Mince Pie Part 12

MRS. IZAAK WALTON WRITES A LETTER TO HER MOTHER

CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, April 28, 1639.

My Dearest Mother: Matters indeed pa.s.s from badd to worse, and I fear mee that with Izaak spending all hys tyme angling along riversydes and neglecting the millinery shoppe (wych is our onlie supporte, for can bodye and soule be keppt in one by a few paltrie brace of trouts a weeke?) wee shall soone come to a sorrye ende. How many tymes, deare Mother, have I bewailed my follye in wedding this creature who seemeth to mee more a fysh than a man, not mearly by reason of hys madnesse for the gracelesse practice of water-dabbling, but eke for hys pa.s.sion for swimming in barley wine, ale, malmsey and other infuriatyng liquours.

What manner of companye doth this dotard keepe on his fyshing pastimes, G.o.d wot! Lo he is wonte to come home at some grievous houre of ye nyghte, bearing but a smalle catche but plentyful aroma of drinke, and ofttimes alsoe hys rybalde freinds do accompany hym. Nothing will serve but they must arouse our kytchen-maide and have some paltry chubb or gudgeon fryed in greese, filling ye house wyth nauseous odoures, and wyth their ill prattle of fyshing tackle, not to say the comely milke-maides they have seen along some wanton meadowside, soe that I am moste distraught. You knowe, my deare, I never colde abyde fyssche being colde clammy cretures, and loe onlye last nyghte this Monster dyd come to my beddside where I laye asleepyng and wake me fromm a sweet drowse by dangling a string of loathsome queasy trouts, still dryppinge, against my nose. Lo, says he, are these not beuties? And his reek of barley wine did fille the chamber. Worste of alle, deare Mother, this all-advised wretche doth spend alle his vacant houres in compiling a booke on the art (as he calleth it) of angling, surely a trifling petty wanton taske that will

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make hym the laughing-stocke of all sober men. G.o.d forbidd that oure littel son sholde be brought uppe in this nastye squanderinge of tyme, wych doth breede nought (meseems) but ale-bibbing and ye disregarde of truth. Oure house, wych is but small as thou knowest, is all cluttered wyth his slimye tackle, and loe but yesterdaye I loste a customer fromm ye millinery shoppe, shee averring (and I trow ryghtly) that ye shoppe dyd stinke of fysshe. Ande soe if thys thyng do continue longer I shall ripp uppe and leave, for I thoght to wed a man and not a paddler of dytches. O howe I longe for those happy dayes with thee, before I ever knew such a thyng as a fysshe existed! Sad too it is that he doth justifye his vain idle wanton pasttyme by misquoting scriptures. Saint Peter, and soe on. Three kytchen maides have lefte us latelye for barbyng themselves upon hydden hookes that doe scatter our shelves and drawers.

Thy persecuted daughter, ANNE WALTON.

TRUTH

Our mind is dreadfully active sometimes, and the other day we began to speculate on Truth.

Our friends are still avoiding us.

Every man knows what Truth is, but it is impossible to utter it. The face of your listener, his eyes mirthful or sorry, his eager expectance or his churlish disdain insensibly distort your message. You find yourself saying what you know he expects you to say, or (more often) what he expects you not to say. You may not be aware of this, but that is what happens. In order that the world may go on and human beings thrive, nature has contrived that the Truth may not often be uttered.

And how is one to know what is Truth? He thinks one thing before lunch; after a stirring bout with corned beef and onions the shining vision is strangely altered. Which is Truth?

Truth can only be attained by those whose systems are untainted by secret influences, such as love, envy, ambition, food, college education and moonlight in spring.

If a man lived in a desert for six months without food, drink or companionship he would be reasonably free from prejudice and would be in a condition to enunciate great truths.

But even then his vision of reality would have been warped by so much sand and so many sunsets.

Even if he survived and brought us his Truth with all the gravity and long night-gown of a Hindu faker, as soon as any one listened to him his message would no longer be Truth. The complexion of his audience, the very shape of their noses, would subtly undermine his magnificent aloofness.

Women have learned the secret. Truth must never be uttered, and never be listened to.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster sh.e.l.l housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster sh.e.l.l of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.

All the above is probably untrue.

