Chimney-Pot Papers

  But the view was high across the houses of the city to a range of hills where tall trees grew as a hedge upon the world. And it was the hours when his book lay fallen that counted most, for then he built poems in his fancy of ships at sea and far-off countries.

  It is by a fine instinct that children thus neglect their books, whether it be Cowley or Circus Dick. When they seem most truant they are the closest rapt. A book at its best starts the thought and sends it off as a happy vagrant. It is the thought that runs away across the margin that brings back the richest treasure.

  But all reading in childhood is not happy. It chanced that lately in the long vacation I explored a country school for boys. It stood on the shaded street of a pretty New England village, so perched on a hilltop that it looked over a wide stretch of lower country. There were many marks of a healthful outdoor life—a football field and tennis courts, broad lawns and a prospect of distant woodland for a holiday excursion. It was on the steps of one of the buildings used for recitation that I found a tattered dog-eared remnant of The Merchant of Venice . So much of its front was gone that at the very first of it shylock had advanced far into his unworthy schemes. Evidently the book, by its position at the corner of the steps, had been thrown out immediately at the close of the final class, as if already it had been endured too long.

  In the stillness of the abandoned school I sat for an hour and read about the choosing of the caskets. The margins were filled with drawings—one possibly a likeness of the teacher. Once there was a figure in a skirt—straight, single lines for legs—Jack's girl —scrawled in evident derision of a neighbor student's amatory weakness. There were records of baseball scores. Railroads were drawn obliquely across the pages, bending about in order not to touch the words, with a rare tunnel where some word stood out too long. Here and there were stealthy games of tit-tat-toe, practiced, doubtless, behind the teacher's back. Everything showed boredom with the play. What mattered it which casket was selected! Let Shylock take his pound of flesh! Only let him whet his knife and be quick about it! All's one. It's at best a sad and sleepy story suited only for a winter's day. But now spring is here—spring that is the king of all the seasons.

  A bee comes buzzing on the pane. It flies off in careless truantry. The clock ticks slowly like a lazy partner in the teacher's dull conspiracy. Outside stretches the green world with its trees and hills and moving clouds. there is a river yonder with swimming-holes. A dog barks on a distant road.

  Presently the lad's book slips from his negligent fingers. He places it face down upon the desk. It lies disregarded like that volume of old Cowley one hundred years ago. His eyes wander from the black-board where the Merchant's dry lines are scanned and marked.

  … … …

  In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

  And then … his thoughts have clambered through the window. They have leaped across the schoolyard wall. Still in his ears he hears the jogging of the Merchant —but the sound grows dim. Like that other lad of long ago, his thoughts have jumped the hills. Already, with giddy stride, they are journeying to the profound region of the stars.

  ON TURNING INTO FORTY

  he other day, without any bells or whistles, I slipped off from the thirties. I felt the same sleepiness that morning. There was no apparent shifting of the grade.

  I am conscious, maybe, that my agility is not what it was fifteen years ago. I do not leap across the fences. But I am not yet comic. Yonder stout man waddles as if he were a precious bombard. He strains at his forward buttons. Unless he mend his appetite, his shoes will be lost below his waistcoat. Already their tops and hulls, like battered caravels, disappear beneath his fat horizon. With him I bear no fellowship. But although nature has not stuffed me with her sweets to this thick rotundity; alas, despite of tubes and bottles, no shadowy garden flourishes on my top—waving capillary grasses and a prim path between the bush. Rather, I bear a general parade and smooth pleasance open to the glimpses of the moon.

  And so at last I have turned into the forties. I remember now how heedlessly I had remarked a small brisk clock ticking upon the shelf as it counted the seconds—paying out to me, as it were, for my pleasure and expense, the brief coinage of my life. I had heard, also, unmindful of the warning, a tall and solemn clock as i lay awake, marking regretfully the progress of the night. And I had been told that water runs always beneath the bridge, that the deepest roses fade, that Time's white beard keeps growing to his knee. These phrases of wisdom I had heard and others. But what mattered them to me when my long young life lay stretched before me? Nor did the revolving stars concern me—nor the moon, spring with its gaudy brush, nor gray-clad winter. Nor did I care how the wind blew the swift seasons across the earth. Let Time's horses gallop, I cried. Speed! The bewildering peaks of youth are forward. The inn for the night lies far across the mountains.

  But the seconds were entered on the ledger. At last the gray penman has made his footing. The great page turns. I have passed out of the thirties.

  I am not given to brooding on my age. It is only by checking the years on my fingers that I am able to reckon the time of my birth. In the election booth, under a hard eye, I fumble the years and invite suspicion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think it was. But even this salient fact—this milepost on my eternity—I remember most quickly by the recollection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth birthday. By way of celebration on that day, having selected the longest blade, I cut the date—1888—in the kitchen woodwork with rather a pretty flourish when the cook was out. The swift events that followed the discovery—the dear woman paddled me with a great spoon through the door—fastened the occurrence in my memory.

