 Chapter 7 of Hints to Pilgrims. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information on to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sunil Goswami. Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks. Little Candles. High conceit of one's self and a sureness of one's opinion are based so insecurely in experience that one is perplexed how their slight structure stands. One marvels why these emphatic builders trust again their glittering towers. Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees its void or malformation ought by rise to shrink from adulation of self and his own opinion should appear to him merely as one candle among a thousand. And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable failures and any new pinnacle that is set up neglecting the broken rubble on the ground and all the wreckage at the base boasts again of his sure communion with the stars. A man let us say has gone headlong from one formula of belief into another. In each for a time he burns with a hot conviction. Then his faith cools. His God no longer nods. But just when you think that failure must have brought him modesty, again he amazes you with the golden prospect of a new adventure. He has climbed in his life a hundred hillocks thinking each to be a mountain. He has journeyed on many paths but always has fallen in a bog. Conceit is a thin bubble in the wind. It is an empty froth and breath. Yet hammered into ship plates it defies the U-boat. On every sidewalk also we see some fine fellow dressed and curled to his satisfaction parading in the sun. An accident of wealth or birth has marked him from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in gaudy color but is bare within. He is not a cipher but golden circumstance like figure in the million column gives him substance. Yet the void cries out in all matters in dispute with firm conviction. But this cipher need not dress in purple. He is shabby let us say and pinched with poverty. Whose fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in itself give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that the world is sick with pestilence and accordingly he proclaims himself a doctor. Or perhaps he sits at ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon his ignorance until it flames with hatred. He sets up to be a thinker and he is resolved to shatter the foundations of a thousand years. The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy distance. And these thousand candles of belief flickering in the night are so insufficient even in their aggregate. Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick shielded in the fingers from misadventure the greatest light? Who is here who has read more than a single chapter in the book of life? Most of us have faltered through scarcely a dozen paragraphs. Yet we scribble our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling pebble fall in a muddy pool and we think that we have listened to the pounding of the sea. We hold up our little candle and we consider that its light dispels the general night. But it has happened once in a while that someone really strikes a larger light and offers it to many travelers for their safety. He holds his candle above his head for the general comfort and to it they rush the multitude of those whose candles have been cutted. They delight their wicks and go their way with a song and cry to announce their bitter hood. If they see a stranger of the path they call to him to join their band and they draw him from the mire. And sometimes this company respects the other candles that survive the wind. They confess with good temper that their glare also is sufficient that there is indeed more than one path across the night. But sometimes in their intensity in their sureness of exclusive salvation they fall to bickering. One band of converts elbows another. There is a mutual lifting of the nose in a scorn. An amused contempt or they come to blows and all candles are extinguished. And sometimes with candles out they travel onward still telling one another of their band how the darkness flees before them. We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind conceit, of shrill and intolerant opinion. The past is worshipped. The past is scorned. Some wish only to kiss the great toe of convention. Others shout that we must run bandaged in the dark if we will prove our faith in God and men. It is the best of times and the worst of times. It is the dawn. We grope toward midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our fathers were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to the past. Any change is sacrilege. Let's rip it up. Let's destroy it all together. We'll kill him and stamp on him. He's a Montague. We'll draw him and quarter him. He's the Capulet. He's a radical. He must be hanged. A conservative. His head shall decorate our pike. A plague on both your houses. Penises are hooked among us each with the magic to cure our ills. Universal suffrage is a leap to perfection. Dextreform will bring the golden age. With capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven. The Soviet, the recalled from office, the six hour day, the demands of labor mark the better path. The greater clamour of the crowd is a guide to wisdom. Men with black beards and ladies with cigarettes say that machine guns and fire and death are pills that are potent for our good. We live in a welter of quarrel and disagreement. One pictures a mighty shelf with bottles and doctors running to and fro. The poor world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. By the hubbub in the pantry, the yells and scuffling at the sink, we know that drastic and contrary cures are striving for the mastery. There was a time when beacons burned on the hills to be our guidance. The flames were fed and molded by the experience of the centuries. Men might differ on the path, might even scramble up a dozen different slopes, but the hilltop was beyond dispute. But now the great fires is molded. The constitution, it is said. Petite, since the first, must now be carted off and sold as junk. Art has toned down its older standards. The colours of Titian are in the dust. Poets no longer bend the knee into Shakespeare. Conceit is a pilot who scorns the harbour lights. Modesty was once a virtue. Patience, diligence, thrift, humility, charity. Who pays now a tribute to them? Charity is only a swap, it seems, that is thrown in fright to the swift wolves of revolution. Humility is now a weakness. Diligence is despised. Thrift is the advice of cowards. Who now cares for the lessons that experience and tested fact once taught? Ignorance now sits in the highest seat and gives its orders. And the clamour of the crowd is its high authority. And what has become of modesty? A maid once was prodigal if she enmasked her beauty to the moon. Morality? Let's all laugh together. It's a quaint old world. Tolerance is the last study in the school of wisdom. Lord, Lord! Tonight let my prayer be that I may know that my opinion is but a candle in the wind. End of Chapter 7, Recording by Sunil Goswami Chapter 12 of Hints to Pilgrims This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kera Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks Chapter 8, A Visit to a Poet Not long ago I accepted the invitation of a young poet to visit him at his lodging. As my life has fallen chiefly among merchants, lawyers and other practical folk, I went with much curiosity. The poet, I must confess, is not entirely famous. His verses have appeared in several of the less known papers, and a judicious printer has even offered to gather them into a modest chief. There are, however, certain vile details of expense that hold up the project. The printer, although he confesses their merit, feels that the poet should bear the cost. His verses are of the newer sort. When read aloud they sound pleasantly in the ear, but I sometimes miss the meaning. I once pronounced an intimate soul study to be a jolly description of a rainy night. This was my stupidity. I could see a soul quite plainly when it was pointed out. It was like looking at the moon. You get what you look for—a man or a woman or a kind of map of Asia. In poetry of this sort I need a hint or two to start me right. But when my nose has been rubbed so to speak against the anise-bag, I am a very hound upon the scent. The street where my friend lives is just north of Greenwich Village, and it still shows a remnant of more aristocratic days. Behind its shabby fronts are long drawing-rooms with tarnished glass chandeliers and frescoed ceilings and gaunt windows with inside blinds. Plaster cornices still gather the dust of years. There are heavy stairways with black walnut rails. Marble Lincoln's still liberate the slaves in niches of the hallway. Bronze ladies of the lake await their tardy lovers. Diana runs with her hunting-dogs upon the Newell Post. In these houses lived the heroines of sixty years ago, who shopped for crinoline and spent their mornings at Stuart's to match a gaudet pattern. They drove of an afternoon with gay silk parasols to the Crystal Palace on 42nd Street. In short they were our despised Victorians. With our advancement we have made the world so much better since. I pressed an electric button. Then as the door clicked I sprang against it. These patent catches throw me into a momentary panic. I feel like one of the foolish virgins with untrimmed lamp just about to be caught outside. But perhaps I confused the legend. Inside there was a bare hallway with a series of stairways rising into the gloom. Round and round like the frightful staircase of the opium eater. At the top of the stairs a black disc hung over the rail. Probably ahead. Hello? I said. Oh, it's you. Come up. And the poet came down to meet me with slippers slapping at the heels. There was a villainous smell on the stairs. Something burning? I asked. At first the poet didn't smell it. Oh, that smell! he said at last. That's the embalmer. The embalmer? We were opposite a heavy door on the second floor. He pointed his thumb at it. There's an embalmer's school inside. Dear me, I said. Has he any? Anything to practice on? The poet pushed the door open a crack. It was very dark inside. It smelled like Ptolemy in his later days. Or perhaps I detected Polonius found at last beneath the stairs. Bless me, I asked. What does he teach in his school? Embalming and all that sort of thing. It never occurred to me. I confessed that undertakers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't suppose you knew old Mr. Smith? No. He wore a white carnation on business afternoons. We rounded a turn of the black walnut's stair. There, exclaimed the poet, that is the office of the shriek. I know the shriek. It is one of the periodicals of the newer art that does not descend to the popular taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints pictures of men and women with hideous distorted bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police know what it is talking about and then they rather stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so. Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to the shriek because I wished to see my friends' verses as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the newer art was doing and could brush out of my head the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have been thrown into the discard. We have come a long way from the older poets. I would like to subscribe, I said. The poet, of course, was pleased. He rapped at a door marked editor. A young woman's head in a mob cap came into view. She wore a green and purple smock and a cigarette hung loosely from her mouth. She looked at me at first as if I were an old-fashioned poem or a bundle of modest drawings but cheered when I told my errand. There was a cup of steaming soup on an alcohol burner and half a loaf of bread. On a string across the window handkerchiefs and stockings were hung to dry. A desk was littered with papers. I paid my money and was enrolled. I was given a current number of the shriek and was told not to miss a poem by Silovitch. Silovitch? I asked. Silovitch? the lady answered. Our greatest poet, maybe the greatest of all time, writes only for the shriek, wonderful, realistic. Snug little office. I said to the poet when we were on the stairs. She lives in there, too. Oh, yes, he said. Smart girl that, never compromises, wants reality and all that sort of thing. You must read Silovitch. Amazing, doesn't seem to mean anything at first, but then you get it in a flash. We had now come to the top of the building. There isn't much smell up here, I said. You don't mind the smell, you come to like it, he replied, it's bracing. At the top of the stairs a hallway led to rooms both front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even in the middle, sloped to windows of half height and dormers. The poet waved his hand. I have been living in the front room, he said, but I am adding this room behind for a study. We entered the study. A man was mopping up the floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general wreckage of furniture, a chair, a table with marble top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken picture, had been swept to the middle of the room. There was also a pile of old embalmist journals and a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of toothpaste. You see, said the poet, I have been living in the other room. This used to be a storage years ago for the family that once lived here and more recently for the embalmer. Storage, I exclaimed, you don't suppose that they kept any—no. Well, I said, it's a snug little place. I bent over and picked up one of the embalmist journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little boy in a nightgown saying his prayer to his mother. The prayer was printed underneath. And Mama, it read, have God make me a good boy, and when I grow up let me help Papa in his business and never use anything but twerp's old reliable embalming fluid, the kind that Papa has always used and grand-pup before him. Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's advertisement. Methinks, he writes, I could be willing to die in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close drove best black Japan's nails. How feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down. But the journal did not stir me to this high emotion. I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the dormer window, into a shallow yard where an abandoned tin bathtub and other unpriced valuables were kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost its way but didn't know what to do about it. It had its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. A wash-stand lay on its side as if it snapped its fingers forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall building with long tables and rows of girls working. One of the girls desisted for a moment from her feathers with which she was making hats and stuck out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went back to her feathers. The young man who had been mopping up the floor went out for fresh water. Who is that fellow? I asked. He works downstairs. For the shriek? For the embalmer. He's an apprentice. I would like to meet him. Presently I did meet him. What have you there? I asked. He was folding up a great canvas bag of curious pattern. It's when you were shipped away to Texas or somewhere. This is a little one. You'd need. He appraised me from head to foot. You'd need a number ten. He'd assisted from detail. He shifted to the story of his life. Since he had been a child he had wished to be an undertaker. Now I had myself once known an undertaker and I had known his son. The son went to Munich to study for grand opera. I crossed on the steamer with him. He sang in the ship's concert, Oh that we two were maying. It was pitched for high tenor, so he sang at an octave low and was quite gloomy about it. In the last verse he expressed a desire to lie at rest beneath the churchyard sod. The boat was rolling and I went out to get the air. And then I did not see him for several years. We met at a funeral. He wore a long black coat and a white carnation. He smiled at me with a gentle mournful smile and waved me to a seat. He was tristan no longer. Valhalla no more echoed to his voice. He had succeeded to his father's business. Hear the poet interposed. The Countess came to see me yesterday. Mercy, I said, what Countess? Oh don't you know her work? She's a poet and she writes for the people downstairs. She's the Countess Silovitch. Silovitch, I answered, of course I know her. She's the greatest poet, maybe, of all time. No doubt about it, said the poet excitedly. And there's a poem of hers in this number. She writes in italics when she wants you to yell it and when she puts it in capitals, my God, you could hear her to the elevated. It's ripping stuff. Dear me, I said, I should like to read it. Awfully, it must be funny. It isn't funny at all, the poet answered. It isn't meant to be funny. Did you read her burning kiss? I'm sorry, I answered. The poet sighed. It's wonderfully realistic. There's nothing old-fashioned about that poem. The Countess wears painted stockings. Bless me, I cried. Stalks with flowers. She comes from Bulgaria or Estonia or somewhere. Has a husband in a castle, incompatible. He stifles her, common, in business. Beer spigots. She is artistic, wants to soar. And tragic. You remember my study of a soul? The rainy night. Yes, I remember. Well, she's the one. She sat on the floor and told me her troubles. You don't suppose that I could meet her, do you? I asked. The poet looked at me with withering scorn. You wouldn't like her. He said, she's very modern. She says very startling things. You have to be in the modern spirit to follow her. And sympathetic. She doesn't want any marriage or government or things like that. Just truth and freedom. It's convention that clips our wings. Conventions are stupid things, I agreed. And the past isn't any good either, the poet said. The past is a chain upon us. It keeps us off the mountains. Exactly, I assented. That's what the Countess thinks. We must destroy the past. Everything. Customs. Art. Government. For the coming of the dawn. Naturally, I said, candles trimmed and all that sort of thing. You don't suppose that I could meet the Countess? Well, I'm sorry. What's the bit of red paper on the wall? Is it over a dirty spot? It's to stir up my ideas. It's gay and when I look at it I think of something. And then I suppose that you look out of that window against that brick wall and those windows opposite and right poems. A sonnet to the girl who stuck out her tongue at me. Oh, yes. Hot in summer up here? Yes. And cold in winter? Yes. And I suppose that you get some ideas out of that old tin bathtub and those ash cans? Well, hardly. And you look at the moon through that dirty skylight? No, there's nothing in that old stuff. It's fed up on the moon. It's a snug place, I said, and I came away. I circled the stairs into the denser smell, which by this time I found rather agreeable. The embermer's door was open. In the gloom inside I saw the apprentice busied in some dark employment. I got something to show you, he called. Tomorrow, I answered. As I was opening the street door a woman came up the steps. She was a dark Bulgarian sort of woman. Or Estonian, perhaps. I held back the door to let her pass. She wore long earrings. Her skirt was looped high in scallops. She wore sandals. And painted stockings. End of chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Hints to Pilgrims This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jay Salem, Las Vegas, Nevada. Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stefan Brooks. Autumn days. It was rather a disservice when the poet wrote that the melancholy days were come. The melancholy is inexplicable. If he had sung through his nose of thaw and drizzle, all of us would have pitched in to help him in his dismal chorus. But October and November are brisk and cheerful months. In the spring, to be sure, there is a languid sadness. Its beauty is too frail. Its flowerets droop upon the plucking. Its warm nights. Its breeze that blows from the fragrant hills. Warn us how brief is the blossom time. In August, the year slumbers. Its sleepy days not across the heavy orchards and the yellow-grain fields. Smoke looks out from the chimneys, but finds no wind for comrade. For a penny it would stay home and doze upon the hearth to await a playmate from the north. The birds are still. Only the insects sing. A threshing machine, far off, sinks to as drowsy a melody as theirs, like a company of grasshoppers, but with longer beard and deeper voice. The streams that froliced to nimble tunes in May now crawl from pool to pool. The very shadows linger under cover. They crouch close beneath shed and tree and scarcely stir a finger until the fiery sun has turned its back. September rubs its eyes. It hears autumn, as it were, pounding on its bedroom door and turns for another wink of sleep. But October is awakened by the frost. It dresses itself in gaudy color. It flings a scarlet garment on the woods and a purple scarf across the hills. The wind at last, like a merry piper, cries out the tune of the brisk and sunny days come dancing from the north. Yesterday was a holiday, and I went walking in the woods, although it is still September. It grows late, and there is already a touch of October in the air. After a week of sultry weather, a tardy remnant from last month, a breeze yesterday spring out of the northwest. Like a good housewife, it swept the dusty corners of the world. It cleared our path across the heavens and raked down the hot cobwebs from the sky. Clouds had yawned in idleness. They had sat on the dull circle of earth, like fat old men with drooping chins. But yesterday, they stirred themselves. The wind whipped them to their feet. It pursued them and plucked at their frightened skirts. It is thus, after the sleepy season, that the wind practices for the rough and tumble of November. It needs but to quicken the tempo into sixteenth notes to rouse a wholesome tempest. Who could be melancholy in so brisk a month? The poet should hang his head for shame at uttering such a libel. These dazzling days could hail him into court. The jury, with one voice, without rising from its box, would hold for a heavy fine. Apples have been gathered in. There is a thirsty, tipsy smell from the cider presses. Hay is pitched up to the very roof. Bursting granaries show their golden produce at the cracks. The yellow stubble of fields is a promise that is kept. And who shall say that there is any sadness in the fallen leaves? They are a gay and sounding carpet. Who dances here needs no billop on his ankle and no fiddle for the tune. And sometimes in October the air is hazy and spiced with smells. Nature, it seems, has cooked a feast in the heat of summer, and now its vines stand out to cool. November lights its fires and brings in early candles. This is the season when chimneys must be tightened for the tempest. Their mighty throats roar that all is strong aloft. Dogs now leave a stranger to go his way in peace, and they bark at the windy moon. Windows rattle, but not with sadness. They jest and chatter with the blast. They gossip of storms on barren mountains. Night for so many months has been a timid creature. It has hid so long in gloomy cellars while the regal sun strutted on his way. But now night and darkness put their heads together for his overthrow. In shadowy garrets, they mutter their discontent and plan rebellion. They snatch the fields by four o'clock. By five they have restored their kingdom. They set the stars as guardsmen of their rule. Now travelers are pelted into shelter. Signboards creak. The wind whistles for its rowdy company. Night, the monarch, rides upon the storm. A match will light the logs, will crack nuts and pass the cider. How now, master poet, is there no thirsty passage in your throat? I'll offer you a bowl of milk and popcorn. Must you brood to night upon the barren fields? The meadows brown and sear? Who cares now how the wind grapples with the chimneys? Here is snug company, warm and safe. Here are syrup and griddle cakes. Do you still suck your melancholy pen when such a feast is going forward? End of Chapter 9. Recording by Jay Salem. Las Vegas, Nevada. Chapter 10 of Hints to Pilgrims This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks. Chapter 10 On Finding a Plot A young author has confessed to me that lately, in despair of hitting on a plot, he locked himself in his room after breakfast with an oath that he would not leave it until something was contrived and under way. He did put an apple and sandwich prudently at the back of his desk, as he swore, like the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness should last him through his struggle. By a happy afterthought he took with him into retirement a volume of du moissant. Perhaps, he considered, if his own invention lagged and the hour grew late, he might shift its characters into new positions. Rather than starve till dawn he could dress a courtesan in honest cloth or tease a happy wife from her household in the text to a mad elopement. Or by jiggling all the plots together like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, the pieces might fall into strange and startling patterns. This is not altogether a new thought with him. While sucking at his pen in a former droth he considered whether a novel might not be made by combining the characters of one story with the circumstance of another. Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister do you think have cooled her southern blood? Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot color always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay parasol in her pretty swishing skirts past the bishop's window. We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon with his eyes on space for any wandering thought as if the clouds, like treasureships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The bishop is brooding on an address to the lady's sewing-gild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from its mate. There is wind in the treetops with lively invitation to adventure. But the bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind risking with her skirt. Hey, dear me! The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign heir. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen. A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravals. He calls to Betsy the housemaid for a freshened-up cloth and his gators. He is recalled a meeting with the vicar and goes out whistling softly to disaster. Ah, lass! In my forgetfulness I have skimmed upon the actual plot. You have recalled already how Dignior Madeleine descended from the bishop's palace. Her beauty was a hard assault. Except for her crippled state she might herself have toppled the bishop over. But she pales beside the dangerous Carmen. Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in crime and punishment. Even Duff Steyesky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding. Flower girls and angel food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass. Oliver Twist and Nancy. Merely acquaintances in the original story. With a fresh hand at the plot might have gone on a bank holiday to Marigate and been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player of the ship's band who had blown himself so full of wind for Foxtrot on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Caruso lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island. Observe the cunning of the plot who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Caruso, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sykes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons and a hidden cove. And Caruso falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Caruso's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck, you see now why he was saved from the wreck, is discovered to be a retired clergyman, doubtless, a Methodist, the happy knot is tied. And then a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London with oyster shells along the garden path and cattails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plain tree at the drear, tea for three with a trombone solo, and the Faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall. Was there a serpent in the garden at Peaceful Cranford? Suppose that one of the gay rascals of Dumas with tall boots and black mustachios had got in when the tempting moon was up. Could the gentle ladies in their fragile guard of Crenolin have withstood this French assault? Or Camille, perhaps, before she took her cough, settled at Bath and entangled Mr. Pickwick in the pump room. Do not a great hat and feather find their victim anywhere? Is not a silken ankle as potent at Bath as in Bohemia? Surely a touch of age and gout is no prevention against the general plague. Nor does a bald head tower above the softer passions. Camille's pretty nose is powdered for the onslaught. She has arranged her laces in dangerous hazard to the eye. And now the bold hussy undeniably winks at Mr. Pickwick over her pint of kilobit. She drops her fan with usual consequence. A nod. A smile. A word. At the assembly, macro sudden progress in their triumphant end, they sit together in the shadows of the balcony. My dear, says Mr. Pickwick, gazing tenderly through his glasses. My love, my own, will you bless my soul? Will you share my lodging to Mrs. Bardell's in Grozwell Street? We are mariners all of us, coasting in dangerous waters. It is the siren's voice, her white beauty gleaming on the shore. It is the moon that throws us on the rocks. And then a dozen dowagers breed the gossip. Duchesses frail with years pop and burst with a pleasant secret. There is even greater commotion than at Mr. Pickwick's other disturbing affair with the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers. This previous affair you may recall he had left his watch by an oversight in the tap room and he went down to get it when the inn was dark. On the return he took a false direction at the landing and, being misled by the row of boots along the hall, he entered the wrong room. He was in his nightcap in bed when, peering through the curtains, he saw the aforesaid lady brushing her back hair. A duel was narrowly averted when this startling scandal came to the ears of the lady's lover, Mr. Peter Magnus. Camille, I think, could have kept this sharper scandal to herself. At most, with a prudent finger to her lips, she would have whispered the intrigue harmlessly behind her fan and set herself to snare a duke. I like to think also of the incongruity of throwing Rolo. Rolo the perfect, the Bayard of the nursery, for example, in our suffering childhood. Rolo grown up, of course, and without his aseptic Uncle George into the gay scandal, let us say, of the Queen's necklace. Perhaps it is forgotten how he and his little sister Jane went to the bullfight in Rome on Sunday morning by mistake. They were looking for the Presbyterian church, and hand in hand they followed the crowd. It is needless to remind you how Uncle George was vexed. Rolo was a prig. He loved his Sunday school and his hour of piano practice. He brushed his hair and washed his face without compulsion. He even got