Read Ebook: Journeys to Bagdad by Brooks Charles S Charles Stephen Lewis Allen Illustrator

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Ebook has 148 lines and 20539 words, and 3 pages

d, like a family horse.

Here was quandary. I looked at Bell, but God forgive me, it was not with the old trustfulness. He was on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had set him thus conspicuous with intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?

And now it seemed he was in some sort a villain. Although shocked, I felt a secret joy. For somewhat too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you will steal a slim occasion to proclaim a flaw. There is much human nature goes to the stoning of a saint. In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire that chaste assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I should neighbor them with this Bell, who, as it appeared, was no better than a wolf in calf's clothing. It was Little Red Riding Hood, you will recall, who mistook a wolf for her grandmother. And with what grief do we look on her unhappy end!

My hand was now raised to drag Bell out by the heels, when I reflected that what I had heard might be unfounded gossip, mere tattle, and that before I turned against an old acquaintance, it were well to set an inquiry afoot. First, however, I put him alongside Herbert Spencer. If it were Bell's desire to play the grandmother to him, he would find him tough meat.

Bell, John--I looked him up, first in volume Aus to Bis of the encyclopedia, without finding him, and then successfully in the National Biography--Bell, John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 1745, published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, and after this assault, with the blood upon him, lived fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then but a bit of wild oats, no hanging matter. I now went at the question deeply. Yet I left him awhile with the indigestible Herbert.

So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare. Bell was not a man of the schools. Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was not to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of his plays. Instead, he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the gallery laugh.

A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped a dinner out, and being of a consequence in a kindly mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat abated in my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over its sides and along its yellow edges. Then I made myself comfortable and opened it up.

There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our title-pages. It is in a mean spirit that we pinch and starve them. I commend the older kind wherein, generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet that shall follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go within that booth that has most allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door, my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the title-page.

Bell's title-page is of the right kind. In the profusion and variety of its letters it is like a printer's sample book, with tall letters and short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.

There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting from the past.

Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling hospital--sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text. "Where grief is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid slowly on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just expression of it.... Ardent affection is gained by closing both hands warmly, at half arm's length, the fingers intermingling, and bringing them to the breast with spirit.... Folding arms, with a drooping of the head, describe contemplation." I have put it to you and you can judge it.

It must appear from this, that, although one gains no knowledge of Shakespeare, one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his time. And this is just as well. For Bell's light on Shakespeare would be but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that Bell's smoking light goes wandering off.

As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in the pit, in that tinkling time of 'seventy-four. The patched Laetitia sits surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress." "The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, of odes to red heels and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It was town-and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in their new creation with sun and shadow on them, together with the minstrelsy of the winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one? London was so certain it was the center of circumambient space. Tintinnabulate, little Bell!

So you see that the head and front of Bell's villainy was that he was a little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a gallows matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the contrary, if gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for clement judgment.

In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little "skike." But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit him virtuous.

A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.

It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I'm told, though I answer not for the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper scandal being hissed about , all the inmates became distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.

This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is true he had given me no "chill and arid knowledge" of Shakespeare, but I had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full acquittal.

No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom. At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.

He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?

THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS

THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS

It sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend from the stern business of this present time to write of night-caps: And yet while the discordant battles are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes, it is relief if there be intermingled a small, shrill treble--any slightest squeak outside the general woe.

There was a time when the chief issue of fowl was feather-beds. Some few tallest and straightest feathers, maybe, were used on women's hats, and a few of better nib than common were set aside for poets' use--goose feathers in particular being fashioned properly for the softer flutings, whether of Love or Spring--but in the main the manifest destiny of a feather was a feather-bed.

In those days it was not enough that you plunged to the chin in this hot swarm of feathers, for discretion, in an attempt to ward off from you all snuffling rheums, coughings, hackings and other fleshly ills, required you before kicking off the final slippers to shut the windows against what were believed to be the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. You slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the curtains had to be pulled together beyond the peradventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a sunbonnet and the cords dangled against his chest, but this was a matter of taste. It was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and were adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the dark. Consequently your bed was not exactly like a little boat. Rather it was like a Pullman sleeper, which, as you will remember, was invented early in the nineteenth century and stands as a monument to its wisdom.

I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Desdemona. Further thought gives it explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic speech, "Wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could get at you through the circumvallation of glass, brocade, cotton and feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated house-breaker, compounded out of desperate villainies.

Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least, there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose . Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered through the window.

Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence the harsh opinion against the night softened.

Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand, she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten. It is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that blew across her bed--loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had heard within the night.

It was vanity killed the night-cap. What aldermanic man would risk the chance of seeing himself in the mirror? What judge, peruked by day, could so contain his learned locks? What male with waxed moustachios, or with limpest beard, or chin new-reaped would put his ears in such a compress? You will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when he found the lady in the curl papers in his room. His round face showed red with shame against the dusky bed-curtains, like the sun peering through the fog.

