Chapter IX

“Ho! ho!” he laughed, “’tis plain to see
New York is too advanced for me.
I should have stayed in Hades;
For who the devil, pray, am I
In this enlightened age to try
My wit against the Ladies!”

SPRING

By his cold hearth, sans Youth, sans Mirth,
Sits poor old shivering Daddy Earth.

A knock, a footstep on the floor.
“Come in!” he growls--“and _shut that door_!”

Two soft hands on his eyelids press;
A laughing voice: “Who am I?--guess!”

“’Tis Mistress Spring! Alas, my dear,
You find me sadly changed, I fear.”

“Cheer up!” cried Spring, “I bring for you
The Spell of Youth: Gold--Silver--Blue.”

Sun gold, sky turquoise, silver rain,
And Daddy Earth was young again!

He danced, he sang: “Hail Spring divine!
Ethereal Spring--h’m--_wine?--pine--shine?_”

Too late the rhyme popped in his head;
“Be _mine_!” he sang--but Spring had fled.

THE CATFISH

The saddest fish that swims the briny ocean,
The Catfish I bewail.
I can not even think without emotion
Of his distressful tail.
When with my pencil once I tried to draw one,
(I dare not show it here)
Mayhap it is because I never saw one,
The picture looked so queer.
I vision him half feline and half fishy,
A paradox in twins,
Unmixable as vitriol and vichy--
A thing of fur and fins.
A feline Tantalus, forever chasing
His fishy self to rend;
His finny self forever self-effacing
In circles without end.
This tale may have a Moral running through it
As Æsop had in his;
If so, dear reader, you are welcome to it,
If you know what it is!

THE PRODIGAL CENTIPEDE

Once to a Centipede a Snail
Remarked, “I wonder why you trail
Along the ground with such a lot
of feet--a hundred, is it not?
A hundred feet! when two or three
Are all you need. Just look at me!

“The speed and ease with which I crawl,
And yet I have no feet at all!
In these days would it not be wise
For you to--well, to _Hoof_erize?
You surely don’t need more than two
To get along! If I were you,
I’d use one pair and stand up straight,
And save the other ninety-eight
Against a rainy day.”

“Indeed
You’re right!” replied the Centipede.
“I’ve often thought, to do my part,
’Twould be advisable to start
A Feetless Day--but then, you see,
If I stood upright I should be
A hundred feet in height, and I
Might bump my head against the sky!”
“Well,” said the Snail, “I must admit
That puts a different face on it!
Your life depends on lying flat!
Dear! Dear! I hadn’t thought of that!”

A BALLADE OF BLACK SOCKS

Plain Black socks can never be wrong.
--_The Gentleman of Letters
in “Vanity Fair.”_

Lords of Fashion may disagree
On the question of questions, what to wear
At _déjeuner_, dinner, dance or tea,
“Feed informal” or “Smart affair.”
Let not the neophyte despair
Dreading disdain of the gilded throng
Hark to the dictum of Vanity Fair
“Plain Black Socks can never be wrong.”

Let scribes sartorial decree
Whether the “skirt” shall be full or spare,
Whether the crease be above the knee,
Whether the seam shall be here or there.
Of the openwork sock with the clock beware!
On Fancy’s rein let your curb be strong!
Hark to the dictum of Vanity Fair,
“Plain Black Socks can never be wrong.”

Doubting dolts may be all at sea
Tossed on tempestuous waves of care.
Are they wearing two studs?--or one?--or three?
Will a satin tie cause a well bred stare?
Leave dressy deeds to dudes that dare!
Heed not the scented siren’s song
Hark to the dictum of Vanity Fair,
“Plain Black Socks can never be wrong.”

L’envoi
Princes of Fashion, wherever ye fare--
London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong,
Hark to the dictum of Vanity Fair:
“Plain Black Socks can never be wrong.”

OTHER PEOPLE INCLUDING MARK TWAIN

THE GENTLEMAN OF LETTERS

How splendid to have men’s attire treated by a gentleman and
litterateur.--_John Armstrong Chaloner._

Ah me! Had Horace when his muse was flagging,
But given laughing Lalage a rest,
And kept Mæcenas’ pantaloons from bagging,
(Whatever ’twas he wore below his vest.)

If when his frisky Pegasus he mounted,
He’d sung, instead of the eternal HER
The stylish HIM, he might have been accounted
A gentleman as well as litterateur.

If Shakespeare had abstained from malty liquors,
And spent the time (when not purloining plays)
In pressing Francis Bacon’s velvet knickers
He might thereby have gained a social raise.

If Tommy Moore when not devoutly pressing
His suit in amorous rhyme, had pressed instead
His patrons lordly “pants,” it is past guessing
What titles had been showered on his head.