in behind his ears. He went to bed cheerfully upon a hint. Thirty years ago, I was so pestered, if I could have met Rolo in the flesh I would have lured him to the alleyway behind our barn and pushed him into the manure pit. In the crisp vernacular of our street I would have punched the everlasting tar out of him. It was circumstance that held the bishop and Rolo down? Isn't Cinderella just a common story of the sordid realism until the fairy godmother appears? Except for the pumpkin and a very small foot she would have married the butcher's boy and been snubbed by her sisters to the end. It was only luck that it was a prince who awakened the sleeping beauty. The plumber's assistant might have stumbled by. What was Aladdin without his uncle, the magician? Do princesses still sleep exposed to a golden kiss? Are there lamps for rubbing discarded now in attics? Zinbad, with a steady wife, would have stayed at home and become an alderman. Romeo might have married a Montague and lived happily ever after. It was but chance that Titania awakened in the ass's company. Chance that Viola was cast on the coast of malaria and found her lover. Any of these plots could have been altered by jogging the author's elbow. A bit of indigestion wrecks the crimson shell up. Comedy or tragedies but the falling of the dice. By the flip of a coin comes the poisoned goblet. Or the princess. But my young author's experiment with Dermas Poisson was not successful. He tells me that hunger caught him in the middle of the afternoon and that he went forth for a cup of malted milk which is his weakness. His head was as empty as his stomach. And yet there are many novels written and even published and most of them seem to have what pass for plots. Vipeads, undeniably, are set up with some likeness to humanity. They talk from page to page without any squeak of bellows. They live in lodgings and make acquaintance across the air-shaft. They wrestle with villains. They fall in love. They starve and then grow famous. And at last in all good books journeys end in lovers' meeting. It is as easy as lying. Only a plot is needed. And may not anyone set up the puppets? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? You have only to say, eeny-meeny down the list and trot out a brunette or a blonde. There is a broadcloth in the tiring box and swords and velvet. And there is also patched wool and shiny elbows. Here a lady may sigh her soul to the Grecian tents or watch for honest Tom on his motorcycle. On Venetian balcony and village stoop the stars show alike for lovers and everywhere there are friendly shadows in the night. Like a master of marionettes we may pull the puppets by their strings. It is such an easy matter if once a plot is given to lift a beggar or to overthrow a rascal. A virtuous puppet can be hoisted to a tinsel castle, a twitching of the thumb upsets the wicked king, rollo is pitched to his knees before a scheming beauty. And would it not be fun to dangle before the bishop that little Carmen figure with her daring lace and scarlet stockings or to swing the bold cameo by the strings into Mr. Pickwick's arms as the curtain falls? Was it not Hawthorne who died leaving a notebook full of plots? And Walter Scott, when that loyal, harassed hand of his was shriveled into death, must have had by him a hundred hints for projected books. One author, I forget who he was, bequeathed to another author, the name has escaped me, a memorandum of characters and events. At any author's death there must be a precious salvage. Among the surviving papers there sits at least one dusty heroine waiting for a lover. Here are notes for the Duchess's allotment. Here is a sketch how the deacon proved to be a villain. As old ladies put by scraps of silk for a crazy quilt, shall not an author, also, treasure in his desk shreds of character and odds and ends to make a plot? Now the truth is, I suspect, that the actual plot has little to do with the merits of a great many of the best books. It is only the bucket that fetches up the water from the well. It is the string which holds the shining beads. Who really cares whether Tom Jones married Sophia? And what does it matter whether Falstaff died in bed or in his boots? Or whether Uncle Toby married the widow? It is the mirth and casual adventure by the way that holds our interest. Some of the best authors, indeed, have not given a thought to their plots and told his time to wind up the volume. When Dickon sent the Pickwick Club upon its travels, certainly he was not concerned whether Tracy Tubman found a wife. He had not given a thought to Sam's romance with the pretty housemaid at Mr. Nupkins. The elder Mrs. Weller's fatal cough was clearly a happy afterthought. Thackery, at the start, could hardly have foreseen Eslund's marriage. When he wrote the early chapters of Vanity Fair, he had not traced Becky to her shabby garret of the elephant at Pumpernickel. Dumas, I have no doubt, wrote from page to page, careless of the end. Doubtless he marked Millady for a bad end, but was unconcerned whether it would be a cough or noose. Victor Hugo did no more than follow a trail across the mountains of his invention, content with the kingdoms of each new turning. In these older and more deliberate books, if a young lady smiled upon the hero, it was not already schemed whether they would be lovers, with the very manner of his proposal already said. The glittering moon was not as yet be spoken for the night. My dear young lady, this older author thinks, you have certainly very pretty eyes and I like the way that lock of brown hair rests against your ear, but I am not at all sure that I shall let you marry my hero. Please sit around for a dozen chapters while I observe you. I must see you in tweed as well as silk. Perhaps you have an ugly habit of whining, or safe in a married state you might wear a mobcap into breakfast. I'll send my hero up to London for his fling. There is an actress I must have him meet. I'll let him frolic through the winter. On his return he may choose between you. My dear madam, another of these older authors meditates, how can I judge you on a first acquaintance? Certainly you talk loosely for an honest wife. It is too soon as yet to know how far your flirtation leads. I must observe you with Mr. Flappling in the garden after dinner. If later I grow dull in my reader's nod, your elopement will come handy. Nor was a lady novelist any older school less deliberate. When a bold adventurer appears she holds her heroine to the rearward of her affection. I'll make no decision yet for Lady Emily, she thinks. This gay fellow may have a wife somewhere. His smooth manner with the ladies comes with practice. It is soon enough if I decide upon their affair in my second volume. Perhaps, after all, the captain may prove to be the better man. And yet this spacious method requires an ample genius. A smaller writer must take a map and put his figure of a forehand on his destination. When a hero fares forth singing in the dawn, the author must know at once his snug tavern for the night. The hazard of the morning has been matched already with a peaceful twilight. The seas of time are planted. The very harvest counted when the furrows made. My heart goes out to that young author who sits locked in his study, munching his barren apple. He must perfect his scenario before he starts. How easy would be his task if only he could just begin once upon a time and follow his careless contrivance. I know a teacher who has a full-length novel unpublished and concealed. Sometimes, I fancy, at midnight, when his Latin themes are marked he draws forth its precious pages. He alters and smooths his sentences while the household sleeps. And even in his classroom, in the groaning of a conjugation, he leaps to horse. Little do his students suspect as they stutter with their verbs. They're with their teacher, heedless of convention, rides the dark lady of his swift adventure. I look with great awe on an acquaintance who averages more than one story a week and publishes them in a periodical called Frisky Stories. He shifts for variety among as many as five or six pen names. And I marvel at a friend who once wrote a story a day for a newspaper syndicate. But his case was pathetic. When I saw him last, he was sitting on a log in the North Forest gloomily estimating how many of his righteous stories would cover the wood pulp of the State. His health was threatened. He was resting from the toil of dropping buckets into empty wells and growing old and drawing nothing up. From all this it must appear that the real difficulty is finding a sufficient plot. The start of a plot is easy, but it is hard to carry it on and end it. I, myself, on any vacant morning, could get a hero tied hand and foot inside a cab, but that I would not know where to drive him. I have thought in an enthusiastic moment that he might be lowered down a manhole through the bottom of the cab. This is an unprecedented villainy, and I have gone so far as to select a lonely manhole in Grimacy Park round the corner from the Players Club. But I am lost how my hero could be rescued. Covered with muck, I could hardly hope that his lady would go running to his arms. I have also a pretty pencil for a fight in the ancient style with swords upon a stairway. But what then? And what shall I do with the gallant Percival Devere after he has slid down the rope from his beatling dungeon tower? As for ladies, I could dress up to pretty creatures, but would they move or speak upon my bidding? No one would more gladly throw a lady and gentleman on a desert island. At a pinch I flatter myself I could draw a roaring lion. But in what circumstance should the hungry cannibals appear? These questions must tax a novelist heavily. Or might I not? For copy, strip the front from that building opposite. The hold of the fronted, shaven shear, the inside gaped exposed to-day, right and wrong and common and queer, bare as the palm of your hand it lay. Every room contains a story, that chair, the stove, the very tub for washing holds its secrets, the stairs echo with the tread of a dozen lives. And in every crowded upon the street I could cast a stone and find a hero. There is a seamstress somewhere, a locksmith, a fellow with a shovel. I need but the genius to pluck out the heart of their mystery. The rumble of the subway is the friction of lives and rubbed together. The very roar of cities is the meshing of our human gear. I dream of this world I might create. In a romantic mood a castle lifts its towers into the blue dome of heaven. I issue in spirit with Jean Dark from the gate of Orleans. And I play the tragedy with changing scene until the fires of Roi have fallen into ashes. I sail the seas with Raleigh. I scheme with the humped-back Richard, out of the north with wind and sunlight. My hero comes singing to his adventures. It would be glorious fun to create a world, to paint a valley in autumn colors and set up a village at the crossroads. Howl's wives chatter at their wash lines. Wheels rattle on the wooden bridge. Old men doze on the grocery bench. And now let's throw the plot at a hazard round the lovely Susan, the grocery's clerk. For her lover we select a young garage man, the jest of the village, who tinkers at an improvement of a carburetor. The owner of a thousand acres on the hill shall be our villain, a waste-roll and a gambler. Now there is a mortgage on his acres. He is pressed for payment. He steals the garage man's blueprints. And now it is night. Susan dearly loves a movie. The orpheum is eight miles off. Painted cupids, angels with trumpets. A villain, an eight-sword roundabout. Susan. The movie, the roundabout again. A lonely road. Just a kiss, my pretty girl. Help! Help! Tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk. Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Foiled. The garage man. You, her! You, hound! Take that. And that! Susan. The garage man. The blueprints. Name the happy day. Oh joy. Oh bliss. It would be fun to model these little worlds and set them up to cool. Is it any wonder that there are a million stars across the night? God himself enjoyed the vast creation of his worlds. It was the evening and the morning of the sixth day when he set his puppets moving in to their compendous comedy. End of Chapter 10. Recording by Todd. Chapter 11 of Hints to Pilgrims This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Anita Sloma Martinez. Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Rooks. Circus Days There have been warm winds out of the south for several days. Soft rains have teased the daffodils into blossom along the fences, and this morning I heard the first clicking of a lawnmower. It seems but yesterday that winter was tugging at the chimneys, that March freshets were brawling in the gutters, but with the shifting of the cock upon the steeple, the spring comes from its hiding in the hills. At this moment, to prove the changing of the season, a street organ plays beneath my window. It is a rather miserable box and is stocked with sentimental tunes for coaxing nickels out of pity. Its inlaid mahogany is soiled with travel. It has a peg leg and it hangs around the musician's neck as if weary of the road. Master, it seems to say, may we sit a while? My old stump is wearing off. And yet on this warm morning in the sunlight there is almost a touch of frolic in the box. A single patient attempts a happier temper. It has sniffed the fragrant air and desires to put a better face upon its troubles. The housemaid next door hangs out the Monday's garments to dry, and there is a pleasant flapping of legs and arms as if impatient for partners in a dance. Must a petticoat sit unasked when the music plays? Surely breeches and stockings will not hold back when a lively skirt shall beckon. As slow waltz might even tempt Auntie's nightgown off the line. If only a vegetable man would come with a cart of red pie plant and green lettuce and offer his gaudy wares along the street then the evidence of spring would be complete. But there is even better evidence at hand. This morning I noticed that a circus poster had been pasted on the billboard near the schoolhouse. Several children and I stopped to see the wonders that were promised. Then the school bell rang and they dawdled off. At Stratford also, once upon a time, boys with shining morning faces crept like snails to school. Were there circus billboards in so remote a day? The pundits, speared with search, are strangely silent. This morning it will be a shrewd lesson that keeps the children's thoughts from leaping out the window. Two times two will hardly hold their noses on the desk. On the billboard there is the usual blond with pink legs balanced on one toe on a running horse. The clown holds the paper hoop. The band is blowing itself very red in the face and Acrobat leaps headlong from a high trapeze. There are five rings, thirty clowns, an amazing variety of equestrian and slack wire genius, a galaxy of dazzling beauties, and every performance includes a dizzy death-defying dive by a dauntless daredevil on a bicycle from the top of the tent. And, of course, there are elephants and performing dogs and fat ladies. One day only, two performances reign or shine. Does not this kind of billboard stir the blood in these languid days of spring? It is a tonic to the sober street. It is a shining dial that marks the coming of the summer. In the winter let barns and fences proclaim the fashion of our dress and tease us with bargains for the kitchen. But in the spring, when the wind is from the south, fences have a better use. They announce the circus. What child now will not come upon a trot? What student can keep to a solemn book? There is a sleepy droning from the schoolhouse, the irregular verbs, lullous rascals with a past, chafe in a dull routine, the clock loitered through the hour. It was by mere coincidence that last night on my way home I stopped at a newsstand for a daily paper and saw a periodical by the name of the paste brush. On a gay cover was the picture of another blonde, a sister maybe of the lady of the billboard. She was held by an ankle over a sea of upturned faces, but by her happy inverted smile she seemed unconscious of her danger. The paste brush is new to me. I bought a copy, folded its scandalous cover out of sight and took it home. It proves to be the trade journal of the circus and amusement park interests. It announces a circulation of seventy thousand, which I assume is largely among acrobats, magicians, fat ladies, clowns, liniment vendors, lion tamers, Caucasian beauties, and actors on obscure circuits. Now it happens that among a fairly wide acquaintance I cannot boast a single acrobat or liniment vendor, not even a professional fat man. A friend of mine, it is true, swells in that direction as an amateur, but he rolls night and morning as a corrective. I did once also pass an agreeable hour at a county fair with a strong man who bends iron bars in his teeth. He had picked me from his audience as one of convincing weight to hang across the bar while he performed his trick. When the show was done he introduced me to the bearded beauty and a talkative mermaid from Chicago. One of my friends also has told me that she is acquainted with a lady, a former pupil of her Sunday school, who leaps on holidays in the park from a parachute. The Bantam Champion, too, many years ago, lived behind us around the corner. But he was a distant hero, sated with fame unconscious of our youthful worship. But these meetings are exceptional and accidental. Most of us, let us assume, find our acquaintance in the usual walks of life. Last night, therefore, having laid by the letters of Madame d'Orblay, on whose seven volumes I have been engaged for a month, I took up the paste brush and was carried at once into another and unfamiliar world. The frontispiece is the big tent of the circus with side shows in the foreground. There is a great wheel with its swinging baskets, a merry-go-round, a funny castle, and a sword-swallower's booth. By a dense crowd around a wagon I am of opinion that here nothing less than red lemonade is sold. Certainly, jolly maud, that mountain of flesh holds a distant surging crowd against the ropes. An article entitled Freaks I Have Known is worth the reading. You may care to know that a celebrated missing link, I withhold the lady's name, plays solitaire in her tent as she waits her turn. Bearded ladies, it is asserted, are mostly married and have a fondness for crocheting out of ours. A certain three-legged boy, the favourite of applauding thousands, tried to enlist for the war, but was rejected because he broke up a pair of shoes. The wild man of Borneo lived and died in Waltham, Massachusetts. If the street and number were given, it would tempt me to a pilgrimage. Have I not journeyed to Concord and to Plymouth? Perhaps an old inhabitant, an antique spinster or rheumatic grocer, can still remember the pranks of the wild man's childhood. But in the paste brush, the pages of advertisement are best. Slot machines for chewing gum are offered for sale. Mary widow swings, beach babies, a kind of doll. Genuine Tiffany rings that defy the expert, second-hand saxophones, fountain pens at eight cents each, and sofa pillows with pictures of Turkish beauties. But let us suppose that you, my dear sir, are one of those 70,000 subscribers and are by profession a tattooer. On the day of publication, with what eagerness you scan its columns, here's your opportunity to pick up an improved outfit, stencils and supplies complete with twelve chest designs, and a picture of a tattooed lady in colors, twelve by eighteen, for display, send for price list. Or if you have skill in charming snakes and your stalk of vipers is running low, write to the snake king of Florida for his catalog. He treats you right. Here is an advertisement of an alligator farm. Alligator wrestlers, it is said, make big money at popular resorts on the Southern Circuit. You take off your shoes and stockings when the crowd has gathered and wade into the slimy pool. It needs only a moderate skill to raise the fierce creature by his tail and haul him to the shore. A deft movement throws him on his back. Then you tickle him under the ear to calm him and pass the hat. Here in the paste brush is an announcement of a shipload of monkeys from Brazil. Would you care to buy a walrus? A crocodile is easy money on the public square in old home week. Or perhaps you are a glassblower with your own outfit, a ventriloquist, a diving beauty, a lyric tenor, or a nail eater. If so, here is an agent who will book you through the West. The small cities and large towns of Kansas yearn for you. Or if you, my dear madam, are of good figure, the Alamo beauties touring in Mississippi want your services. Long season, no back pay. Would you like to play a tuba in a ladies' orchestra? You are wanted in Oklahoma. Sunshine girls, famous on Western circuits, are looking to augment their number. Wanted, woman for