Chapter III: Part 3

I once sat with an undertaker at a tragedy. He was of a lively sympathy in the earlier parts and seemed hopeful that the hero would come through alive. But in the fifth act, when the clanking army was defeated in the wings and Brutus had fallen on his sword, then, unmistakably his thoughts turned to the peculiar viewpoint of his profession. In fancy he sat already in the back parlor with the grieving Mrs. Brutus, arranging for the music.

To undertakers, Caesar is always dead and turned to clay. Falstaff is just a fat old gentleman who drank too much sack, a' babbled of green fields and then needed professional attention. Perhaps at the very pitch of their meetings when the merry glasses have been three times filled, they pledge one another in what they are pleased to call the embalmers' fluid. This jest grows rosier with the years. For these many centuries at their banquets they have sung that it was a cough that carried him off, that it was a coffin--Now then, gentlemen! All together for the chorus!--that it was a coffin they carried him off in.

I dined lately with a man who could look like a weasel. When this was applauded, he made a face like the Dude of _Palmer Cox's Brownies_. Even Susan, the waitress, who knows her place and takes a jest soberly, broke down at the pantry door. We could hear her dishes rattling in convulsions in the sink. And then our host played the insect with his fingers on the tablecloth, smelling a spot of careless gravy from the roast with his long thin middle finger. He caught the habit that insects have of waving their forward legs.

I still recall an uncle who could wiggle his ears. He did it every Christmas and Thanksgiving Day. It was as much a part of the regular program as the turkey and the cranberries. It was a feature of his engaging foolery to pretend that the wiggle was produced by rubbing the stomach, and a circle of us youngsters sat around him, rubbing our expectant stomachs, waiting for the miracle. A cousin brought a guitar and played the "Spanish Fandango" while we sat around the fire, sleepy after dinner. And there was a maiden aunt with thin blue fingers, who played waltzes while we danced, and she nodded and slept to the drowsy sound of her own music.

Of my own after-dinner pleasantries I am modest. I have only one trick. Two. I can recite the fur-bearing animals of North America--the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, and sixteen others--and I can go downstairs behind the couch for the cider. This last requires little skill. As the books of magic say, it is an easy and baffling trick. With every step you crook your legs a little more, until finally you are on your knees, hunched together, and your head has disappeared from view. You reverse the business coming up, with tray and glasses.

But these are my only tricks. There is a Brahms waltz that I once had hopes of, but it has a hard run on the second page. I can never get my thumb under in time to make connections. My best voice, too, covers only five notes. You cannot do much for the neighbors with that cramped kind of range. "A Tailor There Sat on His Window Ledge" is one of the few tunes that fall inside my poverty. He calls to his wife, you may remember, to bring him his old cross-bow, and there is a great Zum! Zum! up and down in the bass until ready, before the chorus starts. On a foggy morning I have quite a formidable voice for those Zums. But after-dinner pleasantries are only good at night and then my bass is thin. "A Sailor's Life, Yo, Ho!" is a very good tune but it goes up to D, and I can sing it only when I am reckless of circumstance, or when I am taking ashes from the furnace. I know a lady who sings only at her sewing-machine. She finds a stirring accompaniment in the whirling of the wheel. Others sing best in tiled bathrooms. Sitting in warm and soapy water their voices swell to Caruso's. Laundresses, I have noticed, are in lustiest voice at their tubs, where their arms keep a vigorous rhythm on the scrubbing-board. But I choose ashes. I am little short of a Valkyr, despite my sex, when I rattle the furnace grate.

With hymns I can make quite a showing in church if the bass part keeps to a couple of notes. I pound along melodiously on some convenient low note and slide up now and then, by a happy instinct, when the tune seems to require it. The dear little lady, who sits in front of me, turns what I am pleased to think is an appreciative ear, and now and then, for my support, she throws in a pretty treble. But I have no tolerance with a bass part that undertakes a flourish and climbs up behind the tenor. This is mere egotism and a desire to shine. "Art thou there, true-penny? You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" That is the proper bass.

Dear me! Now that I recall it, we have guests--guests tonight for dinner. Will I be asked to sing? Am I in voice? I tum-a-lum a little, up and down, for experiment. The roar of the subway drowns this from my neighbors, but by holding my hand over my mouth I can hear it. Is my low F in order? No--undeniably, it is not. Thin. And squeaky. The Zums would never do. And that fast run in Brahms? Can I slip through it? Or will my thumb, as usual, catch and stall? Have my guests seen me go down--stairs behind the couch for the cider? Have they heard the fur-bearing animals--the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, the beaver, the otter, the fox and raccoon?

Perhaps--perhaps it will be better to stop at the Trick Shop and buy a dribble-glass and a long black beard to amuse my guests.

