Post-Impressions: An Irresponsible Chronicle

Part 1

Chapter 13,752 wordsPublic domain

POST-IMPRESSIONS

An Irresponsible Chronicle

BY SIMEON STRUNSKY

Author of "The Patient Observer," "Through the Outlooking Glass," etc.

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1914

The papers in the present volume were published during 1913 in the Saturday Magazine of the _New York Evening Post_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE I ALMA MATER BROADWAY 1 II THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 8 III SUMMER READING 17 IV NOCTURNE 26 V HAROLD'S SOUL, I 35 VI EDUCATIONAL 44 VII MORGAN 53 VIII THE MODERN INQUISITION 63 IX THORNS IN THE CUSHION 72 X LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 80 XI ROMANCE 89 XII WANDERLUST 99 XIII UNREVISED SCHEDULES 108 XIV SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 117 XV HAROLD'S SOUL, II 126 XVI RHETORIC 21 134 XVII REAL PEOPLE 141 XVIII DIFFERENT 150 XIX ACADEMIC FREEDOM 157 XX THE HEAVENLY MAID 166 XXI SHEATH-GOWNS 176 XXII WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS 185 XXIII A MAD WORLD 194 XXIV PH.D. 202 XXV TWO AND TWO 211 XXVI BRICK AND MORTAR 220 XXVII INCOHERENT 228 XXVIII REALISM 236 XXIX ART 239 XXX THE PACE OF LIFE 242 XXXI MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914 244 XXXII BY THE TURN OF A HAND 247 XXXIII THE QUARRY SLAVE 250 XXXIV MONOTONY OF THE POLES 253

POST-IMPRESSIONS

ALMA MATER BROADWAY

He came in without having himself announced, nodded cheerfully, and dropped into a chair across the desk from where I sat.

"I am not interfering with your work, am I?" he said.

"To tell the truth," I replied, "this is the busiest day in the week for me."

"Fine," he said. "That means your mind is working at its best, brain cells exploding in great shape, and you can follow my argument without the slightest difficulty. What I have to say is of the highest importance. It concerns the present condition of the stage."

"In that case," I said, "you want to see Mr. Smith. He is the editor responsible for our dramatic page."

"I want to speak to the irresponsible editor," he said. "I asked and they showed me in here. I think I had better begin at the beginning."

I sighed and looked out of the window. But that made no difference. He, too, looked out of the window and spoke as follows:

"Last night," he said, "I attended the first performance of A. B. Johnson's powerful four-act drama entitled 'H2O.' It was a remorseless exposure of the phenomena attending the condensation of steam. In the old days before the theatre became perfectly free the general public knew nothing of the consequences that ensue when you bring water to a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The public didn't know and didn't care. Those who did know kept the secret to themselves. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was a conspiracy of silence on the subject. A play like 'H2O' would have been impossible. The public would not have tolerated such thoroughgoing realism as Johnson employs in his first act, for instance. With absolute fidelity to things as they are he puts before us a miniature reciprocating engine, several turbine engines, and the latest British and German models in boilers, piston-rods, and valve-gears. When the curtain rose on the most masterly presentation of a machine shop ever brought before the public, the house rocked with applause. But this was nothing compared to the delirious outburst that marked the climax of the second act, when the hero, with his arm about the woman he loves, proudly declares that saturated steam under a pressure of 200 pounds shows 843.8 units of latent heat and a volume of 2.294 cubic feet to the pound. The curtain was raised eleven times, but the audience would not be content until the author appeared before the footlights escorted by a master plumber and the president of the steamfitters' union.

"The third act was laid in the reception room of a Tenderloin resort--"

"I don't quite see," I said.

"That followed inevitably from the development of the plot," he replied. "The heroine, you must understand, had been abducted by the president of a rival steamfitters' union and had been sold into a life of shame. She is saved in the nick of time by an explosion of the boiler due to superheated steam. In the old days such a scene would have been impossible and the author's lesson about the effects of condensation and vaporization would have been lost to the world."

"And the play will be a success?" I said.

"It's a knockout," he replied. "No play of real life with a punch like that has been produced since C. D. Brewster put on his three-act tragi-comedy, 'Ad Valorem.' As the title implies, the play sets out to demonstrate the difference between the Payne-Aldrich tariff law and the Underwood law, item by item. I have rarely seen an audience so deeply stirred as all of us were during the long and pathetic scene toward the end of the first act in which the author deals with the chemical and mineral oil schedule. Are you aware that under the Underwood law the duty on formaldehyde is reduced from twenty-five per cent. to one cent a pound?"

