Chapter 4

But the hurdy-gurdy is the call to sterner business also. I know an old lady who, at the first tinkle from the street, will take off her glasses with a finality as though she were never to use them again for the light pleasure of reading, but intended to fill the remainder of her days with deeper purpose. There is a piece of two-legged villainy in her employ by the name of William, and even before the changing of the tune, she will have him rolling up the rugs for the spring cleaning. There is a sour rhythm in the fellow and he will beat a pretty syncopation on them if the hurdy-gurdy will but stick to marching time. It is said that he once broke the fabric of a Kermanshah in his zeal at some crescendo of the _Robert E. Lee_. But he was lost upon the valse and struck languidly and out of time.

But maybe, Reader, in your youth you have heated a penny above a lamp, and with treacherous smile you have come before an open window. And when the son of Italy has grinned and beckoned for your bounty--the penny being just short of a molten state--you have thrown it to him. He stoops, he feels.... You have learned by this how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. Or, to dig deep in the riot of your youth, you have leased a hurdy-gurdy for a dollar and with other devils of your kind gone forth to seek your fortune. It's in noisier fashion than when Goldsmith played the flute through France for board and bed. If you turned the handle slowly and fast by jerks you attained a rare tempo that drew attention from even the most stolid windows. But as music it was as naught.

Down the street--it being now noon and the day Monday--Mrs. Y's washing will be out to dry. Observe her gaunt replica, _cap-a-pie_, as immodest as an advertisement! In her proper person she is prodigal if she unmask her beauty to the moon. And in company with this, is the woolen semblance of her plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for sportive tricks: But look upon them when the music starts! Hand in hand upon the line, as is proper for married folk, heel and toe together, one, two, and a one, two, three. It is the hurdy-gurdy that calls to life such revelry. The polka has come to its own again.

Yet despite this evidence that the hurdy-gurdy sets the world to dancing--like the fiddle in the Turkish tale where even the headsman forgot his business--despite such evidence there are persons who affect to despise its melody. These claim such perceptivity of the outer ear and such fineness of the channels that the tune is but a clack when it gets inside. God pity such! I'll not write a word of them.

A spring day is at its best about noon. I thrust this in the teeth of those who prefer the dawn or the coming on of night. At noon there are more yellow wheels upon the street. The hammering on sheds is at its loudest as the time for lunch comes near. More grocers' carts are rattling on their business. There is a better chance that a load of green wheelbarrows may go by, or a wagon of red rhubarb. Then, too, the air is so warm that even decrepitude fumbles on the porch and down the steps, with a cane to poke the weeds.

If you have luck, you may see a "cullud pusson" pushing a whitewash cart with altruistic intent toward all dusky surfaces except his own. Or maybe he has nice appreciation of what color contrasts he himself presents when the work is midway. If he wear the faded memory of a silk hat, it's the better picture.

But also the schools are out and the joy of life is hissing up a hundred gullets. Baseball has now a fierceness it lacks at the end of day. There is wild demand that "Shorty, soak 'er home!" "Butter-fingers!" is a harder insult. And meanwhile a pop-corn wagon will be whistling a blithe if monotonous tune in trial if there be pennies in the crowd. Or a waffle may be purchased if you be a Croesus, ladled exclusively for you and dropped on the gridiron with a splutter. It is a sweet reward after you have knocked a three-bagger and stolen home, and is worth a search in all your eleven pockets for any last penny that may be skulking in the fuzz.

Or perhaps there is such wealth upon your person that there is still a restless jingle. In such case you will cross the street to a shop that ministers to the wants of youth. In the window is displayed a box of marbles--glassies, commonies, and a larger browny adapted to the purpose of "pugging," by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to the impact of your thumb. Then there are baseballs of graded excellence and seduction. And tops. Time is needed for the choosing of a top. First you stand tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your trial selection. Pay no attention to the color, for that's the way a girl chooses! Black is good, without womanish taint. Then you wiggle the peg for its tightness and demand whether it be screwed in like an honest top. And finally, before putting your money down, you will squint upon its roundness. Then slam the door and yell your presence to the street!

Or do you come on softer errand? In the rear of the shop is a parlor with a base-burner and virtuous mottoes on the walls--a cosy room with vases. And here it is they serve cream-puffs.... For safe transfer you balance the puff in your fingers and take an enveloping bite, emerging with a prolonged suck for such particles as may not have come safely across, and bending forward with stomach held in. I'll leave you in this refreshment; for if the money hold, you will gobble until the ringing of the bell.