Little Candles.

High conceit of one's self and a sureness of one's opinion are based so insecurely in experience that one is perplexed how their slight structure stands. One marvels why these emphatic builders trust again their glittering towers. Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees its void or malformation ought by rights to shrink from adulation of self, and his own opinion should appear to him merely as one candle among a thousand.

And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable failures, and any new pinnacle that is set up, neglecting the broken rubble on the ground and all the wreckage at the base, boasts again of its sure communion with the stars. A man, let us say, has gone headlong from one formula of belief into another. In each, for a time, he burns with a hot conviction. Then his faith cools. His god no longer nods. But just when you think that failure must have brought him modesty, again he amazes you with the golden prospect of a new adventure. He has climbed in his life a hundred hillocks, thinking each to be a mountain. He has journeyed on many paths, but always has fallen in a bog. Conceit is a thin bubble in the wind, it is an empty froth and breath, yet, hammered into ship-plates, it defies the U-boat.

On every sidewalk, also, we see some fine fellow, dressed and curled to his satisfaction, parading in the sun. An accident of wealth or birth has marked him from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in gaudy color, but is bare within. He is a cypher, but golden circumstance, like a figure in the million column, gives him substance. Yet the void cries out on all matters in dispute with firm conviction.

But this cypher need not dress in purple. He is shabby, let us say, and pinched with poverty. Whose fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in itself give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that the world is sick with pestilence, and accordingly he proclaims himself a doctor. Or perhaps he sits at ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon his ignorance until it flames with hatred. He sets up to be a thinker, and he is resolved to shatter the foundations of a thousand years.

The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy distance! And these thousand candles of belief, flickering in the night, are so insufficient even in their aggregate! Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick, shielded in the fingers from misadventure, the greatest light?

Who is there who has read more than a single chapter in the book of life? Most of us have faltered through scarcely a dozen paragraphs, yet we scribble our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling pebble fall in a muddy pool, and we think that we have listened to the pounding of the sea. We hold up our little candle and we consider that its light dispels the general night.

But it has happened once in a while that someone really strikes a larger light and offers it to many travelers for their safety. He holds his candle above his head for the general comfort. And to it there rush the multitude of those whose candles have been gutted. They relight their wicks, and go their way with a song and cry, to announce their brotherhood. If they see a stranger off the path, they call to him to join their band. And they draw him from the mire.

And sometimes this company respects the other candles that survive the wind. They confess with good temper that their glare, also, is sufficient; that there is, indeed, more than one path across the night. But sometimes in their intensity--in their sureness of exclusive salvation--they fall to bickering. One band of converts elbows another. There is a mutual lifting of the nose in scorn, an amused contempt, or they come to blows and all candles are extinguished. And sometimes, with candles out, they travel onward, still telling one another of their band how the darkness flees before them.

We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind conceit, of shrill and intolerant opinion. The past is worshiped. The past is scorned. Some wish only to kiss the great toe of old convention. Others shout that we must run bandaged in the dark, if we would prove our faith in God and man. It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It is the dawn. We grope toward midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our fathers were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to the past! Any change is sacrilege. Let's rip it up! Let's destroy it altogether!

We'll kill him and stamp on him: He's a Montague. We'll draw and quarter him: He's a Capulet. He's a radical: He must be hanged. A conservative: His head shall decorate our pike.

A plague on both your houses!

Panaceas are hawked among us, each with a magic to cure our ills. Universal suffrage is a leap to perfection. Tax reform will bring the golden age. With capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven. The soviet, the recall from office, the six-hour day, the demands of labor, mark the better path. The greater clamor of the crowd is the guide to wisdom. Men with black beards and ladies with cigarettes say that machine-guns and fire and death are pills that are potent for our good. We live in a welter of quarrel and disagreement. One pictures a mighty shelf with bottles, and doctors running to and fro. The poor world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. By the hubbub in the pantry--the yells and scuffling at the sink--we know that drastic and contrary cures are striving for the mastery.

There was a time when beacons burned on the hills to be our guidance. The flames were fed and moulded by the experience of the centuries. Men might differ on the path--might even scramble up a dozen different slopes--but the hill-top was beyond dispute.

But now the great fires smoulder. The Constitution, it is said,--pecked at since the first,--must now be carted off and sold as junk. Art has torn down its older standards. The colors of Titian are in the dust. Poets no longer bend the knee to Shakespeare.

Conceit is a pilot who scorns the harbor lights--

Modesty was once a virtue. Patience, diligence, thrift, humility, charity--who pays now a tribute to them? Charity is only a sop, it seems, that is thrown in fright to the swift wolves of revolution. Humility is now a weakness. Diligence is despised. Thrift is the advice of cowards. Who now cares for the lessons that experience and tested fact once taught? Ignorance sits now in the highest seat and gives its orders, and the clamor of the crowd is its high authority.

