Hints to Pilgrims

Toothpicks were guns. Every soldier had a gun. If he was hit by a marble in the battle and the toothpick remained in place, he was only wounded; but he was dead if the toothpick fell out. Of each two men wounded, by Hague Convention, one recovered for the next engagement.

Of course we had other toys. Lead soldiers in cocked hats came down the chimney and were marshaled in the Christmas dawn. A whole Continental Army lay in paper sheets, to be cut out with scissors. A steam engine with a coil of springs and key furnished several rainy holidays. A red wheel-barrow supplied a short fury of enjoyment. There were sleds and skates, and a printing press on which we printed the milkman's tickets. The memory still lingers that five cents, in those cheap days, bought a pint of cream. There was, also, a castle with a princess at a window. Was there no prince to climb her trellis and bear her off beneath the moon? It had happened so in Astolat. The princes of the gorgeous East had wooed, also, in such a fashion. Or perhaps this was the very castle that the wicked Kazrac lifted across the Chinese mountains in the night, cheating Aladdin of his bride. It was a rather clever idea, as things seem now in this time of general shortage, to steal a lady, house and all, not forgetting the cook and laundress. But one day a little girl with dark hair smiled at me from next door and gave me a Christmas cake, and in my dreams thereafter she became the princess in my castle.

We had stone blocks with arches and round columns that were too delicate for the hazard of siege and battle. Once, when a playmate had scarlet fever, we lent them to him for his convalescence. Afterwards, against contagion, we left them for a month under a bush in the side yard. Every afternoon we wet them with a garden hose. Did not Noah's flood purify the world? It would be a stout microbe, we thought, that could survive the deluge. At last we lifted out the blocks at arm's length. We smelled them for any lurking fever. They were damp to the nose and smelled like the cement under the back porch. But the contagion had vanished like Noah's wicked neighbors.

But store toys always broke. Wheels came off. Springs were snapped. Even the princess faded at her castle window.

Sometimes a toy, when it was broken, arrived at a larger usefulness. Although I would not willingly forget my velocipede in its first gay youth, my memory of sharpest pleasure reverts to its later days, when one of its rear wheels was gone. It had been jammed in an accident against the piano. It has escaped me whether the piano survived the jolt; but the velocipede was in ruins. When the wheel came off the brewery wagon before our house and the kegs rolled here and there, the wreckage was hardly so complete. Three spokes were broken and the hub was cracked. At first, it had seemed that the day of my velocipede was done. We laid it on its side and tied the hub with rags. It looked like a jaw with tooth-ache. Then we thought of the old baby-carriage in the storeroom. Perhaps a transfusion of wheels was possible. We conveyed upstairs a hammer and a saw. It was a wobbling and impossible experiment. But at the top of the house there was a kind of race-track around the four posts of the attic. With three wheels complete, we had been forced to ride with caution at the turns or be pitched against the sloping rafters. We now discovered that a missing wheel gave the necessary tilt for speed. I do not recall that the pedals worked. We legged it on both sides. Ten times around was a race; and the audience sat on the ladder to the roof and held a watch with a second-hand for records.

Ours was a roof that was flat in the center. On winter days, when snow would pack, we pelted the friendly milkman. Ours, also, was a cellar that was lost in darkened mazes. A blind area off the laundry, where the pantry had been built above, seemed to be the opening of a cavern. And we shuddered at the sights that must meet the candle of the furnaceman when he closed the draught at bedtime.

Abandoned furniture had uses beyond a first intention. A folding-bed of ours closed to about the shape of a piano. When the springs and mattress were removed it was a house with a window at the end where a wooden flap let down. Here sat the Prisoner of Chillon, with a clothes-line on his ankle. A pile of old furniture in the attic, covered with a cloth, became at twilight a range of mountains with a gloomy valley at the back. I still believe – for so does fancy wanton with my thoughts – that Aladdin's cave opens beneath those walnut bed-posts, that the cavern of jewels needs but a dusty search on hands and knees. The old house, alas, has come to foreign use. Does no one now climb the attic steps? Has time worn down the awful Caucasus? No longer is there children's laughter on the stairs. The echo of their feet sleeps at last in the common day.