"I hardly ever go to the theatre nowadays," I said.

He looked at me reproachfully.

"Some day you will find yourself, quite unexpectedly, facing a crisis in which your ignorance of the duty on formaldehyde will cost you dear, and then you will have cause to regret your indifference toward the progress of the modern drama. However, the third act of 'Ad Valorem' is laid in the reception room of a Tenderloin resort."

"What?" I said.

"It was bound to be," he replied. "Freed from all Puritanical restrictions, the playwright of the present day follows wherever his plot leads him in accordance with the truth of life. In 'Ad Valorem,' for instance, the fabulously rich importer of oils and chemicals who is the villain of the piece has succeeded in smuggling an enormously valuable consignment of formaldehyde out of the Government warehouse. What is more natural than that he should conceal the smuggled goods in the Tenderloin? The case is a perfectly simple one. Forbid a playwright to show the interior of a Tenderloin dive and the public will never know the truth about the Underwood bill. You see, there is nothing about the tariff in the newspapers. There is nothing in the magazines. College professors never mention the subject. Campaign speakers ignore it. There is a conspiracy of silence. Only the theatre offers us enlightenment on the subject. Under such conditions would you keep the playwright from telling us what he knows?"

"Putting it that way--" I said.

"I knew you would agree with me," he went on. "Take, for instance, E. F. Birmingham's realistic drama, 'The Shortest Way,' in which the author has demonstrated with implacable truthfulness and irresistible logic that in any triangle the sum of two sides is greater than the third. In a joint letter to the freshman classes of Columbia University and New York University, the author and the producer of 'The Shortest Way' have pointed out that nowhere have the principles of plane geometry been so clearly formulated as in the second act of the play. The gunman has just shot down his victim on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. He flees northward on Broadway to Forty-third Street and then doubles backward on Seventh Avenue. The hero, who is a professor of mathematics, recalling his Euclid, runs westward on Forty-second Street, and the curtain descends. At the beginning of the next act we find that the gunman has taken refuge in the reception room of a Tender--"

"I know," I replied. "He was driven there by the irresistible logic of the dramatist's idea."

"Exactly," he said. And so left me.

THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

From the chapter entitled "My Milkman," in Cooper's volume of "Contemporary Portraits," hitherto unpublished, through no fault of his own, but because one publisher declined to handle anything but typewritten copy, and another suggested that if cut down by half the book might be accepted by the editor of some religious publication, and still another editor thought that if several chapters were expanded and a love story inserted, the thing might do, otherwise there was no market for essays, especially such as failed to take a cheerful view of life, whereupon Cooper insisted that his book was exceptionally cheerful, inasmuch as it showed that life could be tolerable in spite of being so queer, to which the editor replied that serializing a book of humour was quite out of the question. "Then how about Pickwick?" said Cooper--but let us get back to the chapter on the milkman. I quote:

Would sleep never come! I shifted the pillow to the foot of the bed and back; threw off the covers; pulled them over my head; discarded them; repeated the multiplication table; counted footsteps in the street beneath my window; lit a cigarette; tried to go to sleep sitting up and embracing my knees the way they bury the dead in Yucatan. No use. I would doze off, and immediately that unfortunate column of figures would appear, demanding to be added up, and I unable to determine whether sums written in Roman numerals could be added up at all. That is the disadvantage of taking conversation seriously, after ten in the evening, or at any time. I had been discussing the immigration problem till nearly midnight, and now I was busy adding up the annual influx from Austria-Hungary during the last twelve years expressed in Roman numerals. Some people are different. Their opinions don't hurt them. I have heard people say the most biting things about the need of abolishing religion and the family, and five minutes later ask for a caviare sandwich. Whereas I take the total immigration from Austria-Hungary for the last twelve years to bed with me and cannot fall asleep.

I heard the rattle of wheels under my window. It was nearing daybreak. I looked at my watch and it was close to five. I got up, washed in cold water, dressed, and went outside. As I walked downstairs I heard the clatter of bottles in the hallway below and some one whistling cheerfully. It was the milkman. His wagon was at the curb, and as I passed down the front steps and stopped to breathe in the sharp, clean, mystic air of dawn, the milkman's horse raised his head, gazed at me for a moment with a curious, friendly scepticism, and sank back into thoughtful contemplation of a spot eighteen inches immediately in front of his fore-legs.

