When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 11

And now two new Rolt-Wheeler books are ready! _Heroes of the Ruins_, the third volume of the "Boy Journalist Series," tells of a fourteen-year-old who lived for four years of war in trenches and dugouts. Andre, the Mole, went from one company to another, dodged the authorities and successfully ran the risks of death, emerging at the end to take up the search for his scattered family, from whom he had been separated in the early days of the fighting.

The third volume in the "Romance-History of America" books is _The Coming of the Peoples_, which tells how the French, Spanish, English and Dutch settled early America.

=v=

Olive Roberts Barton is a sister of Mary Roberts Rinehart. When she taught school in Pittsburgh for several years before her marriage, she worked with children of all sizes and ages during part of that time and found small children were her specialty. She says:

"Working with them, and giving out constantly as one must with small children, was like casting bread upon waters. It came back to me, what I was giving them, not after many days but at once; their appreciation, their spontaneous sympathy, their love gave to me something I could get nowhere else, and it was enriching. I felt then, as I still feel, that children give us the best things the world has to offer, and my effort has been to make some return. Twice during the crises in my married life I went back to the schoolroom for comfort. Once after the death of one of my own children, when I had no others left, and again when my husband went to the battle-fields of France.

"I have written with the same experience as I taught. My first successes were with adult fiction. I have had something like six hundred short stories published by syndicates, and magazine articles have appeared from time to time, but gradually I realised that I wanted children for my audience. Several years ago I published _Cloud Boat Stories_. Later _The Wonderful Land of Up_. A syndicate editor saw these books and asked me to start a children's department for the five hundred papers he served. That was the beginning of the 'Twins.' Nancy and Nick were born two years ago.

They still visit their little friends every day in the columns of many newspapers. What a vast audience I have! A million children! No wonder one wishes to do his best.

"I have two children of my own. They are my critics. What they do not like, I do not write. We all love the out-of-doors and to us a bird or a little wild animal is a fairy."

But when I try to say something about the _Nancy and Nick_ series I find it has all been said for me (and said so much better!) by that accomplished bookseller, Candace T. Stevenson:

"I have just finished all of the books by Olive Roberts Barton. They are truly spontaneous and delightful. In fact, they have carried my small group of children listeners and myself along as breathlessly as if they were Alice in Wonderland or Davy and the Goblin. They are delightful nonsense with exactly the right degree of an undercurrent of ideas which they can make use of in their business of everyday living. Children love morals which are done as skilfully as the chapter on Examinations in Helter Skelter Land, and Sammy Jones, the Topsy Turvy Boy in Topsy Turvy Land, and I found my group not only seriously discussing them but putting them into practice. Speaking of putting things into practice, there is only one spot in all of the books which seemed to me as if it might get some children into trouble. The description of Waspy Weasel's trick on the schoolmaster in Helter Skelter Land where he squeezes bittersweet juice into the schoolmaster's milk and puts him to sleep, I think would lead any inquiring mind to try it.

"The whale who loved peppermints, Torty Turtle with his seagull's wings on, the adventures of the children when they help Mr. Tingaling collect the rents--this isn't the same old stuff of the endless 'bedtime' stories which are dealt out to us by the yard. These animals are real people with the tinge which takes real imagination to paint.

"At first I was disappointed in the pictures, but as I read on I came to like those also, and I found that they were wholly satisfactory to the children. The picture of the thousand legger with all his shoes on is entrancing, and poor Mrs. Frog cutting out clothes because the dressmaker had made them for the children when they were still tadpoles. These books ought to come like an oasis in the desert to the poor-jaded-reading-aloud-parent."

=vi=

At Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, in a small house built from her own plans and standing 2,000 feet above sea level, in a growing shade of trees, lives Marion Ames Taggart, author of the Jack-in-the-Box series--four children's books that renew their popularity every year. They are:

AT GREENACRES THE QUEER LITTLE MAN THE BOTTLE IMP POPPY'S PLUCK

_At Greenacres_ and _The Queer Little Man_ are particularly good to read aloud to a group of children; they really are the mystery and detective story diluted for children.

Miss Taggart, an only child and extremely frail in childhood, had the good fortune as a consequence of ill-health to be educated entirely at home. As a result she had free access to really good books--for the home was in Haverhill, Ma.s.s. She began to carry out a cherished wish to write for young girls in 1901, when her first book (for girls of about sixteen) was published in St. Nicholas. She has a habit of transplanting four-footed friends in her stories under their own names--as where, in the Jack-in-the-Box series, one finds Pincushion, Miss Taggart's own plump grey kitten.

