Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 8

"Most people are fools," said the Man Above the Square. "You may go now."

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest autobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and still his mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenly he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats.

The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire.

Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago," he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added: "Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose," making "purple riot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together in the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Alice to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long honeymoon."

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name was really Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had trusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What further reflections this question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the mood.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_The Vacant Room in Drama_

I am content to let Mr. John Corbin sing the praises of the stage without scenery; I prefer to sing the praises of the stage without actors. Ever since I was a little boy, nothing in the world has been for me so full of charm and suggestiveness as an empty room. I remember as vividly as though it were week before last being brought home from a visit somewhere, when I was four years old, and arriving after dark. My mother had difficulty in finding the latch-key in her bag (I have since noted that this is a common trait of women), and while the search was going on I ran around the corner of the house and peered in one of the low windows of the library. The moonlight lay in two oblong patches on the floor; and as I pressed my nose against the pane and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually emerged from the gloom, as if a faint, invisible light were being turned slowly up by an invisible hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did by day, but everything took on a new and mysterious significance that bewildered me. I think it must also have terrified me, for I recall my father's carrying me suddenly into the glare of the hall, and saying, "What's the matter with the boy?" And to-day I cannot enter a theatre, even at the prosaic hour of ten in the morning, when the chairs are covered with cloths and maids are dusting, when the house looks very small and the unlit and unadorned stage very like a barn, without a thrill of imaginative pleasure. I have even mounted the stage of an empty theatre and addressed with impa.s.sioned, soundless words the deeply stirred, invisible, great audience, rising row on row to the roof. At such moments I have experienced the creative joy of a mighty orator or a sublime actor; I have actually felt my pulses leap. And then the entrance of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter the illusion!

But it is when I am one of a real audience, and the stage is disclosed set with scenery but barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, the keenest pleasure. A few playwrights have recognized the power of the vacant room in drama, but on the whole the opportunities for such enjoyment are far too rare. This is odd, too, with such convincing examples at hand. There is, for instance, the close of the second act of _Die Meistersinger_, when the watchman pa.s.ses through the sleepy town after the street brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathed street lies quiet for a time, before the curtain closes. Of course, here there is music to aid in creating the poetic charm and soothing repose of that moment. But at the end of _Sh.o.r.e Acres_ there was no such aid. Who that saw it, however, can forget that final picture?

After Nat Berry--played by Mr. Herne, the author--had scratched a bit of frost off the window-pane to peer out into the night, locked the door, and banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged footsteps up the stairs to bed. At the landing he turned to survey the old kitchen below, that lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of his eye.

Then he disappeared with his candle, and the stage grew quite dim, save for the red glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall; and through a mist of tears, tears it cleansed one's soul to shed, the audience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now familiar room where so much of joy and grief had happened,--deserted, tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to be how vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play!

It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full reality until the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus spoken the epilogue.

It is strange to me that more playwrights have not profited by such examples. The cry of the average playgoer is for "action," to be sure; but even "action" may be heightened by contrast, by peace and serenity. Certainly the vitality, the illusion, of a scenic background on the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain amount of attention to it alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in _The Return of the Native_, paints Egdon Heath--"Haggard Egdon"--in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant stage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_On Giving an Author a Plot_

There are two people who annoy an author more than any others--the person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical, or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a dandy plot for you"--and proceeds to tell it.

The first person, of course, is annoying, because an author's stories always _are_ either biographical or autobiographical, and he never cares to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To be sure, his characters are composites, and his self-revelations are rather possibilities (or even, alas, Freudian wishes!) than records of actuality. But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing female who has developed a sudden pa.s.sion for calling on your wife, and is heard to remark, "Oh, is that where he writes?" as you flee by a back door, down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much because most of the "dandy plots" that he or she tells are h.o.a.ry with age, or even because most writers don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't define a plot if they had to; but rather because a writer, however humble, has to feel the idea for a story come glowing up over the horizon of his brain out of the east of his own subconsciousness, or it is never his, it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color and light to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which your modest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaning friend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of print could draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps deserves some attention.

Suppose it is my common method, in writing a story, to start from some social situation which illumines a strata of life; suppose, let us a.s.sume, that I am present at a dinner party where a radical has got in by mistake and says something which profoundly shocks some capitalistic pirate who honestly feels himself a pillar of law and order, and in this situation I see an irony which gradually demands fictional expression, as imagined characters and more extensive clashes begin to shape in my brain. There you have a not at all impossible evolution of a story. But now suppose that instead of my being present at this party, a friend had been present, quite as alive as I to the ironies of the situation, and suppose my friend later repeated the incident to me--why should it not serve me just as well, why should it not start the fictional urge, the gestation of character and incident?

