Chapter 3

Chapter 34,331 wordsPublic domain

Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence the harsh opinion against the night softened.

Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand, she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten. It is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that blew across her bed--loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had heard within the night.

It was vanity killed the night-cap. What aldermanic man would risk the chance of seeing himself in the mirror? What judge, peruked by day, could so contain his learned locks? What male with waxed moustachios, or with limpest beard, or chin new-reaped would put his ears in such a compress? You will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when he found the lady in the curl papers in his room. His round face showed red with shame against the dusky bed-curtains, like the sun peering through the fog.

As for bed-curtains, they served the intrigue of at least five generations of novelists from Fielding onward. There was not a rogue's tale of the eighteenth century complete without them. The wrong persons were always being pinned up inside them. The cause of such confusion started in the tap, too much negus or an over-drop of pineapple rum with a lemon in it or a potent drink whose name I have forgotten that was always ordered "and make it luke, my dear." Then, after such evening, a turn to the left instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along the passage, the jiggling of bed-curtains, screams and consternation. It is one of the seven original plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and bed-curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel business, Sheridan have lost fecundity and Dryden starved in a garret. But the moths got into their red brocade at last and a pretty meal they made.

A sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly truce between man and the material universe. The world itself and the void spaces of its wanderings, together with the elements of our celestial neighborhood, have been viewed by man with dark suspicion, with rather a squint-eyed prejudice. Let's take a single case! Winds for a long time have borne bad reputations--except such anemic collateral as are called zephyrs--but winds, properly speaking, which are big and strong enough to have rough chins and beards coming, have been looked upon as roustabouts. What was mere humor in their behavior has been set down to mischief. If a wind in playfulness does but shake a casement, or if in frolic it scatters the ashes across the hearth, or if in liveliness it swishes you as you turn a corner and drives you aslant across the street, is it right that you set your tongue to gossip and judge it a son of Belial?

There are persons also--but such sleep indoors--in whose ears the wind whistles only gloomy tunes. Or if it rise to shrill piping, it rouses only a fear of chimneys. Thus in both high pitch and low there is fear in the hearing of it. Into their faces will come a kind of God-help-the-poor-sailors-in-the-channel look, as in a melodrama when the paper snowstorm is at its worst and the wind machine is straining at its straps. One would think that they were afraid the old earth itself might be buffeted off its course and fall afoul of neighboring planets.

But behold the man whose custom is to sleep upon a porch! At what slightest hint--the night being yet young, with scarce three yawns gone round--does he shut his book and screen the fire! With what speed he bolts the door and puts out the downstairs lights, lest callers catch him in the business! How briskly does he mount the stairs with fingers already on the buttons! Then with what scattering of garments he makes him ready, as though his explosive speed had blown him all to pieces and lodged him about the room!

Then behold him--such general amputation not having proved fatal--advancing to the door muffled like a monk! There is a slippered flight. He dives beneath the covers. (I draw you a winter picture.) You will see no more of him now than the tip of his nose, rising like a little Ætna from the waves.

But does _he_ fear the wind as it fumbles around the porch and plays like a kitten with the awning cords? Bless you, he has become a playmate of the children of the night--the swaying branches, the stars, the swirl of leaves--all the romping children of the night. And if there was any fear at all within the darkness, it has gone to sulk behind the mountains.

But the wind sings a sleepy song and the game's too short. Then the wind goes round and round the house looking for the leaves--for the wind is a bit of a nursemaid--and wherever it finds them it tucks them in, under fences and up against cellar windows where they will be safe until morning. Then it goes off on other business, for there are other streets in town and a great many leaves to be attended to.

But the fellow with the periscopic nose above the covers lies on his back beneath the stars, and contemplation journeys to him from the wide spaces of the night.

MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES

In what pleasurable mystery would we live were it not for maps! If I chance on the name of a town I have visited, I locate it on a map. I may not actually get down the atlas and put my finger on the name, but at least I picture to myself its lines and contour and judge its miles in inches. And thereby for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished from the world its immensity and mystery. But if there were no maps--what then? By other devices I would have to locate it. I would say that it came at the end of some particular day's journey; that it lies in the twilight at the conclusion of twenty miles of dusty road; that it lies one hour nightward of a blow-out. I would make it neighbor to an appetite gratified and a thirst assuaged, a cool bath, a lazy evening with starlight and country sounds. Is not this better than a dot on a printed page?

