.•* .A *> A ♦* v ..-...> » ^ - ° 4* 1 & Mi»$* .MMS*- r +^& <^ •*„/?** 0^ ^^ o_ * *©y ^d* W * ^ ■•^. % "W <£> * « u o 9 ^ v - V* i * ■5^ V* **0« •' >« ^°- -, ^r^^ „ %;^s\4f SHANDYGAFF SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, and by stroll- ing tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been in- vented by Henry VIII as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide no other tipple. John Mistletoe: Dictionary of Deplorable Fads. SHANDYGAFF A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life and Letters, interspersed with Short Stories and Skitts, the whole Most " Diverting to the Reader Accompanied also by some Notes for Teachers whereby the Booke may be made usefull in class-room or for private Improvement By CHRISTOPHER, MORLEY Reputed also to be the Authour of "Parnassus on Wheels," and "Songs for a Little House" Published by Doubleday, Page and Company at the Country Life Press in Garden City, New York, and to be had at the Terminal Book Shop, the Lord <& Taylor Book Shop, the Liberty Tower Book Shop, and indeed of all reputable booksellers. A Dom' 1918 <•$$ Copyright, 1918, by DOUBLEDAT, PAGE & COMPANY All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, • including the Scandinavian MAY -3 1918 142 The Song' of Shandygaff Now there are poets many, and singers bold and free, But I desire a special choir to troll a stave for me, No limping stave, no pimping stave, but a ballad bluff and rude In honour of sweet shandygaff, the finest tipple brewed. Though Vachel Lindsay sings with fire, alas, he drinks no beer; And Masters never could be called a poet of good cheer; And Bill Benet, though people say he hath a Bacchic vein, Is a married man, and his bousing can is hung up high to drain. Joyce Kilmer plucks a pleasing string, Don Marquis mulls his malt; And Untermeyer twangs a lyre with which I find no fault; But of all who lilt when wine is spilt, who swim in half-and- half, Where is the Jove, the Proper Cove, to sing of Shandygaff? He should be grey and bearded, and stained with nicotine, With a five-inch chop before him, and a glass like a tureen; Rotund as any firkin, with a wit like W eland! s brand, And he will chant the ribald songs that poets understand. Then all the young and feeble will be gently warned away, And thrice the draught will go the round with never a word to say; But when the gifted moment comes, and serving men retire, He'll sing the Song of Shandygaff, the song that I desire. I TITLES AND DEDICATIONS I WANTED to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry, were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice THESE BASINS ARE FOR CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, must not be too bitterly resented, even by their pub- lishers. To borrow O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso. The real purpose in writing books is to have viii TITLES AND DEDICATIONS the pleasure of dedicating them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance. I thought of dedicating the book to Clayton Sedgwick Cooper The Laird of Westcolang I thought of dedicating to the Two Best Book Shops in the Woeld Blackwell's in Oxford and Leary's in Philadelphia I thought of dedicating to The 8:13 Train I thought of dedicating to Edward Page Allinson The Squire of Town's End Farm Better known as Mifflin McGill In affectionate memory of Many unseasonable jests I thought of dedicating to Professor Francis B. Gummere From an erring pupil I thought of dedicating to Francis R. Bellamy Author of "The Balance" Whose Talent I Revere, But Whose Syntax I Deplore TITLES AND DEDICATIONS ix I thought of dedicating to John N. Beffel My First Editor Who insisted on taking me seriously I thought of dedicating to Guy S. K. Wheeleb The Lion Cub I thought of dedicating to Robert Cortes Holliday The Urbanolater I thought of dedicating to Silas Orrin Howes Faithful Servant of Letters But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedi- cate this book to The Miehle Printing Press More Sinned Against Than Sinning For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York Evening Post, The Boston Transcript, The Bellman, The Smart Set, The New York Sun, The New York Evening Sun, The American Oxonian, Collier's, and The Ladies' Home Journal. Wyncote, Pa. November, 1917. CONTENTS PAGE ~ The Song of Shandygaff v Titles and Dedications vii A Question of Plumage 3 Don Marquis 22 - The Art of Walking Rupert Brooke . 5i The Man 72 The Head of the Firm 82 17HeriotRow 90 Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader . 103 William McFee 112 Rhubarb 127 The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine . . 137 v ^Ingo 142 Housebroken 150 The Hilarity of Hilaire 154 A Casual of the Sea 169 The Last Pipe . 182 si xii CONTENTS PAGE ^-Time to Light the Furnace . . . . . 194 My Friend 201 A Poet of Sad Vigils 205 Trivia 222 Prefaces 229 The Skipper 238 A Friend of FitzGerald 246 A Venture in Mysticism 260 An Oxford Landlady 266 "Peacock Pie" 271 The Literary Pawnshop 278 /A Morning in Marathon 284 The American House of Lords .... 289 Cotswold Winds 292 Clouds 296 Unhealthy . 800 Confessions of a Smoker S09 Hay Febrifuge 315 -^- r Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers. . . 324 f SHANDYGAFF SHANDYGAFF A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE KENNETH STOCKTON was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He . was the literary editor of a leading metro- politan daily; but this job only netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so the latter was never very sure how long his job would con- tinue. But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht, that very ingenious sub- urb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to be done. The house was still being paid 8 4 SHANDYGAFF for on the installment plan. There were plumb- ers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club— his only extravagance. A simple middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends, Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the Elizabethan song naively puts it. There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama. Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the news- paper office to earn his fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote pains- taking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on Saturdays " to give the stuff kick, as the proprietor ordered. Though he did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to ap- proach the book publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells in Harper's Magazine for the honourable quality of his criticisms. But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a SHANDYGAFF 5 certain fund of energy and enthusiasm at his dis- posal. His work on the paper used up the first fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged about six dollars a week. That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the limit of our friend's en- durance. The additional ten dollars or so needed for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways. Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote "Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in the same 6 SHANDYGAFF place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy he wrote a novel, which was pub- lished, and sold 2,580 copies the first year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30 — not one- third as much, he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature. It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were wrong when they wrote to him admiringly — as they did twice a year — asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr. Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hote, with an apologetic murmur. But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again, with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would SHANDYGAFF 7 have thought Stockton rich indeed with his fifty- dollar salary. But he was one of those estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books, and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the hap- piest men in New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous sign in the British Museum washroom. It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row. Gen- erally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind, and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work until one o'clock with the happy con- centration of those who enjoy their tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, and after that 8 SHANDYGAFF he worked persistently in his little den under the roof until past midnight. One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on the shining river and con- sider his course. A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism. Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men, although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they would ever meet, he SHANDYGAFF 9 had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon. The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How like a poet! In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of evenings beside the fire when they would talk for 10 SHANDYGAFF hours of the things that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour? This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub- fuse depths of New Utrecht! Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby, makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously. English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have bought books on Paternoster Row, SHANDYGAFF 11 have drunk half-and-half and eaten pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton. Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean, bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios. What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco! Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tender- ness. They would send the three younger chil- dren to their grandmother, to be interned there until the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stock- ton was going to do what she could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had children of his own : perhaps 12 SHANDYGAFF he would be amused rather than dismayed by the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Pre- sumably, the poet was over here for a lecture tour — he would be entertained and feted everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad. He looked again at the telegram which had shat- tered the simple routine of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doc- tor's assistant call for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman, and undoubtedly he knew all about wines. Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, SHANDYGAFF 13 the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair," the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's "contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good humour for a humourist. "What's the matter, Stock," he inquired gen- ially, "Got a cold? Or has George Moore sent in anew novel?" Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he confess his paltry prob- lem to this debonair creature who wore life lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis, with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble. "A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of year." "Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and have some ale. That'll put you on your feet." "Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to make up my page. I tell you what, though " 14 SHANDYGAFF He hesitated, and flushed a little. "Say it," said Bolles kindly. "Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time, and I — I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I were a member, you know." "Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of * Candle Light'? And you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than Masefield. Take him to lunch — I should say I willJ Why, I'll put him in the col- yum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you knew him." "I don't — yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this afternoon." "Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never read. The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that he was still wearing the SHANDYGAFF 15 threadbare serge that had done duty for three winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried out- doors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street. Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was compelled to buy any- thing so important as a suit, for usually Mrs. Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his unlucky star was in the zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste, and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the humour- ist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the purchase price and fled to the sub- way. When he reached the pier at the foot of Four- 16 SHANDYGAFF teenth Street he saw that the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship office, but on showing his news- paperman's card the official admitted him to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight. What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the mustard-coloured trousers one more round — they were much too long for him — and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his wedding. He* expected no difficulty in recognizing Fins- bury Verne, for he was very familiar with his SHANDYGAFF 17 photograph. As the passengers poured down the slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage; gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne. Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it pos- sible that — the second class? His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking. There were more of the latter, and the passage- way was still thronged. Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four children in single file, each hold- ing fast to the one in front like Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous care not to slip on the cleated boards. 18 SHANDYGAFF To his amazement the reviewer recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet. Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin. The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. "Daddy, look out for Ink!*' shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. "Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file. Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they waited for the customs ex- amination. With mingled feelings he saw that Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the SHANDYGAFF 19 poet, who stood in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around him. " He shrank from imagining what might happen when he ap- peared at home with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and introduced himself. Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, im- mediately uttered cryptic remarks which Stock- ton judged were addressed to him. "Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit. "Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath. Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you must consider yourself a citizen of that nation." Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your telegram this morning. We'd be de- lighted to have you." 20 SHANDYGAFF "It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some lectures." A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow. "Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs. Stockton and I were hoping " "My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your hospitality," said Verne. "Per- haps you can recommend us to some quiet hotel where we can stay the night." Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any hotel when asked sud- denly. At first he said the Astor House, and then remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the Obelisk. After the customs formalities were over — not without embarrassment, as Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red union suits and a half -empty bottle of brandy — Stockton convoyed them to a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite ashamed SHANDYGAFF 21 of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward the nearest telephone booth. As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful to spend a few days with the Stocktons." "My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and your clothes — well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bank- rupt." The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the country near New York," he said. "That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes? He looked like a canary." DON MARQUIS THERE is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives in Port Wash- ington. You may even (for instance) call him stout. . . . Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08— well, call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corn-cob pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and Napoleon III. He has con- ducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the 22 SHANDYGAFF 23 most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he is a poet — a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stock- tonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk he is a dramatist. He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cut- ting satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only "a mild, mild smile." As he puts it: A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw com- edy the other evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us sad. The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral chuckle — and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with all its heart and soul. 24 SHANDYGAFF Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as a mirth-provoking instru- ment. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier. Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing son- nets, are among the finest pieces he has done. The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship. The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhan- dranaths and Fothergill Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Mar- quis has emerged from the underworld of news- paper print just by his heroic ability to transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on an up- turned packing box. (When the American Maga- zine published a picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the Sun got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) News- paper men are a hardy race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old Sun building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle. SHANDYGAFF 25 "Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like dropping a rose- petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into circulation. Any reader who went to Dreams and Dust (poems, published October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question the answerle3s face of life — Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, Still broods the dull distrust; Which shall have ultimate dominion, Dream, or dust? Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of Dob- sonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, aus- tere music. He can turn a rondeau or a triolet as 26 SHANDYGAFF gracefully as a paying teller can roll Durham cigarettes. How neat this is : TO A DANCING DOLL Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, You begin your steps demurely — There's a spirit almost prim In the feet that move so surely. So discreetly, to the chime Of the music that so sweetly Marks the time. But the chords begin to tinkle Quicker, And your feet they flash and flicker — Twinkle!