Chimney-Pot Papers

  Flint took a fresh cigar. "Last Sunday morning i walked in central Park. There were all manner of toy sailboats on the pond—big and little—thirty of them at the least—tipping and running in the breeze. Grown men sail them. They set them on a course, and then they trot around the pond and wait for them. Presently I was curious. A man upward of fifty had his boat out on the grass and was adjusting the rigging.

  "'That's quite a boat,' I began.

  "'It's not a bad tub,' he answered.

  "'Do you hire it from the park department?' I asked.

  "'No!' with some scorn.

  "'Where do you buy them?'

  "'We don't buy them.'

  "'Then how—?' I started.

  "'We make 'em—nights.'

  "He resumed his work. The boat was accurately and beautifully turned—hollow inside—with a deck of glossy wood. The rudder was controlled by finest tackle and hardware. Altogether, it was as delicately wrought as a violin.

  "'It's this way!'—its builder and skipper laid down his pipe—'There are about thirty of us boys who are dippy about boats. We can't afford real boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am an interior decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next winter—if my wife will stand the muss (My God! How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new boat each spring!' The old fellow squinted at his mast and tightened a cord. Then he continued. 'If you are interested, come around any Sunday morning until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try your hand at a boat this winter, just ask any of us boys and we will help you. Your first boat or two will be sad—Ju-das! But you will learn.'"

  Flint was interrupted by Quill. "Isn't that rather a silly occupation for grown men?"

  "It's not an occupation," said Flint. "It's an avocation, and it isn't silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren't so self-conscious. And it's more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what courtesy! These men form what is really a club—a club in its primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be one of them."

  Flannel Shirt broke in. "By George, that was courtesy. If you had happened on a polo player at his club—a man not known to you—he wouldn't have invited you to come around and bring your pony for instruction."

  "It's not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel Shirt?"

  "No, maybe not."

  There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. "I rather like to think of that interior decorator littering up his dining-room every night—clamps and glue-pots on the sideboard—hardly room for the sugar- bowl—lumber underneath—and then bringing out a new boat in the spring."

  Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," he said, "should have known that fellow. He would have found him a place among his Lantern Bearers."

  Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down Fifth Avenue."

  "It's Fifth Avenue," said Flannel Shirt, "everything up above Fifty-ninth Street—and what it stands for, that I want to get away from."

  "Easy, Flannel Shirt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue doesn't interest me much either. It's too lonely. Everybody is always away. The big stone buildings aren't homes: they are points of departure, as somebody called them. And they were built for kings and persons of spacious lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a 'bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts." Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a wonderful street it would be if persons really lived there, and looked out of their windows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their tapestries and rugs across the outer walls. Actually," added flint, "i prefer to walk on the East Side. It is gayer."

  "There is poverty, of course," he went on after a moment, "and suffering. But the streets are not depressing. They have fun on the East Side. There are so many children and there is no loneliness. If the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems designed as a post for leaping. Any vacant wall—if the street is so lucky—serves for a game. There is baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch—not stretched out, for there isn't room, but rolled up like a jelly cake. One must hop to the middle and out again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon he spends his grudge upon an enemy—these drawings can be no likeness of a friend. Or love guides the chalky fingers. And all the time slim-legged girls sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the younger fry."

  "But, my word, what smells!"

  "Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. Down on these streets we can learn what dogs think of us. But every Saturday night on Grand Street there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts from an old woman. They aren't much good to eat—wee nuts, all shell—and they still sit in the kitchen getting dusty. It was raining when I bought them and the woman's hair was streaked in her face, but she didn't mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. everything on god's earth was for sale. On the cart next to my old woman's, there was hardware—sieves, cullenders—kitchen stuff. And on the next, wearing gear, with women's stockings hung on a rope at the back. A girl came along carrying a pair of champagne-colored shoes, looking for stockings to match. Quite a belle. Somebody's girl. Quill, go down there on a Saturday night. It will make a column for your paper. I wonder if that girl found her stockings. A black-eyed Italian.

  "But what I like best are the windows on the East Side. No one there ever says that his house is his castle. On the contrary it is his point of vantage—his outlook—his prospect. His house front never dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look out of—not openings for household exhibits—ornamental lamps or china things—at every window there is a head—somebody looking on the world. There is a pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes—a recipe for onions—a hint of fashion—a cure for rheumatism. The street bears the general life. The home is the street, not merely the crowded space within four walls. The street is the playground and the club—the common stage, and these are the galleries and boxes. We come again close to the beginning of the modern theatre—an innyard with windows round about. The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders come and go, selling fruit and red suspenders. An ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen children on its tailboard."

  Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," he said at length, "that those persons who try to tempt these people out of the congested city to farms, don't see how falsely they go about it. They should reproduce the city in miniature—a dozen farmhouses must be huddled together to make a snug little town, where all the children may play and where the women, as they work, may talk across the windows. They must build villages like the farming towns of France.

  "But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? From here even the narrowest fancy reaches out to the four watery corners of the earth. No nose is so green and country-bred that it doesn't sniff the spices of India. Great ships lie in the channel camouflaged with war. If we could forget the terror of the submarine, would not these lines and stars and colors appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of the far-off seas?

  "Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand barrels, oil maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing at fat attention to go aboard. Except for numbers it might appear—although I am rusty at the legend—that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves for roguery when the ship is out to sea. Doubtless if one knocked upon a top and put his ear close upon a barrel, he would hear a villain's guttural voice inside, asking if the time were come.

  "Then there are the theatres and parks, great caverns where a subway is being built. There are geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on dizzy lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus), a roar of traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating—always eating. There has been nothing like this in all the ages. Babylon and
Nineveh were only villages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though all the cities of antiquity had packed their bags and moved here to a common spot."

  "Please, Flint," this from Colum, "but you forget that the faces of those who live in the country are happier. That's all that counts."

  "Not happier—less alert, that's all—duller. For contentment, I'll wager against any farmhand the old woman who sells apples at the corner. She polishes them on her apron with—with spit. There is an Italian who peddles ice from a handcart on our street, and he never sees me without a grin. The folk who run our grocery, a man and his wife, seem happy all the day. No! we misjudge the city and we have done so since the days of Wordsworth. If we prized the city rightly, we would be at more pains to make it better—to lessen its suffering. We ought to go into the crowded parts with an eye not only for the poverty, but also with sympathy for its beauty—its love of sunshine—the tenderness with which the elder children guard the younger—its love of music—its dancing—its naturalness. If we had this sympathy we could help—ourselves , first—and after that, maybe, the East Side."

  Flint arose and leaned against the chimney. He shook an accusing finger at the company. "You, Colum, ruin fifty weeks for the sake of two. You, Quill, hypnotize yourself into a frazzle by Saturday noon with unnecessary fret. You peck over your food too much. A little clear unmuddled thinking would straighten you out, even if you didn't let the ants crawl over you on Sunday afternoon. Old Flannel Shirt is blinded by his spleen against society. As for Wurm, he doesn't count. He's only a harmless bit of mummy-wrapping."

  "And what are you, Flint?" asked Quill.

  "Me? A rational man, I hope."

  "You—you are an egotist. That's what you are."

  "Very well," said Flint. "It's just as you say."

  There was a red flash from the top of the Metropolitan Tower. Flint looked at his watch. "So?" he said, "I must be going."

  And now that our party is over and I am home at last, I put out the light and draw open the curtains. Tomorrow—it is to be a holiday—I had planned to climb in the Highlands, for I, too, am addicted to the country. But perhaps—perhaps I'll change my plan and stay in town. I'll take a hint from Flint. I'll go down to Delancey Street and watch the chaffering and buying. What he said was true. He overstated his position, of course. Most propagandists do, being swept off in the current of their swift conviction. One should like both the city and the country; and the liking for one should heighten the liking for the other. Any particular receptiveness must grow to be a general receptiveness. Yet, in the main, certainly, Flint was right. I'll try Delancey Street, I concluded, just this once.

  Thousands of roofs lie below me, for I live in a tower as of Teufelsdrцckh. And many of them shield a bit of grief—darkened rooms where sick folk lie—rooms where hope is faint. And yet, as I believe, under these roofs there is more joy than grief—more contentment and happiness than despair, even in these grievous times of war. If Quill here frets himself into wakefulness and Colum chafes for the coming of the summer, also let us remember that in the murk and shadows of these rooms there are, at the least, thirty sailors from Central Park—one old fellow in particular who, although the hour is late, still putters with his boat in the litter of his dining-room. Glue-pots on the sideboard! Clamps among the china, and lumber on the hearth! And down on Grand Street, snug abed, dreaming of pleasant conquest, sleeps the dark-eyed Italian girl. On a chair beside her are her champagne boots, with stockings to match hung across the back.

  RUNAWAY STUDIES

  n my edition of "Elia," illustrated by Brock, whose sympathetic pen, surely, was nibbed in days contemporary with Lamb, there is a sketch of a youth reclining on a window-seat with a book fallen open on his knees. He is clad in a long plain garment folded to his heels which carries a hint of a cathedral choir but which, doubtless, is the prescribed costume of an English public school. This lad is gazing through the casement into a sunny garden—for the artist's vague stippling invites the suspicion of grass and trees. Or rather, does not the intensity of his regard attest that his nimble thoughts have jumped the outmost wall? Already he journeys to those peaks and lofty towers that fringe the world of youth—a dizzy range that casts a magic border on his first wide thoughts, to be overleaped if he seek to tread the stars.