THE TRAGEDY OF WASHINGTON SQUARE

One of our favorite amus.e.m.e.nts at lunch-time is to walk down to Henry Rosa's pastry shop, and buy a slab of cinnamon bun. Then we walk round Washington Square, musing, and gradually walking round and engulfing the cinnamon bun at the same time. It is surprising what a large circ.u.mference those buns of Henry's have. By the time we have gnashed our way through one of those warm and mystic phenomena we don't want to eat again for a month.

The real reason for the cinnamon bun is to fortify us for the contemplation and onslaught upon a tragic problem that Washington Square presents to our pondering soul.

Washington Square is a delightful place. There are trees there, and publishing houses and warm green gra.s.s and a fire engine station. There are children playing about on the broad pavements that criss-cross the sward; there is a fine roof of blue sky, kept from falling down by the enormous building at the north side of the Square. But these things present no problems. To our simple philosophy a tree is a vegetable, a child is an animal, a building is a mineral and this cla.s.sification needs no further scrutiny or a.n.a.lysis. But there is one thing in Washington Square that embodies an intellectual problem, a grappling of the soul, a matter for continual anguish and decision.

On the west side of the Square is the Swiss consulate, and, it is this that weighs upon our brooding spirit. How many times we have paused before that quiet little house and gazed upon the little red cross, a Maltese Cross, or a Cross of St. Hieronymus; or whatever the heraldic term is, that represents and symbolizes the diplomatic and spiritual presence of the Swiss republic. We have stood there and thought about William Tell and the Berne Convention and the St. Gothard Tunnel and St.

Bernard dogs and winter sports and alpenstocks and edelweiss and the Jungfrau and all the other trappings and trappists that make Switzerland notable. We have mused upon the Swiss military system, which is so perfect that it has never had to be tested by war; and we have wondered what is the name of the President of Switzerland and how he keeps it out of the papers so successfully. One day we lugged an encyclopedia and the Statesman's Year Book out to the Square with us and sat down on a bench facing the consulate and read up about the Swiss cabinet and the national bank of Switzerland and her child labor problems. Accidentally we discovered the name of the Swiss President, but as he has kept it so dark we are not going to give away his secret.

Our dilemma is quite simple. Where there is a consulate there must be a consul, and it seems to us a dreadful thing that inside that building there lurks a Swiss envoy who does not know that we, here, we who are walking round the Square with our mouth full of Henry Rosa's bun, once spent a night in Switzerland. We want him to know that; we think he ought to know it; we think it is part of his diplomatic duty to know it.

And yet how can we burst in on him and tell him that apparently irrelevant piece of information?

We have thought of various ways of breaking it to him, or should we say breaking him to it?

Should we rush in and say the Swiss national debt is $----, or ---- kopecks, and then lead on to other topics such as the comparative heights of mountain peaks, letting the consul gradually grasp the fact that we have been in Switzerland? Or should we call him up on the telephone and make a mysterious appointment with him, when we could blurt it out brutally?

We are a modest and diffident man, and this little problem, which would be so trifling to many, presents inscrutable hardships to us.

Another aspect of the matter is this. We think the consul ought to know that we spent one night in Switzerland once; we think he ought to know what we were doing that night; but we also think he ought to know just why it was that we spent only one night in his beautiful country. We don't want him to think we hurried away because we were annoyed by anything, or because the national debt was so many rupees or piasters, or because child labor in Switzerland is----. It is the thought that the consul and all his staff are in total ignorance of our existence that galls us. Here we are, walking round and round the Square, bursting with information and enthusiasm about Swiss republicanism, and the consul never heard of us. How can we summon up courage enough to tell him the truth? That is the tragedy of Washington Square.

It was a dark, rainy night when we bicycled into Basel. We hid been riding all day long, coming down from the dark clefts of the Black Forest, and we and our knapsack were wet through. We had been bicycling for six weeks with no more luggage than a rucksack could hold. We never saw such rain as fell that day we slithered and sloshed on the rugged slopes that tumble down to the Rhine at Basel. (The annual rainfall in Switzerland is----.) When we got to the little hotel at Basel we sat in the dining room with water running off us in trickles, until the head waiter glared. And so all we saw of Switzerland was the interior of the tobacconist's where we tried, unsuccessfully, to get some English baccy.

Then he went to bed while our garments were dried. We stayed in bed for ten hours, reading, fairy tales and smoking and answering modestly through the transom when any one asked us questions.