And what has become of modesty? A maid once was prodigal if she unmasked her beauty to the moon. Morality? Let's all laugh together. It's a quaint old word.

Tolerance is the last study in the school of wisdom. Lord! Lord! Tonight let my prayer be that I may know that my own opinion is but a candle in the wind!

A Visit to a Poet.

Not long ago I accepted the invitation of a young poet to visit him at his lodging. As my life has fallen chiefly among merchants, lawyers and other practical folk, I went with much curiosity.

My poet, I must confess, is not entirely famous. His verses have appeared in several of the less known papers, and a judicious printer has even offered to gather them into a modest sheaf. There are, however, certain vile details of expense that hold up the project. The printer, although he confesses their merit, feels that the poet should bear the cost.

His verses are of the newer sort. When read aloud they sound pleasantly in the ear, but I sometimes miss the meaning. I once pronounced an intimate soul-study to be a jolly description of a rainy night. This was my stupidity. I could see a soul quite plainly when it was pointed out. It was like looking at the moon. You get what you look for--a man or a woman or a kind of map of Asia. In poetry of this sort I need a hint or two to start me right. But when my nose has been rubbed, so to speak, against the anise-bag, I am a very hound upon the scent.

The street where my friend lives is just north of Greenwich Village, and it still shows a remnant of more aristocratic days. Behind its shabby fronts are long drawing-rooms with tarnished glass chandeliers and frescoed ceilings and gaunt windows with inside blinds. Plaster cornices still gather the dust of years. There are heavy stairways with black walnut rails. Marble Lincolns still liberate the slaves in niches of the hallway. Bronze Ladies of the Lake await their tardy lovers. Diana runs with her hunting dogs upon the newel post. In these houses lived the heroines of sixty years ago, who shopped for crinoline and spent their mornings at Stewart's to match a Godey pattern. They drove of an afternoon with gay silk parasols to the Crystal Palace on Forty-second Street. In short, they were our despised Victorians. With our advancement we have made the world so much better since.

I pressed an electric button. Then, as the door clicked, I sprang against it. These patent catches throw me into a momentary panic. I feel like one of the foolish virgins with untrimmed lamp, just about to be caught outside--but perhaps I confuse the legend. Inside, there was a bare hallway, with a series of stairways rising in the gloom--round and round, like the frightful staircase of the Opium Eater. At the top of the stairs a black disk hung over the rail--probably a head.

"Hello," I said.

"Oh, it's you. Come up!" And the poet came down to meet me, with slippers slapping at the heels.

There was a villainous smell on the stairs. "Something burning?" I asked.

At first the poet didn't smell it. "Oh, _that_ smell!" he said at last. "That's the embalmer."

"The embalmer?"

We were opposite a heavy door on the second floor. He pointed his thumb at it. "There's an embalmer's school inside."

"Dear me!" I said. "Has he any--anything to practice on?"

The poet pushed the door open a crack. It was very dark inside. It smelled like Ptolemy in his later days. Or perhaps I detected Polonius, found at last beneath the stairs.

"Bless me!" I asked, "What does he teach in his school?"

"Embalming, and all that sort of thing."

"It never occurred to me," I confessed, "that undertakers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't suppose you knew old Mr. Smith."

"No."

"He wore a white carnation on business afternoons."

We rounded a turn of the black walnut stair.

"There!" exclaimed the poet. "That is the office of the _Shriek_."

I know the _Shriek_. It is one of the periodicals of the newer art that does not descend to the popular taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints pictures of men and women with hideous, distorted bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police know what it is talking about, and then they rather stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so.

Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to the _Shriek_, because I wished to see my friend's verses as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the newer art was doing, and could brush out of my head the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have been thrown into the discard. We have come a long journey from the older poets.

"I would like to subscribe," I said.

The poet, of course, was pleased. He rapped at a door marked "Editor."

A young woman's head in a mob-cap came into view. She wore a green and purple smock, and a cigarette hung loosely from her mouth. She looked at me at first as if I were an old-fashioned poem or a bundle of modest drawings, but cheered when I told my errand. There was a cup of steaming soup on an alcohol burner, and half a loaf of bread. On a string across the window handkerchiefs and stockings were hung to dry. A desk was littered with papers.

I paid my money and was enrolled. I was given a current number of the _Shriek_, and was told not to miss a poem by Sillivitch.

"Sillivitch?" I asked.

"Sillivitch," the lady answered. "Our greatest poet--maybe the greatest of all time. Writes only for the _Shriek_. Wonderful! Realistic!"