That is the town, I would say, where we had the mutton chops and where we heard the bullfrogs on the bridge. Or that town may be circumstanced in cherry pie, a comical face at the next table, a friendly dog with hair-trigger tail, or some immortal glass of beer on a bench outside a road-inn. These things make that town as a flame in the darkness, a flame on a hillside to overtop my course. Many years can go grinding by without obliterating the pleasant sight of its flare. Or maybe the town is so intermingled with dismal memories that no good comes of too particularly locating it. Then Tony Lumpkin's advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house is enough. "It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way." And let it go at that.

Maps are toadies to the thoroughfares. They shower their attentions on the wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering and irregularity.

As for me, I do not like a straight thoroughfare. To travel such a road is like passing a holiday with a man who is going about his business. Idle as you are, vacant of purpose, alert for distraction, _he_ must keep his eyes straight ahead and he must attend to the business in hand. I like a road that is at heart a vagabond, which loiters in the shade and turns its head on occasion to look around the corner of a hill, which will seek out obscure villages even though it requires a zigzag course up a hillside, which follows a river for the very love of its company and humors its windings, which trots alongside and listens to its ripple and then crosses, sans bridge, like a schoolboy, with its toes in the water. I love a road which goes with the easy, rolling gait of a sailor ashore. It has no thought of time and it accepts all the vagaries of your laziness. I love a road which weaves itself into eddies of eager traffic before the door of an inn, and stops a minute at the drinking trough because it has heard the thirst in your horse's whinny; and afterwards it bends its head on the hillside for a last look at the kindly spot. Ah, but the vagabond cannot remain long on the hills. Its best are its lower levels. So down it dips. The descent is easy for roads and cart wheels and vagabonds and much else; until in the evening it hears again the murmur of waters, and its journey has ended.

There is of course some fun in a map that is all wrong. Those, for example, of the early navigators are worth anybody's time. There is possibility in one that shows Japan where Long Island ought to be. That map is human. It makes a correct and proper map no better than a molly-coddle. There can be fine excitement in learning on the best of fourteenth century authority that there is no America and that India lies outside the Pillars of Hercules. The uncharted seas, the _incognova terra_ where lions are (_ubi leones erunt_, as the maps say), these must always stir us. In my copy of Gulliver are maps of his discoveries. Lilliput lies off the coast of Sumatra and must now be within sight of the passengers bound from London to Melbourne if only they had eyes to see it. Brobdingnag, would you believe it, is a hump on the west coast of America and cannot be far from San Francisco. That gives one a start. Swift, writing in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects the Californian coast as the most remote and unknown for the scene of his fantastical adventure. It thrusts 1725 into a gray antiquity. And yet there are many buildings in England still standing that antedate 1725 by many years, some by centuries. Queen Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years. Canterbury was almost as old and probably in worse repair than it is now, when Frisco was still Brobdingnag. Can it be that the giant red trees and the tall bragging of the coast date from its heroic past?

Story-writers have nearly always been the foes of maps, finding in them a kind of cramping of their mental legs. And in consequence they have struck upon certain devices for getting off the map and away from its precise and restricting bigotry. Davy fell asleep. It was Davy, you remember, who grew drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed away with the goblin in his grandfather's clock. Robinson Crusoe was driven off his bearings by stress of weather at sea. This is a popular device for eluding the known world. Whenever in your novel you come on a sentence like this--On the third night it came on to blow and that night and the three succeeding days and nights we ran close-reefed before the tempest--whenever you come on a sentence like that, you may know that the author feels pinched and cramped by civilization, and is going to regale you with some adventures of his uncharted imagination which are likely to be worth your attention.

Then there was Sentimental Tommy! Do you remember how he came to find the Enchanted Street? It happened that there was a parade, "an endless row of policemen walking in single file, all with the right leg in the air at the same time, then the left leg. Seeing at once that they were after him, Tommy ran, ran, ran until in turning a corner he found himself wedged between two legs. He was of just sufficient size to fill the aperture, but after a momentary lock he squeezed through, and they proved to be the gate into an enchanted land." In that lies the whole philosophy of going without a map. There is magic in the world then. There are surprises. You do not know what is ahead. And you cannot tell what is about to happen. You move in a proper twilight of events. After that Tommy went looking for policemen's legs. Doubtless there were some details of the wizardry that he overlooked, as never again could he come out on the Enchanted Street in quite the same fashion. Alice had a different method. She fell down a rabbit-hole and thereby freed herself from some very irksome lessons and besides met several interesting people, including a Duchess. Alice may be considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit-hole. Before her time it was known only to rabbits, wood-chucks, and dogs on holidays, whose noses are muddy with poking. But since her time all this is changed. Now it is known as the portal of adventure. It is the escape from the plane of life into its third dimension.

