Chapter 15

"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm.

He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket."

By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street, walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers in his teeth and nipped them vigorously.

I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was perfectly happy!

AN OXFORD LANDLADY

It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.

If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley.

She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.

"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves 'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do."

"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I think her name must be Kathleen...."

Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman."

"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested:

"Beauty must be scorned in none Though but truly served in one."

"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her.

"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?"

The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with Mr. Williams," I said.

"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I think he wrote it 'imself."

"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a book.

"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?" asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he knew."

"We might send him a telegram," I said.

"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning," she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find 'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly.

"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus gentleman 'e was.)

"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's sign mean?'

"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never gets 'em back."

Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey.

_October, 1912._

"PEACOCK PIE"

Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la Mare.

"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.

To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order of poets who do not wear rubbers.

One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:

Three jolly Farmers Once bet a pound Each dance the others would Off the ground. Out of their coats They slipped right soon, And neat and nicesome, Put each his shoon. One--Two--Three-- And away they go, Not too fast, And not too slow; Out from the elm-tree's Noonday shadow, Into the sun And across the meadow. Past the schoolroom, With knees well bent Fingers a-flicking, They dancing went....

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?

The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist journals please copy.

One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and Æsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.

THE LITTLE BIRD

My dear Daddie bought a mansion For to bring my Mammie to, In a hat with a long feather, And a trailing gown of blue; And a company of fiddlers And a rout of maids and men Danced the clock round to the morning, In a gay house-warming then. And when all the guests were gone, and All was still as still can be, In from the dark ivy hopped a Wee small bird: and that was Me.

"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous. It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of outlets of sky.

As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful hardiness.

THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP

Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his neck."

As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with life.

Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.

This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days. There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such fictitious value as manuscript.

Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts!

Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.

The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been fêted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in 1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted genius:

"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of 'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking bounder!

"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting for the cafés to open (I was too done to walk half a dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.

"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This cancer is getting me surely.

"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.'

"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one...."

It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter.

Will not some literary agent think over this idea?

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 moonshine 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 space 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.