Journeys to Bagdad Part 3

Down the street--it being now noon and the day Monday--Mrs. Y's was.h.i.+ng will be out to dry. Observe her gaunt replica, _cap-a-pie_, as immodest as an advertis.e.m.e.nt! In her proper person she is prodigal if she unmask her beauty to the moon. And in company with this, is the woolen semblance of her plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for sportive tricks: But look upon them when the music starts! Hand in hand upon the line, as is proper for married folk, heel and toe together, one, two, and a one, two, three.

It is the hurdy-gurdy that calls to life such revelry. The polka has come to its own again.

Yet despite this evidence that the hurdy-gurdy sets the world to dancing--like the fiddle in the Turkish tale where even the headsman forgot his business--despite such evidence there are persons who affect to despise its melody. These claim such perceptivity of the outer ear and such fineness of the channels that the tune is but a clack when it gets inside. G.o.d pity such! I'll not write a word of them.

A spring day is at its best about noon. I thrust this in the teeth of those who prefer the dawn or the coming on of night. At noon there are more yellow wheels upon the street. The hammering on sheds is at its loudest as the time for lunch comes near. More grocers' carts are rattling on their business. There is a better chance that a load of green wheelbarrows may go by, or a wagon of red rhubarb. Then, too, the air is so warm that even decrepitude fumbles on the porch and down the steps, with a cane to poke the weeds.

If you have luck, you may see a "cullud pusson" pus.h.i.+ng a whitewash cart with altruistic intent toward all dusky surfaces except his own. Or maybe he has nice appreciation of what color contrasts he himself presents when the work is midway. If he wear the faded memory of a silk hat, it's the better picture.

But also the schools are out and the joy of life is hissing up a hundred gullets. Baseball has now a fierceness it lacks at the end of day. There is wild demand that "Shorty, soak 'er home!" "b.u.t.ter-fingers!" is a harder insult. And meanwhile a pop-corn wagon will be whistling a blithe if monotonous tune in trial if there be pennies in the crowd. Or a waffle may be purchased if you be a Croesus, ladled exclusively for you and dropped on the gridiron with a splutter. It is a sweet reward after you have knocked a three-bagger and stolen home, and is worth a search in all your eleven pockets for any last penny that may be skulking in the fuzz.

Or perhaps there is such wealth upon your person that there is still a restless jingle. In such case you will cross the street to a shop that ministers to the wants of youth. In the window is displayed a box of marbles--gla.s.sies, commonies, and a larger browny adapted to the purpose of "pugging," by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to the impact of your thumb. Then there are baseb.a.l.l.s of graded excellence and seduction. And tops. Time is needed for the choosing of a top. First you stand tiptoe with nose just above the gla.s.s and make your trial selection. Pay no attention to the color, for that's the way a girl chooses! Black is good, without womanish taint. Then you wiggle the peg for its tightness and demand whether it be screwed in like an honest top.

And finally, before putting your money down, you will squint upon its roundness. Then slam the door and yell your presence to the street!

Or do you come on softer errand? In the rear of the shop is a parlor with a base-burner and virtuous mottoes on the walls--a cosy room with vases.

And here it is they serve cream-puffs.... For safe transfer you balance the puff in your fingers and take an enveloping bite, emerging with a prolonged suck for such particles as may not have come safely across, and bending forward with stomach held in. I'll leave you in this refreshment; for if the money hold, you will gobble until the ringing of the bell.

By this time, as you may imagine, the person with the sagging pockets whom I told you of, has arrived in the center of the city where already he is practicing such device of penny-picking as he may be master of.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

TO A MOURNFUL AIR

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

TO A MOURNFUL AIR

_To any one of several editors._

Dear Sir: I paid a visit to your city several days since and humored myself with ambitious thoughts in the contemplation of your editorial windows. I was tempted to rap at your door and request an audience but modesty held me off. Once by appointment I pa.s.sed an hour in your office pleasantly and profitably and even so tardily do I acknowledge your courtesy and good-nature. But a beggar must choose his streets carefully and must not be seen too often in a neighborhood as the same door does not always offer pie. So this time your bra.s.s knocker shows no finger-marks of mine.

You did not accept for publication the last paper I sent to you. (You spread an infinite deal of sorrow in your path.) On its return I re-read it and now confess to concurrence with your judgment. Something had gone wrong. It was not as intended. Unlike Cleopatra, age had withered it. Was I not like a cook whose dinner has been sent back untasted? The best available ingredients were put into that confection and if it did not issue from the oven with those savory whiffs that compel appet.i.te, my stove is at fault. Perhaps some good old literary housewife will tell me, disconsolate among my pots and pans, how long an idea must be boiled to be tender and how best to garnish a thought to an editor's taste? And yet, sir, your manners are excellent. It was Petruchio who cried:

What's this? Mutton?-- 'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat.