Children have the true understanding of maps. They never yield slavishly to them. If they want a pirates' den they put it where it is handiest, behind the couch in the sitting-room, just beyond the glimmer of firelight. If they want an Indian village, where is there a better place than in the black space under the stairs, where it can be reached without great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be behind the asparagus bed. The North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear a child's laugh, if it be a real child and therefore a great poet, you may know that from the garret window, even as you pass, Sinbad, adrift on the Indian Ocean, may be looking for a sail, and that the forty thieves huddle, daggers drawn, in the coal hole. Then it is a fine thing for a child to run away to sea--well, really not to sea, but down the street, past gates and gates and gates, until it comes to the edge of the known and sees a collie or some such terrible thing. I myself have fine recollection of running away from a farmhouse. Maybe I did not get more than a hundred paces, but I looked on some broad heavens, saw a new mystery in the night's shadows, and just before I became afraid I had a taste of a new life.

To me it is strange that so few people go down rabbit-holes. We cannot be expected to find the same delight in squeezing our fat selves behind the couch of evenings, nor can we hope to find that the Chinese Mountains actually lie beyond our garden fence. We cannot exactly run away either; after one is twenty, that takes on an ugly and vagrant look, commendable as it may be on the early marches. Prince Hal is always a more amiable spectacle than John Falstaff, much as we love the knight. But there are men, however few, who although they are beyond forty, retain in themselves a fine zest for adventure. A man who, I am proud to say, is a friend of mine and who is a devil for work by which he is making himself known in the world, goes of evenings into the most delightful truantry with his music. And it isn't only music, it is flowers and pictures and books. Of course he has an unusual brain and few men can hope to equal him. He is like Disraeli in that respect, who, it is said, could turn in a flash from the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the contemplation of the daffodils nodding along the fence. But do the rest of us try? There are few men of business, no matter with what singleness of purpose they have been installing their machinery and counting their nickels, but will admit that this is but a small part of life. They dream of rabbit-holes, but they will never go down one. I had dinner recently with a man who by his honesty and perseverance has built up and maintained a large and successful business. An orchestra was playing, and when it finished the man told me that if he could write music like that we had heard he would devote himself to it. Well, if he has enough desire in him for that speech, he owes it to himself that he sound his own depths for the discoveries he may make. It is doubtful if this quest would really lead him to write music, God forbid; it might however induce him to develop a latent appreciation until it became in him both a refreshment and a stimulus.

There are many places uncharted that are worth a visit. Treasure Island is somewhere on the seas, the still-vex'd Bermoothes feel the wind of some southern ocean, the coast of Bohemia lies on the furthermost shore of fairyland--all of these wonderful, like white towers in the mind. But nearer home, as near as the pirates' den that we built as children, within sight of our firelight, should come the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and unvisited seas.

TUNES FOR SPRING

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! Spring, the sweet Spring!

If by any chance you have seen a man in a coat with sagging pockets, and a cloth hat of the latest fashion but two--a hat which I may say is precious to him (old friends, old wine, old hats)--emerging from his house just short of noon, do not lay his belated appearance to any disorder in his conduct! Certain neighbors at their windows as he passed, raised their eyes in a manner, if I mistake not, of suspicion that a man should be so far trespassing on the day, for nine o'clock should be the penny-picker's latest departure for the vineyard. Thereafter the street belongs to the women, except for such sprouting and unripe manhood as brings the groceries, and the hardened villainy that fetches ice and with deep voice breaks the treble of the neighborhood. But beyond these there are no men in sight save the pantalooned exception who mows the grass, and with the whirr of his clicking knives sounds the prelude of the summer. I'll say by way of no more than a parenthetical flick of notice that his eastern front, conspicuous from the rear as he bends forward over his machine, shows a patched and jointed mullionry that is not unlike the tracery of some cathedral's rounded apse. But I go too far in imagery. Plain speech is best. I'll waive the gothic touch.