  It was about the year of the jack-knife that there lived in our neighborhood a bad boy whose name was Elmer. I would have quite forgotten him except that I met him on the pavement a few weeks ago. He was the bully of our street—a towering rogue with red hair and one suspender. I remember a chrome bandage which he shifted from toe to toe. This lad was of larger speech than the rest of us and he could spit between his teeth. He used to snatch the caps of the younger boys and went off with our baseball across the fences. He was wrapped, too, in mystery, and it was rumored—softly from ear to ear—that once he had been arrested and taken to the station-house.

  And yet here he was, after all these years, not a bearded brigand with a knife sticking from his boot, but a mild undersized man, hat in hand, smiling at me with pleasant cordiality. His red hair had faded to a harmless carrot. From an overtopping rascal he had dwindled to my shoulder. It was as strange and incomprehensible as if the broken middle-aged gentleman, my familiar neighbor across the street who nods all day upon his step, were pointed out to me as Captain Kidd retired. Can it be that all villains come at last to a slippered state? Does Dick Turpin of the King's highway now falter with crutch along a garden path? And Captain Singleton, now that his last victim has walked the plank—does he doze on a sunny bench beneath his pear tree? Is no blood or treasure left upon the earth? Do all rascals lose their teeth? "Good evening, Elmer," I said, "it has been a long time since we have met." And I left him agreeable and smiling.

  No, certainly I do not brood upon my age. Except for a gift I forget my birthday. It is only by an effort that I can think of myself as running toward middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and because of an old-fashioned deference for age I bow and scrape in the doorway for his passage.

  Of course I admit a suckling to be my junior. A few days since I happened to dine at one of the Purple Pups of our Greenwich Village. At my table, which was slashed with yellow and blue in the fashion of these places, sat a youth of seventeen who engaged me in conversation. Plainly, even to my blindness, he was younger than myself. The milk was scarcely dry upon his mouth. He was, by his admission across the soup, a writer of plays and he had received already as many as three pleasant letters of rejection. He flared with youth. Strange gases and opinion burned in his speech. Hi
s breast pocket bulged with manuscript, for reading at a hint.

  I was poking at my dumpling when he asked me if I were a socialist. No, I replied. Then perhaps I was an anarchist or a Bolshevist, he persisted. n-no, i answered him, sadly and slowly, for i foresaw his scorn. He leaned forward across the table. Begging my pardon for an intrusion in my affairs, he asked me if I were not aware that the world was slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I had come frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken and decrepit. The youngster had his manuscripts and his anarchy. He held the wriggling world by its futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but it was a gay world and daubed with color.

  And yet, despite this humiliating encounter, I feel quite young. Something has passed before me that may be Time. The summers have come and gone. There is snow on the pavement where I remember rain. I see, if I choose, the long vista of the years, with diminishing figures, and tin soldiers at the start. Yet I doubt if I am growing older. To myself I seem younger than in my twenties. In the twenties we are quite commonly old. We bear the whole weight of society. The world has been waiting so long for us and our remedies. In the twenties we scorn old authority. We let Titian and Keats go drown themselves. We are skeptical in religion, and before our unrelenting iron throne immortality and all things of faith plead in vain. Although I can show still only a shabby inventory, certainly I would not exchange myself for that other self in the twenties. I have acquired in these last few years a less narrow sympathy and a belief that some of my colder reasons may be wrong. nor would i barter certain knacks of thoughts—serious and humorous—for the renewed ability to leap across a five-foot bar. I am less fearful of the world and its accidents. I have less embarrassment before people. I am less moody. I tack and veer less among my betters for some meaner profit. Surely I am growing younger.

  I seem to remember reading a story in which a scientist devised a means of reversing the direction of the earth. Perhaps an explosion of gases backfired against the east. Perhaps he built a monstrous lever and contrived the moon to be his fulcrum. Anyway, here at last was the earth spinning backward in its course—the spring preceding winter—the sun rising in the west—one o'clock going before twelve—soup trailing after nuts—the seed-time following upon the harvest. And so it began to appear—so ran the story—that human life, too, was reversed. Persons came into the world as withered grandames and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and then receded like crabs backward into their maturity, then into their adolescence and babyhood. To return from a protracted voyage was to find your younger friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really too ridiculous.

  But in these last few years no doubt I do grow younger. The great camera of the Master rolls its moving pictures backward. Perhaps I am only thirty-eight now that the direction is reversed.

  I wonder what you thought, my dear X——, when we met recently at dinner. We had not seen one another very often in these last few years. Our paths have led apart and we have not been even at shouting distance across the fields. It is needless to remind you, I hope, that I once paid you marked attention. It began when we were boy and girl. Our friends talked, you will recall. you were then less than a year younger than myself, although no doubt you have since lost distance. What a long time I spent upon my tie and collar—a stiff high collar that almost touched my ears! Some other turn of fortune's wheel—circumstance—a shaft of moonlight (we were young, my dear)—a white frock—your acquiescence—who knows?

  I jilted you once or twice for other girls—nothing formal, of course—but only when you had jilted me three or four times. We once rowed upon a river at night. Did I take your hand, my dear? If I listen now I can hear the water dripping from the oar. There was darkness—and stars—and youth (yourself, white-armed, the symbol of its mystery). Yes, perhaps I am older now.

  Was it not Byron who wrote?