"Snug little office," I said to the poet, when we were on the stairs. "She lives in there, too?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "Smart girl, that. Never compromises. Wants reality and all that sort of thing. You must read Sillivitch. Amazing! Doesn't seem to mean anything at first. But then you get it in a flash."

We had now come to the top of the building.

"There isn't much smell up here," I said.

"You don't mind the smell. You come to like it," he replied. "It's bracing."

At the top of the stairs, a hallway led to rooms both front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even in the middle, sloped to windows of half height in dormers. The poet waved his hand. "I have been living in the front room," he said, "but I am adding this room behind for a study."

We entered the study. A man was mopping up the floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general wreckage of furniture--a chair, a table with marble top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken pitcher--had been swept to the middle of the room. There was also a pile of old embalmer's journals, and a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of tooth-paste.

"You see," said the poet, "I have been living in the other room. This used to be a storage--years ago, for the family that once lived here, and more recently for the embalmer."

"Storage!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose that they kept any--?"

"No."

"Well," I said, "it's a snug little place."

I bent over and picked up one of the embalmer's journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little boy in a night-gown, saying his prayer to his mother. The prayer was printed underneath. "And, mama," it read, "have God make me a good boy, and when I grow up let me help papa in his business, and never use anything but _Twirpp's Old Reliable Embalming Fluid_, the kind that papa has always used, and grandpa before him."

Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's advertisement. "Methinks," he writes, "I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,--how feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down." But the journal did not stir me to this high emotion.

I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the dormer window--into a shallow yard where an abandoned tin bath-tub and other unprized valuables were kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost its way, but didn't know what to do about it. It had its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. A wash-stand lay on its side, as if it snapped its fingers forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall building, with long tables and rows of girls working.

One of the girls desisted for a moment from her feathers with which she was making hats, and stuck out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went back to her feathers.

The young man who had been mopping up the floor went out for fresh water.

"Who is that fellow?" I asked.

"He works downstairs."

"For the _Shriek?_"

"For the embalmer. He's an apprentice."

"I would like to meet him."

Presently I did meet him.

"What have you there?" I asked. He was folding up a great canvas bag of curious pattern.

"It's when you are shipped away--to Texas or somewhere. This is a little one. You'd need--" he appraised me from head to foot--"you'd need a number ten."

He desisted from detail. He shifted to the story of his life. Since he had been a child he had wished to be an undertaker.

Now I had myself once known an undertaker, and I had known his son. The son went to Munich to study for Grand Opera. I crossed on the steamer with him. He sang in the ship's concert, "Oh, That We Two Were Maying." It was pitched for high tenor, so he sang it an octave low, and was quite gloomy about it. In the last verse he expressed a desire to lie at rest beneath the churchyard sod. The boat was rolling and I went out to get the air. And then I did not see him for several years. We met at a funeral. He wore a long black coat and a white carnation. He smiled at me with a gentle, mournful smile and waved me to a seat. He was Tristan no longer. Valhalla no more echoed to his voice. He had succeeded to his father's business.

Here the poet interposed. "The Countess came to see me yesterday."

"Mercy," I said, "what countess?"

"Oh, don't you know her work? She's a poet and she writes for the people downstairs. She's the Countess Sillivitch."

"Sillivitch!" I answered, "of course I know her. She is the greatest poet, maybe, of all time."

"No doubt about it," said the poet excitedly, "and there's a poem of hers in this number. She writes in italics when she wants you to yell it. And when she puts it in capitals, my God! you could hear her to the elevated. It's ripping stuff."

"Dear me," I said, "I should like to read it. Awfully. It must be funny."

"It isn't funny at all," the poet answered. "It isn't meant to be funny. Did you read her 'Burning Kiss'?"

"I'm sorry," I answered.

The poet sighed. "It's wonderfully realistic. There's nothing old-fashioned about that poem. The Countess wears painted stockings."

"Bless me!" I cried.

"Stalks with flowers. She comes from Bulgaria, or Esthonia, or somewhere. Has a husband in a castle. Incompatible. He stifles her. Common. In business. Beer spigots. She is artistic. Wants to soar. And tragic. You remember my study of a soul?"

"The rainy night? Yes, I remember."

"Well, she's the one. She sat on the floor and told me her troubles."

"You don't suppose that I could meet her, do you?" I asked.

The poet looked at me with withering scorn. "You wouldn't like her," he said. "She's very modern. She says very startling things. You have to be in the modern spirit to follow her. And sympathetic. She doesn't want any marriage or government or things like that. Just truth and freedom. It's convention that clips our wings."

"Conventions are stupid things," I agreed.

