beneath. (We have often wondered, by the way, how it is that no one has ever named an apple the Woolsthorpe after Newton's home in Lincolns.h.i.+re, where the famous apple incident occurred.)

An apple orchard, if it is to fill the heart of man to the full with affectionate satisfaction, should straggle down a hillside toward a lake and a white road where the sun s.h.i.+nes hotly. Some of its branches should trail over an old, lichened and weather-stained stone wall, dropping their fruit into the highway for thirsty pedestrians. There should be a little path running athwart it, down toward the lake and the old flat-bottomed boat, whose bilge is scattered with the black and shriveled remains of angleworms used for bait. In warm August afternoons the sweet savor of ripening drifts warmly on the air, and there rises the drowsy hum of wasps exploring the windfalls that are already rotting on the gra.s.s. There you may lie watching the sky through the c.h.i.n.ks of the leaves, and imagining the cool, golden tang of this autumn's cider vats.

You see what it is to have Caliphs in the world.

AS TO RUMORS

MADRID, Jan. 17.--Nikolai Lenine was among the Russians who landed at Barcelona recently, according to newspapers here.--News item.