Generalizing is dangerous work. Of course, there may be authors in whom it would start the process. But I have never known one. Even in so exceptional a case as this--of course, the usual friendly suggestion has no real meat of fiction in it at all--something is lacking to fire the imagination. It is exactly as if your nose were called upon to sense, or your retina to image, an odor or a scene described to you and not directly experienced. Your brain accepts the description, but there is no warmth in the reaction, no tingle of life. Just so, it would almost seem, the conception for a story, a poem, no doubt for a picture, too, or a strain of music, is something less, or more, than merely mental; it is in some subtle way sensory, as if the brain had fingers which must themselves touch the thing directly to get the feel of it. Is it not, perhaps, this fact which has caused so many artists, consciously or unconsciously, to believe in "inspiration"?

The singing line walks from nowhere into the poet's head, the perfect situation comes to the writer of fiction when he is least expecting it. To take a humble example, I was once sitting in an editor's office, listening while he expounded to me a grand "plot" for a series of stories. I looked across the street from his window to avoid his eyes, lest I should show my lack of appreciation, and there beheld a slight incident which I instantly knew was a starting-point. It turned out to be worth a year's income to me. Yet, to a merely impersonal judgment, the editor's idea was more interesting and worth while than mine. Only it wasn't mine; that's the point. It was foreign born, and could never become a citizen of my mental commonwealth. I have not quite reached the pitch of calling my ideas inspirations, but I long ago recognized that unless they were my ideas from the dim days before their birth they could never be mine, and it was only a waste of time to wrestle with them. So when a friend declares he has a dandy plot for me, I summon what patience I may and pretend to listen, while planning a better succession of perennials for next year's garden, or mentally reviewing the prospect of cutting three strokes off my golf score.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_The Twilight Veil_

New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest our hearts and fancies find repose in memory--the memory of an old New England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf beating up the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second and third generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true New Yorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women on Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the great majority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts either the memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give the allegiance of home love. Ours is a curious city in that respect.

Perhaps, indeed, it is a fortunate one. Without such memory or such hope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New Yorkers by economic necessity would be a deadly thing--or shall we say, a more deadly thing?

If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like the Yale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random, asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldom enough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you will probably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city.

A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after we have lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are p.r.o.ne to forget what a geographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as a surprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us, country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little white dwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (I know the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red, but white!) This is probably one reason why our aesthetic sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. Yet we do both the city and ourselves an injustice by this more or less unconscious att.i.tude. Let us consider picturesque to mean what is shaped by chance and the play of light into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walk the town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see the picturesque on every side.

There is the Plaza Hotel, for example. Every New Yorker and every visitor to New York knows it,--a great, white, naked sky-sc.r.a.per, with a green hip-roof, rising close to the Park and St. Gaudens' golden bronze of General Sherman. But how many know that it is probably the one sky-sc.r.a.per in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal j.a.panese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?

They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear n.o.ble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. The view is not easy to find, unless you are one of those who know your Central Park. But a little searching will uncover it. You will see in the southeast corner of the Park a lake, and just beyond this lake you will find a path turning west. That path leads to a stone bridge over a northward-stretching inlet of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and turn your face to the south. At your feet the bank goes down sharply to the still, dark water. Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky, covered with thick shrubbery and trees. Shooting up apparently out of these trees is the white wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the air, and down into the water sinks its still reflection, to an equal depth. It rises alone, open sky to left and right, and there is just room in the lake for its replica. The picture is impressive by day, but as twilight begins to steal over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearly softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among the ancient and "picturesque" cities of the earth without finding a rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal sky-sc.r.a.per in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the forest pool!

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. For instance, as you pa.s.s into the Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wave along the green sh.o.r.e of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night.

The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about you are but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In the great apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and the looming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giant liners going by you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn--which no self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except under compulsing!--you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs'

Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.

For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side of Washington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I walked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and back again. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changing aspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons in the country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signs no less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. The western wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; and though the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up those brick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch their fantastic tracery.

Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the shrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay with sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come to pa.s.s. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-sc.r.a.pers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring!

Imagination, you scoff--and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a cl.u.s.ter of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,

"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles Miles on miles...."

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red sunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the tower itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a star-cl.u.s.ter in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its beautiful image behind my eyelids.