(Here one editor had written in the margin: "Amateurish beginning; should have led off with a crisp phrase or two addressed to the milkman and then proceeded to a psychological analysis of the milkman's horse.")

I said to the milkman:

"This life of yours must be wonderfully conducive to seeing things from a new angle. A world of chill and pure half-shadows; the happiest time of the twenty-four hours; the roisterers gone to bed and the factory-workers not stirring for a good hour. I should imagine that men in your line would all be philosophers."

"It does get a bit lonely," he said. "But I always carry an evening paper with me and read a few lines from house to house. Do you think they'll let Thaw off?"

"What do _you_ think about it?" I said. "I haven't been following up the case."

"I have read every bit of the story," he said. "He isn't any more crazy than you or me. He's been punished enough; what's the use of persecuting a man like that?"

If Thaw were as sound in mind as my friend the milkman, there would be no doubt that he deserved his freedom. My new acquaintance was so well set up, so clear-eyed, with that ruddy glow which comes from shaving and washing in cold water before dawn, with the quiet air of peace and strength which comes from working in the silent hours. I thought what an upright, independent life a milkman's must be, so free from the petty chaffering and meanness that make up the ordinary tradesman's routine. He has no competition to contend with. He is no one's servant. He deposits his wares at your doorstep and you take them or leave them as you please. He can work in the dark because he does not need the light to study your face and overreach you. With no one to watch him, with no one to criticise him, with leisure and silence in which to work out his problems--I envied him.

(Here another editor had written: "Tedious; chance for an excellent bit of characterisation in dialogue entirely missed.")

"You're an early riser," he said.

"Can't fall asleep," I said. "This air will do me good."

"A brisk walk," he suggested.

"I'm too tired," I said.

He turned on the wagon step. "Jump in," he said; and when I was seated beside him he clucked to the horse, who raised his drooping head and started off diagonally across the street, apparently confident that he would find another cobblestone to contemplate, eighteen inches in front of his fore-legs.

"A good many more people find it hard to sleep nowadays than ever before," he said. "You can tell by the windows that are lit up. Though very often it's diphtheria or something of the sort. You hear the little things whimper, and sometimes a man will run down the street and pull the night-bell at the drug-store."

"Then you don't read all the time while you are driving?"

"Oh, you notice those things and keep on reading. It isn't very noisy about this time of the day." He laughed.

"I should think you'd be tired," I said.

He said they did not work them too hard in his line. The hours were reasonable. At one time there was an attempt on the part of the dairy companies to make the hours longer; but the milkmen have some union of their own, and there was a strike which ended in the companies agreeing to pay for over-time from 7 to 9 A.M. Their association was more of a social and benefit society than a trade union. Once a month in summer they had an outing with lunch and some kind of a cabaret show and dancing. They were a contented lot. The work was not too exacting. He could read the evening paper when it got light enough, or sometimes he could just sit still and think.

Think what?

Again I envied him. What extraordinary facilities this man had for thinking straight, for seeing things clearly in this crisp morning air, and around him silence and everything as fresh, as frank, as fragrant as when the world was still young.

He blushed and hesitated, but finally confessed that for more than a year he had been carrying about in his head a scenario for a moving-picture play. His story was naturally interrupted at frequent intervals as he went about the distribution of his milk bottles. But stripped of repetitions and ambiguities the plot he had evolved in the course of more than a year's driving through the silent streets was about as follows:

The infant daughter of an extremely wealthy Mexican mine-owner is stolen by the gipsies. When she grows up she is chosen by the gipsy king for his bride. Before the wedding takes place the gipsies plan to rob the house of a Mexican millionaire who is no other than the girl's father. She volunteers to gain entrance into the house by posing as a celebrated Spanish dancer. At night she opens the door to her confederates. Leaving the girl to keep watch over their prisoner, the gipsies go about ransacking the house. The unhappy man groans and cries out, "Ah, if only I could see my little Juanita before I die." Father and daughter recognise each other, she releases him from big bonds, and arming themselves with Browning revolvers they shoot down the gipsy marauders as they enter the room in single file. Juanita marries the young overseer whom the childless old man has designated as his heir.

(Here one editor wrote: "An ordinary plot; nothing in it to show that it was written by a milkman instead of a clergyman or a structural iron worker.")

I think the criticism is a fair one.