By this time, as you may imagine, the person with the sagging pockets whom I told you of, has arrived in the center of the city where already he is practicing such device of penny-picking as he may be master of.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

TO A MOURNFUL AIR

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

TO A MOURNFUL AIR

_To any one of several editors._

Dear Sir: I paid a visit to your city several days since and humored myself with ambitious thoughts in the contemplation of your editorial windows. I was tempted to rap at your door and request an audience but modesty held me off. Once by appointment I passed an hour in your office pleasantly and profitably and even so tardily do I acknowledge your courtesy and good-nature. But a beggar must choose his streets carefully and must not be seen too often in a neighborhood as the same door does not always offer pie. So this time your brass knocker shows no finger-marks of mine.

You did not accept for publication the last paper I sent to you. (You spread an infinite deal of sorrow in your path.) On its return I re-read it and now confess to concurrence with your judgment. Something had gone wrong. It was not as intended. Unlike Cleopatra, age had withered it. Was I not like a cook whose dinner has been sent back untasted? The best available ingredients were put into that confection and if it did not issue from the oven with those savory whiffs that compel appetite, my stove is at fault. Perhaps some good old literary housewife will tell me, disconsolate among my pots and pans, how long an idea must be boiled to be tender and how best to garnish a thought to an editor's taste? And yet, sir, your manners are excellent. It was Petruchio who cried:

What's this? Mutton?-- 'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat. Where is the rascal cook?

Manners have improved. In pleasant contrast is your courteous note, signifying the excellence of my proffered pastry, your delight that you are allowed to sniff and your regret for lack of appetite and abdominal capacity. Nevertheless, the food came back and I poked at the broken pieces mournfully. It is a witch's business presiding at the caldron of these things and there is no magic pottage above my fire.

And yet, kind sir, with your permission I shall continue in my ways and offer to you from time to time such messes as I have, hoping that some day your taste will deteriorate to my level or that I shall myself learn the witchcraft and enter your regard.

Up to this present time only a few of my papers have been asked to stay. The rest have gone the downward tread of your stair carpet and have passed into the night. My desk has become a kind of mausoleum of such as have come home to die, and when I raise its lid a silence falls on me as on one who visits sacred places.

There is, however, another side of this. Certain it is that thousands of us who write seek your recognition and regard. Certain it is that your favorable judgment moves us to elation, and your silence to our merits urges us to harder endeavors. But for all this, dear sir, and despite your continued neglect, we are a tolerably happy crew. It may be that our best things were never published--best, because we enjoyed them most, because they recall the happiest hours and the finest moods. They bring most freshly to our memories the influences of books and friends and the circumstances under which they were written. It is because we lacked the skill to tame our sensations to our uses, the patience to do well what we wished to do fast, that you rightly judged them unavailable. We do not feel rebellious and we admit that you are right. Only we do not care as much as we did, for most of us are learning to write for the love of the writing and without an eye on the medal. With no livelihood depending, with no compulsion of hours or subject, under the free anonymity of sure rejection, we have worked. It has been a fine world, these hours of study and reflection, and when we assert that one essay is our best, we are right, for it has led us to happiness and pleasant thoughts and to an interpretation of ourselves and the world that moves about us. In these best moods of ours, we live and think beyond our normal powers and even come to a distant kinship with men far greater than ourselves. Knowing this, prudence only keeps us from snapping our fingers at you and marking each paper, as we finish it, "rejected," without the formality of a trip to you, and then happily beginning the next. We are learning to be amateurs and although our names shall never be shouted from the housetops, we shall be almost as content. Still will there be the morning hours of study with sunlight across the floor, the winding country roads of autumn with smells of corn-stacks and burdened vineyards, the fire-lit hours of evening. Still shall we write in our gardens of a summer afternoon or change the winter snowstorm that drives against our windows into the coinage of our thoughts.

We shall be independent and think and write as we please. And although we enclose stamps for a mournful recessional, please know, dear sir, that even as you dictate your polite note of refusal, we are hard at it with another paper.

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

It is rash business scuttling your own ship. Now as I am in a way a practical person, which is, I take it, a diminutive state of hard-headedness, any detraction against hard-headedness must appear as leveled against myself. Gimlet in hand, deep down amidships, it would look as if I were squatted and set on my own destruction.

But by hard-headed persons I mean those beyond the ordinary, those so far gone that a pin-prick through the skull would yield not so much as a drop of ooze; persons whose brain convolutions did they appear in fright at the aperture on the insertion of the pin--like a head at a window when there is a fire on the street--would betray themselves as but a kind of cordage. Such hard-headedness, you will admit, is of a tougher substance than that which may beset any of us on an occasion at the price of meat, or on the recurrent obligations of the too-constant moon.

