Turns about Town Part 13

"Aphorism--Fear makes cowards of us all.

"Billy Sparks--Fine name for a lawyer.

"Nice name for a landlady--Mrs. Baggs.

"Humorous Christian name for a fat boy--Moscow.

"Name for a clerk--Mr. Fife.

"Good name for someone to cry out on a dark night--Peter Clue! Peter Clue!

"Good name for a sporting character--Bob Paddock.

"Aphorism--A fool and his foot are soon in it.

"Good name for a tea room in Greenwich Village--The Bad Egg.

"Epigrammatic remark--Though somewhat down in the mouth he kept a stiff upper lip."

Then follows this on umbrellas, evidently the opening of an unwritten essay:

And, like umbrellas, with their feathers Shield you in all sorts of weathers.

MICHAEL DRAYTON.

"Among all the ingenious engines which man has contrived for his ornament and protection none, certainly, is more richly idiosyncratic than the umbrella. Literary genius has always instinctively recognized this; and doubtless the esoteric fact has been vaguely felt even by the unthinking; but it is a profound truth which, I fear, has had but slight popular appreciation.

"The use of this historic and peculiarly eloquent article of personal property, the umbrella, ill.u.s.trates pictorially a proverbial allusion to the manifestation of intelligence: it shows that a man has 'sense enough to go in out of the rain.' It reveals not only the profundity of his judgment but the extraordinary play of his cleverness, as it exhibits him as the only animal who after crawling into his hole, figuratively speaking, pulls his hole in after him, or, in other words, carries his roof with him. Further than this, in the idea of carrying an umbrella you find the secret of man's striking success in the world: the intrepidity of his spirit in his tenacious pursuit of his own affairs defies both the black cloud's downpour and the sun's hot eye."

There is this, headed

HUMOR

"There was once a man who was nearly dead from a disease. One day while taking the air a friend cried to him encouragingly, 'Well, I see that you're up and about again.' 'Yes,' replied the sick man good-naturedly, 'I'm able to walk the length of the block now.' This notion was so irresistible that both the quick and the dying burst into laughter."

Among the longer entries in this note-book is the following remarkable psychological study, having as its t.i.tle

TEMPERAMENT

"That morning Kendle had seen himself famous. As he worked he began to feel good in his brain and in his heart and in his stomach. He felt virile, elated, full of power, and strangely happy. The joy of creating a thing of art was upon him. Thrills ran down his spine and into his legs. As he looked at his work he admired it. He knew that this was good art. He felt that here was genius. He saw himself in a delectable picture, an idol applauded of the mult.i.tude, and loved by it. For he believed that the mult.i.tude was born, and ate and slept, and squabbled among itself, and acquired property, and begot offspring, but to await the arrival of genius. And the only genius he knew was genius in eccentric painting. The only genius worth while that is, for there is a genius that invents labor-saving machines, telephones, X-rays, and so forth; but n.o.body loves that genius. It occurred to him that he was a very lovable man, with all his faults (his faults were the lovable ones of genius), and he would soon have achieved a distinction that would make any woman proud of him. He determined to renew his addresses to----.

"Somehow in the evening his intoxication had died down. He felt very sad. His work lay before him with so little eccentricity to it that he was ashamed. His sense of power had quite departed. And now he dismally felt that he would never amount to anything. He was a failure. An idle, wicked, disgraceful fellow, no good in the world, and not worth any woman's attention. His heart felt sick when he thought this. He was very miserable. He despised himself. So he sighed. It would have been better, he thought, if he had apprenticed himself to the plumber's trade in his boyhood. He would in that case have grown up happy and contented, remained at home and done his duty, respected by his neighbors and himself, though only a plumber. A plumber is a good honest man that pays his debts.

"At home! Why was he not there, anyway? What good was he doing away from there? There was his mother, in her declining years. Was his place not by her side? He would never desert his mother, he thought. And Sis!

there was Sis. He would never desert Sis. How good they had been to him!

How they believed in him! (he squirmed) how they believed in him still.

He imagined them showing his most sensible pictures around to the neighbors. 'My son is an artist,' he heard his mother say. His flesh crawled. How mad he had been! How contemptible he was! Still a man was not hopeless who had a soul for such feelings as he had now. He would reform. He would henceforth eschew the company of such as Walker. He enumerated his vices and renounced them one by one. He began life over again. He would bask in the simple domestic pleasures of his mother in her declining years, and Sis. He would get up very early every morning and go to his humble toil before it was quite light. He felt himself walking along in the chill of dawn--the street lamps still lit. He would work hard all day. He would always tell the truth. Every Sat.u.r.day night he would come home tired out, with fifteen dollars in his pocket. This he would throw into his mother's lap. 'Here, mother,' he would say in a fine manly voice, 'here are fifteen dollars.' His mother would put her ap.r.o.n to her eyes, and look at him through tears of pride and joy. He would wear old clothes and be very honest and upright looking, the sort of young man that Russell Sage would have approved, that Sis might dress. He would not mind the sneers and gibes of the world, for he would be _right_.

"He looked defiantly around the room for a few sneers and gibes."

CHAPTER XX

INCLUDING STUDIES OF TRAFFIC "COPS"

The other day it was such a pleasant April day I thought I'd take the afternoon off. It was such a very pleasant day that I didn't want to go anywhere in particular. Do you ever feel that way? I mean like you just wanted to be by yourself and sit down and think awhile.

Later on, you have an idea, you'll come back into things much refreshed.