  I am ashes where once I was fire,

  And the soul in my bosom is dead;

  What I loved I now merely admire,

  And my heart is as gray as my head.

  I cannot pretend ever to have had so fierce a passion, but at least my fire still burns and with a cheery blaze. But you will not know this love of mine—unless, of course, you read this page—and even so, you can only suspect that I write of you, because, my dear, to be quite frank, I paid attention to several girls beside yourself.

  Yes, they say that I have come to the top of the hill and that henceforth the view is back across my shoulder. I am counseled that with a turn of the road I had best sit with my back to the horses, for the mountains are behind. A little while and the finer purple will be showing in the west. Yet a little while, they say, and the bewildering peaks of youth will be gray and cold.

  Perhaps some of the greener pleasures are mine no longer. Certainly, last night I went to the Winter Garden, but left bored after the first act; and I had left sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. I suppose there are young popinjays who seriously affirm that Ziegfeld's Beauty Chorus is equal to the galaxy of loveliness that once pranced at Weber and Field's when we came down from college on Saturday night. At old Coster and Bial's there was once a marvelous beauty who swung from a trapeze above the audience and scandalously undressed herself down to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, are there plays now as exciting as the Prisoner of Zenda , with its great fight upon the stairs—three men dead and the tables overturned—Red Rudolph, in the end, bearing off the Princess? Heroes no longer wear cloak and sword and rescue noble ladies from castle towers.

  And Welsh rabbit, that was once a passion and the high symbol of extravagance, in these days has lost its finest flavor. In vain do we shake the paprika can. pop-beer and real beer, its manly cousin, have neither of them the old foaming tingle when you come off the water. Yes, already, I am told, I am on the long road that leads down to the quiet inn at the mountain foot. I am promised, to be sure, many wide prospects, pleasant sounds of wind and water, and friendly greetings by the way. There will be a stop here and there for refreshments, a pause at the turn where the world shows best, a tightening of the brake. Get up, Dobbin! Go 'long! And then, tired and nodding, at last, we shall leave the upland and enter the twilight where all roads end.

  A pleasant picture, is it not—a grandfather in a cap—yourself, my dear sir, hugging your cold shins in the chimney corner? Is it not a brave end to a stirring business? Life, you say, is a journey up and down a hill—aspirations unattained and a mild regret, castles at dawn, a brisk wind for the noontide, and at night, at best, the lights of a little village, the stir of water on the stones, and silence.

  Is this true? Or do we not reiterate a lie? I deny old age. It is a false belief, a bad philosophy dimming the eyes of generations. Men and women may wear caps, but not because of age. In each one's heart, if he permit, a child keeps house to the very end. If Welsh rabbit lose its flavor, is it a sign of decaying power? I have yet to know that a relish for Shakespeare declines, or the love of one's friends, or the love of truth and beauty. Youth does not view the loftiest peaks. It is at sunset that the tallest castles rise.

  My dear sir—you of seventy or beyond—if no rim of mountains stretches up before you, it is not your age that denies you but the quality of your thought. It has been said of old that as a man thinks so he is, but who of us has learned the lesson?

  The journey has neither a beginning nor an end. Now is eternity. Our birth is but a signpost on the road—our going hence, another post to mark transition and our progress. The oldest stars are brief lamps upon our way. We shall travel wisely if we see peaks and castles all the day, and hold our childhood in our hearts. Then, when at last the night has come, we shall plant our second post upon a windy height where it will be first to catch the dawn.

  ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WIT AND HUMOR

  am not sure that I can draw an exact line between wit and humor. Perhaps the distinction is so subtle that only those persons can decide who have long white beards. But even an ignorant ma
n, so long as he is clear of Bedlam, may have an opinion.

  I am quite positive that of the two, humor is the more comfortable and more livable quality. Humorous persons, if their gift is genuine and not a mere shine upon the surface, are always agreeable companions and they sit through the evening best. They have pleasant mouths turned up at the corners. To these corners the great Master of marionettes has fixed the strings and he holds them in his nimblest fingers to twitch them at the slightest jest. But the mouth of a merely witty man is hard and sour until the moment of its discharge. Nor is the flash from a witty man always comforting, whereas a humorous man radiates a general pleasure and is like another candle in the room.

  I admire wit, but I have no real liking for it. It has been too often employed against me, whereas humor is always an ally. It never points an impertinent finger into my defects. Humorous persons do not sit like explosives on a fuse. They are safe and easy comrades. But a wit's tongue is as sharp as a donkey driver's stick. I may gallop the faster for its prodding, yet the touch behind is too persuasive for any comfort.

  Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, whereas humor has a kindly eye and comfortable girth. Wit, if it be necessary, uses malice to score a point—like a cat it is quick to jump—but humor keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments of the day, but humor is concerned with homely eternal things. wit wears silk, but humor in homespun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. Wit is sharper company at table, but humor serves better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively answer. But it is a workaday world in which we live, where we get mud upon our boots and come weary to the twilight—it is a world that grieves and suffers from many wounds in these years of war: and therefore as I think of my acquaintance, it is those who are humorous in its best and truest meaning rather than those who are witty who give the more profitable companionship.