But observe this sluggard who issues from his door! He knows he is suspected--that the finger is uplifted and the chin is wagging. And so he takes on a smarter stride with a pretense of briskness, to proclaim thereby the virtue of having risen early despite his belated appearance, and what mighty business he has despatched within the morning.

But you will get no clue as to whether he has been closeted with the law, or whether it is domestic faction--plumbers or others of their ilk (if indeed plumbers really have any ilk and do not, as I suspect, stand unbrothered like the humped Richard in the play). Or maybe some swirl of fancy blew upon him as he was spooning up his breakfast, which he must set down in an essay before the matter cool. Or an epic may have thumped within him. Let us hope that his thoughts this cool spring morning have not been heated to such bloody purpose that he has killed a score of men upon his page, and that it is with the black gore of the ink-pot on him that he has called for his boots to face the world. You remember the fellow who kills him "some six or seven dozens of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.'"

Such ferocity should not sully this fair May morning, when there are sounds only of carpet-beating, the tinkle of the man who is out to grind your knives and the recurrent melody of the connoisseur of rags and bottles who stands in his cart as he drives his lean and pointed horse. At the cry of this perfumed Brummel--if you be not gone in years too far--as often as he prepares to shout the purpose of his quest, you'll put a question to him, "Hey, there, what do you feed your wife on?" And then his answer will come pat to your expectation, "Pa-a-a-per Ra-a-a-gs, Pa-a-a-per Ra-a-a-gs!" If the persistence of youth be in you and the belief that a jest becomes better with repetition--like beans nine days cold within the pot--you will shout your question until he turns the corner and his answer is lost in the noises of the street. "Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades--"

To this day I think of a rag-picker's wife as dining sparingly out of a bag--not with her head inside like a horse, but thrusting her scrawny arm elbow deep to stir the pottage, and sprinkling salt and pepper on for nicer flavor. Following such preparation she will fork it out like macaroni, with her head thrown back to present the wider orifice. If her husband's route lies along the richer streets she will have by way of tidbit for dessert a piece of chewy velvet, sugared and buttered to a tenderness.

But what is this jingling racket that comes upon the street? Bless us, it's a hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy-gurdy, I need hardly tell you, belongs to the organ family. This family is one of the very oldest and claims descent, I believe, from the god Pan. However, it accepted Christianity early and has sent many a son within the church to pipe divinity. But the hurdy-gurdy--a younger son, wild, and a bit of a pagan like its progenitor--took to the streets. In its life there it has acquired, among much rascality, certain charming vices that are beyond the capacity of its brother in the loft, however much we may admire the deep rumble of his Sabbath utterance.

The world has denied that chanticleer proclaims the day. But as far as I know no one has had the insolence to deny the street-organ as the proper herald of the spring. Without it the seasons would halt. Though science lay me by the heels, I'll assert that the crocus, which is a pioneer on the windy borderland of March, would not show its head except on the sounding of the hurdy-gurdy. I'll not deny that flowers pop up their heads afield without such call, that the jack-in-the-pulpit speaks its maiden sermon on some other beckoning of nature. But in the city it is the hurdy-gurdy that gives notice of the turning of the seasons. On its sudden blare I've seen the green stalk of the daffodil jiggle. If the tune be of sufficient rattle and prolonged to the giving of the third nickel, before the end is reached there will be seen a touch of yellow.

Whether this follows from the same cause as attracts the children to flatten their noses on the windows and calls them to the curb that they put their ears close upon the racket that no sweetest sound be lost, is a deep question and not to be lightly answered. In the sound there is promise of the days to come when circuses will be loosed upon the land and elephants will go padding by--with eyes looking around for peanuts. Why this biggest of all beasts, this creature that looms above you like a crustaceous dinosaur--to use long words without squinting too closely on their meaning--why this behemoth with the swishing trunk, should eat peanuts, contemptible peanuts, lies so deep in nature that the mind turns dizzy. It is small stuff to feed valor on--a penny's worth of food in such a mighty hulk. Whatever the lion eats may turn to lion, but the elephant strains the proverb. He might swallow you instead, breeches, hat and suspenders--if you be of the older school of dress before the belt came in--and not so much as cough upon the buttons. And there will be red and yellow wagons, boarded up seductively, as though they could show you, if they would, snakes and hyenas. May be it is best, you think--such things lying in the seeds of time--to lay aside a dime from the budget of the week, for one can never be sure against the carelessness of parents, and their jaded appetites.