The next morning we overhauled our wardrobe. We will not particularize, but we decided that one change of duds, after six weeks' bicycling, was not enough of a wardrobe to face the Jungfrau and the national debt and the child-labor problenm, not to speak of the anonymous President and the other sights that matter (such as the Matterhorn). Also, our stock of tobacco had run out, and German or French tobacco we simply cannot smoke. Even if we could get along on subst.i.tute fumigants the issue of garments was imperative. The nearest place where we could get any clothes of the kind that we are accustomed to, the kind of clothes that are familiarly symbolized by three well-known initials, was London. And the only way we had to get to London was on our bicycle. We thought we had better get busy. It's a long bike ride from Basel to London. So we just went as far as the Basel Cathedral, so as not to seem too unappreciative of all the treasures that Switzerland had been saving for us for countless centuries; then we got on board our patient steed and trundled off through Alsace.

That was in August, 1912, and we firmly intended to go back to Switzerland the next year to have another look at, the rainfall and the rest of the statistics and status quos. But the opportunity has not come.

So that is why we wander disconsolately about Washington Square, trying to make up our mind to unburden our bosom to the Swiss consul and tell him the worst. But how can one go and interrupt a consul to tell him that sort of thing? Perhaps he wouldn't understand it at all; he would misunderstand our pathetic little story and be angry that we took up his time. He wouldn't think that a shortage of tobacco and clothing was a sufficient excuse for slighting William Tell and the Jungfrau. He wouldn't appreciate the frustrated emotion and longing with which we watch the little red cross at his front door, and think of all it means to us and all it might have meant.

We took another turn around Washington Square, trying to embolden ourself enough to go in and tell the consul all this. And then our heart failed us. We decided to write a piece for the paper about it, and if the consul ever sees it he will be generous and understand. He will know why, behind the humble facade of his consulate on Washington Square, we see the heaven-piercing summits of Switzerland rising like a dream, blue and silvery and tantalizing.

P.S. Since the above we have definitely decided not to go to call on the Swiss consul. Suppose he were only a vice-consul, a Philadelphia Swiss, who had never been to Switzerland in his life!

IF MR. WILSON WERE THE WEATHER MAN

My Fellow Citizens: It is very delightful to be here, if I may be permitted to say so, and I consider it a distinguished privilege to open the discussion as to the probable weather to-morrow not only, but during the days to come. I can easily conceive that many of our forecasts will need subsequent reconsideration, for if I may judge by my own study of these matters, the climate is not susceptible of confident judgments at present.

An overwhelming majority of the American people is in favor of fine weather. This underlying community of purpose warms my heart. If we do not guarantee them fine weather, cannot you see the picture of what would come to pa.s.s? Your hearts have instructed you where the rain falls. It falls upon senators and congressmen not only--and for that we need not feel so much chagrin--it falls upon humble homes everywhere, upon plain men, and women, and children. If I were to disappoint the united expectation of my fellow citizens for fine weather to-morrow I would incur their merited scorn.

I suppose no more delicate task is given any man than to interpret the feelings and purposes of a great climate. It is not a task in which any man can find much exhilaration, and I confess I have been puzzled by some of the criticisms leveled at my office. But they do not make any impression on me, because I know that the sentiment of the country at large will be more generous. I call my fellow countrymen to witness that at no stage of the recent period of low barometric pressure have I judged the purposes of the climate intemperately. I should be ashamed to use the weak language of vindictive protest.

I have tried once and again, my fellow citizens, to say to you in all frankness what seems to be the prospect of fine weather. There is a compulsion upon one in my position to exercise every effort to see that as little as possible of the hope of mankind is disappointed. Yet this is a hope which cannot, in the very nature of things, be realized in its perfection. The utmost that can be done by way of accommodation and compromise has been performed without stint or limit. I am sure it will not be necessary to remind you that you cannot throw off the habits of the climate immediately, any more than you can throw off the habits of the individual immediately. But however unpromising the immediate outlook may be, I am the more happy to offer my observations on the state of the weather for to-morrow because this is not a party issue.

What a delightful thought that is! Whatever the condition of sunshine or precipitation vouchsafed to us, may I not hope that we shall all meet it with quickened temper and purpose, happy in the thought that it is our common fortune?