Part 16
We went through the drawer first. Henry was a bit disconcerted to find it so dusty; and so were we. We found a clay pipe that we hadn’t seen for a long time; we found some foreign stamps that we have been saving to send to a small boy in Philadelphia. We tried with these to distract Henry’s attention from the object of search. We asked him if his little boy was a stamp collector. But Henry kept bringing us back to the receipt, which was necessary for some reason. He said he needed that receipt to complete some scheme he had for reducing our overhead; the best authorities on finance, he said, are agreed that no man has any _right_ to attempt to save money before he is 40; no, he should put it into insurance. We tried to keep Henry talking while we were scuffling about through the back of the desk. We thought that perhaps the receipt would turn up unexpectedly; we didn’t want him to notice that we were looking in parts of the desk where we had explained it could not possibly be.
Damnation, Henry, we said; it isn’t our fault that this desk is in such a mess; we have the most orderly instincts, but our clients keep dumping stuff on us so fast that we can’t ever catch up with it.
It was a queer coincidence, we thought, that when we went out to lunch that day we noticed at 56 Wall Street a tablet in honour of Morris Robinson, who “established on this spot the business of modern life insurance.” He was a Canadian, the tablet says. We’re glad he wasn’t an American.
In the meantime we are going to have another look through those pigeonholes.
* * * * *
AN IDEA
We do not often spend time thinking up ways of surprising humanity with kindness; yet when we stand in line at the bank while a queue of merry merchants ahead of us are drawing out huge payroll sums which take about five minutes each to be counted and recounted, a blithe thought comes our way. It is this: On some Saturday morning, when banking traffic is particularly heavy, we will gather half a dozen friends of ours who have nothing to do. We will go round to the bank and stand in line, all seven of us. As we draw nearer and nearer to the window we will watch the anguished faces of those behind, despairingly counting the number of people that still stand between them and the cherished teller. Then just as the first of our seven gets up to the window we will all slip deftly away and enjoy ourselves by watching the joyous elation of the man who thought himself eighth in line and now finds himself next to the grill. All down the impatient throng passes a tremor of surprised pleasure. Then we will move on to the next bank and do the same thing.
* * * * *
ALGEBRA FOR URCHINS
We wish we weren’t so rusty in our mathematics. One of our favourite projects has always been to write an algebra book for the use of the Urchin when he gets a little older. This algebra would be in the form of a story in which the problems would be introduced naturally into the movement of the tale, and each one would be (if we could persuade him to do it) illustrated by Fontaine Fox.
The problems, moreover, would deal with facts and topics familiar to the Urchin. One problem, for instance, would run something as follows:
Riding in Dame Quickly along the North Hempstead turnpike, the Urchin notices that a man is walking on the sidewalk but at just such a pace that a telephone pole prevents him from being recognized. Attempting to see who the pedestrian is, and foiled by the fact that the simultaneous motions of Dame Quickly and the man on the sidewalk keep the pole constantly in the line of sight, the Urchin becomes interested in the problem. He notes that the speedometer indicates 22 miles an hour. He persuades his father to stop the car and measure the width of the road and the sidewalk. Dame Quickly stops opposite the pole and the measurements are taken. It is 24 feet from the Dame to the pole. The line along which the man was walking, down the middle of the sidewalk, was three feet from the pole. How fast was the man walking?[B]
[B] The answer, if you care to work it out, seems to be 2¾ miles per hour.
* * * * *
A MODEST SCAFFOLD FOR PHILOSOPHERS
We have been meditating on the dissimilar conduct of cats and dogs, since we added a kitten (named _Pepys_) to our household roster.
The dog, plainly, is a boob, for he tries so hard to please and ingratiate the Masters of the Event, his deities. Whereas the cat, while calmly recognizing the paramountcy of the gods, goes ahead in every way within his power to circumvent and outwit their control. The dog, poor honest simpleton, shows his genuine and unselfish affection for his deities; the cat never makes up to them unless he wants something from them, or feels that a little friendly caressing would be agreeable. The cat is 100 per cent. pro-feline. The dog, we reckon, is at least 30 per cent. pro-human. You open the back door. If the cat wants to go abroad, he will streak through without an instant’s hesitation; but the dog will wait, politely, until he is sure whether you wish him to go out. Question, then, for philosophic ruminators--Do not the domestic gods secretly respect the cat a little more because they know he is inwardly hostile and contemptuous and a perfect ego? A whole rationale of heaven and hell may be quizzed out of this matter.