Where is the rascal cook?

Manners have improved. In pleasant contrast is your courteous note, signifying the excellence of my proffered pastry, your delight that you are allowed to sniff and your regret for lack of appet.i.te and abdominal capacity. Nevertheless, the food came back and I poked at the broken pieces mournfully. It is a witch's business presiding at the caldron of these things and there is no magic pottage above my fire.

And yet, kind sir, with your permission I shall continue in my ways and offer to you from time to time such messes as I have, hoping that some day your taste will deteriorate to my level or that I shall myself learn the witchcraft and enter your regard.

Up to this present time only a few of my papers have been asked to stay.

The rest have gone the downward tread of your stair carpet and have pa.s.sed into the night. My desk has become a kind of mausoleum of such as have come home to die, and when I raise its lid a silence falls on me as on one who visits sacred places.

There is, however, another side of this. Certain it is that thousands of us who write seek your recognition and regard. Certain it is that your favorable judgment moves us to elation, and your silence to our merits urges us to harder endeavors. But for all this, dear sir, and despite your continued neglect, we are a tolerably happy crew. It may be that our best things were never published--best, because we enjoyed them most, because they recall the happiest hours and the finest moods. They bring most freshly to our memories the influences of books and friends and the circ.u.mstances under which they were written. It is because we lacked the skill to tame our sensations to our uses, the patience to do well what we wished to do fast, that you rightly judged them unavailable. We do not feel rebellious and we admit that you are right. Only we do not care as much as we did, for most of us are learning to write for the love of the writing and without an eye on the medal. With no livelihood depending, with no compulsion of hours or subject, under the free anonymity of sure rejection, we have worked. It has been a fine world, these hours of study and reflection, and when we a.s.sert that one essay is our best, we are right, for it has led us to happiness and pleasant thoughts and to an interpretation of ourselves and the world that moves about us. In these best moods of ours, we live and think beyond our normal powers and even come to a distant kins.h.i.+p with men far greater than ourselves. Knowing this, prudence only keeps us from snapping our fingers at you and marking each paper, as we finish it, "rejected," without the formality of a trip to you, and then happily beginning the next. We are learning to be amateurs and although our names shall never be shouted from the housetops, we shall be almost as content. Still will there be the morning hours of study with sunlight across the floor, the winding country roads of autumn with smells of corn-stacks and burdened vineyards, the fire-lit hours of evening. Still shall we write in our gardens of a summer afternoon or change the winter snowstorm that drives against our windows into the coinage of our thoughts.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We shall be independent and think and write as we please. And although we enclose stamps for a mournful recessional, please know, dear sir, that even as you dictate your polite note of refusal, we are hard at it with another paper.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

It is rash business scuttling your own s.h.i.+p. Now as I am in a way a practical person, which is, I take it, a diminutive state of hard-headedness, any detraction against hard-headedness must appear as leveled against myself. Gimlet in hand, deep down amids.h.i.+ps, it would look as if I were squatted and set on my own destruction.

But by hard-headed persons I mean those beyond the ordinary, those so far gone that a pin-p.r.i.c.k through the skull would yield not so much as a drop of ooze; persons whose brain convolutions did they appear in fright at the aperture on the insertion of the pin--like a head at a window when there is a fire on the street--would betray themselves as but a kind of cordage.

Such hard-headedness, you will admit, is of a tougher substance than that which may beset any of us on an occasion at the price of meat, or on the recurrent obligations of the too-constant moon.

I am reasonably free from colds. I do not fret myself into a congestion if a breath comes at me from an open window; or if a swirl of wind puts its cold fingers down my neck do I lift my collar. Yet the presence of a thoroughly hard-headed person provokes a sneeze. There is a chilly vapor off him--a swampish miasma--that puts me in a snuffling state, beyond poultice and mustard footbaths. No matter how I huddle to the fire, my thoughts will congeal and my purpose cramp and stiffen. My conceit too will be but a shriveled bladder.

Several years ago I knew a man of extreme hard-headedness. As I recall, I was afflicted at the time--indeed, the malady co-existed with his acquaintance--with a sorry catarrh of the nasal pa.s.sages. I can remember still the clearings and snufflings that obtruded in my conversation. For two winters my complaint was beyond the cunning of the doctors. Despite local applications and such pills as they thought fit to administer, still did the snuffling continue. Then on a sudden my friend left town.

Consequent to which and to the amazement of the profession, the springs of my disease dried up. As this happened at the beginning of the warm days of summer, I am loath to lay my cure entirely to his withdrawal, yet there was a nice jointry of time. My acquaintance thereafter dropped to an infrequent, statistical letter, against which I have in time proofed myself. But the catarrh has ceased except when some faint thought echoes from the past, at which again, as in the older days, I am forced to blow a pa.s.sage in the channel for verbal navigation.

