t a party lately a worn subject came under discussion.
Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved courtyard tucked off from the thoroughfare but with the rattle of the elevated railway close at hand. The building is of decent brick, three stories in height, and it exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical doorsteps. The entrance to the courtyard is a swinging shutter between buildings facing on the street, and it might seem a mystery—like the apple in the dumpling—how the building inside squeezed through so narrow an entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber plant in one corner and a trellis for imaginary vines in the other.
In this courtyard, Pomander Walk might be acted along the stoops. For a necessary stage property—you recall, of course, the lamplighter with his ladder in the second act!—there is a gas lamp of old design in the middle of the enclosure, up near the footlights, as it were. From the stoops the main comedy might proceed, with certain business at the upper windows—the profane Admiral with the timber leg popping his head out of one, the mysterious fat man—in some sort the villain of the piece—putting his head out of another to woo the buxom widow at a third. And then the muffin man! In the twilight when the lamp is lighted and the heroine at last is in the hero's arms, there would be a pleasant crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain falls.
But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location of this courtyard. Many persons think that New York City is but a massive gridiron, and they are ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the lower town. Enough that the Indian of a modest tobacconist guards the swinging shutter of the entrance to the courtyard.
Here we sat in the very window I had designed for the profane Admiral, and talked in the quiet interval between trains.
One of our company—a man whom I shall call Flint—was hardy enough to say that he never employed his leisure in going to the country—that a walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. Flint's livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort of person who looks as if he needed exercise, but he has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark fell on us as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a humorous whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously to his opinion, urging smooth pavements against mud, the study of countless faces against the song of birds and great buildings against cliffs.
Another of our company opposed him in this—Colum, who chafes as an accountant. Colum is a gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. all winter he saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks' vacation in the country, he sets up in trees as birdhouses. He confesses that he took up with a certain brand of tobacco because its receptacle is popular with wrens. Also he cultivated a taste for waffles—which at first by a sad distortion of nature he lacked—for no other reason except that syrup may be bought in pretty log-cabin tins particularly suited for bluebirds. If you chance to breakfast with him, he urges the syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. With satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has a dozen of these empty cabins on the shelf alongside his country boots. Time was when he was lean of girth—as becomes an accountant, who is hinged dyspeptically all day across his desk—but by this agreeable stowage he has now grown to plumpness. When in the country Colum rises early in order to stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about before breakfast from tree to tree to view his feathered tenants. He has even acquired, after much practice, the knack of chirping—a hissing conjunction of the lips and teeth—which he is confident wins the friendly attention of the birds.
Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted before he was done. "Pooh!" he said. "There's mud in the country, and not much of any plumbing, and in the morning it's cold until you light a fire."
"Of course," said Colum. "But I love it. Perhaps you remember, flint, the old willow stump out near the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of it, and now there's a family of wrens inside."
"Nonsense," said Flint. "There is too much climate in the country—much more than in town. It's either too hot or too cold. And it's lonely. As for you, Colum, you're sentimental about your birdhouses. And you dislike your job. You like the country merely because it is a symbol of a holiday. It is freedom from an irksome task. It means a closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the country, you would grumble in a month's time. Even a bullfrog—and he is brought up to it, poor wretch—croaks at night."
Colum interrupted. "That's not true, Flint. I know I'd like it—to live on a farm and keep chickens. Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look out of the window and I see a mirage—trees and hills." Colum sighed. "It's quite wonderful, that view, but it unsettles me for my ledger."
"That's it," broke in Flint. "Your sentimentality spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. It's immoral."
Colum was about to retort, when he was anticipated by a new speaker. It was Quill, the journalist, who has long thin fingers and indigestion. At meals he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats food substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or something of that kind, to a daily paper. He always knows whether Steel is strong and whether Copper is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he glances at you for a moment before he knows you. Yet in his slippers he grows human.
"I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no one ever said that I am sentimental." He tapped his head. "I'm as hard as nails up here." Quill cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, and continued: "I have a shack on the West Shore, and I go there week-ends. My work is so confining that if I didn't get to the country once in a while, I would play out in a jiffy. I'm a nervous frazzle—a nervous frazzle—by Saturday noon. But I lie on the grass all Sunday, and if nobody snaps at me and I am let alone, by Monday morning I am fit again."
"You must be like Antжus."
This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm is a bookish fellow who wears great rimmed glasses. He spends much of his time in company thinking up apposite quotations and verifying them. He has worn out two Bartlett's. Wurm is also addicted to maps and dictionaries, and is a great reader of special articles. Consequently his mind is a pound for stray collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, it more closely resembles a building contractor's back yard—odd salvage—rejected doors—a job of window-frames—a pile of bricks for chipping—discarded plumbing—broken junk gathered here and there. Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who once lived on our street—a man of no broad fame—quite local—surely unknown to you—did not collect so wide a rubbish.
However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather a pleasant and harmless bit of cobweb. For a livelihood, he sits in a bank behind a grill. At noon he eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting season he kills in a day as many as a dozen of these pests' and ranges them in his pen tray. On Saturday afternoon he rummages in Malkan's and the second-hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see Wurm in his most characteristic pose, is to see him on a ladder, with one leg outstretched, far off his balance, fumbling for a title with his finger tips. Surely, in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job. Then he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home to dinner. This is served him on a tin tray by his stout landlady who comes puffing up the stairs. It is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever dish is served happens to be the very one of which he was thinking as he came out of the bank. By this innocent device he is popular with his landlady and she skims the milk for him.