"And the past isn't any good, either," the poet said. "The past is a chain upon us. It keeps us off the mountains."

"Exactly," I assented.

"That's what the Countess thinks. We must destroy the past. Everything. Customs. Art. Government. We must be ready for the coming of the dawn."

"Naturally," I said. "Candles trimmed, and all that sort of thing. You don't suppose that I could meet the Countess? Well, I'm sorry. What's the bit of red paper on the wall? Is it over a dirty spot?"

"It's to stir up my ideas. It's gay and when I look at it I think of something."

"And then I suppose that you look out of that window, against that brick wall and those windows opposite, and write poems--a sonnet to the girl who stuck out her tongue at me."

"Oh, yes."

"Hot in summer up here?"

"Yes."

"And cold in winter?"

"Yes."

"And I suppose that you get some ideas out of that old tin bath-tub and those ash-cans."

"Well, hardly."

"And you look at the moon through that dirty skylight?"

"No! There's nothing in that old stuff. Everybody's fed up on the moon."

"It's a snug place," I said. And I came away.

I circled the stairs into the denser smell which, by this time, I found rather agreeable. The embalmer's door was open. In the gloom inside I saw the apprentice busied in some dark employment. "I got somethin' to show you," he called.

"Tomorrow," I answered.

As I was opening the street door, a woman came up the steps. She was a dark, Bulgarian sort of woman. Or Esthonian, perhaps. I held back the door to let her pass. She wore long ear-rings. Her skirt was looped high in scollops. She wore sandals--and painted stockings.

Autumn Days.

It was rather a disservice when the poet wrote that the melancholy days were come. His folly is inexplicable. If he had sung through his nose of thaw and drizzle, all of us would have pitched in to help him in his dismal chorus. But October and November are brisk and cheerful months.

In the spring, to be sure, there is a languid sadness. Its beauty is too frail. Its flowerets droop upon the plucking. Its warm nights, its breeze that blows from the fragrant hills, warn us how brief is the blossom time. In August the year slumbers. Its sleepy days nod across the heavy orchards and the yellow grain fields. Smoke looks out from chimneys, but finds no wind for comrade. For a penny it would stay at home and doze upon the hearth, to await a playmate from the north. The birds are still. Only the insects sing. A threshing-machine, far off, sinks to as drowsy a melody as theirs, like a company of grasshoppers, but with longer beard and deeper voice. The streams that frolicked to nimble tunes in May now crawl from pool to pool. The very shadows linger under cover. They crouch close beneath shed and tree, and scarcely stir a finger until the fiery sun has turned its back.

September rubs its eyes. It hears autumn, as it were, pounding on its bedroom door, and turns for another wink of sleep. But October is awakened by the frost. It dresses itself in gaudy color. It flings a scarlet garment on the woods and a purple scarf across the hills. The wind, at last, like a merry piper, cries out the tune, and its brisk and sunny days come dancing from the north.

Yesterday was a holiday and I went walking in the woods. Although it is still September it grows late, and there is already a touch of October in the air. After a week of sultry weather--a tardy remnant from last month--a breeze yesterday sprang out of the northwest. Like a good housewife it swept the dusty corners of the world. It cleared our path across the heavens and raked down the hot cobwebs from the sky. Clouds had yawned in idleness. They had sat on the dull circle of the earth like fat old men with drooping chins, but yesterday they stirred themselves. The wind whipped them to their feet. It pursued them and plucked at their frightened skirts. It is thus, after the sleepy season, that the wind practices for the rough and tumble of November. It needs but to quicken the tempo into sixteenth notes, to rouse a wholesome tempest.

Who could be melancholy in so brisk a month? The poet should hang his head for shame at uttering such a libel. These dazzling days could hale him into court. The jury, with one voice, without rising from its box, would hold for a heavy fine. Apples have been gathered in. There is a thirsty, tipsy smell from the cider presses. Hay is pitched up to the very roof. Bursting granaries show their golden produce at the cracks. The yellow stubble of the fields is a promise that is kept. And who shall say that there is any sadness in the fallen leaves? They are a gay and sounding carpet. Who dances here needs no bell upon his ankle, and no fiddle for the tune.

And sometimes in October the air is hazy and spiced with smells. Nature, it seems, has cooked a feast in the heat of summer, and now its viands stand out to cool.

November lights its fires and brings in early candles. This is the season when chimneys must be tightened for the tempest. Their mighty throats roar that all is strong aloft. Dogs now leave a stranger to go his way in peace, and they bark at the windy moon. Windows rattle, but not with sadness. They jest and chatter with the blast. They gossip of storms on barren mountains.