— Flash and flutter to a tricksy Fickle meter; I And you foot it like a pixie- Only fleeter! Not our current, dowdy Things— "Turkey trots" and rowdy Flings — For they made you overseas In politer times than these In an age when grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us! SHANDYGAFF 27 But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from Pilt- down to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious inches of forehead. Much more often than F. P. A., who used to be his brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real earnestness that underlies his chaff. I suppose that the conductor of a daily humor- ous column stands in the hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by Plato in the Republic (not the New Republic) or by Samuel Butler in his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of letters every day — ("The rav- ings fed him" as Don captioned some contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops : Monday. Take up an idea in a serious way. (Roast Beef.) Tuesday. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea. (Cold Roast Beef.) 28 SHANDYGAFF Wednesday. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (Beef Stew.) Thursday. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of Monday's serious idea. (Beefsteak Pie.) Friday. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of Monday's serious idea — there creeps into our copy a more subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main business of life is not mere hare- brained word-play. (Hash or Croquettes With Green Peppers.) Saturday. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself for having ever taken it seriously. (Beef Soup With Barley in It.) Sunday. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers. But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real voltage — the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cock- roach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling has been poured into these Pref- SHANDYGAFF 29 aces: I hope that he will put them between book-covers. One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms and oris^^wettmardenisms.~they had been printing on their weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and pejpjpjaizing of their employees. They had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panjiellenists, and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where they could find more. I advised them to get in touch with Don Mar- quis. I don't know whether they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts. By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know you are loafing? Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that minorities are always right. Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart. I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising young man for twenty years. SO SHANDYGAFF In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the mirthquake: If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it. If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come — the little ball will not settle upon the Tight number or the proper colour — the girl will marry the other man — the public will cry, Bedamned to him ! he can't write anyhow ! — the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity — the Welsh rabbit will be stringy — you will find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade — the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier — and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers. But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite denunciations) . In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany: This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth. . . As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb — Who frowned above him, proud and grim, While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore Of fire and steel and stone and war: She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth SHANDYGAFF 31 Of spirit, honour and clean mirth .... His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur. Up from the wild red Welter of the past Foaming he comes: let this rush be his last. Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. We have been slow as doom. Our dead Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed — We have denied each pleading ghost — We have been slow: God, make us sure. We have been slow. Grant we endure Unto the uttermost, the uttermost. Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, Into one single swinging sword. I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's fa- mous utterance about the press: Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up again. Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all its author's time and 32 SHANDYGAFF calories. No writer in America has greater or more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that furnace out in Port Wash- ington, and more on your novels! There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think partic- ularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benet, Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood. But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone \n the hope of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you wilL find his queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his only expe- dient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the street and buy them a drink. Lately SHANDYGAFF S3 the poor wretch has had to write his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in the afternoon, in order to get it done undis- turbed. How many times I have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresis- tible. ... I dare say Ben Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to en- dow Don and set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the tavernacular. He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic, and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky, and O. W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benet, and (perhaps) Vachel Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benet in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army. Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's Own Story" and "The Cruise of the 34 SHANDYGAFF Jasper B." This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more publicity than any other of Mar- quis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, en- dowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quot- ing this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine him, for instance, in Punch? His author has never told us which one of the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expat- riated eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? Perhaps it should be explained that Archy 's carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many devices to make this pos- sible, but none that seem feasible to the roach himself. SHANDYGAFF 35 The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cock- roach, overhears a person with whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter. Archy's sus- picions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through an air hole, and .prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative, in lower case agate: it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the cap- tains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert would find it for me the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking off the knots said the butler "<■ it needs oiling again but M cuthbert said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy that is not chicken pox at all it is ger- man measles ha ha cried the false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he through a port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered the captain but i had al- ready done so i 36 SHANDYGAFF braced my head against the hour hand and gave me a hypodermic of some pow- and my feet erful east against the minute hand and stopped the indian drug which stiffened me like a mechanism the captain cataleptic but i drew his sword and pried off all the top could still see and hear for days and crust gentlemen days a council he said yonder cockroach has saved the of war was held about me every after- ship noon and wireless let us throw the pie overboard and steam reports sent to london save the cock- rapidly away from roach even if it advised the starboard ensign you lose the ship wirelessed the admir- not so not so cried the captain yon gal- alty england must lant cockroach stand by the smaller nations and every must not perish so gratitude is a tradi- hour the tion of the surgeon gave me another hypodermic british navy i would sooner perish with at the end him than of four weeks the cabin boy who had desert him all the time the strain was been getting thinking deeply all the time suggested worse on me if my feet slipped the clock that a plug of would start again wood be inserted in my place which was and all would be lost beads of sweat done rolled down my forehead and almost and i fell to the deck well nigh ex- blinded me something hausted the next must be done quick said the first assist- day i was set on shore in the captains ant captain the gig and insect is losing his rigidity wait said the here i am. surgeon archy So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joy- ously flavoured with Broadway garlic. The news- paper colyum, too, is a native product. Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and superscription of America. And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: SHANDYGAFF 87 our Great Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the scenery. . . . He has such an oecu- menical kind of humour. It's just as true in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. He is at his best when he takes up some philo- sophic dilemma, or some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, Uxoricide, Pro- hibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few spectators whose centripetal powers are not stanch enough) until, chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as anywhere else. What is there in the nipping air of Galesburgf, 38 SHANDYGAFF Illinois, that turns the young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of literature? S. S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don Marquis — are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words: Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., 111., a mem- ber of the Republican party. My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time and place free of charge. Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat. In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in the Census Bureau, at Washington, D. C. This position I filled for some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power. It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening, after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of showing me how greatly he appreciated it. Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the Census Office, I left the Republican party SHANDYGAFF 39 again, and accepted a position as reporter on a Washington paper. Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented, peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since. There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the Republican party again. This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself. It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person: j/Height, 5 feet 10§ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200 pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thomp- son's poems; inside seam of trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with respira- tion; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates undis- guised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in possession of police; garrulous and argumen- 40 SHANDYGAFF tative; prominent cheek bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story writing; wears 17- inch collar; waist measurement none of your business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, publishers, editors, musi- cians, among whom he often succeeds in insinuating him- self, avoiding association with crooks and reformers as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese, "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes prunes, tramp poets and imita- tions of Kipling; trousers cut loose over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested. I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick Stevensonian instinct SHANDYGAFF 41 for the moral issue, and the Devil not infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the Evening Sun comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment on some bolshevictory in Russia: A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip. For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of the machine: I pray Thee, make my colyum read, And give me thus my daily bread. Endow me, if Thou grant me wit, Likewise with sense to mellow it. Save me from feeling so much hate My food will not assimilate; 42 SHANDYGAFF Open mine eyes that I may see Thy world with more of charity, And lesson me in good intents And make me friend of innocence. . . . Make me (sometimes at least) discreet; Help me to hide my self-conceit, And give me courage now and then To be as dull as are most men. And give me readers quick to see When I am satirizing Me. . . . Grant that my virtues may atone For some small vices of mine own. And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his prayer with this comment : People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really want — and intend to have if they can get it — but for what they think the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of affectation crept in. THE ART OF WALKING Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries! He is as old as his calves — his garteries. . . . — Meditations of Andrew McGill. THERE was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea." This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that the poet's props were very ill shapen — "they were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs" — but none the less he was princeps arte ambulandi. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Words- worth would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic pronouncement: "I cal- culate that with these identical legs W. must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English 43 44 SHANDYGAFF miles — a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most ex- cellent in his writings." A book that .says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amor- ous precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life": Lord ! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon earth a man so little curious in the world as he is. Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of sawmills on sunny after- noons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. SHANDYGAFF 45 Diaries and letters are often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because walk- ing can never again be what it was — the motor- cars will see to that — it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour. Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking. The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road) to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically from the Bristol Channel to the Eng- lish ditto, a rousing stretch. It was Words- worth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient Mariner" was written in the hope of de- fraying the expenses of the adventure. De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty- mile all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, 46 SHANDYGAFF on the evening after first meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement of the day, and through a summer night " divinely calm" he busied himself with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind hastening to decay. I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving medi- tation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up. Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads. It would be a hard- hearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it over the Con- tinent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than a flute: he might have written "The SHANDYGAFF 47 Handy Guide for Beggars" long before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhyth- mically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instru- ment of philosophy. After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course — have you paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than the early morn- ing stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in Octo- ber, 1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial editor of the Times? Never did finan- cial editor live to better purpose! There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker: get these by rote in some membrane of memory: The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown — the Air is our robe of state — the Earth is our throne, and the sea a snighty minstrel playing before it. 48 SHANDYGAFF The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August, 1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George Borrow, Emily Bronte on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not domi- nate the conversation. There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W. H. Davies (Super-Tramp), the G. M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them." There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berk- shires. One could extend the list almost without SHANDYGAFF 49 end. Sometimes it seems as though literature were a co-product of legs and head. Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wander- ings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to specu- late. In the country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and muscle exercised alike. Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are his months: For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours : We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers. Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, 50 SHANDYGAFF When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire. I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G. M. Trevelyan's "Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands "Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education," by the Rev. A. N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in 1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in walking tours: No one, though (this j s th e fi rs t article to be observed), should ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talk- SHANDYGAFF 51 ing (let us suppose) of men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and two, since the world began, there have always been young men who have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so ignor- ant of the nature of journeys as to* suppose that they might be taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake before he would knowingly under- estimate women. But it must be confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they fill. They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or yourself. Noth- ing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to that great order called society that you have for a period got away from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of etiquette. He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, to no time or place. He is neither rich nor 52 SHANDYGAFF poor, but in that which he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural instinct of women. Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published. Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know he is afoot: the Great Khan of Spring- field is unleashed — let alewives and deacons tremble! Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by beg- ging him to recite his poems at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their eating; but despite the naivete of his eager- ness to sing, there is a plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote a Class Day poem at SHANDYGAFF 53 Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will be a Ford. Here is homo americanus, one of our- selves, who never wore spats in his life. But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets at night, watch- ing the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, pea- nut carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday night marketing — he feels the thrill of being one, or at least two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings 54 SHANDYGAFF and celebrates the great symbols of our hodge- podge democracy: ice cream soda, electrical sky- signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and beauty. This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has scrutineered and scuf- fled through a dozen states, lightening larders and puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique — "stopping when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to" — and beg- ging his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any American citizen; and this is how he does it, copied from his little pam- phlet used on many a road: RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois, June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money. This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a tramp- journey from the author's home town, through the West and back, during which he will observe the [following rules: (1) Keep away from the cities. (2) Keep away from the railroads. (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage. (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven. SHANDYGAFF 55 (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five. (6) Travel alone. (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. In order to carry out the last rule there will be three excep- tions to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry this book of rhymes for distri- bution. (3) Also he will carry a small portfolio with pic- tures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view of the history of art, especially as it applies to America. Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting. "The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil" figure from Springfield, Illinois. A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in "The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best friends the open- air walker has, and don't forget it! The motors have done this for us at least, that 56 SHANDYGAFF as they have made the highways their own be- yond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the footpaths, and the pas- tures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick, we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the ways of God to man. And sometimes, about two o'clock of an after- noon (these spells come most often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is SHANDYGAFF 57 scouring the hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road to walk to Roys ton in the rain. . . . Grant us, Zeus ! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words : *' Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." Haec studia per- noctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur. RUPERT BROOKE RUPERT Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born of k East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham, in Nor- folk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church. In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge, England, issued a little anthology called Cambridge Poems 1900-1913. This volume was my first intro- duction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. His poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, reprinted in Heffer's Cambridge Poems, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14. Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cam- bridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the Trump- 58 SHANDYGAFF 59 ington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patch worked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows;, it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "Umgebung" is so dull and monotonous compared with the rolling witch- ery of Oxfordshire. But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Cafe des Westens in Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed. jBalanc- ing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with pain- ful intensity the white winding road from Cam- bridge to Royston which I have bicycled hundreds of times. One sees the little inns along the way — the Waggon and Horses, the Plough, the King's 60 SHANDYGAFF Arms — and the recurring blue signboard Fine Roy- ston Ales (the Royston brewery being famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal questions of youth which have no country and no clime — Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War; he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in training for the iEgean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled "1914." I do not know exactly when they were written or where first published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's SHANDYGAFF 61 quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London Times. No one could read the matchless sonnet: "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England." and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doc- tor in Ohio to whom I sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did: wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter — April 23, 1915. He died on board the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, on Shake- speare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous touch of sunstroke. A description of the burial is given in "Me- morials of Old Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great 62 SHANDYGAFF War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to the Samoan mountain top which Brooke him- self had so recently visited. The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been killed in action: We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen trees, carpeted with mauve- flowering sage. Over its head droops an olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth. About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave. The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty officers of his own com- pany, and so slowly did they go that it was not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave. We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and the bugles sounded the "Last Post." And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to be buried in a Greek island. He could SHANDYGAFF 63 have no lovelier one than Skyros, and no quieter resting place. On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek. . . . "Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the deliver- ance of Constantinople from the Turks." The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisit- ing his grave. It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke . The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift transla- tion in the golden cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray is quoted: "Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of youth and poetry." In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found at least one Certainty — that of being "among the English poets." He would probably be the last to ask a more high- sounding epitaph. 64 SHANDYGAFF His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in 1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking bare- foot on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not — it is all a part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster. And so* of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise. Few of us are im- mortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of Day That I Have Loved; they include such neat little pictures of the gross and sordid as the two poems Wagner and Dawn, written on a trip in Ger- SHANDYGAFF 65 many. (It is curious that the only note of exasper- ation in Brooke's poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily put, in Grantchester.) This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are "scarlet," and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in the Shrop- shire Lad stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet The Hill: Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass, You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; 66 SHANDYGAFF Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old. . . ." "And when we die All's over that is ours; and life burns on Through other lovers, other lips," said I, — "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!" " We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here. Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said: "We shall go down with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned into the darkness!" . . . Proud we were And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. — And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the "1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of " 1914 and Other Poems," containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in Eng- land and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. SHANDYGAFF 67 From the perfected brutality of Jealousy or Mene- laus and Helen or A Channel Passage (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song: "Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings, And Triumph is his crown. Earth fades in flame before his wings, And Sun and Moon bow down." But that, I knew, would never do; And Heaven is all too high. So whenever I meet a Queen, I said, I will not catch her eye. "Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, "The Gift of Love is this; A crown of thorns about thy head, And vinegar to thy kiss!" — But Tragedy is not for me; And I'm content to be gay. So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady, I went another way. And so I never feared to see You wander down the street, Or come across the fields to me On ordinary feet. For what they'd never told me of, And what I never knew; It was that all the time, my love. Love would be merely you. 68 SHANDYGAFF We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) recur — what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those white Greek bodies against the green! Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, which they had sought. On those five pages are packed SHANDYGAFF 69 in simple words all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In his hands the thing became a trumpet" — THE DEAD Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. Honour has come back, as a King, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage. It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious details of existence must be his poem The Great Lover 70 SHANDYGAFF where he catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he holds dear — White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; The benison of hot water; furs to touch; The good smell of old clothes; and other such . ... All these have been my loves. Of his humour only those who knew him per- sonally have a right to speak; but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than Heaven where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a future life. This life cannot be All, they swear, For how unpleasant, if it were! One may not doubt that, somehow, Good Shall come of Water and of Mud; SHANDYGAFF 71 And, sure, the reverent eye must see A Purpose in Liquidity. We darkly know, by Faith we cry The future is not Wholly Dry. . . . But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, Is wetter water, slimier slime! No future anthology of English wit can be com- plete without that exquisite bit of fooling. Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke, "the latest and greatest of young Englishmen.'* THE MAN THE big room was very still. Outside, be- neath a thin, cold drizzle, the first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was a clean, moist whiff of com- ing spring. It was the end of March. In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were gray — a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow in the padded chair. His right hand — the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar — rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slip- ped from his fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he was revising. Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two and a half years. Every 72 SHANDYGAFF 73 line of his lean, strong figure showed some trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a life- long student of history, he had surprised his associ- ates by the clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than he — save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, pain-wrenched mouth. This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor student, nour- ished in classroom and library with the burning visions of great teachers, he had hoped in this high- est of positions to guide his country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher, idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt 74 SHANDYGAFF him, but had never abated his purpose. Li a world reeling and smoking with the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message of the spirit, for the glory of humanity, for the settlement of disputes by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To that he had clung. He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen. What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announc- ing that the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered the first meet- ing thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thought- fully planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation. In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could have believed that great nations would discard without com- punction all the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the highest military honours? That a sup- posedly friendly nation would fill another land SHANDYGAFF 75 with spies — even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy? Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still different. That his country, dis- regarding the old fetishes of honour and insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things, suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the wounds and fill the starv- ing mouths. That one nation — not because she was weak, but because she was strong — should, with God's help, make a firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never conquer force. "A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as the utterance of a man years in advance of his time — but what rolling thunders of vituperation they had cost him! Too proud to fight! ... If only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from Judea ! But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeak- able horror on non-combatants, women and chil- 76 SHANDYGAFF dren, lie had realized that his cherished dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and — with bleeding heart — even the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civiliza- tion. With face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. Arabic, Lusitania, Persia, Laconia, Falaba, GuU fiight, Sussex, California — the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief. And now, since the "barred-zone" decree . . . He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped from him. He snap- ped on the green desk light and turned to his per- sonal typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed into his mind — the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his theses on the church door at Wittenberg: " Gott helfe mir, ich harm nickt anders." They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing. . . . "With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the SHANDYGAFF 77 grave responsibilities which it involves. ... 7 advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact noth- ing less than war against the Government and people of the United States. . . ." The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind. "It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. " Ich kann nicht anders. . . ." " We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. . . . Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. . . . A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. . . . 78 SHANDYGAFF Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their ovm" With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star. Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to feel the whole vast stretch of the con- tinent throbbing; the yearning breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with gunners at their sterns — in one aching synthesis the vastness and dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold ! Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he returned quietly to the typewriter: SHANDYGAFF 79 " We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included. . . . The world must be made safe for democracy." The world must be made safe for democracy! As the wires leaped and the little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander days, years before. He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the Moselle. And England — dear green England, fairest of all — the rich blue line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cot- tages where he had bicycled for tea, and the naive rustic folk who had made him welcome. What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children, millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness of life — where were they now? Life, innocent human life — the most 80 SHANDYGAFF precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and win our own joys of home and love and food — what Black Death had mad- dened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be free and sweet again? The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men now living. But for the sake of the gene- rations to come — he thought of his own tiny grandchildren — for the love of God and the mercy of mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace." Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off the closing words : " To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.'* He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With elbows on the desk SHANDYOAFF 81 he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All the agony, the bitterness, the burden of pre- ceding days swept over him, but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "Ich kann nicht anders," he whispered. Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly: " God helping her, she can do no other.** THE HEAD OF THE FIRM HE ALWAYS lost his temper when the for- eign mail came in. Sitting in his private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers and magazines. He was fa- miliar with several foreign languages, and would skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips. For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons that^were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of his firm. His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes would flash — and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk. When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded 82 SHANDYGAFF 83 physique, it is not well for him to have these fre- quent pulsations of rage. But he had always found it hard to control his temper. He some- times remembered what a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He who loses his temper will lose everything." But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous swim- mer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight. No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, pug- nacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding 84 SHANDYGAFF criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but he paid little heed. The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe. Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He himself with his accus- tomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed congratula- tions, condolences, messages of one kind and an- SHANDYGAFF 85 other to foreign merchants. His publicity depart- ment never rested. He employed famous scien- tists and inventors to improve the products of his factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him. This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had the tendency to snap under great strains. Living always at fever pitch, sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of energy in him often showed signs of overstress. It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last months. You must remem- ber the extraordinary conditions in his line of business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for gen- erations was out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The strain which 86 SHANDYGAFF his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to resign by bankruptcy: "I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to welcome you at the earliest opportunity." The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it is worth while to remember what it was that killed it — and him. While the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and SHANDYGAFF 87 hammer the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of free communities to live their own lives. Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him. He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud, was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of the business to save and some of the goodwill intact. It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on his desk lay a half -ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a mocking cartoon. 88 SHANDYGAFF I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might of the press, of the vast irresis- tible urge of public opinion, that hung like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt. Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together like beads of mercury on a plate, quiver- ing into rhythm and concord, become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, it moves onward like the tide up a harbour. The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His managers had fore- seen every phase of this unprecedented com- petition, and his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents began to focus themselves. Then even his own employees suspected the SHANDYGAFF 89 truth. His agents, solicitors, and salesmen, scat- tered all over the globe, realized that one com- pany cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the execu- tors, pending a reorganization. 17 HERIOT ROW THERE is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pil- grimage to Edinburgh, made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of 1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would that one might again steer Shotover (dearest of pushbikes) along the Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me. That notebook is memorable also in a statis- tical way, and perchance may serve future his- torians as a document proving the moderate cost of wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more interesting than his me- ticulous record of what his amusements cost him. Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions. For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the 90 SHANDYGAFF 91 only time in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon exchange at two cents per penny. July 16 pint cider .... ^ pint cider lunch at Banbury pint cider at Ettington supper at Stratford . stamp and postcard . £ s. d 4 1* 2 2 3 1 3 2 4 3£ July 17 Postcards and stamps ... 9 pencil 1 Warwick Castle 2 - cider at the Bear and Baculus (which Mifflin would call the Bear and Bacillus) .... -2^ Bowling Green Inn, bed and breakfast 3 2 Puncture 1 — Lunch, Kenilworth .... 16 Kenilworth Castle .... 6 02 SHANDYGAFF Postcards . . . . , . Lemonade, Coventry Cider Supper, Tamworth, The Castle Hotel July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield cider at The Three Crowns postcard and shave . The King's Head, bed and breakfast .... cider tip on road* .... lunch, Uttoxeter cider, Ashbourne, The Green Man landlord's drink, Ashbourne supper, Newhaven House, lemonade, Buxton 4 4 2* 2 1 16 5\ 8 4 4 8 7 2 1» 1 8 3 1 1 - 3 Total £1-4-1 ($5.78) That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and emergen- *As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway crossing. tThis was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and he agreed. SHANDYGAFF 93 cies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reck- oning shillings and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, "Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke — "Four and eleven pence half -penny so far to-day!" Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight! There was a reason for all this pedalling mad- ness. Ever since the days when we had wan- dered by Darby Creek, reading R. L. S. aloud to one another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the 94 SHANDYGAFF Water of Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills — O my friends, do those names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the brotherhood — what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world! In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our satisfaction we were known as "the smoking- room gentlemen" throughout our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars lying on the Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that somewhere in his letters R. L. S. speaks of that same sound. He knew Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out above all others of his youth — Rutland Square. And while that was of course only the imaginative fervour of the mo- ment, yet we were glad to know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we were on ground well loved by Tusitala. The first evening, and almost every twilight SHANDYGAFF 95 while we were in Auld Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row — famous address, which had long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a tablet on the house com- memorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign to sell was prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought struck us. Could we not go over the house in the char- acter of prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the Signet. Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once). 16 Charlotte Square Edinburgh 26th July, 19X1 Dear Sir, 17 HERIOT ROW We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view it we shall arrange to have it opened. We are, Yours faithfully, Guild and Shepherd. Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the figure we would cut 96 SHANDYGAFF before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling with slim knap- sacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman. The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attaches, appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes, each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the attache in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had pres- ence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was quoted. SHANDYGAFF 97 He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped softly and with beat- ing hearts. Here we were on the very track of the Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined R. L. S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie light the street-lamps outside — a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining room facing the street — and we imagined Louis and his parents at breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a spacious and attrac- tive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and opening off it the little room where faithful Cum- mie slept. But in vain we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and forlorn. With what subtly mingled feelings we peered 98 SHANDYGAFF from room to room, seeing everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous young agent. And what was it he said? — "This was the house of Lord So-and-so" (I forget the name) — "and incidentally, Robert Louis Steven- son lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the deeds." Incidentally! . . . Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other "offices" with care, imagin- ing that little "Smoutie" may have run here and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the Stevensons for thirty years (1857- 1887) — surely even the thirty years that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those dear ghosts we conjured up ! We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent decep- tion, for the honour of R. L. S. I wonder if any one has yet put a tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day. SHANDYGAFF 99 In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of the dining-room windows: For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more; And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night! But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting up the street." Now- adays he carries a long pole bearing a flame cun- ningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 ("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R. L. S., of whom he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn Street." He seemed to think Penn- sylvania a town, but finally we learned that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, and sending back money to the "kid- dies. " Good Leerie, I wonder do you still light the 100 SHANDYGAFF lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder beacons on Flanders fields? One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was still the same one that R. L. S. had known. We were down on hands and knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze. Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces |from No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the adventure with the lame boy which R. L. S. once described when setting down some recollections of childhood* In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and goody story books, of the SHANDYGAFF 101 isolation of the infirm; and after many days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the venture. But the answer was not he one I had anticipated, for it was a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great affair to me. We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the Edinburgh street lamps," says R. L. S. Aye, and the brightest of them all shines on Heriot Row. 102 SHANDYGAFF The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the dining-room window. R. L. S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him. FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER [Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable manu- scripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half- read MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here in memory of my very dear friend. \ r MY youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself. Engine driver, tug- boat captain, actor, statesman, and wild 103 104 SHANDYGAFF animal trainer — such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy. My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter my message without fear or favour. As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, poking and poring in the unending hope of finding some- thing rich and strange. A gradual stultitia seizes them. They take to drink; they beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid blockish SHANDYGAFF 105 fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is in the blood. Great men have graced the job — and got out of it as soon as possible. George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E. V. Lucas and Gil- bert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety." But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capac- ity as publishers' pursuivants. ♦ Patrolling the porches of literature, why did they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing. But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon 106 SHANDYGAFF some winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the peine forte et dure of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a year — that is a fair showing for the head reader of a large publishing house. One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration; only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the others — alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manu- script which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable SHANDYGAFF 107 to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me once, containing this immortal couplet: She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse on the air, A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen to set it there. Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen un- damped unless your cerebral ooze really has some- thing to impart. And then, once a year or so, when one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs' trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity. Or else — what is indeed more frequent — the reader's fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellec- tual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition 108 SHANDYGAFF affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in many cantos, beginning Our heart is but a bundle of muscle In which our passions tumble and tussle. Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis : "Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a per- petual circle." . . . She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being a continued prognostication, begin- ning and ending as it had done tbe day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a paradoxical mal- ady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments* modern foibles and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female, under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well as in large cities and fash- ionable watering places. But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition, let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a man- uscript (penned by masculine hand) which be- came a by-word in one publisher's office. She was a beautiful young lady. She was,. a medium- sized, elegant figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. Her raven-black hair, copious both in length SHANDYGAFF 109 and volume and figured like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was destined to be pushed forward by sighs; Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently: For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases. His complexion was red- dish. His hazel eyes deepset and close together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges there was a device 110 SHANDYGAFF that worked splendidly, when he wished to show unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in the kindest advances one would wish to see. It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley. I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the A. F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which distorts his vision. Reading in- cessantly, now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly know- ledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philoso- phy, is fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea- water, or on using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg. Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is all too little clan- nishness among us. We who are the helpless tar- get for the slings and arrows of every writer who SHANDYGAFF 111 chooses to put pen on foolscap — might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging anec- dotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? Let us make sixty the minimum — or let there be a pogrom among the authors! WILLIAM McFEE M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it, and half the ship has to clean up the mess. RlJDYARD KjFIJNG. THE next time the Cunard Company com- missions a new liner I wish they would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rud- yard Kipling as purser, and William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck steward and Hall Came as chief -stewardess. Then I would like to be at Raymond and Whit- comb's and watch the clerks booking pas- sages ! William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer in Mr. Kipling's Brugglesmith, but I feel sure that his attitude toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his feelings as a writer, his love of honour- able and honest work, his disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the purveyors of publicity, you may know him . 112 SHANDYGAFF 113 One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, 1 was sitting by the open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Seeker in London. Mr. Seeker, like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned to look over Mr. Seeker's announcements, that a train of events was about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a telegram signed by a dozen of them: "Congratulations. Name him Casuals!" It was in that list of Mr. Seeker's titles for the winter of 1915-16 that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the not-to-be-forgotten words. MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA. Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a copy. My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this note: "Finished reading Casuals of the Sea, a good book. H still laid up with bad ankle. In the 114 SHANDYGAFF p. m. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before the open fire." My first impressions of "Casuals of the Sea, a good book" are interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee. Casuals of the Sea is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents that there are at least ten thou- sand librivora in this country who regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections, indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened to with respect. Mr. McFee had written two books before " Cas- uals" was published, but at that time it was not SHANDYGAFF 115 easy to find any one who had read them. They were Letters from an Ocean Tramp (1908) and Aliens (1914); the latter has been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of a paragraph: — Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes — genuine artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my theme, the problem of human folly. Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of it 116 SHANDYGAFF ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering. And unlike the other English real- ists of his generation who have cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how delightfully he flays it in Aliens) but he loves the middle classes for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea ser- vice, first on a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the man who really has something to say. Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How the benign planets must _, SHANDYGAFF 117 have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W. Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot refuse facts." William M. P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was educated in the city schools of which the first pages of Cas- uals of the Sea give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk — what we would call over 118 SHANDYGAFF here a high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineer- ing firm in Aldersgate. This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse, Smith- field Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out in Aliens. After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on various important engineer- ing jobs, notably a pumping installation at Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very credit- able juvenile verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either imitating Kipling or reacting from him. SHANDYGAFF 119 His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them. In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance. Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year (1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The reader of Aliens will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as 120 . SHANDYGAFF Nutley (N. J), Galesburg (111.), Port Washington (N. Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.) The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem to open a fair prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time monoto- nous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only diversions of most of the profession. Art, litera- ture, and politics do not interest them. Picture post- cards, waterside saloons, and the ladies of the port are the glamour of life that they delight to honour. I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable ac- count (in Aliens) of his induction into the pro- fession of marine engineering has no faint colour of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable weariness, the instant neces- sity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating things about the life of an engineer: It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. SHANDYGAFF 121 But I cannot help wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick. Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean, when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or the officers of the watch. I mean work, hard, sweating, nasty toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the naval auxiliary are the same. I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you do, collec- tively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corre- sponding precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind. I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of it, and I know what I am talking about. The point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. 122 SHANDYGAFF He, the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described. The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any univer- sity. The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting viva voce — the University of the Seven Seas. If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or reading. SHANDYGAFF 123 He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most engineers : As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool) the other day, and saw the tapering spars sil- houetted against the pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door. I've got about all I can get out of books, and now I don't relish them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that character, not incident, is my metier. And you can draw character, paint character, but you can't very well blat about it, can you? I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignor- ance of how people live, of ordinary human possibilities. A . is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended. . . . To hell with writing, I want to feel and seel I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a mer- 124 SHANDYGAFF chant of some sort who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are after him ! His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the hundredweight of foolscap, always in- cluded a score of books, ranging from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of "futurist" pic- tures, he entered eagerly into the current dis- cussion in the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a humorous and ironical mind rang- ing over all topics that concern cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines. When one says that McFee found little intel- lectually in common with his engineering col- leagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too. And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London SHANDYGAFF 125 Board of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to rest on his gauges. In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither Aliens nor Casuals of the Sea, which he had been at work on for years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war. Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a vessel as I have sug- gested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two magnificent prefaces — to A Personal Rec- ord and to The Nigger of the Narcissus — Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to every trafficker in ink, his concep- tion of the duty of the man of letters. They can never be quoted too often: "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of 126 SHANDYGAFF mankind. . . . The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin." That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McFee has paid to the Gooderich family in Casuals of the Sea. Somewhere in that book he has uttered the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in store for us. And there is one other sentence in Casuals of the Sea that lingers with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth remem- bering, and I leave it with you: " She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, instead of snatching the knot- ted cord from the hand of God and dealing murderous blows." RHUBARB WE USED to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which we im- agined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them, imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist — Deutsche Apotheker — and his real name was Friedrich Wil- helm Maximilian Schulz. The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable Land where the gener- ous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sport- ing way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgo- land and as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in dis- creet melancholy is it. The Fire Department con- sists of an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still per- 127 128 SHANDYGAFF formed once a year. People who find Quogue and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read. Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent Rheingold, and on win- ter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and dream of Stuttgart. It did not take me long to find out that apothe- cary Schulz was an educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was very proud. One was a certificate from the Stutt- gart Oberrealschule; the other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire, dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. SHANDYGAFF 129 They were a quaint couple, she so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive. It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little sitting room to see his photo- graphs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life. What an alluring place the little drugstore was ! I was fascinated by the rows and rows of gleam- ing bottles labelled with mysterious Latin abbre- viations. There were cases of patent remedies — Mexican Mustang Liniment, Swamp Root, Dan- derine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, tal- cum, cold cream, marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of paternostrums ! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy trousers — infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say. I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an 130 SHANDYGAFF X across his broad back; his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx. Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave. "I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his broad, thick hand. Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked for anything more com- plex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake his head solemnly and say : " That I have not got." Motorists sometimes turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit of absent- mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged water would spout across the imita- SHANDYGAFF 131 tion marble counter. He would wag his beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue. At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. Th(is she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense carnation " bottles on his per- fume counter, would chuckle at the antics of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naive pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he," which amused us. On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog which plodded desperately after him on her short 132 SHANDYGAFF legs. Sometimes we met him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down, pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past. As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war. Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for con- verting the old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the spine of his contention was that the Ger- man army was unbeatable. He got out his faded discharge ticket from the Wiirtemberger Landsturm to show the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped. But often the glass top of the perfume SHANDYGAFF 133 counter was requisitioned as a large-scale battle- ground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty com- pletely on the perfume counter. "Warte doch!" he would cry. "Just wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!" Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our arguments were wholly lacking in per- sonal animus. When I told him of the Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the British; he would counter with mys- terious allusions to Krupp. And his conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he would stroke his beard plac- idly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good night. How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a true light! Schulz's 134 SHANDYGAFF honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans en masse, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue it out. But that was a hard winter for him. The grow- ing anti-German sentiment in the neighbour- hood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more sur- prised to meet her one very snowy Sunday after- noon, sloshing along the road in the liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing outdoors on a day like this?" I said. "Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen didn't get her airing.'* "You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said severely. Soon after that I had to go away for three SHANDYGAFF 135 weeks. I was snowbound in Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away, so we had no news from Kings. We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped at the drug-store on my way to the train to get some iodine. Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weigh- ing a little cone of white powder in his apothe- cary's scales. He looked far from well. There were great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands. "Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week? Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At last he turned 136 SHANDYGAFF round. His broad, naive face was quivering like blanc-mange. "What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more? Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia." As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor. The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my feet. THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY SLOWLY, reluctantly (rather like a vers libre poem) the quaint little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the fiacre drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the others. You step from the railway carriage — and instantly the hellish din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above the rugged scarp where the blue- bloused ouvriers are quarrying the famous cham- pagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur. . . . At last you are in Strychnine. Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, un- rhapsodied by press agents — there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and untravelled 137 138 SHANDYGAFF corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B. V. D. Chemise de fer (with innumerable ex- aminations of luggage), while it has kept out the contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly inter- dicted, has also kept away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells clanging in your ears and the ineff- able majesty of the Casa Grande crag soaring be- hind the jade canal. The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into the curious seven-wheeled sforza lettered Hotel Decameron. We rumbled andante espressivo over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussee d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what quaintly assorted im- pressions one receives in the first few minutes in a strange place. I remember noticing a sausage SHANDYGAFF 139 kiosk in the marJd-platz where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are de- livered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese cathedral) on the cliff. The Hotel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The haut ton of the sec- tion in which the Hotel Decameron finds itself can readily be seen by the fact that the campa- nile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the H6tel. The antiquaries say there is an under- ground corridor between the two. The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my time exploring 140 SHANDYGAFF the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will some day make Strychnine a place of pelSrinage for all the world. Pay homage to the fromage is a rough translation of the motto of the town, which is car- ved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself. Limberg, Gruyere, Alkmaar, Neufchatel, Camembert and Hoboken — all these famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the bur- gomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheese- mongers' Guild at the Rathaus. The Kurd- meister, who is elected annually by the town coun- cil, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat the German SHANDYGAFF 141 poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by the workmen in the quarries to pre- vent prostration. It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping my verre of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned am- bulance to catch my even more old-fashioned train. The B. V. D. trains only leave Strychnine when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then Strych- nine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance that way, a fragrant memory. And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys. INGO "ZUM ANDENKEN*' THE first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque German I began a conver- sation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was! Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn") found them very 142 SHANDYGAFF 143 amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a coun- try tavern in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excel- lent homely aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find one- self in the haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the summer rain thud- ding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the valley, the women with bright red jackets work- ing in the fields, and the dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's niece when they essayed the native idiom. " Sie arbeiten immer!" she used to say; "Sie werden krank!" ("You're always working; you'll be ill!") There is a particular poignance in looking 144 SHANDYGAFF back now on those happy days two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans. On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed mountains, bathed in waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, and played games with Ingo. Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him SHANDYGAFF 145 at dinner what he was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing smile: "Von den Sternen!" ("Of the stars.") The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent over my pre- posterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task. "Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself 146 SHANDYGAFF hung!" and he would laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo. The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages, then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten " drawn by the other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was near- ing the dangerous places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom. After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book Till Eulens / piegel ) and we sped 7 SHANDYGAFF 147 joyously through the adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Gen- erally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely ludi- crous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth. His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, "Gott! wie er freut sich!" The progress of our reading was held up by these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo explaining. Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of * Treasure Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony ! I read the tale aloud, and I wish R. L. S. might have seen the 148 SHANDYGAFF shining of Ingo's eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at the Admiral Benbow; and how his face would fall when, clear and hollow .from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quick clop, clop of the mail-man's horses. I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight with friend- liness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccen- tric American comrade was going away and there would be no more afternoons with Till Eulen- spiegel on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching six- teen, and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he SHANDYGAFF 149 toiled manfully all one afternoon. I still have it in my scrap-book. And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "HaufFs Marchen" that I bought for him in Frei- burg, and sees the English words that he was to learn how to translate when he should grow older ! As I remember them, they ran like this: For Ingo to learn English will very easy be If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me; Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mis- takes, And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes — Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend: To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend. If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate. , HOUSEBROKEN A FTER Simmons had been married two / % years he began to feel as though he Ji ^needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for some- thing more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous even- ings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight — these were the things that made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in the suburbs like a tame cat! Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp .retort, 150 SHANDYGAFF 151 some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took it quite calmly. "Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an evening with your friends. " A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go. "Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be lonely." This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at night. On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room shining with firelight and the shabby armchair. "Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked. "Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant 15% SHANDYGAFF it. "Diana has a steak in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you." He kissed her and went off. When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway. At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran. He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly. At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused. Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and masculine comradeship — why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away. SHANDYGAFF 153 That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a box of crackers. " At last — it seemed years — the church chimes struck ten and he saw the lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness and cold, he went home. He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned over the bed and Ethel stir- red sleepily. "What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?" "One o'clock," he lied bravely — and just then the dining-room clock struck half -past ten and sup- ported him. " Did you have a good time? " "Bully— perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with the boys now and then." THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE I REMEMBER some friends of mine telling me how they went down to Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine. He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety — impro- vising verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way. I That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigor- ous, Gallic, bursting with energy, hospitality, and 154 SHANDYGAFF 155 wit: the enfant terrible of English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's verses is very welcome.* His introduc- tion is charming: the tribute of an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too some of his judg- ments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grate- ful for in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstand- ing and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is. Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and let- tered blood. Four of his great-uncles were gen- erals under Napoleon. The father of his grand- mother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother was wounded at Waterloo. His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pic- tures are in the Louvre and many French mu- •Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gonune, 1916. 156 SHANDYGAFF seums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an English wife. The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870— the "Terrible Year" it was called— until 1914. Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slin- don, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts. In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a num- ber of biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period: "I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School — some time in '83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his instinctive com- bativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, SHANDYGAFF 157 and saw little of him. But I recollect finding him one day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat/ In those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole school career." In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the pass- age; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that book — everyone should have six copies. After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical contrast to find him win- ning a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford — 158 SHANDYGAFF admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bear- ing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and de- bated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night- long readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up. Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the SHANDYGAFF 159 Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her whole- some democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked au- thority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the donnish sort more bril- liantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the most coveted prize of intel- lectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority. Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says : 160 SHANDYGAFF "He was a few years older and more expe- rienced than most of his college friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in his judgments — who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears." No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind. TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN APRICA Years ago when I was at Balliol, Balliol men — and I was one — Swam together in winter rivers, Wrestled together under the sun. And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, Loved already, but hardly known, Welded us each of us into the others: Called a levy and chose her own. SHANDYGAFF 101 Here is a House that armours a man With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, And a laughing way in the teeth of the world And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again: And the best of Balliol loved and led me, God be with you, Balliol men. I have said it before, and I say it again, There was treason done, and a false word spoken, And England under the dregs of men, And bribes about, and a treaty broken : But angry, lonely, hating it still, I wished to be there in spite of the wrong. My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill And the hammer of galloping all day long. Galloping outward into the weather, Hands a-ready and battle in all: Words together and wine together And song together in Balliol Hall. Bare and single! Noble and few! . . . Oh! they have wasted you over the sea! The only brothers ever I knew, The men that laughed and quarrelled with me. Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again; And the best of Balliol loved and led me, God be with you, Balliol men. 162 SHANDYGAFF Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the thousands of books so gener- ously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of passionate specula- tion into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so im- periously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two of his volumes. II There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary France, on military history, biog- raphy and topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen — it did not take Eng- land long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British SHANDYGAFF 163 subject, and humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamen- tary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be pub-r licly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration." Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in an imper- ative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W. S. Braith- 164 SHANDYGAFF waite, which happens to so few. His " The South Country" will make splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important contribution? What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authen- tic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous Examina- tion Schools at Oxford — that noble building con- secrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spell- bound for an hour and a half — or was it three hours? — with flashing extempore talk about this greatest figure of the Renaissance. Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physi- cian, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! The gospel of exuberance — that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too? SHANDYGAFF 165 Rabelais came from Touraine — the heart of Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His extraor- dinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included. Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born spon- taneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Test- ament chapter of 'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels." * III In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. Rabelaisian in fe- cundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of 166 SHANDYGAFF English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, politics, economics, mili- tary topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes — all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, every- thing or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His passion for places — roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Bor- rovian love of vagabondage — these are the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vi- brant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe. Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some book- seller and procure for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E. V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of SHANDYGAFF 167 food, companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the out- lands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight — in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind": A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the moun- tains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pres- sure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest. IV And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are 168 SHANDYGAFF living to-day men who write as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with this sweet broken music: I never get between the pines But I smell the Sussex air; Nor I never come on a belt of sand But my home is there. And along the sky the line of the Downs So noble and so bare. A lost thing could I never find, Nor a broken thing mend: And I fear I shall be all alone When I get towards the end. Who will there be to comfort me Or who will be my friend? I will gather and carefully make my friends Of the men of the Sussex Weald, They watch the stars from silent folds, They stiffly plough the field. By them and the God of the South Country My poor soul shall be healed. If I ever become a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Sussex songs be sung And the story of Sussex told. I will hold my house in the high wood Within a walk of the sea, And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me. A CASUAL OF THE SEA He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea. — George Herbert. BOOKS sometimes make surprising connec- tions with life. Fifteen-year-old Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O. S. (ordinary seaman) on the S. S. Fernfield in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the sec- ond engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one more proof of the surprising power of the written word? For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print. The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote about him, brought (so he naively told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to help the Fernfield carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands of 169 170 SHANDYGAFF good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your "round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes." "Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more bread for supper — that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only sloudiy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands. Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils given the privilege of learn- ing an extra language in the evenings. He chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his great ambition was to be a SHANDYGAFF 171 seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came. After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running to him. "Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the Queen Eleanor!'* It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the Queen Eleanor, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly. "Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away — we sail at four o'clock." "Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen !) The chief roars with laughter. "Too small!" he says. Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward. "Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and come back again. Then we'll see how you look!" Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hen- 172 SHANDYGAFF drick was a small man, and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the Queen Eleanor. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds five a month. Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy. "Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened him "Tommy/* and that handle turns him still. Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A. B. was on the Fernfield in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster. One thing that always struck Tommy was the SHANDYGAFF 173 number of books the engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duch- ess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Mon- taigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important role! The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, as seaman, as quarter- master, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht Alvina. He was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one then!) Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer — his best friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the 174 SHANDYGAFF engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English transport. He scanned the poster with amazement. Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and bought the book. He fell into talk with the book- seller, who had read the book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how the writer, who was the former second engineer of the Fernfield, had done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at sea. Then came another surprise. "I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the bookseller. It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee, who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that he might SHANDYGAFF 175 become an officer; and that though they had not met for several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that Hoboken and Passayunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under his arm. Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the Alvina was to sail the next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed. Then I saw in the papers that the Alvina had been halted in the Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, pending an investigation. Then enters the elbow Of coincidence. Looking over some books in the very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I over- 176 SHANDYGAFF heard another member of the Alvina's crew asking about "Casuals of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been there a few days before. So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to see Tommy and the Alvina. I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible excuse to bum about the water- front. Is there any passion in the breast of man- kind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners, and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met Captain Claret of the Minnehaha, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape of the Orduna, SHANDYGAFF 177 Mr. Jones of the Lusitania and many another. They knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the officers' cabins on the Lusitania when she went down, God rest her. I know, because I put them there. And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels — the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the Comanche outward bound for Galveston (I think) ; the Ascalon, full-rigged ship, with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowspirit snugging the can- vas. And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate indignities — and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy Hook. . . . At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The Alvina was not there. One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came to my aid. 178 SHANDYGAFF " There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his gesture, and saw her — a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into trouble with "39" — "39" being a United States destroyer lying in the Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on a dollar and a quarter. That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader! Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a "bight" — surrounded by ships and the men who sail them — I might almost have been a hardy newspaper man ! But Long Island commuters are nurtured to a tough and perilous life, and I clambered the Alvina's side without dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts. Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those Dioscuri of seamen, had been at work. The skipper was ashore. He keeps a saloon. SHANDYGAFF 179 The Alvina is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me, and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached; she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck was cum- bered with sacks of coal lashed down. A trans- atlantic voyage in January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons. I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch lad — round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me all his treasures — his certificates of good conduct from all the ships (both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother, who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta — a very pretty girl — who is also mentioned in Casuals of the Sea. The drunken fireman in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of letters from Mr. McFee. I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describ- ing his letters to this Dutch sailor-boy as "sen- 180 SHANDYGAFF sible," but that is just what they were. Tommy is one of his own "casuals" — — those frail craft upon the restless Sea Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started — and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of chance are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put it in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, libraries, and art galleries; get to know something about this great America if you intend to settle down there — that is the kind of word Tommy gets from his friend. Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common sense. SHANDYGAFF 181 ; When I left her that afternoon, the Alvina was getting up steam, and she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, and for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and thoughts of the simple, childlike men who live on ships. I realized for the first time the truth of that background of aimless hazard that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a book of more than passing merit. As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not. When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to work oiling the dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton cor- respondence course on steam engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. That lasted just two weeks. The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound. But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put him in a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our day, you will find him — a casual of the sea! THE LAST PIPE The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair., his back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced by the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed. — Leigh Hunt. THE sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of diminishing returns. I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. It is true that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs, inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a morn- ing pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled 182 SHANDYGAFF 183 eggs, shirred to a lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae. After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf, mured about by an occlud- ing wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober pacing: then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free — and then for your sackerhets tdndstickor ! A day so begun is well begun, and sin will flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; the curling 184 SHANDYGAFF vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The first pipe! But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for thought, burrows tingling into the unknow- able. As the smoke drifts and shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that impon- derable energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most potent force in existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing dottel in your briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down the stem. The most precious things in the world are also vivid with poison. Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he have written " The Criti- que of Pure Reason" ? Tobacco is the handmaid of science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his indigestion and snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous use of the weed makes the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to SHANDYGAFF 185 forgers, second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, who had little enough truck with church- men, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop of London. Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and rightly, his first impulse Was to decline. But before answering the Bishop's letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. The latter (the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in the fold of the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and hugely enjoyed himself. There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delight- ful information for all acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social History of Smoking," by G. L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives some- where in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to return it. If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and relent. Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (Canadian journals please copy!) I was contending that the joy of smoking in- creases harmonically with the weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course the incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his tongue and grows callous to the true 186 SHANDYGAFF delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best not to smoke during office hours. This may be a hard saying to some, but a proper respect for the art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast can be at his devotions always. It is not those who are horny with genuflection who are nearest the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope ( .1 speak in all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto now and then! This is the schedule I vouch for: After breakfast: 2 pipes At luncheon: 2 pipes Before dinner: 2 pipes Between dinner and bed* 10 to 12 pipes (Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.) The matter of smoking after dinner requires con- sideration. If your meal is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your SHANDYGAFF 187 eyes see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents, or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however, when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason, emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. Such a regime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a con- tinuance of intellect. Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in pain, sorrow, or grievous per- plexity it operates as a sovereign consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than 188 SHANDYGAFF any ginseng in the herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort virgins not to marry men who do not smoke. Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the so- long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to weariness. No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of living. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology. Chlor- ophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define life as a process of the Will- to-Smoke: recurring periods of consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, in- terrupted by intervals of recuperation. Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the recuperation in- terval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is the penultimate mo- ment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the Hesperus was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef. SHANDYGAFF 189 The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhila- rations of the day, after piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or schreibmaschine for some hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, invig- orating book for consideration. My favourite is the General Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland for the brain fatigued with the insigni- ficant and trifling tricks by which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous precis of the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly paragraph, one meets a topical echo : " The Oxford Shakespeare Glos- sary: by C. T. Onions: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price, relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the lexi- 190 SHANDYGAFF con of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents belabour one another! With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering inter- ruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue. "Henry Peacham's Compleat Gentleman. Fashioning him absolut in the most necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may be required in a Noble Gentle- man. Wherunto is annexed a Description of the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes, with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. At the Clarendon Press." Or this: "H. His Devises, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure. Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii + 104. 5s. net." O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an introduction by Professor Sir SHANDYGAFF 191 Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in excep- tionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest are repro- ductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good hands." One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and curiosity are now both going strong. "The Cures of the Diseased in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie incident in For- raine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. Is. 6d. net." Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of "Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of Conscience"), or "Origenis Hex- aplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum Interpre- tum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865. Two volumes 192 SHANDYGAFF £6 6s. net" or " Shuckf ord's Sacred and Profane History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declen- sion of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp 550. 10s. net." But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent poem entitled "My Pipe," mention- ing the brands I delight to honour, the editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends. He said that sound editorial policy for- bids mentioning commercial products in the text of the magazine. But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony: "When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven." SHANDYGAFF 193 And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars . . . a distant chime . . . and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian herb about me. TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE THE twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs. Black- well had made a resolution not to start the furnace until Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires courage. Commuters the world over are a hardy, valor- ous race. The Arab commutes by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, the African chief gets a team of his mothers-in- law to tow him to the office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered soul, inured to privation and calamity. At seven-thirty in the morning he leaves his bunga- low, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife he is going to work. How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And hoping that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the furnace until the last touchdown had been made. But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new cook, had begun to work for 194 SHANDYGAFF 195 them on the fifth of October. Belinda came from the West Indies, a brown maiden still un- spoiled by the sophistries of the employment agencies. She could boil an egg without crack- ing it, she could open a tin can without maiming herself. She was neat, guileless, and cheerful. But, she was accustomed to a warm climate. The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner, Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how chilly the evenings were growing. But across the table came one of those glances familiar to indis- creet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with rebuke, charged with the lightning of instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze struck him dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze! Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich in calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully what Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of coal bills danced in his mind. After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and Mrs. Blackwell talked in dis- creet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in wash- ing the dishes. "Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. 196 SHANDYGAFF Blackwell, "haven't you better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from Barbados, where the ther- mometer never goes below sixty. She said she couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've given her my old fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One other remark like that of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, Bob, use your skull!" Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating wisdom of women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply. Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility. "You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected by chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If you must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. Otherwise we'll have to start the furnace at once." Mr. Blackwell 's face was full of the admira- tion common to the simple-minded race of hus- bands. "Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on. Mental sug- SHANDYGAFF 197 gestion is the dope. The power of the chance remark!" The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, Mr. Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for hot soup," he said. "All the men at the office were talking about the unseasonable hot weather. I think we'd better have a window open." To Mrs. Blackwell 's dismay, he raised one of the dining- room windows, admitting a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she was game, and presently called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda was in the room they talked pointedly of the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau notes from the evening paper. After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force of habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just as he was set- ting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other wistfully, for the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirt- sleeves until Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire, by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before retiring, so that Belinda might suspect nothing in the morning. The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at 198 SHANDYGAFF dinner in a Palm Beach suit. Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They both sneezed vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town to-day, I think I caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell. Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examin- ing the thermometer with a puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the attic. But the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. Blackwell explained that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a similar psychological campaign. Belinda and Mrs. Chester's cook, Tulip — jocularly known as the Black Tulip — were friends, and would undoubt- edly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed not to start her furnace without consultation with Mrs. Blackwell. October yielded to November. By good for- tune the weather remained sunny, but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late at night. "I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm sure it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She never opens the windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning." SHANDYGAFF 199 "Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. Blackwell drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels. Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Black- wells' experiment in psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train less fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men loudly clamoured for permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no, Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream to-night. I don't w — want to get chilled. Bring me some hot coffee." As she brought his cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration. "By George," he thought, "this mental suggestion business certainly works." Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze in an ulster. The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the doctor in the hall. "Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?" 200 SHANDYGAFF "Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. "It's the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is the 17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has all the symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat." MY FRIEND TO-DAY we called each other by our given names for the first time. Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many of his kind. In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry leanness of our writing men. We have no Ches- tertons, no Bellocs. I look to Don Marquis, to H. L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly cor- pulent. My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these parts. Force of circum- stances may compel him to write of trivial things, but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of 201 202 SHANDYGAFF his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great literature. I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publish- ing business, and try to bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love (I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry considera- tions of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die than dishonour that chosen instrument. I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in my mind a large import- ance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slip- shod and insincere. Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than comfort, SHANDYGAFF 203 more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a publicity story about A. B," he said woefully to me, "because I am convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling books : what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called literature." I would be sorry to have it thought that be- cause of this devotion to high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not find him lacking.' Wherever a love of beauty and a rip- ened judgment of men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man. In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that confound the unlettered — these are amiable trifles that endear him to those who understand. Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the 204 SHANDYGAFF crass worship of comfort and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding Eng- lish, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine prose. I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet: And the men who were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me. Indeed let us hope that they will. A POET OF SAD VIGILS THERE are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary of hers. I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn "The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White? But on the drawing-room tables of our grand- mothers' girlhood the plump volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of several young versifiers, and deemed that in intro- ducing poor White's remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was the worthy laureate's esti- £05 206 SHANDYGAFF mate of his young foundling; but alas! Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a parlous sport. The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and over- study, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of roman- ticism. They are so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that Henry's father was a butcher and should pre- sumably have reared him on plenty of sound beef- steak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lath- rop or Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's College, Cam- bridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and honourable fragrance, SHANDYGAFF 207 and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so soon have been removed from the world. He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents; his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from his books, even at meal- times. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it to his mother. Southey 's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary feeling." His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the pros- perous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were dismally employed 208 SHANDYGAFF in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The Wealth of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy that I know. No one, after reading Southey's memoir, will overload his brain again. At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at this amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged to enter into this resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading romances." He is human enough to add, however, that "after long and fatiguing researches in * Blackstone' or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson Crusoe' afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the English language." The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in London, apparently a SHANDYGAFF 209 fairly successful man of business. Henry per- mitted himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the benefit and improve- ment of his kinsman. They seem to have carried on a mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville was inclined to belittle the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his brother's unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and " instructive" topics. Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for self -improve- ment. If our great-grandparents were all like that what an age it had been for the Scranton corres- pondence courses! "What is requisite to make one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, sound sense." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but it is with regret I see that you will not give your- self the trouble of writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any art, however trivial, that did not require some application at first." He begs the astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he reads. "You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself." Does one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave? Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of prizes won in magazine compe- 210 SHANDYGAFF titions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch gloves shortly became his for meritorious con- tributions to the Monthly Mirror. He was also admitted a member of a famous literary society then existing in Nottingham, an)d although the youngest of the sodality he promptly announced that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering assembled at the appointed time, and the in- spired youth harangued them for two hours on the subject of Genius. The devil, or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for de- struction. In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He published a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as Consump- tion, Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the Night Previous to Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, The Eve of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female Limatic to a Lady, had been warmly wel- comed by the politest magazines of the time. To wish to publish them in more permanent form was natural; but the unfortunate young man conceived the thought that the venture might even be a profitable one. He had found himself troubled with deafness, which threatened to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his SHANDYGAFF -211 spirit was canting seriously toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college career and then the church were lively in his mind. The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in pre- paring his manuscript for the printer. Probably never before or since, until the Rev. John Frank- lin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about garnering his collected works into that volume which is the delight of the wicked, has a human heart mulled over indifferent verses with so honest a pleasure and such unabated certainty of immortality. The first two details to be at- tended to were the printing of what were modestly termed Proposals — i. e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for pledges of sub- scription — and, still more important, securing the permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the manu- script was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of Devonshire. A very humble letter from honest Henry accom- panied it, begging leave of her Grace to dedicate his "trifling effusions" to her. 212 SHANDYGAFF Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are very entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such circumstan- ces. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would be sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already got twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready: "I have got twenty- three, without making the affair public at all, among my immediate acquain- tance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got abroad, and has been received more favour- ably than I expected." But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind the poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so feelingly calls a weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's heels, but no word arrived from the duchess. She was known to be assaulted from all sides by such applications: indeed her mail seems to have been very nearly as large as that of Mary Pick- ford or Theda Bara. Then, to his unspeakable anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all parcels sent to the duchess, unless marked with a password known only to her par- ticular correspondents, were thrown into a closet SHANDYGAFF 213 by her porter to be reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried Henry in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccess- ful visits to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. Finally, after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. Even then undaunted, this long-suffering older brother made one more try in the poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, and called on her in person, wisely leaving the manuscript at home; and with the complaisance of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's modest request. Her name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the little volume, and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises that "Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it is probable that she never opened the book." "Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in 1803. It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more seriously than any seventeen- year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see what Henry 's reading had been — Milton, Collins, and Gray, evi- dently. His unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his 214 SHANDYGAFF mind and became part of his own outpourings. II Penseroso gushes to the surface of poor Henry 's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of, his poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary information, but in the more active business of life, must not be expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correct- ness of a Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace." The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies. After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he dispatched copies to the lead- ing periodicals, and sat down in the sure hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when SHANDYGAFF 215 the Monthly Review for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put boy to rhyme with sky, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course, "If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, produce better sense and better rhymes." The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested opinion must have con- firmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent, but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seven- teen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so in- flated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross and callous malignity and con- spiracy in the criticism. His theology, his health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused Southey 's interest in the young man's ef- forts to raise himself above his level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge looked over, his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the fervour of his industry and ambition. 216 SHANDYGAFF Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger. The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascina- tion for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own : he himself always felt that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet — epilepsy — his frail and uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of 1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the univer- sity, and accordingly thought it all the more nec- essary to do well at the law. Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six. His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading. Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this SHANDYGAFF 217 period of extreme depression. The "Ode on Dis- appointment," and some of his sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the cliche and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight musings at their highest pitch: — TO CONSUMPTION Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head, Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay, Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, And softly go to slumber with the dead. And if 'tis true what holy men have said, That strains angelic oft foretell the day Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey, O let the aerial music round my bed, Dissolving sad in dying symphony, Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; That I may bid my weeping friends good-byo, Ere I depart upon my journey drear: And smiling faintly on the painful past, Compose my decent head, and breathe my last But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near his well-be- loved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer nights, awed 218 SHANDYGAFF by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heed- less of drenched and muddy clothes. Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St. John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers, who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters during this period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The proper obser- vance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic. In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St. John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of two very dif- ferent undergraduates — William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler. His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a pleasant picture of his quiet rambles through the SHANDYGAFF 219 town, his solitary cups of tea as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is his account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the man- servant who makes the bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for his coal bin. But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the haven of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill health, his tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship ex- amination in December, and when the unfortu- nate fellow pleaded physical inability, they dosed him with "strong medicines" to enable him to face the examiners. After the ordeal he was so unstrung that he hurried off to London to spend Christmas with his aunt. The account of his year at college is very piti- ful. His tutors were, according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as far as possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense enough to restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he was always at work memo- 220 SHANDYGAFF rizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or what not. In a memorandum found in his desk his life was thus planned: "Rise at half -past five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel and breakfast till eight. Study and lectures till one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk and dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. Nine to ten, devotions. Bed at ten." In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of his year, and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him the unusual compliment of keeping him in college through the vacation with a special mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics being considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he was over- taken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and he died on October 19, 1806. Poor Henry ! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. His letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps once a twelvemonth he displays a sad little vein of pleasantry, but not for long. Probably the SHANDYGAFF 221 light-hearted undergraduates about him found him a very prosy, shabby, amd mournful young man, but if one may judge by the outburst of tributary verses published after his death he was universally admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation from a tribute paid him by a lady versifier: If worth, if genius, to the world are dear, To Henry's shade devote no common tear. His worth on no precarious tenure hung, From genuine piety his virtues sprung: If pure benevolence, if steady sense, Can to the feeling heart delight dispense; If all the highest efforts of the mind, Exalted, noble, elegant, refined, Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret, Ye song of genius, pay the mournful debt! TRIVIA The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame. — Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. VHt. f I! "^HE bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian civilization JL demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family, should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of mature years who do not know the relative batting averages of the Red Sox and the Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of from thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what one means by bachelor) must either marry and settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay please notice. The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled the shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without ruth. SHANDYGAFF 223 But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful born bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But that most amiable of cities does not encourage detached and meditative bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known as " a guarded education in morals and man- ners" at Haverford College, our hero passed to Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to Oxford. Literature and liberalism became his pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself en- grossed in the task of proving to the British electo- rate that England need not always remain the same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir Henry Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful short stories about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnas- sus") and a valuable little book on the history and habits of the English language. But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his mental humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by incomprehen- sible twinges of esprit. Travelling about Eng- land, leading the life of the typical English bache- lor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit, 224 SHANDYGAFF evening clothes and tweeds; passing froni country house to London club, from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage. Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set them down under the title of "Trivia/' and now at length we are en- riched by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately intel- lectual brainslide of our generation. This is no Ring Lardner,no Irvin Cobb, no Casey SHANDYGAFF 225 at the bat. Mr. Smith is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual vir- ginity. He comes to us trailing clouds of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered specula- tion which is our home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as disturbing as devilled crabs. Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from mind to mind, leaping — a shy and shining spark — from brain to brain! I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked ! Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm — all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scena- rio of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences — the mind of a strolling bachelor. 226 SHANDYGAFF Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of mod- esty at the thought of all his sacred spots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away. " These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large, Carnivorous Mammal, belong- ing to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orange-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And his heart, we find, is strangely like our own. His reveries, his sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I wish I were un- flinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eye- brows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist." Like us he has that dreadful feeling (now and then) of being only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and pros- perous merchants and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man, with the thought of the meaningless creation SHANDYGAFF