As for bed-curtains, they served the intrigue of at least five generations of novelists from Fielding onward. There was not a rogue's tale of the eighteenth century complete without them. The wrong persons were always being pinned up inside them. The cause of such confusion started in the tap, too much negus or an over-drop of pineapple rum with a lemon in it or a potent drink whose name I have forgotten that was always ordered "and make it luke, my dear." Then, after such evening, a turn to the left instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along the passage, the jiggling of bed-curtains, screams and consternation. It is one of the seven original plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and bed-curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel business, Sheridan have lost fecundity and Dryden starved in a garret. But the moths got into their red brocade at last and a pretty meal they made.

A sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly truce between man and the material universe. The world itself and the void spaces of its wanderings, together with the elements of our celestial neighborhood, have been viewed by man with dark suspicion, with rather a squint-eyed prejudice. Let's take a single case! Winds for a long time have borne bad reputations--except such anemic collateral as are called zephyrs--but winds, properly speaking, which are big and strong enough to have rough chins and beards coming, have been looked upon as roustabouts. What was mere humor in their behavior has been set down to mischief. If a wind in playfulness does but shake a casement, or if in frolic it scatters the ashes across the hearth, or if in liveliness it swishes you as you turn a corner and drives you aslant across the street, is it right that you set your tongue to gossip and judge it a son of Belial?

There are persons also--but such sleep indoors--in whose ears the wind whistles only gloomy tunes. Or if it rise to shrill piping, it rouses only a fear of chimneys. Thus in both high pitch and low there is fear in the hearing of it. Into their faces will come a kind of God-help-the-poor-sailors-in-the-channel look, as in a melodrama when the paper snowstorm is at its worst and the wind machine is straining at its straps. One would think that they were afraid the old earth itself might be buffeted off its course and fall afoul of neighboring planets.

But behold the man whose custom is to sleep upon a porch! At what slightest hint--the night being yet young, with scarce three yawns gone round--does he shut his book and screen the fire! With what speed he bolts the door and puts out the downstairs lights, lest callers catch him in the business! How briskly does he mount the stairs with fingers already on the buttons! Then with what scattering of garments he makes him ready, as though his explosive speed had blown him all to pieces and lodged him about the room!

Then behold him--such general amputation not having proved fatal--advancing to the door muffled like a monk! There is a slippered flight. He dives beneath the covers. You will see no more of him now than the tip of his nose, rising like a little AEtna from the waves.

But the wind sings a sleepy song and the game's too short. Then the wind goes round and round the house looking for the leaves--for the wind is a bit of a nursemaid--and wherever it finds them it tucks them in, under fences and up against cellar windows where they will be safe until morning. Then it goes off on other business, for there are other streets in town and a great many leaves to be attended to.

But the fellow with the periscopic nose above the covers lies on his back beneath the stars, and contemplation journeys to him from the wide spaces of the night.

MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES

MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES

That is the town, I would say, where we had the mutton chops and where we heard the bullfrogs on the bridge. Or that town may be circumstanced in cherry pie, a comical face at the next table, a friendly dog with hair-trigger tail, or some immortal glass of beer on a bench outside a road-inn. These things make that town as a flame in the darkness, a flame on a hillside to overtop my course. Many years can go grinding by without obliterating the pleasant sight of its flare. Or maybe the town is so intermingled with dismal memories that no good comes of too particularly locating it. Then Tony Lumpkin's advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house is enough. "It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way." And let it go at that.

Maps are toadies to the thoroughfares. They shower their attentions on the wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering and irregularity.

Story-writers have nearly always been the foes of maps, finding in them a kind of cramping of their mental legs. And in consequence they have struck upon certain devices for getting off the map and away from its precise and restricting bigotry. Davy fell asleep. It was Davy, you remember, who grew drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed away with the goblin in his grandfather's clock. Robinson Crusoe was driven off his bearings by stress of weather at sea. This is a popular device for eluding the known world. Whenever in your novel you come on a sentence like this--On the third night it came on to blow and that night and the three succeeding days and nights we ran close-reefed before the tempest--whenever you come on a sentence like that, you may know that the author feels pinched and cramped by civilization, and is going to regale you with some adventures of his uncharted imagination which are likely to be worth your attention.