What will the children say to _A Wonder Book_, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with pictures in color by Arthur Rackham? I do not know why I ask this rhetorical question, which, like most questions of the sort, should be followed by exclamation points! There will be exclamations, at any rate, over this book, surely the most beautiful of the year, perhaps of several years. The quality of Arthur Rackham's work is well known, its artistic value is undisputedly of the very highest. And Hawthorne's text--the story of the Gorgon's head, the tale of Midas, Tanglewood, and the rest--is of the finest literary, poetic and imaginative worth.

CHAPTER XI

COBB'S FOURTH DIMENSION

=i=

As a three-dimensional writer, Irvin S. Cobb has long been among the American literary heavy-weights. Now that he has acquired a fourth dimension, the time has come for a new measurement of his excellences as an author.

Among those excellences I know a man (responsible for the manufacture of Doran books) who holds that Cobb is the greatest living American author.

The reason for this is severely logical, to wit: Irvin Cobb always sends in his copy in a perfect condition. His copy goes to the manufacturer of books with a correctly written t.i.tle page, a correctly written copyright page, the exact wording of the dedication, an accurate table of contents, and so on, all the way through the ma.n.u.script. Moreover, when proofs are sent to Mr. Cobb, he makes very few changes. He reduces to a minimum the difficulties of a printer and his changes are always perceptibly changes for the better.

But I don't suppose that any of this would redound to Cobb's credit in the eyes of a literary critic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IRVIN S. COBB]

And to return to the subject of the fourth dimension: My difficulty is to know in just what direction that fourth dimension lies. Is the fourth dimension of Cobb as a novelist or as an autobiographer? It puzzles me to tell inasmuch as I have before me the ma.n.u.scripts of Mr. Cobb's first novel, _J. Poindexter, Colored_, and his very first autobiography, a volume called _Stickfuls_.

The t.i.tle of _Stickfuls_ will probably not be charged with meaning to people unfamiliar with newspaper work. Perhaps it is worth while to explain that in the old days, when type was set by hand, the printer had a little metal holder called a "stick." When he had set a dozen lines--more or less--he had a "stickful." Although very little type is now set by hand, the stick as a measure of s.p.a.ce is still in good standing. The reporter presents himself at the city desk, tells what he has got, and is told by the city editor, "Write a stickful." Or, "Write two sticks." And so on.

_Stickfuls_ is not so much the story of Cobb's life as the story of people he has met and places he has been, told in a series of extremely interesting chapters--told in a leisurely and delightful fashion of reminiscence by a natural a.s.sociation of one incident with another and one person with someone else. For example, Cobb as a newspaper man, covered a great many trials in court; and one of the chapters of _Stickfuls_ tells of famous trials he has attended.

=ii=

Now about this novel of Cobb's: Jeff Poindexter will be remembered by all the readers of Mr. Cobb's short stories as the negro body servant of old Judge Priest. In _J. Poindexter, Colored_, we have Jeff coming to New York. Of course, New York seen through the eyes of a genuine Southern darkey is a New York most of us have never seen. There's nothing like sampling, so I will let you begin the book:

"My name is J. Poindexter. But the full name is Jefferson Exodus Poindexter, Colored. But most always in general I has been known as Jeff for short. The Jefferson part is for a white family which my folks worked for them one time before I was born, and the Exodus is because my mammy craved I should be named after somebody out of the Bible. How I comes to write this is this way:

"It seems like my experiences here in New York is liable to be such that one of my white gentleman friends he says to me I should take pen in hand and write them out just the way they happen and at the time they is happening, or right soon afterwards, whilst the memory of them is clear in my brain; and then he's see if he can't get them printed somewheres, which on the top of the other things which I now is, will make me an author with money coming in steady. He says to me he will fix up the spelling wherever needed and attend to the punctuating; but all the rest of it will be my own just like I puts it down. I reads and writes very well but someway I never learned to puncture. So the places where it is necessary to be punctual in order to make good sense and keep everything regulation and make the talk sound natural is his doings and also some of the spelling.

But everything else is mine and I asks credit.

"My coming to New York, in the first place, is sort of a sudden thing which starts here about a month before the present time. I has been working for Judge Priest for going on sixteen years and is expecting to go on working for him as long as we can get along together all right, which it seems like from appearances that ought to be always. But after he gives up being circuit judge on account of him getting along so in age he gets sort of fretful by reasons of him not having much to do any more and most of his own friends having died off on him. When the State begins going Republican about once in so often, he says to me, kind of half joking, he's a great mind to pull up stakes and move off and go live somewheres else. But pretty soon after that the whole country goes dry and then he says to me there just naturally ain't no fitten place left for him to go without he leaves the United States."