* * * * *
ICI ON PARLE
We have been considerably humiliated lately by the fact that although we once studied French with some persistence, and enjoy nothing more than reading such demi-gods as the chrysostom Bourget (a celestial ironist far too little known in this country)--humiliated, we repeat, that our spoken French is so appalling. Lately, as the surprising result of an advt. in the _Herald_, Titania landed an elderly female French cook who speaks no word of English. And if you speak French no better than we do, figure to yourself the complexities of trying to explain to Celeste the workings of a kerosene water-heater (we have no gas in the rustic Salamis Estates) while Titania (whose French is better than ours) stands by squeaking with cruel mirth. Comme ça:
Voyez vous, Celeste, l’huile--comment dit-on en français le liquide?--le petrole? Ah, oui--eh bien, le petrole entre par là, dans le petit cylindre, vous prenez moi, hein?--et donc on place le cylindre comme ça--mais pas comme ça, comprenez?--et donc le petrole marche (quand le--comment appelle-t-on le _wick_? le petit toile ici--le mèche? ah oui!--quand le mèche est en ordre laborieux--telle quelle ce n’est pas maintenant)--_ye gods, Titania, give me a hand with this explanation_--le petrole marche en haut--mais voyez vous, ceci n’est pas un mèche honnete-à-dieu; c’est d’asbeste; on place le soi-disant mèche--(le _burner_ on dit en anglais) comme ainsi ici bas, et donc on allume une allumette et vous directez le feu par ici, par là, et après le feu s’eteint vous reallumez avec patience. Du patience, toujours, avec ces poêles à l’huile,--et prenez garde, ne replacez pas ces cylindres à flamme auparavant que le feu a monté, et exhibite quelque vitalité, vous voyez?
Eh bien; en une heure peut-etre vous rattrapez de l’eau chaud, si le feu n’evanouie pas et le _backdoor_--la porte de derrière--n’est pas ouverte et le vent ne siffle pas trop forte....
CELESTE: Ah oui, Monsieur, c’est bien simple!
* * * * *
ASTONISHMENT
One of the most astounding scenes in the local panorama of human oddity is a news-stand at one of the big terminals when the homeward-bound commuters are buying their evening papers. Those who believe there is no hustle in New York might contemplate that spectacle--the continual patter of hurried people scampering up to the counter to seize a paper, throw down their money, and bound away. Indeed, if you stand for a while near the news-stand and watch, you will gradually become aware that there is something pathologic about the matter; that the great mass of newspaper readers crave and swallow their daily potion much as they would a familiar drug or anodyne. The absolute definiteness of the traffic is another curious feature: the news dealer can tell you, almost to a figure, how many of each paper he will sell each evening. As the commuters hurry up to the counter, you will never see them hesitate, ponder, and ask themselves, “Well, which paper shall I read to-night?” No; they grab the usual sheet, and off they go.
* * * * *
SPIDERS
We wrote[C] something about the spider’s “struts and cantilevers,” and were gently chaffed by some friendly correspondents. Well, the spider is not only a marvellous engineer, he also seems a persistent patriot. There is one on our front lawn who still celebrates the Spanish-American war. Every morning, among the sun-sparkled shrubbery, we find he has erected a dewey arch.
[C] You can refer, if you insist, to a book called _Plum Pudding_.
One of the most exciting things we know is a series of dainty models at the Natural History Museum in New York, showing the various stages in a spider’s web. Did you know, for instance, that often a preliminary spiral is blocked in, to hold the web together during construction? This is afterward carefully removed to make room for the sticky spiral which does the fly-catching. So at any rate we remember the Museum’s models. If you find being stricken with astonishments a pleasing humiliation, the Museum is the place to visit. We always think to ourself, how old Sir Kenelm Digby would have enjoyed it.
Then, of course, you mustn’t omit to read Fabre’s glorious _Life of the Spider_. The microscopic Archimedes can much more than mere tenuous trusses and gossamer girders. M. Fabre tells us that the triumph of the spider’s unconscious art (for the creature works divinely, without reason or calculation) is the logarithmic spiral. So if by chance you have ever fallen into that meanest absurdity of the unthinking and asserted that “Mathematics is uninteresting,” consider Fabre’s words:--
Geometry, that is to say, the science of harmony in space, presides over everything. We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira’s lime-snare; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider’s thread, as in the orbit of a planet; it is everywhere, as perfect in the world of atoms as in the world of immensities. And this universal geometry tells us of a Universal Geometrician, whose divine compass has measured all things.
The mathematician, let us add for our own part, is the greatest of poets, the greatest of priests.
But a study of M. Fabre’s magnificent books will not necessarily add consolations to the Pollyanna brand of religious thought. You will find, in his discussion of the appalling married life of insects, gruesome considerations which will furnish merriment to the cynic and painful grief to the old-fashioned. M. Maeterlinck says, in his eloquent preface to _The Life of the Spider_:
Nothing equals the marriage of the Green Grasshopper, of which I cannot speak here, for it is doubtful whether even the Latin language possesses the words needed to describe it as it should be described.