Wurm rapped his pipe bowl on the arm of his chair. "You must be like Antжus," he replied.
"Like what?" asked Flint.
"Antжus—the fellow who wrestled with Hercules. each time that antжus was thrown against the earth his strength was doubled. He was finally in the way of overcoming Hercules, when Hercules by seizing him around the middle lifted him off the ground. By this strategy he deprived him of all contact with the earth, and presently Antжus weakened and was vanquished."
"That's me," said Quill, the journalist. "If I can't get back to my shack on Sunday, I feel that Hercules has me, too, around the middle."
"Perhaps I can find the story," said Wurm, his eye running toward the bookshelves.
"Don't bother," said Flint.
There was now another speaker—Flannel Shirt, as we called him—who had once been sated with formal dinners and society, and is now inclined to cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and free verse. He was about to praise the country for its freedom from sordidness and artificiality, when Flint, who had heard him before, interrupted.
"Rubbish!" he cried out. "All of you, but in different ways, are slaves to an old tradition kept up by Wordsworth, who would himself, doubtless, have moved to London except for the steepness of the rents. You all maintain that you like the country, yet on one excuse or another you live in the city and growl about it. There isn't a commuter among you. Honest folk, these commuters, with marrow in their bones—a steak in a paper bag—the sleet in their faces on the ferryboat. I am the only one who admits that he lives in the city because he prefers it. The country is good enough to read about—I like it in books—but I choose to sit meantime with my feet on a city fender."
Here Wurm broke in again. "I see, Flint," he said, "that you have been reading Leslie Stephen."
Flint denied it.
"Well, anyway, you have quoted him. Let me read you a bit of his essay on 'Country Books.'"
Flint made a grimace. "Wurm always has a favorite passage."
Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. He blew off the dust and smoothed its sides. "Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume at Schulte's, on the twenty-five cent table. 'A love of the country is taken,'" he read, "'I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues…. We assert a taste for sweet and innocent pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excitements of artificial society. I, too, like the country,…' (you'll like this, Flint) 'but I confess—to be duly modest—that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best…. Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in dandie Dinmont's parlour … or to drop into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams.'"
"You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And now as I was saying—"
Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You think that that quotation supports your side of the discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that sometimes we get greater reality from books than we get from life. Leslie Stephen liked the real country, also. In his holidays he climbed the Swiss mountains—wrote a book about them—it's on that top shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll stones off a cliff? And as a pedestrian he was almost as famous as George Borrow—walked the shirt off his back before his college trustees and all that sort of thing. But he got an even sharper reality from books. He liked the city, too, but in many a mood, there's no doubt about it, he preferred to walk to Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, rather than to jostle on the actual pavement outside his door."
"Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the journalist. "Inch along, old caterpillar!"
"As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I would rather go with Charles and Mary Lamb to see The Battle of Hexham in their gallery than to any show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine old pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, lest they tread on a neighbor's heels. Then the pleasant gallery, with its great lantern to light their expectant faces!"
Wurm's eyes strayed again wistfully to his shelves. Flint stayed him. "And so you think that it is possible to see life completely in a mirror."
"By no means," Wurm returned. "We must see it both ways. Nor am I, as you infer, in any sense like the Lady of Shalott. A great book cannot be compared to a mirror. There is no genius in a mirror. It merely reflects the actual, and slightly darkened. A great book shows life through the medium of an individuality. The actual has been lifted into truth. Divinity has passed into it through the unobstructed channel of genius."
Here Flint broke in. "Divinity—genius—the Swiss Alps— The Battle of Hexham —what have they to do with Quill's shack out in Jersey or Colum's dirty birdhouses? You jump the track, Wurm. When everybody is heading for the main tent, you keep running to the side-shows."
Quill, the journalist, joined the banter. "You remind me, Wurm—I hate to say it—of what a sea captain once said to me when I tried to loan him a book. 'Readin',' he said, 'readin' rots the mind.'"
It was Colum's turn to ask a question. "What do you do, Flint," he asked, "when you have a holiday?"
"Me? Well, I don't run off to the country as if the city were afire and my coat-tails smoked. And I don't sentimentalize on the evils of society. And I don't sit and blink in the dark, and moon around on a shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I walk around and look at things—shop windows and all that, when the merchants leave their curtains up. I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there's the Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one may make acquaintances. People are always more communicative when they look out on the water. The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about himself, his wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk to a good many persons, first and last, or I stand around until they talk to me. So many persons wear blinders in the city. They don't know how wonderful it is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop on Fourteenth Street, just to listen to the crowd on its final round—mother's carpet sweeper, you understand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas is different—it's gayer—reckless—it's an exalted Saturday night. Afterwards I heard Midnight Mass at the Russian Cathedral. Then there are always ferryboats—the band on the boat to Staten Island—God! What music! Tugs and lights. I would like to know a tug—intimately. If more people were like tugs we'd have less rotten politics. Wall Street on a holiday is fascinating. No one about. Desolate. But full of spirits."
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.