I am reasonably free from colds. I do not fret myself into a congestion if a breath comes at me from an open window; or if a swirl of wind puts its cold fingers down my neck do I lift my collar. Yet the presence of a thoroughly hard-headed person provokes a sneeze. There is a chilly vapor off him--a swampish miasma--that puts me in a snuffling state, beyond poultice and mustard footbaths. No matter how I huddle to the fire, my thoughts will congeal and my purpose cramp and stiffen. My conceit too will be but a shriveled bladder.

Several years ago I knew a man of extreme hard-headedness. As I recall, I was afflicted at the time--indeed, the malady co-existed with his acquaintance--with a sorry catarrh of the nasal passages. I can remember still the clearings and snufflings that obtruded in my conversation. For two winters my complaint was beyond the cunning of the doctors. Despite local applications and such pills as they thought fit to administer, still did the snuffling continue. Then on a sudden my friend left town. Consequent to which and to the amazement of the profession, the springs of my disease dried up. As this happened at the beginning of the warm days of summer, I am loath to lay my cure entirely to his withdrawal, yet there was a nice jointry of time. My acquaintance thereafter dropped to an infrequent, statistical letter, against which I have in time proofed myself. But the catarrh has ceased except when some faint thought echoes from the past, at which again, as in the older days, I am forced to blow a passage in the channel for verbal navigation.

This man's interest in life was oil. It oozed from the ventages of his talk. If he looked on the map of this fair world, with its mountains like caterpillars dozing on the page--for so do maps present themselves to my fancy--_he_ would see merely the blueprint and huge specification of oil production and consumption. The dotted cities would suggest no more than agencies in its distribution, and they would be pegged in many colors--as is the custom of our business efficiency--by way of base symbolism of their rank and pretense; the wide oceans themselves would be merely courses for his tank ships to bustle on and leave a greasy trail. Really, contrary to my own experience and sudden cure, one might think that such an oleaginous stream of talk, if directed in atomizer fashion against the nostrils of the listener, would serve as a healing emulsion for the complaint I then suffered with.

Be these things as they may, what I can actually vouch for is that when this fellow had set himself and opened a volley of facts on me, I was shamed to silence. There was a spaciousness, a planetary sweep and glittering breadth that shriveled me. The commodity which I dispensed was but used around the corner, with a key turned upon it at the shadowy end of day against its intrusion on the night. But his oil, all day long and all night too, was swishing in its tanks on the course to Zanzibar. And all the fretted activity of the earth was tributary to his purpose. How like an untrimmed smoky night-candle did my ambition burn! If I chanced to think in thousands it was a strain upon me. My cerebrum must have throbbed itself to pieces upon the addition of another cypher. But he marshaled his legions and led them up and down, until it dazed me. I was no better than some cobbler with a fiddle, crooked and intent to the twanging of his E string, while the great Napoleon thundered by.

The secret channels of the earth and the fullness thereof made a joyful gurgle in his thoughts. And if he ever wandered in the country and ever saw a primrose on the river's brim--which I consider unlikely, his attention being engaged at the moment on figuring the cost of oil barrels, with special consideration for the price of bungs--if this man ever did see a primrose, would it have been a yellow primrose to him and nothing more? Bless your dear eyes, it would have been a compound of by-products--parafine, wax-candles, cup-grease, lamp-black, beeswax and peppermint drops--not to mention its proper distillation into such rare odors as might be sold at so much a bottle to jobbers, and a set price at retail, with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman Act.

This man has lived--my spleen rises at the thought--in many of the capitals of Europe. For six months at a time he has walked around one end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his head inside. Indeed, it is probable he hasn't noticed the building, or if he has, thinks it is an arsenal. Now in all humility, and unbuttoned, as it were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give it, I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre, regarding it somewhat as an endurance test for tired tourists, a kind of blow-in-the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, as at a country fair. And so I am not sure but that the band playing in the gardens is a better amusement for a bright afternoon, and that a nursemaid in uniform with her children--bare-legged tots with fingers in the sand--that such sight is more worthy of respect than a dead Duchess painted on the wall. It is but a ritualistic obeisance I have paid the gods inside. My finer reverence has been for benches in the sun and the vagabondage of a bus-top.

If ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but another point for exportation. How closely he will listen for any squeaking of the Pearly Gates, with a nostrum ready for their dry complaint! When he is once through and safe (the other pilgrims still coming up the hill--for heaven, I'm sure, will be set on some wind-swept ridge, with purple distance in the valleys--) how he will put his ear against the hinge for nice diagnosis as to the weight of oil that will give best result! How he will wink upon the gateman that he write his order large!