Nor must furniture, of necessity, be discarded. We dived from the footboard of our bed into a surf of pillows. We climbed its headboard like a mast, and looked for pirates on the sea. A sewing-table with legs folded flat was a sled upon the stairs. Must I do more than hint that two bed-slats make a pair of stilts, and that one may tilt like King Arthur with the wash-poles? Or who shall fix a narrow use for the laundry tubs, or put a limit on the coal-hole? And step-ladders! There are persons who consider a step-ladder as a menial. This is an injustice to a giddy creature that needs but a holiday to show its metal. On Thursday afternoons, when the cook was out, you would never know it for the same thin creature that goes on work-days with a pail and cleans the windows. It is a tower, a shining lighthouse, a crowded grandstand, a circus, a ladder to the moon.

But perhaps, my dear young sir, you are so lucky as to possess a smaller and inferior brother who frets with ridicule. He is a toy to be desired above a red velocipede. I offer you a hint. Print upon a paper in bold, plain letters – sucking the lead for extra blackness – that he is afraid of the dark, that he likes the girls, that he is a butter-fingers at baseball and teacher's pet and otherwise contemptible. Paste the paper inside the glass of the bookcase, so that the insult shows. Then lock the door and hide the key. Let him gaze at this placard of his weakness during a rainy afternoon. But I caution you to secure the keys of all similar glass doors – of the china closet, of the other bookcase, of the knick-knack cabinet. Let him stew in his iniquity without chance of retaliation.

But perhaps, in general, your brother is inclined to imitate you and be a tardy pattern of your genius. He apes your fashion in suspenders, the tilt of your cap, your method in shinny. If you crouch in a barrel in hide-and-seek, he crowds in too. You wag your head from side to side on your bicycle in the manner of Zimmerman, the champion. Your brother wags his, too. You spit in your catcher's mit, like Kelly, the ten-thousand-dollar baseball beauty. Your brother spits in his mit, too. These things are unbearable. If you call him "sloppy" when his face is dirty, he merely passes you back the insult unchanged. If you call him "sloppy-two-times," still he has no invention. You are justified now to call him "nigger" and to cuff him to his place.

Tagging is his worst offense – tagging along behind when you are engaged on serious business. "Now then, sonny," you say, "run home. Get nurse to blow your nose." Or you bribe him with a penny to mind his business.

I must say a few words about paper-hangers, although they cannot be considered as toys or play – things by any rule of logic. There is something rather jolly about having a room papered. The removal of the pictures shows how the old paper looked before it faded. The furniture is pushed into an agreeable confusion in the hall. A rocker seems starting for the kitchen. The great couch goes out the window. A chair has climbed upon a table to look about. It needs but an alpenstock to clamber on the bookcase. The carpet marks the places where the piano legs came down.

And the paper-hanger is a rather jolly person. He sings and whistles in the empty room. He keeps to a tune, day after day, until you know it. He slaps his brush as if he liked his work. It is a sticky, splashing, sloshing slap. Not even a plasterer deals in more interesting material. And he settles down on you with ladders and planks as if a circus had moved in. After hours, when he is gone, you climb on his planking and cross Niagara, as it were, with a cane for balance. To this day I think of paper-hangers as a kindly race of men, who sing in echoing rooms and eat pie and pickles for their lunch. Except for their Adam's apples – got with gazing at the ceiling – surely not the wicked apple of the Garden – I would wish to be a paper-hanger.

Plumbers were a darker breed, who chewed tobacco fetched up from their hip-pockets. They were enemies of the cook by instinct, and they spat in dark corners. We once found a cake of their tobacco when they were gone. We carried it to the safety of the furnace-room and bit into it in turn. It was of a sweetish flavor of licorice that was not unpleasant. But the sin was too enormous for our comfort.