Then there was Sentimental Tommy! Do you remember how he came to find the Enchanted Street? It happened that there was a parade, "an endless row of policemen walking in single file, all with the right leg in the air at the same time, then the left leg. Seeing at once that they were after him, Tommy ran, ran, ran until in turning a corner he found himself wedged between two legs. He was of just sufficient size to fill the aperture, but after a momentary lock he squeezed through, and they proved to be the gate into an enchanted land." In that lies the whole philosophy of going without a map. There is magic in the world then. There are surprises. You do not know what is ahead. And you cannot tell what is about to happen. You move in a proper twilight of events. After that Tommy went looking for policemen's legs. Doubtless there were some details of the wizardry that he overlooked, as never again could he come out on the Enchanted Street in quite the same fashion. Alice had a different method. She fell down a rabbit-hole and thereby freed herself from some very irksome lessons and besides met several interesting people, including a Duchess. Alice may be considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit-hole. Before her time it was known only to rabbits, wood-chucks, and dogs on holidays, whose noses are muddy with poking. But since her time all this is changed. Now it is known as the portal of adventure. It is the escape from the plane of life into its third dimension.

Children have the true understanding of maps. They never yield slavishly to them. If they want a pirates' den they put it where it is handiest, behind the couch in the sitting-room, just beyond the glimmer of firelight. If they want an Indian village, where is there a better place than in the black space under the stairs, where it can be reached without great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be behind the asparagus bed. The North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear a child's laugh, if it be a real child and therefore a great poet, you may know that from the garret window, even as you pass, Sinbad, adrift on the Indian Ocean, may be looking for a sail, and that the forty thieves huddle, daggers drawn, in the coal hole. Then it is a fine thing for a child to run away to sea--well, really not to sea, but down the street, past gates and gates and gates, until it comes to the edge of the known and sees a collie or some such terrible thing. I myself have fine recollection of running away from a farmhouse. Maybe I did not get more than a hundred paces, but I looked on some broad heavens, saw a new mystery in the night's shadows, and just before I became afraid I had a taste of a new life.

To me it is strange that so few people go down rabbit-holes. We cannot be expected to find the same delight in squeezing our fat selves behind the couch of evenings, nor can we hope to find that the Chinese Mountains actually lie beyond our garden fence. We cannot exactly run away either; after one is twenty, that takes on an ugly and vagrant look, commendable as it may be on the early marches. Prince Hal is always a more amiable spectacle than John Falstaff, much as we love the knight. But there are men, however few, who although they are beyond forty, retain in themselves a fine zest for adventure. A man who, I am proud to say, is a friend of mine and who is a devil for work by which he is making himself known in the world, goes of evenings into the most delightful truantry with his music. And it isn't only music, it is flowers and pictures and books. Of course he has an unusual brain and few men can hope to equal him. He is like Disraeli in that respect, who, it is said, could turn in a flash from the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the contemplation of the daffodils nodding along the fence. But do the rest of us try? There are few men of business, no matter with what singleness of purpose they have been installing their machinery and counting their nickels, but will admit that this is but a small part of life. They dream of rabbit-holes, but they will never go down one. I had dinner recently with a man who by his honesty and perseverance has built up and maintained a large and successful business. An orchestra was playing, and when it finished the man told me that if he could write music like that we had heard he would devote himself to it. Well, if he has enough desire in him for that speech, he owes it to himself that he sound his own depths for the discoveries he may make. It is doubtful if this quest would really lead him to write music, God forbid; it might however induce him to develop a latent appreciation until it became in him both a refreshment and a stimulus.

There are many places uncharted that are worth a visit. Treasure Island is somewhere on the seas, the still-vex'd Bermoothes feel the wind of some southern ocean, the coast of Bohemia lies on the furthermost shore of fairyland--all of these wonderful, like white towers in the mind. But nearer home, as near as the pirates' den that we built as children, within sight of our firelight, should come the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and unvisited seas.

TUNES FOR SPRING

TUNES FOR SPRING

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! Spring, the sweet Spring!

If by any chance you have seen a man in a coat with sagging pockets, and a cloth hat of the latest fashion but two--a hat which I may say is precious to him --emerging from his house just short of noon, do not lay his belated appearance to any disorder in his conduct! Certain neighbors at their windows as he passed, raised their eyes in a manner, if I mistake not, of suspicion that a man should be so far trespassing on the day, for nine o'clock should be the penny-picker's latest departure for the vineyard. Thereafter the street belongs to the women, except for such sprouting and unripe manhood as brings the groceries, and the hardened villainy that fetches ice and with deep voice breaks the treble of the neighborhood. But beyond these there are no men in sight save the pantalooned exception who mows the grass, and with the whirr of his clicking knives sounds the prelude of the summer. I'll say by way of no more than a parenthetical flick of notice that his eastern front, conspicuous from the rear as he bends forward over his machine, shows a patched and jointed mullionry that is not unlike the tracery of some cathedral's rounded apse. But I go too far in imagery. Plain speech is best. I'll waive the gothic touch.

But observe this sluggard who issues from his door! He knows he is suspected--that the finger is uplifted and the chin is wagging. And so he takes on a smarter stride with a pretense of briskness, to proclaim thereby the virtue of having risen early despite his belated appearance, and what mighty business he has despatched within the morning.

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