Eliza and Ophelia, also a child for Eva, must double as a pony, state salary, Canada theaters. It is affirmed that there is money in box-ball, that hoopla yields a fortune, that you mop up the tin with a huckley-buck. It sounds easy. I wonder what a huckley-buck is like. I wonder if I have ever seen one. It must become a knowledge to the readers of the pace brush, for the term is not explained. Perhaps one puts a huckley-buck in a wagon and drives from town to town. Doubtless it returns a fortune in a county fair. Is this not an opportunity for an underpaid school teacher or slim seamstress? No longer must she subsist upon a pittance. Here is rest for her blue, old fingers. Let her write today for a catalogue. She should choose a huckley-buck of gaudy color with a Persian princess on the side to draw the crowd. Let her stop by the village pump and sound a stirring blast upon her megaphone. Or perhaps you, my dear sir, have been chafing in an indoor job. You have been hooped through a dreary winter upon a desk. If so, your gloomy disposition can be mended by a hoopla booth, whatever it is. This way, gentlemen, try your luck. Positively no blanks. A valuable prize for everybody. Your stooped shoulders will straighten. Your digestion will come to order in a month. Or why not run a stand at the beach for walking sticks with a view in the handle of a dashing French princess in a daring pose? Or the latest picture of President and Mrs. Wilson at the peace conference? Or curiosities may be purchased. Two-headed giants, mermaids, sea serpents, a devil child, and an Egyptian mummy, new lists ready. A mummy would be a quiet and profitable companion for our seamstress in the long vacation. It would need less attention than a sea serpent. She should announce the dusty creature as the darling daughter of the Ptolemies. When the word has gone round, she may sit at ease before the booth in scarlet overalls and mount the dropping nickels. With what vigor will she take to her thimble in the autumn? Out in Gilmore, Texas, there is a hog with six legs, alive and healthy, $500 take it. Here is a merchant who will sell you snake, frog, and monkey-tites. After your church supper on the stage of the Sunday school, surely in such a costume, my dear madam, you could draw a crowd. You can see the trombone and double your income. Can you yodel? It can be learned at home, evenings, in six easy lessons. A used popcorn engine is cut in half. A waffle machine will be shipped to you on trial. Does no one wish to take the road with a five-legged cow? Here is one for sale, an extraordinary animal that cleaned up $60 in one afternoon at a county fair in Indiana. Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, the marvel of the age, plenty of time before the big show starts, a five-legged cow, count them, answers to the name of Guinevere, shown before all the crowned heads of Europe, once owned by the Tsar of Russia, only a dime, a tenth of a dollar, ten cents, show about to start. Or perhaps you think it more profitable to buy a steam caliope. Some very good ones are offered secondhand in the paste brush and tour your neighboring towns. Make a stand at the crossroads under the soldiers' monument. Give a free concert. Then, when the crowd is thick about you, offer them a magic ointment. Rub an old man for his rheumatism, throw away his crutch, clap him on the back and pronounce him cured, or pull teeth for a dollar each. It takes but a moment for a diagnosis. When once the fashion starts, the profitable bicuspids will drop around you. And funny castles can be bought. Perhaps you do not know what they are. They are usual in amusement parks. You and a favorite lady enter hand in hand. It is dark inside, and if she is of an agreeable timidity, she leans to your support. Only if you are a churro will you deny your arm. Then, presently, a fiery devil's head flashes beside you in the passage, the flooring tilts and wobbles as you step. Here, surely, no lady will wish to keep her independence. Presently a picture opens in the wall. It is souls in hell, or the queen of Sheba on a journey. Then a sharp draft ascends through an opening in the floor. Your lady screams and minds her skirts. A progress through a funny castle, it is said, ripens the greenest friendship. Now take the lady outside, smooth her off and regale her with the lover's Sunday. Funny castles with wind machines, a queen of Sheba almost new, and devil's head complete can be purchased. Remit 25% with order, the balance on delivery. Perhaps I am too old for these high excitements. Funny castles are behind me. Ladies of the circus alas, who ride in golden chariots are no longer beautiful. Cleopatra in her tinsel to the common level. Clowns with slapsticks rousing me only a moderate delight. At this moment, as I write, the clock strikes twelve. It is noon and school is out. There is a slamming of desks and a rush for caps. The boys scamper on the stairs. They surge through the gate. The acrobat on the billboard greets their eyes. The clown, also the lady with the pink legs, they pause, they gather in a circle. When victims to her smile they mark the great day in their memory. The wind is from the south. The daffodils flourish along the fences. The street organ hangs heavily on its strap. There will be a parade in the morning. The freaks will be on their platforms by one o'clock. The great show starts at two. I shall buy tickets and take Nepos, my nephew. End of Chapter 11 CHAPTER 12 IN PRANGE OF A LONMOWER so in virgin soil. One could hardly expect a poet to lift up his voice on such a homely theme. By instinct he prefers the more rhythmic scythe. Nor, on the other hand, will mechanical folk pay a full respect to a barren engine without cylinders and motive power. But to me it is just intricate enough to engage the interest. I can trace the relation of its wheels and knives and see how the lesser spinning starts the greater. In a printing press, on the contrary, I hear only the general rattle. Before a gas engine also I am dumb. Its sixteen processes to an explosion baffle me. I could as easily digest a machine for setting type. I nod blankly, as if a god explained the motion of the stars. Even when I select a motor I take it merely on reputation and by bouncing on the cushions to test its comfort. It has been a great many years since I was last intimate with a lawnmower. My acquaintance began in the days when a dirty face was the badge of freedom. One early Saturday morning I was hard at work before breakfast. Mother called down through the upstairs shutters at the first clicking of the knives to ask if I wore my rubbers in the Jew. With the money earned by noon I went to Conrad's shop. The season for tops and marbles had gone by. But in the window there was a peerless baseball with a rubber core known as a cock of the walk. By indecision even by starting for the door I bought it a nickel off because it was specked by flies. It did not occur to me last week at first that I could cut the grass. I talked with an Irishman who keeps the lawn next door. He leaned on his rake, took his pipe from his mouth, and told me that his time was full. If he had as many hands as a centipede, so he expressed himself, he could not do all the work that was asked of him. The whole street clamoured for his service. Then I talked with an Italian on the other side who comes to work on a motorcycle with his lawn mower across his shoulder. His time was worth a dollar an hour and he could squeeze me in after supper and before breakfast. But how can I consistently write upstairs? I am puttering with a novel, with so expensive a din sounding in my ears. My expected royalties shrink besides such swollen pay. So I have become my own yard man. Last week I had the lawn more sharpened. But it came home without adjustment. It went down the lawn without clipping a blade. What a struggle I had as a child getting the knives to touch along their entire length. I remember it as yesterday. What an ugly path was left when they cut on one side only. My bicycle chain, the front wheel that wobbled the ball bearings in the gear, none of these things were so perplexing. Last week I got out my screwdriver with somewhat of my old feeling of impotence. I sat down on the grass with discouragement and contemplation. One set of screws had to be loosened while another set was tightened and success lay in the delicacy of my advance. What was my amazement to discover that on a second trial my mower cut to its entire width? Even when I first wired a base plug and found that the table lamp would really light, I was not more astonished. This success with the lawn mower has given me hope. I am not, as I am accused, all thumbs. I may yet become a handyman around the house. Is the swirl of furnace pipes inside my intellect? Perhaps I can fix the leaky packing in the laundry tubs and henceforth look on the plumber as an equal brother. My dormant brain cells at last are awakened. But I must curb myself. I must not be too useful. There is no rest for a handyman. It is ignorance that permits a vacant holiday. At most I shall admit a familiarity with base plugs and picture wire and rubber washers, perhaps even with canvas awnings, which smack pleasantly of the sea. But I shall commit myself no further. Once in a while I rather enjoy cleaning the garage, raking down the cobwebs from the walls and windows with a stream from the hose, puddling the dirt into the central drain. I am ruthless with old oil cans and with the discarded clothing of the chauffer we had last month. Why is an old pair of pants stuffed so regularly in the tool drawer? There is a barrel at the alley fence. But I shall spare the details. It was the river Alpheus that Hercules turned through the Aegean stables. They had held three thousand oxen and had not been cleaned for thirty years. Dear me, I know oxen. I rank this labour ahead of the killing of the Hydra or fetching the golden apples of the Hisperides. Our garage can be sweetened with a hose. But I really like outside work. Last week I pulled up a quantity of dock and dandelions that were strangling the grass. And I raked in seed. This morning, when I went out for the daily paper, I saw a bit of tender green. The reds, as I noticed in the headline of the paper, were advancing on Warsaw. France and England were consulting for the defence of Poland. But I ignored these great events and stood transfixed in admiration before this shimmer of new grass. Our yard, fore and aft, is about an afternoon's