Reader, I have sent you off upon a wrong direction. I have twisted the wooden finger at the crossroads. The man of oil does not exist. He is a piece of fiction with which to point a moral. Pig-iron or cotton-cloth would have served as well; anything, in fact, whereon, by too close squinting, one may blunt his sight.

We have all observed a growing tendency in many persons to put, as it were, electric lights in all the corners and attics of their brains, until it is too much a rarity to find any one who will admit a twilight in his whole establishment. This is carrying mental housekeeping too far. I will confess that I prefer a light at the foot of the back stairs, where the steps are narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare himself like a lighted ballroom.

Much of our best mental stuff--if you exclude the harsher grindings of our business hours--fades in too coarse a light. 'Tis a brocade that for best preservation must not be hung always in the sun. There must be regions in you unguessed at--cornered and shadowed places--recesses to be shown at peep of finger width, yielding only to the knock of fancy, dim sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the world, where one must be taken by the hand and led--dusky closets beyond the common use. It is in such places--your finger on your lips and your feet a-tiptoe on the stairs--that you will hide away from baser uses the stowage of moonlight stuff and such other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in your inheritance.

HOOPSKIRTS & OTHER LIVELY MATTER

HOOPSKIRTS & OTHER LIVELY MATTER

Several months ago I had occasion to go through a deserted "mansion." It was a gaunt building with long windows and it sat in a great yard. Over the windows were painted scrolls, like eyebrows lifted in astonishment. Whatever was the cause of this, it has long since departed, for it is thirty years since the building was tenanted. It would seem as if it fell asleep--for so the blinds and the drawn curtains attest--before the lines of this first astonishment were off its face. I am told that the faces of men dead in battle show in similar fashion the marks of conflict. But there is a shocked expression on the face of this house as if a scandal were on the street. It is crying, as it were, "Fie, shame!" upon its neighbors.

Inside there are old carpets and curtains which spit dust at you if you touch them. (Is there not some fabulous animal which does the same, thereby to escape in the mirk it has itself created?) Most of the furniture has been removed, but here and there bulky pieces remain, an antique sideboard, maybe too large to be taken away; like Robinson Crusoe's boat, too heavy to be launched. In each room is a chandelier for gas, resplendent as though Louis XV had come again to life, with tinkling glass pendants and globules interlinked, like enormous Kohinoors.

Down in the kitchen--which is below stairs as in an old English comedy--you can see the place where the range stood. And there are smoky streaks upon the walls that may have come from the coals of ancient feasts. If you sniff, and put your fancy in it--it is an unsavory thought--it is likely even that you can get the stale smell from such hospitable preparation.

From the first floor to the second is a flaring staircase with a landing where opulence can get its breath. And then there is a choice of upward steps, either to the right or left as your wish shall direct. And on each side is a balustrade unbroken by posts from top to bottom. Now the first excitement of my own life was on such a rail, which seemed a funicular made for my special benefit. The seats of all my early breeches, I have been told, were worn shiny thereon, like a rubbed apple. These descents were executed slowly at the turn, but gathered wild speed on the straight-away. There was slight need for Annie to dust the "balusters."

An old house is strong in its class distinctions. There is a front part and a back part. To know the front part is to know it in its spacious and generous moods. But somewhere you will find a door and there will be three steps behind it, and poof!--you will be prying into the darker life of the place. In this particular house of which I write, it was as if the back rooms, the back halls and the innumerable closets had been playing at hide and seek and had not been told when the game was over, and so still kept to their hiding places. It is in such obscure closets that a family skeleton, if it be kept at all, might be kept most safely. There would be slight hazard of its discovery if the skeleton restrained itself from clanking, as is the whim of skeletons.

It was in the back part of this house that I came on a closet, where, after all these years, women's garments were still hanging. A lighted match--for I am no burglar with a bull's-eye as you might suspect--displayed to me an array of petticoats--the flounced kind that gladdened the eye of woman in those remote days--also certain gauzy matters which the writers of the eighteenth century called by the name of smocks. Besides these, there were suspended from hooks those sartorial deceits, those lying mounds of fashion, that false incrustation on the surface of nature, known as "bustles." Also, there was a hoopskirt curled upon the floor, and an open barrel with a stowage of books--a novel or two of E. P. Roe, the poems of John Saxe, a table copy of Whittier in padded leather, an album with a flourish on the cover--these at the top of the heap.