Had Bobby Burns renounced his Highland lassies,
And tuned his pipes to “Gentlemen’s attire,”
He might in time have risen from the masses
And been addressed as Robert Burns, Esquire.

If Hall Caine--............................
...........................................
...........................................
..............but why drag in Hall Caine?

Come, Chaloner, confess like a good feller
By “Gentleman and litterateur” you meant
The literary style of the Best Seller
And the strictly pure refinement of the Gent.

THE WOMEN OF THE BETTER CLASS

“The artists and writers were the first Americans to make
themselves at home in this amusing Parisian resort. (_The Old
Café Martin._) And it was here, too, that women of the better
class first tasted the delights of café life. It was considered
quite a daring thing in the late eighties for be-cloaked and
be-diamonded women of Fifth Avenue to sit here and sip their
after-dinner coffee.”
_Vanity Fair._

One of those queer, artistic dives,
Where funny people had their fling.
Artists, and writers, and their wives--
Poets, and all that sort of thing.
Here, too, to view the vulgar herd
And sip the daring demi-tasse--
Be-cloaked, be-diamonded, be-furred--
Came women of the better class.

With its Parisian atmosphere,
It had a Latin Quarter ring.
Painters and journalists came here--
Actors, and all that sort of thing.
Here, too, to watch the Great Ungroomed
And sip the dangerous demi-tasse,
Be-furred, be-feathered and be-plumed,
Came women of the better class.

Here Howells dined--Saint Gaudens, Nast,
Kipling, Mark Twain and Peter Dunne,
Nell Terry, and not least though last
One Robert Louis Stevenson.
And mingling with that underworld,
To sip the devilish demi-tasse,
Be-cloaked, be-diamonded, be-pearled,
Came women of the better class.

Like geese to see the lions fed,
They came--be-jewelled and be-laced,
Only to find the lions fled.
“My Word!” cried they, “What wretched taste!”
Ermined and minked and Persian-lambed,
Be-puffed (be-painted, too, alas!)
Be-decked, be-diamonded--be-damned!
The women of the better class.

MARK TWAIN

_A Pipe Dream_

Well I recall how first I met
Mark Twain--an infant barely three
Rolling a tiny cigarette
While cooing on his nurse’s knee.

Since then in every sort of place
I’ve met with Mark and heard him joke,
Yet how can I describe his face?
I never saw it for the smoke.

At school he won a _smokership_,
At Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.)
His name was soon on every lip,
They made him “smoker” of his class.

Who will forget his smoking bout
With Mount Vesuvius--our cheers--
When Mount Vesuvius went out
And didn’t smoke again for years?

The news was flashed to England’s King,
Who begged Mark Twain to come and stay,
Offered him dukedoms--anything
To smoke the London fog away.

But Mark was firm. “I bow,” said he,
“To no imperial command,
No ducal coronet for me,
My smoke is for my native land!”

For Mark there waits a brighter crown!
When Peter comes his card to read--
He’ll take the sign “No Smoking” down,
Then Heaven will be Heaven indeed.

PRINCE POMPOM

Beneath a Fruitful Apple Tree
Sate Pompom, youth of high degree,
And Prince of Apple-Tartary;
While in the branches overhead
The apples blushed with rapture red,
As from a great book on his knees
He read of the Hesperides,
And how, to win the apples gold,
One Hercules, a Hero bold,
A hundred-headed Dragon shew.
“How brave! How wonderful! How true!”
Exclaimed the apples, flushed and red.
“That proves what we have always said:
We come of Ancient Pedigree!
We’re of the Applestocracy!
Our title cannot be denied.”
Whereat they swelled and swelled with Pride
Until their High and Mighty Air
Was more than Apple Tree could bear.
“Come!” cried the Tree, “you must vacate
My boughs--they will not bear your weight!”
Pride goes before a fall.
Alas!
Next morning, prone upon the grass,
Blushing for shame, the Apples lay,
And when Queen Pompom passed that way
She picked them up, and by and by
She made them into Apple Pie.

THE SERIAL

_To the Tune of Tennyson_

_I burst upon the reader’s eye
With verbal trumpet blaring,
Proclaiming me the latest cry
In fictionary daring--
Vital, compelling, hectic, rare,
Heart-gripping, epoch-making!
A woman’s naked soul laid bare,
A climax record-breaking!
A quivering, pulsating plot,
The mystery of a red room,
A story to be read red hot
In boudoir, or bedroom,
An Eve, repentant, up to date,
Confesses what her fall meant;
You simply won’t know how to wait
Until the next installment._

I come from heaven knows where--or when.
My pedigree is shady.
My father was a Fountain Pen;
My mother, a Typelady,

Who smote the keys from morn till night
With fingers swift and taper,
Till I appeared, all clean and bright,
On reams of foolscap paper.