work. And now that I have cut it once, I have signed up for the summer. It requires just the right amount of intelligence. I would not trust myself to pull weeds in the garden. M. has the necessary skill for this. I might pull up the canterbury bells which, out of season, I consider unsightly stalks. And I do not enjoy clipping the grass along the walks. It is a kind of barber's job. But I like the long straightaways, and I could wish that our grass plot stretched for another hundred feet. And I like the sound of a lawnmower. It is such a busy click and whir. It seems to work so willingly. Not even a sewing machine has quite Zubriska tempo. And when a lawnmower strikes a twig, it stops suddenly on its haunches with such impatience to be off again. Bend over, won't you? It seems to say, and pull out that stick. These trees are a pesky nuisance. They keep dropping branches all the while. Now then, are we ready? Whee! What's an apple? I can cut an apple all to flinders. You whistle, and I'll whir. Let's run down that slope together. I sleep too well. That is, I go to sleep too soon. I am told that I pass a few minutes of troubled breathing, not vulgar snores, but a kind of uneasy ripple on the shore of wakefulness. Then I drift out with the silent tide. Doubtless I merit no sympathy for my perfection, and yet—well, in the first place. Lately we have had windy moonlit nights, and as my bed sets at the edge of the sleeping porch, and the rail cuts off the earth, it is like a ride at an aeroplane to lie awake among the torn and ragged clouds. I have cast off the borings of the sluggish world. Our garden with its flowering path, the coop for our neighbor's chickens, the apple tree, all have sunk from sight. The prow of my plane is pitched across the top of a waving poplar. Earth's harbour lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the channel to the open sky. I must hang out a lantern to fend me from the moon. I shall keep awake for fifteen minutes, I think. Perhaps I can recall Keith's sonnet to the night. When I behold upon the night's starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and those lines of Milton about the moon rising in clouded majesty unveiling her peerless light, here a star peeps out. Presently its companions will show themselves, and I shall know the constellation. Are they playing like little children at height and sea? Do I catch our tourists looking from its cover? Shall I shout high spy to Alphalera? A shooting star that has crouched behind a cloud runs home to the goal untagged. Surely these glistening worlds cannot be hard-fisted planets like our own, holding a close schedule across the sky. They have looted the shining treasure of the sunset. They sail the high fantastic seas like caravals blown from India. In the twilight they have lifted vagrant anchors, and they will more in strange havens at the dawn. Are not these ragged clouds the garment of the night? Like the beggar maiden of an ancient tale she runs with flying raiment. She unmasks her beauty when the world's asleep, and the wind like an eager prince upon his wooing rides out of the stormy north, and then, poof, sleep draws its dark curtain across the glittering pageant. Presently I hear Annie the cook on the kitchen steps below, beating me up to breakfast. She sounds her unwelcome revelry on a tin pan with an iron spoon. Her first alarm I treat with indifference. It even weaves itself pleasantly into my dreams. I have been to a circus lately, let us say, and this racket seems to be the tom-tom of a sideshow where a thin gentleman swallows snakes. Nor does a second outburst serve me. She only tries the metal and practices for the later din. At the third alarm I rise, for now she nurses a mighty wrath. I must humor the angry creature lest in her fury she push over a shelf of crockery. There is a cold jump for slippers, a chilly passage. I passed a week lately at a country hotel where there were a number of bad sleepers, men broken by the cares of business, but convalescent. Each morning as I dressed I heard them on the veranda outside my window, exchanging their complaints. Well, said one, I slept three hours last night. I wish I could, said a second. I never do, said a third. No matter how little sleep the first man allowed himself, the second clipped off an hour. The third man told the bells he had heard, one and two and three and four, both Baptist and Methodist, and finished with his preceding competitor at least a half hour down. But always there was an old man, an ancient man with flowing beard, who waited until all were done and concluded the discussion just at the breakfast gong. I never slept a wink. This was the perfect score. His was the golden cup. Whereupon the insomnia's veranda hung its defeated head with shame, and filed into the dining room to be soothed and comforted with griddle cakes. This daily contest recalled to me the story of the two men drowned in the Dayton and Johnstown floods, who boasted to each other when they came to heaven. Has the story gone the rounds? For a while they were the biggest lions among all the angels, and harps hung untuned and neglected in their presence. As often as they met in the windy portico of heaven, one of these heroes, falling to reminisce of the flood that drowned him, lifted the swirling water of Johnstown to the second floor. The other hero, not to be outdone, drenched the Dayton garrets. The first was now compelled to submerge at chimney. Turn by turn they mounted in competition to the top of familiar steeples. But always an old man sat by, an ancient man with flowing beard, who said, Fudge, in a tone of great contempt. Must I continue? Surely you have guessed the end. It was the old mariner himself. It was the survivor of Ararat. It was Noah. Once I myself, among these bad sleepers on the veranda, boasted that I had heard the bells at two o'clock, but I was scorned as an unfledged novice in their high convention. Sleeping too well seems to argue that there is nothing on your mind. Your head, it is asserted by the jealous, is a vacancy that matches the empty spaces of the night. It is as void as the untwinkling north. If there has been a rummage, they affirm, of important matters all day above your ears, it can hardly be checked at once by popping the tired head down upon a pillow. These fizzing squibs of thought cannot be smothered in a blanket. When one has planned a railroad or a revolution, the mighty churning still progresses in the dark. A dubious franchise must be gained, villains must be pricked down for execution, or bankers have come up from Paraguay and one meditates from hour to hour on the sureness of the loan, or perhaps an imperfect poem searches for a rhyme or the plot of a novel sticks. It is the shell they say which is fetched from the stormy sea that roars all night. My head alas, by the evidence, is a shell which is brought from a stagnant shore. Tired nature's sweet restorer bought me sleep. Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. That is all very well and pretty poetry, but I am afraid when everything is said that I am a sleepyhead. I do not, of course, have to pinch myself at a business meeting. At high noon I do not hear the lotus song. I do not topple full of dreams off the platform of a streetcar. The sleepy poppy is not always at my nose. Nor do I yawn at dinner behind a napkin or doze in the firelight when there are guests about. My manners keep me from this borishness. In an extremity, if they sit too late, I stir the fire or I put my head out of doors for the wind to weaken me. I show a sudden anxiety whether the garage is locked. I pretend that the lawnmower is left outside or that the awnings are loose and flapping. But I do not dash out the lights when our guests are still upon the steps. I listen at the window until I hear their motor clear the corner. Then I turn furiously to my buttons. I kick off my shoes upon the staircase. Several of us were camping once in the woods north of Lake Superior. As we had no guides we did all the work ourselves and every one was of harder endurance than myself. Was it not Pippa who cried out mornings at seven? Seven! I look at her as being no better than a slugabed. She should have had her dishes washed and been on her way by six. Our day began at five. Our tents had to be taken down, our blankets and duffel packed. We were regularly on the water an hour before Pippa stirred a foot. And then there were four or five hours of paddling, perhaps in windy water. And then a new camp was made. Our day matched the exertions of a traveling circus. In default of expert knowledge I carried water, cut browse for the beds and washed dishes. Little jobs of an unpleasant nature were found for me as often as I paused. Others did a showy light-fingered work. I was house-made and roused about from sunrise to weary sunset. I was never allowed to rest. Nor was I permitted to flop the bacon, which I consider an easy sedentary occupation. I acquired, unjustly, let us agree in this, a reputation for laziness, because one day I sat for several hours in a blueberry patch when work was going forward. And then one night, when all labor seemed done and there was an hour of twilight, I was asked to read aloud. Everyone settled himself for a feast of Shakespeare's sonnets. But it was my ill luck that I selected the sonnet that begins, weary with toil I hasted me to my bed. A great shout went up, a shout of derision. That night I read no more. I carried up six or eight pales of water from the spring and followed the sonneteer's example. There are a great many books that I would like to read of a winter's evening if I could stay awake. All of the history's certainly a fisk, and roads perhaps. I might even read the Four Horsemen, Trilby, and the Education of Henry Adams so as not to be alone. It is snug by the fire and the very wind taps on the window as if it asked for invitation to share the hearth. I could compile a list, a five foot shelf, for these nights of tempest. There is a writer in a Boston paper who tells us every week the books that he would like to read. His is a prospect rather than a review, for it is based on his anticipation. But does he ever read these books? Perhaps he two doses. The book slips off his knee and his chin drops to comfort on his front. Let me inform him that a wood fire, if the logs are hardly dry, is a corrective. Its stability, as water oozes at the end, requires attendance every five minutes. Even Wardle's fat boy at Manor Farm could