Shandygaff Part 7

But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame cunningly sheltered in a bra.s.s 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 sanct.i.ty 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 Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you still light the 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 prom 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 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 one I had antic.i.p.ated, 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 a.s.sume 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.

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 ma.n.u.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_.]

In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself.

Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never did the merry life of a ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script readers? Also I realized the other day, while reading a ma.n.u.script 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 cla.s.s, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and nights a.s.siduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and strange. A gradual _stult.i.tia_ 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 fiction that pa.s.ses 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 Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a ma.n.u.script 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 capacity 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 ma.n.u.script 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 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 ma.n.u.scripts, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 t.i.tle of a novel in ma.n.u.script which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable 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 undamped unless your cerebral ooze really has something 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 ma.n.u.script before him, but by its absolute literary nonent.i.ty, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition 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 pa.s.sions tumble and tussle.

Another lady begins her novel with the following psycha.n.a.lysis:

"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a p.r.o.nounced 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 fashionable 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 ma.n.u.script (penned by masculine hand) which became 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 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x 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 reddish. 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 a.s.sumed 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 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 sanct.i.ty 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 incessantly, now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, 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.

Ma.n.u.script readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging anecdotes? No cla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 c.o.c.kroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it, and half the ship has to clean up the mess.

--RUDYARD KIPLING.

The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking pa.s.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 att.i.tude toward c.o.c.kroaches 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 honourable and honest work, his disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's att.i.tude toward the purveyors of publicity, you may know him.

One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I 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 Secker in London. Mr. Secker, like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the t.i.tles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned to look over Mr. Secker'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 a.s.sociates; 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. Secker's t.i.tles for the winter of 1915-16 that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory l.u.s.t, upon the not-to-be-forgotten words.

MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA.

Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a t.i.tle? 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 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 thousand 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 "Casuals" was published, but at that time it was not 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 cla.s.ses--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 ill.u.s.trates my theme, the problem of human folly.