And now in serial form I flow,
And flout at style and diction,
As like a babbling brook I go
To join the Sea of Fiction.

Some streams, I know, more deeply flow,
And some for speed endeavor.
Short stories come, short stories go,
But I’ll go on forever.

I glitter like a foolish string
Of pearls, with polish painful,
With epigrams of doubtful ring
And platitudes Hall-Caineful.

And many a mood and tense amiss,
And metaphor amuddle,
And here and there a clinging kiss,
And here and there a cuddle--

And here and there a phrase in French,
To give a touch linguisty;
And here and there a Fisher wench,
And here and there a Christy.

And here and there and everywhere
My thin stream slowly trickles
’Twixt _Bunk’s Elixir for the Hair_
And _Black and Croswell’s Pickles_.

And here a temperamental scene,
Fervid, intense, Byronic--
Tosses tempestuous between
_Ayre’s Soap and Tinkham’s Tonic_.

A sprightly conversation’s flow
Is checked by _Soak and Stingham’s
Pink Pills_, to reappear below
An ad for ladies’ thingums.

The well-known slip ’twixt cup and lip
Here, too, finds confirmation--
“He raised his glass”--_Thy Anti-Grip!
Beware of Imitations!_

--“Up to his lips; when on his wrist
He felt a grip, steel-sinewed;
The glass fell, and a hoarse voice hissed
The words”--_To be Continued_.

Editorial Note

_Some streams, we know, more deeply flow,
And some for speed endeavor.
Short stories come, short stories go,
But this goes on forever._

THE CLOUD

_An Idyll of the Western Front_

SCENE: _A wayside shrine in France_.

PERSONS: Celeste, Pierre, a Cloud.

CELESTE (_gazing at the solitary white Cloud_):
I wonder what your thoughts are, little Cloud,
Up in the sky, so lonely and so proud!

CLOUD: Not proud, dear maiden; lonely, if you will.
Long have I watched you, sitting there so still
Before that little shrine beside the way,
And wondered where your thoughts might be astray;
Your knitting lying idle on your knees,
And worse than idle--like Penelope’s,
Working its own undoing!

CELESTE (_picks up her knitting_): Who was she?
Saints! What a knot!--Who was Penelope?
What happened to _her_ knitting? Tell me, Cloud!

CLOUD: She was a Queen; she wove her husband’s shroud.

CELESTE (_drops the knitting_):
His shroud!

CLOUD: There, there! ’Twas only an excuse
To put her lovers off, a wifely ruse,
Bidding them bide till it was finished, she
Each night the web unravelled secretly.

CELESTE: He came home safe?

CLOUD: If I remember right,
It was the lovers needed shrouds that night!
It is an old, old tale. I heard it through
A Wind whose ancestor it was that blew
Ulysses’ ship across the purple sea
Back to his people and Penelope.
We Clouds pick up strange tales, as far and wide
And to and fro above the world we ride,
Across uncharted seas, upon the swell
Of viewless waves and tides invisible,
Freighted with friendly flood or forkèd flame,
Knowing not whither bound nor whence we came;
Now drifting lonely, now a company
Of pond’rous galleons--

CELESTE: Oft-times I see
A Cloud, as by some playful fancy stirred,
Take likeness of a monstrous beast or bird
Or some fantastic fish, as though ’twere clay
Moulded by unseen hands.

CLOUD: Then tell me, pray,
What I resemble now!

CELESTE: I scarcely know.
But had you asked a little while ago,
I should have said a camel; then your hump
Dissolved, and you became a gosling plump,
Downy and white and warm--

CLOUD: What! _Warm_, up here?
Ten thousand feet above the earth!

CELESTE: Oh dear!
What am I thinking of! Of course I know
How cold it is. Pierre has told me so
A thousand times.

CLOUD: And who is this Pierre
That tells you all the secrets of the air?
How came he to such frigid heights to soar?

CELESTE: Pierre’s my--He is in the Flying Corps.

CLOUD: Ah, now I understand! And he’s away?

CELESTE: He left at dawn, where for he would not say,
Telling me only ’twas a bombing raid
Somewhere--My God! What’s that?

CLOUD: What, little maid?

CELESTE (_pointing_): That--over there--beyond the
wooded crest!

CLOUD: Only a skylark dropping to her nest;
Her mate is hov’ring somewhere near. I heard
His tremulous song of love--

CELESTE: That was no bird!
(_Drops upon her knees._)
O Mary! Blessed Mother! Hear my prayer!
That one that fell--grant it was not Pierre!
Here is the cross my mother gave me--I
Will burn the longest candle it will buy!

CLOUD: Courage, my child! Your prayer will not be vain!
Who guards the lark, will guide your lover’s plane.
The West Wind’s calling. I must go!--Hark! There
He sings again! _Le bon Dieu garde, ma chère!_