have lasted through the evening if the poker had been forced into his hands so often. I read, says Tennyson, before my eyelids dropped their shade, and wasn't Alice sitting with her book when she fell asleep and down the rabbit-hole? And so to bed, writes Peeps. He, too, then, is one of us. I wonder if that phrase, he who runs may read, has not a deeper significance than lies upon the surface. Perhaps the prophet—was it Habakkuk who wrote the line? It does not matter. Perhaps the bearded prophet had himself the sleepy habit, and kept moving briskly for remedy around his study. I can see him in dressing-gown and slippers with book in hand, his whiskers veering in the wind, quickening his lively pace around the kerosene lamp, steering among the chairs, stumbling across the cat. In ambition I am a night-hawk. I would like to sit late with books and reconstruct the forgotten world at midnight. These bells that I hear now across the darkness are the mad bells of Saint Bartholomew. With that distant whistle a train on the B and O, Guy Fox gathers his villains to light the fuse. Through my window from the night I hear the sounds of far-off wars and kingdoms falling. And I would like, also, at least in theory, to sit with the merry company of friends and let the canokin clink till dawn. I would like to walk the streets of our crowded city and marvel at the windows to speculate on the thousand dramas that weave their webs in our common life. Here is mirth that shakes its sides when its neighbours sleep. Here is a hungry student whose ambition builds him rosy castles. Here is a light at a fevered pillow where hope burns dim. On some fairy night I would wish to wander in the woods when there are dancing shadows and a moon. Here Oberon holds state. Here Titania sleeps. I would cross the silver upland. I would stand on a barren hilltop like the skipper of the world in its whirling voyage. But these high accomplishments are beyond me. Habakkuk and the Fat Boy and Alice and Peeps and I and all the others must be content. Even the wet wood and the poker fail. The very wind grows sleepy at the window. Our chins fall forward. Our books slip off our knees. And now at last our buoyant bed floats among the stars. I have cast off the moorings of the sluggish world. Earth's harbor lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the channel to the moon. Poof! Sleep draws again its dark curtain across the glittering pageant. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Hence to Pilgrims This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Frank Duncan Hence to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks Chapter 14 Who was Jeremy? Who was Jeremy Bentham? I have run on his name recently two or three times. I could of course find out. The encyclopedia volume Offs to Biss would enlighten me. Right now, downstairs, in the bookcase up near the top, where the shabby books are kept, among the old beddickers, there is a life of him by Leslie Stephen. No, that is a life of Hobbes. I don't know anything about Hobbes either. It seems to me that he wrote the Leviathan, whatever that was. But there is a Bentham somewhere around the house. But I have not read it. In a rough way, I know who Bentham was. He lived perhaps a hundred years ago, and he has a theory of utility. Utility was to clean the infected world. Even the worst of us were to rise out of the tub, white and perfect. It was Bentham who wished to revisit the world in a hundred years to see how sweet and clean we had become. He was to utility what Malthus was to population. Malthus, there is another hard one. It is the same kind of name that has cut round the top of a new city hall to shame citizens by their ignorance. I could go downstairs this minute and look up Bentham. Is it worthwhile? But then, I might be called to dinner in the middle of the article, or I might be wanted to move the refrigerator. There is a musty smell, it seems, in the drain pipe. And the stubborn casters are turned sideways. It hardly seems worth the chance and effort. There are a great many things that really do stir my curiosity, and even those things I don't look up, or tardily, after my ignorance has been exposed. The other day the moon arose as a topic at the round table of the club where I eat lunch. It had really never occurred to me that we have never seen its other side, that we never could expect by a catastrophe unless it smashed into a planet and was thrown heels up. How does it keep itself so balanced? That one face is forever hid. Try to roll an apple around a pumpkin and meanwhile spin the pumpkin. Try this on your carpet. I take my hat off to the moon. I have been very ignorant of the moon. All of these years I have regarded it as kindly creature that showed itself now and then merely on a whim. It was just jogging around of an evening, so I supposed, and looked us up. It was an old neighbor who dropped in after dinner, as it were, for a bit of gossip. And an apple. But even the intendent knife grinder whose whirling wheel I can hear this minute below me in the street. Even the knife grinder has a root. He knows at what season we grow dull. What necessity then of ours beckons to the moon. Perhaps it comes with a silver brush to paint the earth when it grows shabby with traffic of the day. Perhaps it shows itself to stir a lover who halts coldly in a suit. The pink god, they say, shoots a dangerous arrow when the moon is full. The extent of my general ignorance is amazing. And yet I suppose by persistence and energy I could mend it. Old Dr. Dwight used to advise those of us who sat in his classroom to read a hard book for half an hour each day. How those half hours would mount up through the years. What a prodigious background of history, of science, of literature one would gain as the years revolved. If I had followed his advice, I would today be bursting with knowledge of Jeremy Bentham. I would never have been tripped upon the moon. How ignorant most of us are of the times in which we live. We see the smoke and fires in revolution in Europe. We hear the cries of famine and disease, but our perception is lost in general smudge. How were the Balkans parceled? How was the nest of nationalities along the Danube disposed? This morning there is a revolt in Londonderry. What parties are opposite in the quarrel? Trouble brews in Chile. Is Tachne Africa a district or a mountain range? The Alond Islands breed war in the north. Today there is a casualty list from Baghdad. The Bolshevik advance on Warsaw. Those of us who are cobblers tap our shoes unruffled. Tailors stitch. We bargain in the market all of us go about on little errands without excitement when the news is brought. And then there is mechanics. This is now so preeminently a mechanical world that no one ought to be entirely ignorant of cylinders and cogs. And carburetors. And yet my own motor is as dark as Africa. I am as ignorant of a carburetor as of the black stomach of a zebra. Once a carpenter's bench was given me at Christmas. Fitted up with all manner of tricky tools. The bookshelves I built in my first high enthusiasm have now gone down to the basement to hold the canned fruit. Where they lean with rickets against the wall. Even the box I made to hold the milk bottles on the back steps have gone the way of flesh. Any chicken coop of mine would topple in the wind. Well instructed hens would sit around on fence posts and cackle at my efforts with a saw. Certainly if a company of us were thrown on a desert island it would not be I who proved the admiral Crichton. Not by my shrewdness could we build a hut. Robinson Crusoe contrived a boat. If I tied a raft together it would be sure to sink. Where are the virgin islands? What makes a teapot bubble? What forces bring the rain and tempest? In cooking I go no farther than an egg. Birds to me are either sparrows or robins. I know an elm and a maple. But hemlocks and pines and furs mix me up. I'm not to be trusted to pull the weeds. Up would come the hollyhocks. Japanese prints and Chinese vases sit in a world above me. I can thump myself in front without knowing whether I jar my stomach or my liver. I have no notion where my food goes when it disappears. When once I have tilted my pudding off its spoon, my knowledge ceases. It is as a child of Israel on journey in the wilderness. Does it pass through my thorax? And where do my lungs branch off? I know nothing of etchings. And I sit in a gloomy silence when friends toss whistler and rembrandt across the table. I know who our mare is, but I scratch my head to name our senator. And why does this world crumple up in hills and mountains? I could look up Jeremy Bentham and hear after I would know all about him. And I could look up the moon and Hobbes and Leslie Stephen who wrote a book about him and a man named Maitland who wrote a life of Stephen. Somebody must have written about Maitland. I could look him up too. And I could read about the Balkans and tell my neighbors whether they are tertiary or Triassic. I could pursue the thorax to its lair. Saws and chicken coops no doubt are an engaging study. I might take a tree book to the country or seek an instructive job in a garage. But what is the use? Right in front of Jeremy Bentham in Ost Abyss is George Bentham, an English botanist. To be thorough I would have to read about him also. Then following along is Bentevoglia and Benzene. A long article on Benzene. And Beowulf. No educated person should be quite ignorant of him. Albrecht Bitzius was a Swiss novelist. Somehow he escaped me entirely. And Susanna Blamir, the muse of Cumberland. She sounds engaging. Who is there so incurious that we would not give an evening to Borneo and the Bria Fitta, which I am glad to learn include the mosses and the liverworts, dear me. It is quite discouraging. And then, when I am gaining information on Hobbes, the Hittites, right in front, take my eyes. Hilarious wrote light verses of the galardic type, whatever that means, and the hippopotamus, the largest representative of the non-riminating artyodactyl undulate mammals. I must sit with the hippopotamus and warm his secret. And after I have learned to use the saw, I would have to take up the plane, and then the auger, and whistler, and Japanese prince, and a bird book. It is very discouraging. I stand with a pope, certainly, unless one is very thirsty, and has a great deal of vacant time. It is best to avoid the period in spring. Jeremy can go and hang himself. I am learning to play golf. End of Chapter 14