Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 15

"'You are old, Father William,'" I quoted.

He rubbed his biceps sadly. "I'm out of practice!" he said with some asperity. But we tried no more stunts on the apple-tree.

Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail fence, gray and old, with brambles growing at the intersections--one of the relics of an elder day in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked at it as he put on his coat.

"There ought to be a b.u.mblebees' nest in that fence," he said. "If we should poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over rotted wood from our fingers."

"Are you looking for trouble?" I asked. "However, if you hold your breath, a bee can't sting you."

"I recall that ancient superst.i.tion--with pain," he smiled. "Why does a bee have such a fascination for a boy? Is it because he makes honey?"

"Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's because he's a bee," I answered. "Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets'

nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer?

We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, and n.o.body could get back in the door without being stung. It was against the unwritten law to stone the school-house nests in vacation time!"

"Recess!" mused Old Hundred. "Do you know, sometimes in court when the judge announces a recess (which he p.r.o.nounces with the accent on the second syllable, a manifest error), those old school-days come back to me, and my case drops clean out of my head for the moment."

"I should think that would be embarra.s.sing," said I.

"It isn't," he said, "it's restful. Besides, it often restores my mislaid sense of humor. I picture the judge out in a school-yard playing leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prosecution and the foreman of the jury. It makes 'em more human to see 'em so."

"A Gilbertian idea, to say the least," I smiled. "Why not set the whole court to playing squat-tag?"

"There was step-tag, too," said Old Hundred. "Remember that? The boy or girl who was It shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened his eyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you moving you became It. On 'ten' you tried to freeze into stiffness. We must have struck some funny att.i.tudes."

"Att.i.tudes," said I, "that was another game. Somebody said 'fear' or 'cat' or 'geography,' and you had to a.s.sume an att.i.tude expressive of the word. The girls liked that game."

"Oh, the girls always liked games where they could show off or get personal attention," replied Old Hundred. "They liked hide-and-seek because you came after them, or because you took one of 'em and went off with her alone to hide behind the wood-shed. They liked kissing games best, though--drop-the-handkerchief and post-office."

"Those weren't recess games," I amended. "Those were party games. You played them when you had your best clothes on, which entirely changed your mental att.i.tude, anyhow. When a girl dropped the handkerchief behind you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you could, and when you got a letter in post-office you had to go into the next room and be kissed. Everybody t.i.ttered at you when you came back."

"Well, soak and scrub were recess games, anyhow. I can hear that glad yell, 'Scrub one!' rising from the first boy who burst out of the school-house door. Then there were dare-base, and foot-ball, which we used to play with an old bladder, or at best a round, black rubber ball, not one of these modern leather lemons. We used to kick it, too.

I don't remember tackling and rushing, till we got older and went to prep school--or you and I went to prep school."

"I'd hate to have been tackled on the old school playground," said I.

"It was hard as rocks."

"It _was_ rocks," said Old Hundred. "You could spin a top on it anywhere."

"Could you spin a top now?" I asked.

"Sure!" said Old Hundred. "And pop at a snapper, too."

"It's wicked to play marbles for keeps," said I impressively. "Only the bad boys do that."

"Poor mother!" said Old Hundred. "Remember the marble rakes we used to make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for the owner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went into the kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences of gambling."

"I know," said I. "It was almost as terrible as sending 'comic valentines.' Remember the 'comics'? They were horribly colored lithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought 'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles wouldn't sell 'em."

"Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "Shall you ever forget Emily Ruggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a flight of steps--a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it was just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars'

companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming ba.s.s voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for all her forbidding manner."

"Of course she loved us," said I. "She loved her country, too. Don't you remember the story of how she paid for a subst.i.tute in the Civil War, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poor woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us.

She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see such shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops and marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important any longer."

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a hill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun.

Old Hundred sat down on a stone.

"I'm weary," he said, "and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore and forty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You look ridiculous."

"Shut up," said I, "and don't get maudlin just because you can't chin yourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"

"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said viciously. "A year at Muldoon's wouldn't bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game, would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, or following a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling 'Daddy on the castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped on Frank Swain's veranda and off again into his mother's flower-bed!"

"I trust not," said I. "Just what are you getting at?"

"This," answered Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive--usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right."

"Old Hundred," said I, "you are something of an idiot. Those games of ours were nature's school; nature takes that way to teach us how to behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how to conquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake, can't you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood without becoming maudlin?"

"You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall," retorted Old Hundred. "No doubt our games were nature's way of teaching us how to be men, but that doesn't alter the fact that the process of being taught was better than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hate these folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as 'potential little men.' Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because they _ain't_ men yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory, because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nasty little beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you!

Well, come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous heap of mortar down there to the south, where there are no children who know how to play, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees' nests in the fences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, the gravestone of a game, and the only sport left is the playing of the market for keeps!"

He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hill in silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. "What do you say to the club for dinner?" he asked. "I ought to go across to the Bar a.s.sociation afterward and look up some cases on that rebate suit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"

"That pleases me all right," I answered. "I've got to meet Ainsley after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going to like it better than the old."

At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a newsboy. "I want to see how the market closed," he explained, as he buried himself in his paper.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Barber Shops of Yesterday_

I have just been to a barber shop,--not a city barber shop, where you expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, "Manicures himself!"--but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not, that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he held a hand-gla.s.s behind my head for me to see the result, quite like his city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say the cut _wasn't_ all right, when the barber held that hand-gla.s.s behind his head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the walls!

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one flight up--a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair between the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go by below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a dark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of the sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the spittoons,--large shallow boxes, two feet square,--four of them, full of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps, and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top shelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used to thrill me, and at twelve I began surrept.i.tiously to feel my chin, to see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the not-too-distant future.

Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several of those pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New York I came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and was restrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I've been ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. I feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burning building upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious streams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles of the engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from every window of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block three stories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save all adjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picture in Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, wore red shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still another displayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it was coated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depicted the same fire, because the trees were in full leaf in the others.

There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss of the Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, and figures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shaken hickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with relief to Maude S. standing before a bright green hedge and looking every inch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches long, framed under gla.s.s, with his weight--a ponderous figure--printed on the frame.

Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he loved was angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long time to cut your hair, even when, on the first hot day of June, you bade him, "take it all off with the lawn-mower." (Do any boys have their heads clean-clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talked of fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew every brook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next day where Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or a shave on the first of April, when "the law went off on trout."

Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Sat.u.r.day, many a pious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshaven or untrimmed.

I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless they have gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of our vanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he sold me when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shall always cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never could shave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only proved himself thereby the ultimate Yankee.