Night, for so many months, has been a timid creature. It has hid so long in gloomy cellars while the regal sun strutted on his way. But now night and darkness put their heads together for his overthrow. In shadowy garrets they mutter their discontent and plan rebellion. They snatch the fields by four o'clock. By five they have restored their kingdom. They set the stars as guardsmen of their rule.

Now travelers are pelted into shelter. Signboards creak. The wind whistles for its rowdy company. Night, the monarch, rides upon the storm.

A match! We'll light the logs. We'll crack nuts and pass the cider. How now, master poet, is there no thirsty passage in your throat? I offer you a bowl of milk and popcorn. Must you brood tonight upon the barren fields--the meadows brown and sear? Who cares now how the wind grapples with the chimneys? Here is snug company, warm and safe. Here are syrup and griddle-cakes. Do you still suck your melancholy pen when such a feast is going forward?

On Finding a Plot.

A young author has confessed to me that lately, in despair at hitting on a plot, he locked himself in his room after breakfast with an oath that he would not leave it until something was contrived and under way. He did put an apple and sandwich prudently at the back of his desk, but these, he swore, like the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, should last him through his struggle. By a happy afterthought he took with him into retirement a volume of De Maupassant. Perhaps, he considered, if his own invention lagged and the hour grew late, he might shift its characters into new positions. Rather than starve till dawn he could dress a courtezan in honest cloth, or tease a happy wife from her household in the text to a mad elopement. Or by jiggling all the plots together, like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, the pieces might fall into strange and startling patterns.

This is not altogether a new thought with him. While sucking at his pen in a former drouth he considered whether a novel might not be made by combining the characters of one story with the circumstance of another. Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you think, have cooled her southern blood? Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot color always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the Cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's window.

We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt.

"Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neck-cloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.

Alas! In my forgetfulness I have skimmed upon the actual plot. You have recalled already how La Signora Madeline descended on the Bishop's Palace. Her beauty was a hard assault. Except for her crippled state she might herself have toppled the Bishop over. But she pales beside the dangerous Carmen.

Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding--flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.

Oliver Twist and Nancy,--merely acquaintances in the original story,--with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver and perhaps the trombone player of the ship's band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island,--observe the cunning of the plot!--who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman--doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then--a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear--tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall.

Was there a serpent in the garden at peaceful Cranford? Suppose that one of the gay rascals of Dumas, with tall boots and black moustachios, had got in when the tempting moon was up. Could the gentle ladies in their fragile guard of crinoline have withstood this French assault?

Or Camille, perhaps, before she took her cough, settled at Bath and entangled Mr. Pickwick in the Pump Room. Do not a great hat and feather find their victim anywhere? Is not a silken ankle as potent at Bath as in Bohemia? Surely a touch of age and gout is no prevention against the general plague. Nor does a bald head tower above the softer passions. Camille's pretty nose is powdered for the onslaught. She has arranged her laces in dangerous hazard to the eye. And now the bold huzzy undeniably winks at Mr. Pickwick over her pint of "killibeate." She drops her fan with usual consequence. A nod. A smile. A word. At the Assembly--mark her sudden progress and the triumphant end!--they sit together in the shadows of the balcony. "My dear," says Mr. Pickwick, gazing tenderly through his glasses, "my love, my own, will you--bless my soul!--will you share my lodgings at Mrs. Bardell's in Goswell Street?" We are mariners, all of us, coasting in dangerous waters. It is the syren's voice, her white beauty gleaming on the shoal--it is the moon that throws us on the rocks.

And then a dozen dowagers breed the gossip. Duchesses, frail with years, pop and burst with the pleasant secret. There is even greater commotion than at Mr. Pickwick's other disturbing affair with the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers. This previous affair you may recall. He had left his watch by an oversight in the taproom, and he went down to get it when the inn was dark. On the return he took a false direction at the landing and, being misled by the row of boots along the hall, he entered the wrong room. He was in his nightcap in bed when, peeping through the curtains, he saw the aforesaid lady brushing her back hair. A duel was narrowly averted when this startling scandal came to the ears of the lady's lover, Mr. Peter Magnus. Camille, I think, could have kept this sharper scandal to herself. At most, with a prudent finger on her lips, she would have whispered the intrigue harmlessly behind her fan and set herself to snare a duke.

I like to think, also, of the incongruity of throwing Rollo (Rollo the perfect, the Bayard of the nursery, the example of our suffering childhood)--Rollo grown up, of course, and without his aseptic Uncle George--into the gay scandal, let us say, of the Queen's Necklace. Perhaps it is forgotten how he and his little sister Jane went to the Bull Fight in Rome on Sunday morning by mistake. They were looking for the Presbyterian Church, and hand in hand they followed the crowd. It is needless to remind you how Uncle George was vexed. Rollo was a prig. He loved his Sunday school and his hour of piano practice. He brushed his hair and washed his face without compulsion. He even got in behind his ears. He went to bed cheerfully upon a hint. Thirty years ago--I was so pestered--if I could have met Rollo in the flesh I would have lured him to the alleyway behind our barn and pushed him into the manure-pit. In the crisp vernacular of our street, I would have punched the everlasting tar out of him.