  And yet it seems a sleepy afternoon. Flowers nod upon a shelf in the idle breeze from the open casement. On the warm sill a drowsy sunlight falls, as if the great round orb of day, having labored to the top of noon, now dawdled idly on the farther slope. A cat dozes with lazy comfort on the window-seat. Surely, this is the cat—if the old story be believed—the sleepiest of all her race, in whose dull ear the mouse dared to nest and breed.

  This lad, who is so lost in thought, is none other than Charles Lamb, a mere stripling, not yet grown to his black small-clothes and sober gaiters, a shrill squeak of a boy scarcely done with his battledore. And here he sits, his cheek upon his palm, and dreams of the future.

  But Lamb himself has written of this window-seat. Journeying northward out of London—in that wonderful middle age of his in which the Elia papers were composed—journeying northward he came once on the great country house where a part of his boyhood had been spent. It had been but lately given to the wreckers, "and the demolition of a few weeks," he writes, "had reduced it to—an antiquity."

  "Had I seen those brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction," he continues, "at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of that cheerful storeroom, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me—it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns…."

  I confess to a particular enjoyment of this essay, with its memory of tapestried bedrooms setting forth upon their walls "the unappeasable prudery of diana" under the peeping eye of actжon; its echoing galleries once so dreadful when the night wind caught the candle at the turn; its hall of family portraits. But chiefly it is this window-seat that holds me—the casement looking on the garden and its southern sun-baked wall—the lad dreaming on his volume of Cowley, and leaping the garden border for the stars. These are the things that I admit most warmly to my affection.

  It is not in the least that I am a lover of Cowley, who seems an unpleasantly antiquated author. I would choose, instead, that the youthful Elia were busy so early with one of his favorite Elizabethans. He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from a circulating library, yet I would willingly move the occasion forward, coincident to this. And I suspect that the artist Brock is also indifferent to Cowley: for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the shelf for the sure time when Cowley shall grow dull? Has he not even put Cowley flat down upon his face, as if, already neglected, he had slipped from the lad's negligent fingers—as if, indeed, Elia's far-striding meditation were to him of higher interest than the stiff measure of any poet?

  I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay upon the rug before the fire to read his book, with his chin resting on both his hands. His favorite hour was the winter twilight before the family came together for their supper, for at that hour the lamplighter went his rounds and threw a golden string of dots upon the street. He drove an old thin horse and he stood on the seat of the cart with up-stretched taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of the fire was enough for the child to read, for he lay close against the hearth. And as the shadows gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly, of such intensity that the excitement of it swept through his body and out into his waving legs. Perhaps its last copy has now vanished off the earth. It dealt with a deserted house on a lonely road, where chains clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of earth, glimmered at the windows, while groans—such was the dark fancy of the author—issued from a windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter in which the
hero was locked in a haunted room and saw a candle at a chink of the wall. It belonged to the villain, who nightly played there a ghostly antic to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure.

  And in summer the child read on the casement of the dining-room with the window up. It was the height of a tall man from the ground, and this gave it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This sill could be dully reached from inside, but the approach from the outside was riskiest and best. For an adventuring mood this window was a kind of postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond the eye of both the sitting-room and cook. Sometimes it was the bridge of a lofty ship with a pilot going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step-ladder which—on Thursday afternoons when the cook was out—unbent from its sober household duties and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill the child read his books on summer days. His cousins sat inside on chairs, starched for company, and read safe and dimpled authors, but his were of a vagrant kind. There was one book, especially, in which a lad not much bigger than himself ran from home and joined a circus. A scolding aunt was his excuse. And the child on the sill chafed at his own happy circumstance which denied him these adventures.

  In a dark room in an upper story of the house there was a great box where old books and periodicals were stored. No place this side of Cimmeria had deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of the neighbor's cow, which showed a gloomy window on the garden, gave quite the chill. It was only on the brightest days that the child dared to rummage in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind fumbling unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent over, jack-knife fashion, until the upper part of him—all above the legs—disappeared. In the obscurity—his head being gone—it must have seemed that Solomon lived upon the premises and had carried out his ugly threat in that old affair of the disputed child. Then he lifted out the papers—in particular a set of Leslie's Weekly with battle pictures of the Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules Verne—a journey to the center of the earth—and he spread its chapters before the window in the dusty light.