III

SUMMER READING

Our vacation plans last year were of the simplest. Personally, I said to Emmeline, there was just one thing I longed for--to get away to some quiet place where I could lie on my back under the trees and look up at the clouds. To this Emmeline replied that in this posture (1) I always smoke too much; (2) I catch cold and begin to sneeze; (3) I don't look at the clouds at all, but tire my eyes by studying the baseball page in the full glare of the sun. The newspaper habit is one which I regularly forswear every summer on leaving town. I hold to my resolution to this extent that I refrain from going down to the post office in the morning to buy a paper. But toward eleven o'clock the strain becomes unendurable and I borrow a copy of yesterday's paper after peering wistfully over other people's shoulders. Emmeline thinks this habit all the more inexcusable because, working for a newspaper myself, I ought to know there is never anything in them. She can't imagine what drives me on. I told her, perhaps it is the unconscious hope that some day I shall find in the paper something worth while.

Actually, one soon discovers that the simple act of lying on one's back on the grass and looking up at the clouds involves an extraordinary amount of preparation. I am inclined to think that there must be correspondence courses which teach in ten lessons how to lie on one's back properly and look up. There must be text-books on how to tell the cumuli from the cirrus. There must be useful hints on how to relax and lose yourself in the immensity of the blue void.

The personal equipment one needs to gaze at the clouds, if you believe the department stores, is tremendous. English flannels; French shirtings; native khaki; silks; home-spuns; belts with a monogram buckle; flowered cravats in colours to blend with the foliage; safety razors; extra blades for the razors; strops to sharpen the blades; unguents to keep the strops flexible; nickeled cases to keep the unguents in; and metal polish for the nickeled cases. Arduous labour is involved in going to Maple View Farm from the comparatively simple civilisation of New York. I am not certain whether in the best circles one can properly lie on one's back and look at the clouds without a humidor and a thermos bottle.

Emmeline said I must be sure and not forget my fishing-pole, as that trout in the brook behind the barn would probably be expecting me.

It seems absurd for a full-grown man to speak of hating a trout. But why deny it? When I think of the utterly debased creature in the pool behind the barn, the accumulated results of ten thousand years of civilisation drop from me, and my heart is surcharged with venom. It all came about so gradually. My landlord asked me one morning whether I shouldn't like to try my luck with his rod. I said I should. I took his rod and hooked the blackberry bush on the other side of the stream. I did better on my next try. As my hook sank below the surface, a thrill ran along the line, the slender bamboo stem arched forward, and I waited with my heart in my mouth for an enormous trout to emerge and engage me in a life-and-death struggle. But through three long weeks he refused to emerge. Emmeline said it was the bottom of the soap-box whose upper edge is visible above the surface. But that cannot be. No inanimate object could elicit in any one the rage and the sense of frustrated desire--perhaps I had better say no more. All my better instincts corrode with the thought of that fish. It would have been compensation, at least, if I had ever caught any other fish in that brook. It might have been a near relation, a favourite son perhaps, and I should have had my revenge--but there I go again.

* * * * *

What Emmeline wanted was a chance to catch up in her reading. It had been a hard winter and spring, with the doctor too frequently in the house and books quite out of the question. There were a half-dozen novels Emmeline had in mind, not to mention Mr. Bryce's book on South America, John Masefield, and Strindberg, whom she cordially detests. I do too. I warned her against drawing up too ambitious a list, but she was determined to make a summer of it. She said she felt illiterate and terribly old. All I could do was to mention a few bookshops where she could get the best choice with the least expenditure of energy. Nevertheless she came back from her first day's shopping with a headache.

Éponge is a rough, Turkish-towel fabric, selling in many widths, and eminently desirable for out-of-door wear because of its peculiar adaptability to the slim styles which prevent walking. Éponge has this fatal defect, however, that when it is advertised in ready-made gowns at an astounding reduction from $39.50, all the desirable models sell out some time before ten o'clock in the morning. Hence Emmeline's headache. She took very little supper and expressed the belief that our vacation would be a complete failure. The mountains are always hot and dusty and the crowd is a very mixed one.

After a while Emmeline had a cup of tea and felt better. We went over our list of books for the summer and she wondered whether it wouldn't pay to get a seamstress into the house and avoid the exhausting trips downtown. On second thoughts she decided not to. Next morning she was quite well and asked me to remind her not to forget Robert Herrick's new novel. She said she might drop in at the office for lunch if she got through early at the stores, and we might look at books together.