It was circumstance that held the Bishop and Rollo down. Isn't Cinderella just a common story of sordid realism until the fairy godmother appears? Except for the pumpkin and a very small foot she would have married the butcher's boy, and been snubbed by her sisters to the end. It was only luck that it was a prince who awakened the Sleeping Beauty. The plumber's assistant might have stumbled by. What was Aladdin without his uncle, the magician? Do princesses still sleep exposed to a golden kiss? Are there lamps for rubbing, discarded now in attics?

Sinbad, with a steady wife, would have stayed at home and become an alderman. Romeo might have married a Montague and lived happily ever after. It was but chance that Titania awakened in the Ass's company--chance that Viola was cast on the coast of Illyria and found her lover. Any of these plots could have been altered by jogging the author's elbow. A bit of indigestion wrecks the crimson shallop. Comedy or tragedy is but the falling of the dice. By the flip of a coin comes the poisoned goblet or the princess.

But my young author's experiment with De Maupassant was not successful. He tells me that hunger caught him in the middle of the afternoon, and that he went forth for a cup of malted milk, which is his weakness. His head was as empty as his stomach.

And yet there are many novels written and even published, and most of them seem to have what pass for plots. Bipeds, undeniably, are set up with some likeness to humanity. They talk from page to page without any squeak of bellows. They live in lodgings and make acquaintance across the air-shaft. They wrestle with villains. They fall in love. They starve and then grow famous. And at last, in all good books, journeys end in lovers' meeting. It is as easy as lying. Only a plot is needed.

And may not anyone set up the puppets? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief! You have only to say _eenie meenie_ down the list, and trot out a brunette or a blonde. There is broadcloth in the tiring-box, and swords and velvet; and there is, also, patched wool, and shiny elbows. Your lady may sigh her soul to the Grecian tents, or watch for honest Tom on his motor-cycle. On Venetian balcony and village stoop the stars show alike for lovers and everywhere there are friendly shadows in the night.

Like a master of marionettes, we may pull the puppets by their strings. It is such an easy matter--if once a plot is given--to lift a beggar or to overthrow a rascal. A virtuous puppet can be hoisted to a tinsel castle. A twitching of the thumb upsets the wicked King. Rollo is pitched to his knees before a scheming beauty. And would it not be fun to dangle before the Bishop that little Carmen figure with her daring lace and scarlet stockings?--or to swing the bold Camille by the strings into Mr. Pickwick's arms as the curtain falls?

Was it not Hawthorne who died leaving a notebook full of plots? And Walter Scott, when that loyal, harassed hand of his was shriveled into death, must have had by him a hundred hints for projected books. One author--I forget who he was--bequeathed to another author--the name has escaped me--a memorandum of characters and events. At any author's death there must be a precious salvage. Among the surviving papers there sits at least one dusty heroine waiting for a lover. Here are notes for the Duchess's elopement. Here is a sketch how the deacon proved to be a villain. As old ladies put by scraps of silk for a crazy quilt, shall not an author, also, treasure in his desk shreds of character and odds and ends to make a plot?

Now the truth is, I suspect, that the actual plot has little to do with the merits of a great many of the best books. It is only the bucket that fetches up the water from the well. It is the string that holds the shining beads. Who really cares whether Tom Jones married Sophia? And what does it matter whether Falstaff died in bed or in his boots, or whether Uncle Toby married the widow? It is the mirth and casual adventure by the way that hold our interest.

Some of the best authors, indeed, have not given a thought to their plots until it is time to wind up the volume. When Dickens sent the Pickwick Club upon its travels, certainly he was not concerned whether Tracy Tupman found a wife. He had not given a thought to Sam's romance with the pretty housemaid at Mr. Nupkins's. The elder Mrs. Weller's fatal cough was clearly a happy afterthought. Thackeray, at the start, could hardly have foreseen Esmond's marriage. When he wrote the early chapters of "Vanity Fair," he had not traced Becky to her shabby garret of the Elephant at Pumpernickel. Dumas, I have no doubt, wrote from page to page, careless of the end. Doubtless he marked Milady for a bad end, but was unconcerned whether it would be a cough or noose. Victor Hugo did no more than follow a trail across the mountains of his invention, content with the kingdoms of each new turning.

