The Invisible Censor Part 11

It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors are not in public life; that they are very distinguished, very wealthy personages, receiving private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other of their responsibilities, accessories, possessions. With every deference I answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking, these are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. Their t.i.tle may be secure, but not their peace of mind. Whatever they wish, they are obliged to administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of gravitation keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers. And so in some degree they are connected with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. Without necessarily being popular, they are in the center of populace. They have to meet, if only to repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being public characters. It is often against their desires. But being called upon to convert a part of their souls into a reception-room, a place where people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it follows that they give up some of their ecstatic privacy in order to retain the rest.

This I do not decry. For certain good and valuable considerations one might be induced to barter some of one's own choice stock of privacy, but for myself I should insist on retaining enough to keep up my interest in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be dogged by urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, no.

"There's a telegram upstairs for you, sir." "A telegram? How long has it been here?" "It came about half an hour ago." "Ah, thank you.... No, never mind, I'm going upstairs." What may not this sort of ba.n.a.lity precede? Perhaps another ba.n.a.lity, in ink. But not always. A telegram is an arrow that is aimed to fly straight and drive deep. Whether from friend or rival, whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the heart is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the message has come, singing enigmatically across the country. But there is a path that leaps out of the dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings, homes, hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion from which piercing nerve-fibers curve into the last crevices of human lives. When you enter it to send a telegram it may depress you. You submit your confidence across a public counter. But what does it matter to a creature glazed by routine? He enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of their meaning. To him a word is not a bullet-just an inert little lump of lead.

Some messages come with a force not realizable. Tragedy dawns slowly.

The mind envisages, not apprehending. And then, for all the customary world outside, one is penned in one's trouble alone. One remembers those sailors who were imprisoned in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off from escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the a.s.suaging waters on every side, they could see the free, could cry out to them, could almost touch hands. But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a slip of paper one may meet one's own. There are countries to-day where the very word _telegram_ must threaten like a poisoned spear. And such wounds as are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense is worse than dreadful certainty. But there are shocks which are irreparable. It is cruel to break those shocks, crueler to deliver them.

All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, the telegram attends on death, it attends no less eagerly on love and birth. "A boy arrived this morning. Father and child doing well"-this is more frequently the tenor of the wire. And the wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember Bernard Shaw's rebuff to Lady Randolph Churchill for asking him to dinner? He had the vegetarian view of eating his "fellow-creatures." He chided her for inviting a person of "my well-known habits." "Know nothing of your habits," came the blithe retort, "hope they're better than your manners."

The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we struggled to put our all in ten words-simple, at least, if not sensuous and pa.s.sionate. Now the day-letter and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No transition from Greek to Byzantine could be worse than this. We should resist it. The time will doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as austere and frugal in our use of the telegram. But we should preserve this sign of our Spartan manhood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, virginal, terse.

OF PLEASANT THINGS

When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that pa.s.sed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under the old city gateway and out through the mean city "lanes." The other branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they pa.s.sed over the uneven road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver's seat, a battered silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady, homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die.

The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its pa.s.sengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I hate bells-the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or the dinner bell.

I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern sh.o.r.e of Long Island, who has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.

The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the same, or even a more aetherial, radiance. From the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor.

This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.

Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life that trails so impudently across the path, the life that sp.a.w.ns in the forgotten pond-this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the only living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily paddled through waters laced down with sc.u.m. It was pleasant to see him, a not too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family had been home the gardener would have scoured him.

Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire-which I thank heaven I am not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one-I should take pleasure in the silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up everything, even the Sunday newspapers-those I should enjoy. I should enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets.

The greatest of all plat.i.tudes is the plat.i.tude that life is in the striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It is pleasant to think of one's first delicious surrender to fatigue after a long day's haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one's joints, with all one's driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees-but I wish to think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen possess and understand.

These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet.

They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity, admirable masters of our mundane inst.i.tutions. But they fill the mind with _-ations_. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free swing of pleasant things.

THE AVIATOR

_So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ _Kept me within his eye,_ _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ _And followed up the sky._

I was the lark whose song was heard When I was lost to sight, I was the golden arrow loosed To pierce the heart of night.

I fled the little earth, I climbed Above the rising sun, I met the morning in a blaze Before my hour was gone.

I ran beyond the rim of s.p.a.ce, Its reins I flung aside, Laughter was mine and mine was youth And all my own was pride.

_So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ _Kept me within his eye,_ _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ _And followed up the sky._

From end to end I knew the way, I had no doubt or fear; The minutes were a forfeit paid To fetch the landfall near.

But all at once my heart I held, My carol frozen died, A white cloud laid her cheek to mine And wove me to her side.

Her icy fingers clasped my flesh, Her hair drooped in my face, And up we fell and down we rose And twisted into s.p.a.ce.

_So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ _Kept me within his eye,_ _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ _And followed up the sky._

Laughter was mine and mine was youth, I pressed the edge of life, I kissed the sun and raced the wind, I found immortal strife.

Out of myself I spent myself, I lost the mortal share, My grave is in the ashen plain, My spirit in the air.

Good-by, sweet pride of man that flew, Sweet pain of man that bled, I was the lark that spilled his heart, The golden arrow sped.

_So endlessly the gray-lipped sea_ _Kept me within his eye,_ _And lean he licked his hollow flanks_ _And followed up the sky._

THE END