But in November, when days were turning cold and hands were chapped, our parents' thoughts ran to the kindling-pile, to stock it for the winter. Now the kindling-pile was the best quarry for our toys, because it was bought from a washboard factory around the corner. Not every child has the good fortune to live near a washboard factory. Necessary as washboards are, a factory of modest output can supply a county, with even a little dribble for export into neighbor counties. Many unlucky children, therefore, live a good ten miles off, and can never know the fascinating discard of its lathes – the little squares and cubes, the volutes and rhythmic flourishes which are cast off in manufacture and are sold as kindling. They think a washboard is a dull and common thing. To them it smacks of Monday. It smells of yellow soap and suds. It wears, so to speak, a checkered blouse and carries clothes-pins in its mouth. It has perspiration on its nose. They do not know, in their pitiable ignorance, the towers and bridges that can be made from the scourings of a washboard factory.

Our washboard factory was a great wooden structure that had been built for a roller-skating rink. Father and mother, as youngsters in the time of their courtship, had cut fancy eights upon the floor. And still, in these later days, if you listened outside a window, you heard a whirling roar, as if perhaps the skaters had returned and again swept the corners madly. But it was really the sound of machinery that you heard, fashioning toys and blocks for us. At noonday, comely red-faced girls ate their lunches on the window-sills, ready for conversation and acquaintance.

And now, for several days, a rumor has been running around the house that a wagon of kindling is expected. Each afternoon, on our return from school, we run to the cellar. Even on baking-day the whiff of cookies holds us only for a minute. We wait only to stuff our pockets. And at last the great day comes. The fresh wood is piled to the ceiling. It is a high mound and chaos, without form but certainly not void. For there are long pieces for bridges, flat pieces for theatre scenery, tall pieces for towers and grooves for marbles. It is a vast quarry for our pleasant use. You will please leave us in the twilight, sustained by doughnuts, burrowing in the pile, throwing out sticks to replenish our chest of blocks.

And therefore on this Christmas night, as I stand before the toy-shop in the whirling storm, the wind brings me the laughter of these far-off children. The snow of thirty winters is piled in my darkened memory, but I hear shrill voices across the night.

Sic Transit —

IDO not recall a feeling of greater triumph than on last Saturday when I walked off the eighteenth green of the Country Club with my opponent four down. I have the card before me now with its pleasant row of fives and sixes, and a four, and a three. Usually my card has mounted here and there to an eight or nine, or I have blown up altogether in a sandpit. Like Byron – but, oh, how differently! – I have wandered in the pathless wood. Like Ruth I have stood in tears amid the alien corn.

In those old days – only a week ago, but dim already (so soon does time wash the memory white) – in those old days, if I were asked to make up a foursome, some green inferior fellow, a novice who used his sister's clubs, was paired against me; or I was insulted with two strokes a hole, with three on the long hole past the woods. But now I shall ascend to faster company. It was my elbow. I now square it and cock it forward a bit. And I am cured. Keep your head down, Fritzie Boy, I say. Mind your elbow – I say it aloud – and I have no trouble.

There is a creek across the course. Like a thread in the woof it cuts the web of nearly every green. It is a black strand that puts trouble in the pattern, an evil thread from Clotho's ancient loom. Up at the sixth hole this creek is merely a dirty rivulet and I can get out of the damned thing – one must write, they say, as one talks and not go on stilts – I can get out with a niblick by splashing myself a bit. But even here, in its tender youth, as it were, the rivulet makes all the mischief that it can. Gargantua with his nurses was not so great a rogue. It crawls back and forth three times before the tee with a kind of jeering tongue stuck out. It seems foredoomed from the cradle to a villainous course. Farther down, at the seventeenth and second holes, which are near together, it cuts a deeper chasm. The bank is shale and steep. As I drive I feel like a black sinner on the nearer shore of Styx, gazing upon the sunny fields of Paradise beyond. I put my caddy at the top of the slope, where he sits with his apathetic eye upon the sullen, predestined pool.

But since last Saturday all is different. I sailed across on every drive, on every approach. The depths beckoned but I heeded not. And, when I walked across the bridge, I snapped my fingers in contempt, as at a dog that snarls safely on a leash.