In these older and more deliberate books, if a young lady smiled upon the hero, it was not already schemed whether they would be lovers, with the very manner of his proposal already set. The glittering moon was not yet bespoken for the night. "My dear young lady," this older author thinks, "you have certainly very pretty eyes and I like the way that lock of brown hair rests against your ear, but I am not at all sure that I shall let you marry my hero. Please sit around for a dozen chapters while I observe you. I must see you in tweed as well as silk. Perhaps you have an ugly habit of whining. Or safe in a married state you might wear a mob-cap in to breakfast. I'll send my hero up to London for his fling. There is an actress I must have him meet. I'll let him frolic through the winter. On his return he may choose between you."

"My dear madam," another of these older authors meditates, "how can I judge you on a first acquaintance? Certainly you talk loosely for an honest wife. It is too soon, as yet, to know how far your flirtation leads. I must observe you with Mr. Fopling in the garden after dinner. If, later, I grow dull and my readers nod, your elopement will come handy."

Nor was a lady novelist of the older school less deliberate. When a bold adventurer appears, she holds her heroine to the rearward of her affection. "I'll make no decision yet for Lady Emily," she thinks. "This gay fellow may have a wife somewhere. His smooth manner with the ladies comes with practice. It is soon enough if I decide upon their affair in my second volume. Perhaps, after all, the captain may prove to be the better man."

And yet this spacious method requires an ample genius. A smaller writer must take a map and put his finger beforehand on his destination. When a hero fares forth singing in the dawn, the author must know at once his snug tavern for the night. The hazard of the morning has been matched already with a peaceful twilight. The seeds of time are planted, the very harvest counted when the furrow's made. My heart goes out to that young author who sits locked in his study, munching his barren apple. He must perfect his scenario before he starts. How easy would be his task, if only he could just begin, "Once upon a time," and follow his careless contrivance.

I know a teacher who has a full-length novel unpublished and concealed. Sometimes, I fancy, at midnight, when his Latin themes are marked, he draws forth its precious pages. He alters and smooths his sentences while the household sleeps. And even in his classroom, as he listens to the droning of a conjugation, he leaps to horse. Little do his students suspect, as they stutter with their verbs, that with their teacher, heedless of convention, rides the dark lady of his swift adventure.

I look with great awe on an acquaintance who averages more than one story a week and publishes them in a periodical called _Frisky Stories_. He shifts for variety among as many as five or six pen-names. And I marvel at a friend who once wrote a story a day for a newspaper syndicate. But his case was pathetic. When I saw him last, he was sitting on a log in the north forest, gloomily estimating how many of his wretched stories would cover the wood-pulp of the state. His health was threatened. He was resting from the toil

"Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up."

From all this it must appear that the real difficulty is in finding a sufficient plot. The start of a plot is easy, but it is hard to carry it on and end it. I myself, on any vacant morning, could get a hero tied hand and foot inside a cab, but then I would not know where to drive him. I have thought, in an enthusiastic moment, that he might be lowered down a manhole through the bottom of the cab. This is an unprecedented villainy, and I have gone so far as to select a lonely manhole in Gramercy Park around the corner from the Players' Club. But I am lost how my hero could be rescued. Covered with muck, I could hardly hope that his lady would go running to his arms. I have, also, a pretty pencil for a fight in the ancient style, with swords upon a stairway. But what then? And what shall I do with the gallant Percival de Vere, after he has slid down the rope from his beetling dungeon tower? As for ladies--I could dress up the pretty creatures, but would they move or speak upon my bidding? No one would more gladly throw a lady and gentleman on a desert island. At a pinch I flatter myself I could draw a roaring lion. But in what circumstance should the hungry cannibals appear? These questions must tax a novelist heavily.

Or might I not, for copy, strip the front from that building opposite?

"The whole of the frontage shaven sheer,
The inside gaped: exposed to day,
Right and wrong and common and queer,
Bare, as the palm of your hand, it lay."

Every room contains a story. That chair, the stove, the very tub for washing holds its secrets. The stairs echo with the tread of a dozen lives. And in every crowd upon the street I could cast a stone and find a hero. There is a seamstress somewhere, a locksmith, a fellow with a shovel. I need but the genius to pluck out the heart of their mystery. The rumble of the subway is the friction of lives that rub together. The very roar of cities is the meshing of our human gear.

I dream of this world I might create. In romantic mood, a castle lifts its towers into the blue dome of heaven. I issue in spirit with Jeanne d'Arc from the gate of Orleans, and I play the tragedy with changing scene until the fires of Rouen have fallen into ashes. I sail the seas with Raleigh. I scheme with the hump-backed Richard. Out of the north, with wind and sunlight, my hero comes singing to his adventures.