But the thought of answering these letters now, or of doing this or doing that, kind of lets you down inside your stomach. Your brain seems to have dropped down somewhere behind your ears. If that fellow across the office comes over to pull another of his bright ideas on you you think you'll probably scream, or brain him, or something. He's getting terrible, anyhow.

You have any number of excellent friends, and (ordinarily) you are quite fond of them. Perhaps you will go to see one of them. There's Ed, you've been wanting for you don't know how long to go round and see him. Never seemed to have time. But no; you don't want to see Ed--today. Same way with all the others, as you go over the list of them in your mind.

Couldn't bear to see any of 'em--not this afternoon. For one thing, they're all so selfish.... So interested in their own affairs.

As I was straightening up my desk an idea came to me about jobs. Seems to me that when I have a job I'm all the while worrying about how to break out of it. I think: Well, I'm tied up here until the first of the year; but I'll sure shake it after that; too cramped and limited. And then when I am out of a job I immediately begin to worry about how to get another one. That's Life, I guess.

I turned uptown and floated along with the current of the Avenue throng.

It was a glittering April throng. The newest stockings were out. I had not seen them before. The newest stockings (you will have noted) are so very, very thin and the pores (so to say) in them are so large that they give the ladies who wear them the agreeable effect of being bare-legged.

At Thirty-fourth Street the traffic policeman on post at our side of this corner, by an outward gesture of his arms pressed back the sidewalk stream for a couple of moments of cross-town vehicular traffic.

He stood within a few inches of the front row of the largely feminine crush. Whenever an impatient pedestrian broke through the line he had formed and attempted to dart across the street he emitted a peculiar little whistle followed by the admonishment, "Hold on, lady!" or "Hey there, mister!" Thus having returned the derelict to cover, he would smile very intimately, with a kind of sly cuteness, at the more handsome young women directly before him--who invariably t.i.ttered back at him.

And thus, frequently, a little conversation was started.

Now as a vigilant historian of the social scene this matter of the gallant relations of traffic policemen to perambulating ladies of somewhat fashionable, even patrician aspect, I find highly interesting.

It is a subject which does not seem to have been much examined into.

Why, exactly, should flowers of debutante-Bryn-Mawr appearance look with something like tenderness at policemen? Seems to me I have read now and then in the papers strikingly romantic stories wherein a mounted policeman in the park (formerly a cowboy) saved the life of an equestrienne heiress on a runaway mount, and was rewarded the next day (or something like that) with her hand. Such a story my mind always gladly accepts as one of the dramatic instances where life artistically imitates the movies. Crossing Thirty-fourth Street, however, seems to me another matter.

And what system of selection operates in the Department whereby this officer or that is chosen from among all his brethren for the paradisaical job of being beau of a fashionable crossing? And would you not think that a more uniform judgment would be exercised in the election of men to such Brummellian duties? Adonises in the traffic force I have, indeed, seen (there is one at Forty-second Street), but this chap of whom I have just been speaking (the whimsical whistler) certainly was not one of them. He was what is called "pie-faced."

Hunched up his shoulders like an owl. Yet his ogling of loveliness in new spring attire was completely successful, was in no instance that I observed resented, was received with arch merriment. Indeed, his heavy, pink-tea attentions were obviously regarded as quite flattering by the fair recipients! As he let the tide break to cross the street it was plain, from bright glances backward, that he had fluttered little hearts which would smile upon him again. And so, in such a Romeo-like manner, does this bulky sentimentalist, armed with concealed weapons, have dalliance with the pa.s.sing days. What you 'spose it is about him gives him his fascination in flashing eyes haughty to the rest of the masculine world--his bright b.u.t.tons, or what?

Yes; these curious and romantic little relationships between traffic cops on social duty, so to say, and their dainty admirers are not (in some instances at least) so transient as to be merely the exchange of roguish words and soft glances of the moment. There is that really august being of matinee-idol figure at--well, let us say at Forty-second Street. Sir Walter Raleigh could not with more courtliness pilot his fair freight across the Avenue. So it was the day after Christmas I saw not one but several of his young friends blushingly put dainty packages into his hands.

Is there not an excellent O. Henry sort of story in this piquant city situation?

Well, floating like a cork upon a river I drifted along up the Avenue. I pa.s.sed a man I had not seen for several years. Yes; that certainly was the fellow I used to know. And yet he was an altogether different being now, too. The sort of a shock I got has perhaps also been experienced by you. Only a short time ago, it seemed to me, this friend of mine had been robust and ruddy, masterful and gay, in the prime of his years. I had somehow innocently expected him always to be so. Just as I find it very unreal to think of myself in any other way than I am now. Don't you? As to yourself, I mean. He was quite grey. His shoulders hung forward. His chest seemed to have fallen in on itself. His legs moved back and forth without ever altogether straightening out. He had a whipped look. Wrinkled clothes and dusty black derby hat, he was conspicuous in the peac.o.c.kean scene. And yet on a time he had been, I knew, as much a conqueror of hearts as any policeman. So would it sometime be with me--like this?

What do you know about that! In the next block another acquaintance of old I saw. But when I had known him he was stooped and little and thin and dried up and cringing. He worked in a bas.e.m.e.nt and did not wear a collar, at least by day. He used to look very old. Now here he was swinging along looking very much like Mr. Caruso, or some such personage as that.

How may this phenomenon be accounted for, what was the misfortune of one of these persons and the secret of the other? I know a man who has a theory which, at least, sounds all right. It is not b.u.t.termilk nor monkey glands, he contends, which will keep a man young and stalwart so much as (what he calls) an objective in life--a distant rampart to take, a golden fleece to pursue. That is why, he declares, scientists and artists frequently live happy and alert to such a great age: Thomas A.