It seems that Judge Priest finally succ.u.mbed to an invitation to visit Bermuda, a place where a gentleman can still raise a thirst and satisfy it. Jeff could not stand the house without the Judge in it; and when an opportunity came to go to New York, Jeff went.

=iii=

The biographer of Cobb is Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey's Magazine, whose authoritative account I take pleasure in reprinting here--the more so because it appeared some time ago in a booklet which is now out of print. Mr. Davis's article was first printed in The Sun, New York:

"Let me deal with this individual in a categorical way. Most biographers prefer to mutilate their canvas with a small daub which purports to be a sketch of the most significant event in the life of the accused. Around this it is their custom to paint smaller and less impressive scenes, blending the whole by placing it in a large gilded frame, which, for obvious reasons, costs more than the picture--and it is worth more. Pardon me, therefore, if I creep upon Mr. Cobb from the lower left-hand corner of the canvas and chase him across the open s.p.a.ce as rapidly as possible. It is not for me to indicate when the big events in his life will occur or to lay the milestones of the route along which he will travel. I know only that they are in the future, and that, regardless of any of his achievements in the past, Irvin Cobb has not yet come into his own.

"The first glimpse I had of him was in a half-tone portrait in the New York Evening World five years ago. This picture hung pendant-like from a t.i.tle which read 'Through Funny Gla.s.ses, by Irvin S. Cobb.' It was the face of a man scarred with uncertainty; an even money proposition that he had either just emerged from the Commune or was about to enter it. Grief was written on the brow; more than written, it was emblazoned. The eyes were heavy with inexpressible sadness. The corners of the mouth were drooped, heightening the whole effect of incomprehensible depression.

Quickly I turned to the next page among the stock quotations, where I got my depression in a blanket form. The concentrated Cobb kind was too much for me.

"A few days later I came suddenly upon the face again. The very incongruity of its alliance with laughter overwhelmed me, and wonderingly I read what he had written, not once, but every day, always with the handicap of that half-tone. If Cobb were an older man, I would go on the witness stand and swear that the photograph was made when he was witnessing the Custer Ma.s.sacre or the pa.s.sing of Geronimo through the winter quarters of his enemies. Notwithstanding, he supplied my week's laughter.

"Digression this:

"After Bret Harte died, many stories were written by San Franciscans who knew him when he first put in an appearance on the Pacific Coast. One contemporary described minutely how Bret would come silently up the stairs of the old Alta office, glide down the dingy hallway through the exchange room, and seat himself at the now historic desk. It took Bret fifteen minutes to sharpen a lead pencil, one hour for sober reflection, and three hours to write a one-stick paragraph, after which he would carefully tear it up, gaze out of the window down the Golden Gate, and go home.

"He repeated this formula the following day, and at the end of the week succeeded in turning out three or four sticks which he considered fit to print. In later years, after fame had sought him out and presented him with a fur-lined overcoat, which I am bound to say Bret knew how to wear, the files of the Alta were ransacked for the pearls he had dropped in his youth. A few gems were identified, a very few. Beside this entire printed collection the New England Primer would have looked like a set of encyclopedias. Bret worked slowly, methodically, brilliantly, and is an imperishable figure in American letters.

"Returning to Cobb: He has already written twenty times more than Bret Harte turned out during his entire career. He has made more people laugh and written better short stories. He has all of Harte's subtle and delicate feeling, and will, if he is spared, write better novels about the people of today than Bret Harte, with all his genius and imagination, wrote around the Pioneers. I know of no single instance where one man has shown such fecundity and quality as Irvin Cobb has so far evinced, and it is my opinion that his complete works at fifty will contain more good humour, more good short stories, and at least one bigger novel than the works of any other single contemporaneous figure.

"He was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in June, '76. I have taken occasion to look into the matter and find that his existence was peculiarly varied. He belonged to one of those old Southern families-there being no new Southern families--and pa.s.sed through the public schools sans incident. At the age of sixteen he went into the office of The Paducah Daily News as a reportorial cub.

"He was first drawn to daily journalism because he yearned to be an ill.u.s.trator. Indeed, he went so far as to write local humorous stories, ill.u.s.trating them himself. The pictures must have been pretty bad, although they served to keep people from saying that his literature was the worst thing in the paper.

"Resisting all efforts of the editor, the stockholders and the subscribers of The Paducah Daily News, he remained barricaded behind his desk until his nineteenth year, when he was crowned with a two-dollar raise and a secondary caption under his picture which read 'The Youngest Managing Editor of a Daily Paper in the United States.'

"If Cobb was consulted in the matter of this review, he would like to have these preliminaries expunged from his biography. But the public is ent.i.tled to the details.