I play best with a niblick. It is not entirely that I use it most. (Any day you can hear me bawling to my caddy to fetch it behind a bunker or beyond a fence.) Rather, the surface of the blade turns up at a reassuring, hopeful angle. Its shining eye seems cast at heaven in a prayer. I have had spells, also, of fondness for my mashie. It is fluted for a back-spin. Except for the click and flight of a prosperous drive I know nothing of prettier symmetry than an accurate approach. But my brassie I consider a reckless creature. It has bad direction. It treads not in the narrow path. I have driven. Good! For once I am clear of the woods. That white speck on the fairway is my ball. But shall my ambition o'erleap itself? Shall I select my brassie and tempt twice the gods of chance? No! I'll use my mashie. I'll creep up to the hole on hands and knees and be safe from trap and ditch.

Has anyone spent more time than I among the blackberry bushes along the railroad tracks on the eleventh? It is no grossness of appetite. My niblick grows hot with its exertions.

Once our course was not beset with sandpits. In those bright days woods and gulley were enough. Once clear of the initial obstruction I could roll up unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing stroke with my putter that offered security at twenty yards. But now these approaches are guarded by traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains with sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to fall into another. "What a word, my son, has passed the barrier of your teeth!" said Athene once to Odysseus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sandpits, also, on the hills of stony Ithaca? Or in Ortygia, sea-girt? Was the dear wanderer off his game and fallen to profanity? The white-armed nymph Calypso must have stuffed her ears.

But now my troubles are behind me. I have cured my elbow of its fault. I keep my head down. My very clubs have taken on a different look since Saturday. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. A bit of green upon the heel of my driver showed how it was that I went sidewise to the woods. In those days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower. Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an empty locker? Or should I strangle it? But now all is changed. My clubs are servants to my will, kindly, obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my brassie knows me for its master. And the country seems fairer. The valleys smile at me. The creek is friendly to my drive. The tall hills skip and clap their hands at my approach. My game needs only thought and care. My fives will become fours, my sixes slip down to fives. And here and there I shall have a three.

Except for a row of books my mantelpiece is bare. Who knows? Some day I may sweep off a musty row of history and set up a silver cup.

Later – Saturday again. I have just been around in 123. Horrible! I was in the woods and in the blackberry bushes, and in the creek seven times. My envious brassie! My well-belovèd mashie! Oh, vile conspiracy! Ambition's debt is paid. 123! Now – now it's my shoulder.

The Posture of Authors

THERE is something rather pleasantly suggestive in the fashion employed by many of the older writers of inscribing their books from their chambers or lodging. It gives them at once locality and circumstance. It brings them to our common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, for example, having finished his Church History of Britain, addressed his reader in a preface from his chambers in Sion College. "May God alone have the glory," he writes, "and the ingenuous reader the benefit, of my endeavors! which is the hearty desire of Thy servant in Jesus Christ, Thomas Fuller."

One pictures a room in the Tudor style, with oak wainscot, tall mullioned windows and leaded glass, a deep fireplace and black beams above. Outside, perhaps, is the green quadrangle of the college, cloistered within ancient buildings, with gay wall – flowers against the sober stones. Bells answer from tower to belfry in agreeable dispute upon the hour. They were cast in a quieter time and refuse to bicker on a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow with old age. Such a dedication from such a place might turn the most careless reader into scholarship. In the seat of its leaded windows even the quirk of a Latin sentence might find a meaning. Here would be a room in which to meditate on the worthies of old England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten kings, queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into night.

Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make a start. "I have sometimes solitarily pleased myself," he begins, and he gazes into the dark shadows of the room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant spectres of the past. Bishops of Britain, long dead, in stole and mitre, forgetful of their solemn office, dance in the firelight on his walls. Popes move in dim review across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his heresy. The past is not a prude. To her lover she reveals her beauty. And the scholar's lamp is her marriage torch.

Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that Sion College did not slope thus in country fashion to the peaceful waters of the Cam, with its fringe of trees and sunny meadow; did not possess even a gothic tower and cloister. It was built on the site of an ancient priory, Elsing Spital, with almshouses attached, a Jesuit library and a college for the clergy. It was right in London, down near the Roman wall, in the heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept breaking in – muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced gingerbread and broken glass. I hope, at least, that the good gentleman's rooms were up above, somewhat out of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness. Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleasant tune, is not inclined to rouse a scholar from his meditation. And even broken glass is blunted on a journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman climbed three flights or more and that a range of chimney-pots was his outlook and speculation.