This man's interest in life was oil. It oozed from the ventages of his talk. If he looked on the map of this fair world, with its mountains like caterpillars dozing on the page--for so do maps present themselves to my fancy--_he_ would see merely the blueprint and huge specification of oil production and consumption. The dotted cities would suggest no more than agencies in its distribution, and they would be pegged in many colors--as is the custom of our business efficiency--by way of base symbolism of their rank and pretense; the wide oceans themselves would be merely courses for his tank s.h.i.+ps to bustle on and leave a greasy trail. Really, contrary to my own experience and sudden cure, one might think that such an oleaginous stream of talk, if directed in atomizer fas.h.i.+on against the nostrils of the listener, would serve as a healing emulsion for the complaint I then suffered with.

Be these things as they may, what I can actually vouch for is that when this fellow had set himself and opened a volley of facts on me, I was shamed to silence. There was a s.p.a.ciousness, a planetary sweep and glittering breadth that shriveled me. The commodity which I dispensed was but used around the corner, with a key turned upon it at the shadowy end of day against its intrusion on the night. But his oil, all day long and all night too, was swis.h.i.+ng in its tanks on the course to Zanzibar. And all the fretted activity of the earth was tributary to his purpose. How like an untrimmed smoky night-candle did my ambition burn! If I chanced to think in thousands it was a strain upon me. My cerebrum must have throbbed itself to pieces upon the addition of another cypher. But he marshaled his legions and led them up and down, until it dazed me. I was no better than some cobbler with a fiddle, crooked and intent to the tw.a.n.ging of his E string, while the great Napoleon thundered by.

The secret channels of the earth and the fullness thereof made a joyful gurgle in his thoughts. And if he ever wandered in the country and ever saw a primrose on the river's brim--which I consider unlikely, his attention being engaged at the moment on figuring the cost of oil barrels, with special consideration for the price of bungs--if this man ever did see a primrose, would it have been a yellow primrose to him and nothing more? Bless your dear eyes, it would have been a compound of by-products--parafine, wax-candles, cup-grease, lamp-black, beeswax and peppermint drops--not to mention its proper distillation into such rare odors as might be sold at so much a bottle to jobbers, and a set price at retail, with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman Act.

This man has lived--my spleen rises at the thought--in many of the capitals of Europe. For six months at a time he has walked around one end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his head inside. Indeed, it is probable he hasn't noticed the building, or if he has, thinks it is an a.r.s.enal. Now in all humility, and unb.u.t.toned, as it were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give it, I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre, regarding it somewhat as an endurance test for tired tourists, a kind of blow-in-the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, as at a country fair. And so I am not sure but that the band playing in the gardens is a better amus.e.m.e.nt for a bright afternoon, and that a nursemaid in uniform with her children--bare-legged tots with fingers in the sand--that such sight is more worthy of respect than a dead d.u.c.h.ess painted on the wall. It is but a ritualistic obeisance I have paid the G.o.ds inside. My finer reverence has been for benches in the sun and the vagabondage of a bus-top.

If ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but another point for exportation. How closely he will listen for any squeaking of the Pearly Gates, with a nostrum ready for their dry complaint! When he is once through and safe (the other pilgrims still coming up the hill--for heaven, I'm sure, will be set on some wind-swept ridge, with purple distance in the valleys--) how he will put his ear against the hinge for nice diagnosis as to the weight of oil that will give best result! How he will wink upon the gateman that he write his order large!

Reader, I have sent you off upon a wrong direction. I have twisted the wooden finger at the crossroads. The man of oil does not exist. He is a piece of fiction with which to point a moral. Pig-iron or cotton-cloth would have served as well; anything, in fact, whereon, by too close squinting, one may blunt his sight.

We have all observed a growing tendency in many persons to put, as it were, electric lights in all the corners and attics of their brains, until it is too much a rarity to find any one who will admit a twilight in his whole establishment. This is carrying mental housekeeping too far. I will confess that I prefer a light at the foot of the back stairs, where the steps are narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the bas.e.m.e.nt, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare himself like a lighted ballroom.

Much of our best mental stuff--if you exclude the harsher grindings of our business hours--fades in too coa.r.s.e a light. 'Tis a brocade that for best preservation must not be hung always in the sun. There must be regions in you unguessed at--cornered and shadowed places--recesses to be shown at peep of finger width, yielding only to the knock of fancy, dim sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the world, where one must be taken by the hand and led--dusky closets beyond the common use. It is in such places--your finger on your lips and your feet a-tiptoe on the stairs--that you will hide away from baser uses the stowage of moonlight stuff and such other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in your inheritance.

[Ill.u.s.tration]