The fiercest realist yet produced by the younger generations of Chicago and Greenwich Village is a mere trifler compared to the immortal Fabre.
* * * * *
PERNICIOUSNESS OF MR. LEAR
We are rather startled to find, on beginning to read Edward Lear’s immortal _Nonsense Books_ to our Archurchin, that liquor plays a considerable rôle in his waggishness. This phase of Lear’s works we had quite forgotten, although it may have played a subtle part in undermining our character when young. But what are we to do, we ask, when, in reading aloud we come upon such distressing testaments as this:
B was a Bottle blue, which was not very small; Papa he filled it full of beer, And then he drank it all.
Or this:
There was an Old Man with an Owl, Who continued to bother and howl; He sat on a rail, and imbibed bitter ale, Which refreshed that Old Man and his Owl.
Or this:
There was an old person of Sheen, Whose expression was calm and serene; He sate in the water, and drank bottled porter, That placid old person of Sheen.
Now, of course, in reading these passages we can improvise variations: we can say that Papa’s blue bottle was filled with tea; we can substitute “ginger ale” for “bitter ale”; we can make the old person of Sheen sit in the porter and drink bottled water; but before very long our audience will begin to read the book for himself, and when he finds that we have implanted a false version in his mind there will be a swift succession of logical inquiries. The Old Soak’s problem is far easier: _his_ sons are grown up and become “revenooers”; their minds were long since formed on this topic. But what is the comparatively Young Soak to do in the matter of explaining literature to his offspring?
Only in one place, as far as we can see, does Mr. Lear refer to drink with any tinge of moral or reprobatory feeling. Thus:
Twas a tumbler full Of Punch all hot and good; Papa he drank it up, when in The middle of a wood.
We shall have to lean heavily upon that cautionary stanza in reading to the Urchin. We will not try to bias him, of course; but by grave and solemn repetition surely the idea will pierce his meninges--that no matter how excellent the libation, it must be performed in secret and far from scrutiny.
THE SEDAN
Not long ago, in the garage at Salamis run by our friend Fred Seaman, we were admiring and examining a very beautiful sedan. Not that we had any idea of ever abandoning our cherished Dame Quickly, who means more to us than any other vehicle ever will or can. But, just in a contemplative spirit, and as a frustrated lover of luxury, we were admiring this sedan, and saying to ourself that if we were a person of wealth and standing that would be just about the kind of car we would like to own. And we gazed entranced at its opulent upholstery, its cut-glass carnation-vase, its little 8-day clock, cigar-holder, and all the other gauds and trinkets. Just in idle curiosity we inquired the price. Then we went over the hill to our home.
A day or so later a cheerful Polish friend of ours, who is so kind as to call for the washing weekly, and who used to do odd jobs round our estate, and with whom we boarded our admirable cat _Pepys_ while we were in town, called at our house. Titania had always represented this person to us as being in the last agony of financial dissolution and a worthy object of charity.
“I want to show you my new boat,” said he.
We thought at first that he meant an actual boat, down in the harbour, and were interested. But he pointed out to the front of the house. There was the very sedan we had admired. He insisted on our going down to listen to the engine. “Paid all cash for it,” he said proudly.
When we see a large, glimmering limousine pass us on the road, hereafter, we shall always wonder whether it is some thrifty washerman and his family.
BAD VERSE
Really thoroughly bad verse (as Mr. Hilaire Belloc pointed out in an essay) has a magic and an attraction all its own. It has (he said) “something of the poignant and removed from common experience which you get also in poetry. Great pits strike one with horror, as do the mountains with their sublimity.”
A philosophic friend of ours, whose dolorous task it is to examine manuscripts for a large publishing house, sent us the other day a collection of verses that had been submitted to his firm. We have had considerable diversion in examining them; though compositions of this sort lead one also to melancholy. It is sad to think that the accident of rhyme, which has been the occasion of so much verbal loveliness, has also been responsible for so many atrocities.
We shall not say who wrote the verses in question, except that he lives in a Southern State, but we will quote a few stanzas from a poem called “Love’s Progress.” After several pages describing the sorrows of a pair of lovers, we arrive at this:
They broke to break their breaking breach, Which both have caused, because of each Failing to procure, or reach, The longing goal they did beseech.
They sought to seek their seeking truth, Which all do crave, and never boot; They kept their cadence to a flute, Which only wisdom seeks to mute.
They slid to slide their sliding sleigh Toward goals, but met a fray; And, striking, struck the striking broil; And found themselves to winds a spoil.
They swung to swing their swinging life To higher spheres and lusty fife; But flung against the sturdy cliff, And sunk beneath the brutal grief.