It seems as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book by knowing the circumstance of its composition. Not only would we know the complexion of a man, whether he "be a black or a fair man," as Addison suggests, "of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor," but also in what posture he works and what objects meet his eye when he squares his elbows and dips his pen. We are concerned whether sunlight falls upon his papers or whether he writes in shadow. Also, if an author's desk stands at a window, we are curious whether it looks on a street, or on a garden, or whether it squints blindly against a wall. A view across distant hills surely sweetens the imagination, whereas the clatter of the city gives a shrewder twist to fancy.

And household matters are of proper concern. We would like to be informed whether an author works in the swirl of the common sitting-room. If he writes within earshot of the kitchen, we should know it. There has been debate whether a steam radiator chills a poet as against an open fire, and whether a plot keeps up its giddy pace upon a sweeping day. Histories have balked before a household interruption. Novels have been checked by the rattle of a careless broom. A smoky chimney has choked the sturdiest invention.

If a plot goes slack perhaps it is a bursted pipe. An incessant grocer's boy, unanswered on the back porch, has often foiled the wicked Earl in his attempts against the beautiful Pomona. Little did you think, my dear madam, as you read your latest novel, that on the very instant when the heroine, Mrs. Elmira Jones, deserted her babies to follow her conscience and become a movie actress – that on that very instant when she slammed the street door, the plumber (the author's plumber) came in to test the radiator. Mrs. Jones nearly took her death on the steps as she waited for the plot to deal with her. Even a Marquis, now and then, one of the older sort in wig and ruffles, has been left – when the author's ashes have needed attention – on his knees before the Lady Emily, begging her to name the happy day.

Was it not Coleridge's cow that calved while he was writing "Kubla Khan"? In burst the housemaid with the joyful news. And that man from Porlock – mentioned in his letters – who came on business? Did he not despoil the morning of its poetry? Did Wordsworth's pigs – surely he owned pigs – never get into his neighbor's garden and need quick attention? Martin Luther threw his inkpot, supposedly, at the devil. Is it not more likely that it was at Annie, who came to dust? Thackeray is said to have written largely at his club, the Garrick or the Athenæum. There was a general stir of feet and voices, but it was foreign and did not plague him. A tinkle of glasses in the distance, he confessed, was soothing, like a waterfall.

Steele makes no complaint against his wife Prue, but he seems to have written chiefly in taverns. In the very first paper of the Tatler he gratifies our natural curiosity by naming the several coffee-houses where he intends to compose his thoughts. "Foreign and domestic news," he says, "you will have from Saint James's Coffee-House." Learning will proceed from the Grecian. But "all accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-House." In the month of September, 1705, he continues, a gentleman "was washing his teeth at a tavern window in Pall Mall, when a fine equipage passed by, and in it, a young lady who looked up at him; away goes the coach – " Away goes the beauty, with an alluring smile – rather an ambiguous smile, I'm afraid – across her silken shoulder. But for the continuation of this pleasant scandal (you may be sure that the pretty fellow was quite distracted from his teeth) one must turn up the yellow pages of the Tatler.

We may suppose that Steele called for pens and paper and a sandbox, and took a table in one of White's forward windows. He wished no garden view or brick wall against the window. We may even go so far as to assume that something in the way of punch, or canary, or negus luke, my dear, was handy at his elbow. His paragraphs are punctuated by the gay procession of the street. Here goes a great dandy in red heels, with lace at his beard and wrists. Here is a scarlet captain who has served with Marlborough and has taken a whole regiment of Frenchmen by the nose. Here is the Lady Belinda in her chariot, who is the pledge of all the wits and poets. That little pink ear of hers has been rhymed in a hundred sonnets – ear and tear and fear and near and dear. The King has been toasted from her slipper. The pretty creature has been sitting at ombre for most of the night, but now at four of the afternoon she takes the morning air with her lap dog. That great hat and feather will slay another dozen hearts between shop and shop. She is attended by a female dragon, but contrives by accident to show an inch or so of charming stocking at the curb. Steele, at his window, I'm afraid, forgets for the moment his darling Prue and his promise to be home.