They shed their shedding tears in vain, Fruitless as the dismal rain; And pined their pine, and pined it more; And reaped their crop they sowed to store.
Defying fies have they defied; Lying lies have they belied; Brisky thought did both deride; Happy hope had both denied!
You see how low rhyme can bring a man.
Of the following, our friend the publisher’s reader observes: “Alas, poor Henley--’twas an excellent fellow: I knew him well!”
I Am
I am the tutor of my mind; I am the pastor of my soul; All that pass, I leave behind, And focus straight upon my goal.
Until we read that we felt sorry for the author; but indeed it takes him out of the sphere of charity.
[Illustration]
TWO REVIEWS
I
(New York _Evening Post_, July, 1922)
It is curious that the agencies for letting people know about the things that really matter are so feeble and ineffective. There was published in England, last February, a book called _Disenchantment_, by C. E. Montague. It seems to us perhaps the first book we have seen that tells truth about the war, tells it beautifully, with a power and humour and tenderness that are palpable on every page. Five months have elapsed, and yet we have heard no word as to its being published over here. Worse still, we learn that more than one New York publisher, after reading the book, reluctantly declined it. Sometimes one fears that publishers are not unerring judges of what we all desire to read.
What does a man need to do to deserve well of his generation? Suppose he had written a book that with quiet dignity and restraint summed up the “ardours and endurances” of earth’s greatest crisis; a book that showed sane and sweet knowledge of our poor, frail, tough, bedevilled human nature; a book so delicately and firmly written that the manner of it was no less potent than the matter; a book that dealt with furious subjects calmly; that reviewed passion and misery with reason and candour; a book that was bitter where bitterness was needed, but with the bitterness of antiseptic. C. E. Montague has written such a book. And even though it may be bad manners to speak about it publicly before it has been published here, we venture do so in the hope of speeding its coming. To confess a personal incident, when we were half way through it we encountered one of our friends who is a sagacious devourer of books. “What’s worth reading?” he said. “Sit down at your desk and let me dictate a letter to you,” we replied. With admirable docility this fine creature obeyed. We happened to know that he has an account at Brentano’s, so we dictated thus: “Brentano’s, New York. Gentlemen: Please order for me from Chatto & Windus, London, three copies of _Disenchantment_, by C. E. Montague, and charge to my account.” We watched carefully while our friend signed his name, addressed and stamped the envelope, and dropped it down the chute.
By the time we had read him half a page of the book he had already decided to whom he would give his two extra copies. He will never regret the transaction, we swear.
We are anxious to put a brake on ourself in speaking of this book: if we tried to tell you how deeply moving and true we found it, you might be alarmed. We admit that we came to it favourably prejudiced, for Mr. Montague’s name has been honourable to us ever since we read his novel _The Morning’s War_, published in 1913. We had heard, also, of his gallant record in the war: that in spite of his age (born in 1867), and an occupation (he is one of the editors of the Manchester _Guardian_) that many found a full excuse for non-combatancy, he enlisted as a private in 1914, rose through the ranks to a captain’s commission, and was three times mentioned in dispatches. We also knew (from _Who’s Who_) that his recreation was mountaineering, and that he had been awarded a medal “for saving life from drowning.” But we found in this book so much more than we had imagined possible that we are at a loss to describe it. It is the kind of book that, like its author, “saves life from drowning.” It may save some foundering reason from the dark tide of cynicism and disorder that is the natural result of the war years. Even if we only persuaded every newspaper man in America to read this book, we would have done a good stroke of achievement. It is a book peculiarly necessary for journalists to meditate.
It is very plain that the world to-day has a bad case of acid mouth, and Mr. Montague’s book (to use a very humble metaphor) is a kind of litmus paper that shows the extent of our palate’s embitterment. His reminiscent synopsis of the war’s moods and its increasing disillusions and perplexities is the first account that seems to us to fit in with those troubled, enigmatic, and fragmentary confessions that one hears from those who saw the trouble from the under side; who are not always very articulate, but spasmodically ejaculate that “The war didn’t get into the papers.” The book deals with the greatest topic of our age in a spirit of commensurate greatness. Of course we think we can guess why some American publishers have been timid about it. In this country we have not been anywhere nearly so close to the war as Britain was. The war was still bullish with us when it suddenly ended. As a nation, we had not been in it long enough to feel that infernal douche of skepticism. England has been far, far more bitterly disillusioned. The war left us economically troubled, but spiritually much the same. The old bunkums, one suspects, still pass current here as they do not any longer in England. And perhaps this book, conceived in suffering and weariness, can be relished only by those who have been more deeply immersed in horror than most of us. Even in England, we hear, its sale has not been very large.