Chimney-Pot Papers Part 5

"Me? Well, I don't run off to the country as if the city were afire and my coat-tails smoked. And I don't sentimentalize on the evils of society. And I don't sit and blink in the dark, and moon around on a shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I walk around and look at things--shop windows and all that, when the merchants leave their curtains up. I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there's the Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one may make acquaintances.

People are always more communicative when they look out on the water.

The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about himself, his wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk to a good many persons, first and last, or I stand around until they talk to me. So many persons wear blinders in the city. They don't know how wonderful it is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop on Fourteenth Street, just to listen to the crowd on its final round--mother's carpet sweeper, you understand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas is different--it's gayer--reckless--it's an exalted Sat.u.r.day night.

Afterwards I heard Midnight Ma.s.s at the Russian Cathedral. Then there are always ferryboats--the band on the boat to Staten Island--G.o.d!

What music! Tugs and lights. I would like to know a tug--intimately.

If more people were like tugs we'd have less rotten politics. Wall Street on a holiday is fascinating. No one about. Desolate. But full of spirits."

Flint took a fresh cigar. "Last Sunday morning I walked in Central Park. There were all manner of toy sailboats on the pond--big and little--thirty of them at the least--tipping and running in the breeze. Grown men sail them. They set them on a course, and then they trot around the pond and wait for them. Presently I was curious. A man upward of fifty had his boat out on the gra.s.s and was adjusting the rigging.

"'That's quite a boat,' I began.

"'It's not a bad tub,' he answered.

"'Do you hire it from the park department?' I asked.

"'No!' with some scorn.

"'Where do you buy them?'

"'We don't buy them.'

"'Then how--?' I started.

"'We make 'em--nights.'

"He resumed his work. The boat was accurately and beautifully turned--hollow inside--with a deck of glossy wood. The rudder was controlled by finest tackle and hardware. Altogether, it was as delicately wrought as a violin.

"'It's this way!'--its builder and skipper laid down his pipe--'There are about thirty of us boys who are dippy about boats. We can't afford real boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am an interior decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next winter--if my wife will stand the muss (My G.o.d! How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new boat each spring!'

The old fellow squinted at his mast and tightened a cord. Then he continued. 'If you are interested, come around any Sunday morning until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try your hand at a boat this winter, just ask any of us boys and we will help you. Your first boat or two will be sad--_Ju-das!_ But you will learn.'"

Flint was interrupted by Quill. "Isn't that rather a silly occupation for grown men?"

"It's not an occupation," said Flint. "It's an avocation, and it isn't silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren't so self-conscious.

And it's more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what courtesy! These men form what is really a club--a club in its primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be one of them."

Flannel s.h.i.+rt broke in. "By George, that _was_ courtesy. If you had happened on a polo player at his club--a man not known to you--he wouldn't have invited you to come around and bring your pony for instruction."

"It's not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel s.h.i.+rt?"

"No, maybe not."

There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. "I rather like to think of that interior decorator littering up his dining-room every night--clamps and glue-pots on the sideboard--hardly room for the sugar-bowl--lumber underneath--and then bringing out a new boat in the spring."

Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," he said, "should have known that fellow. He would have found him a place among his Lantern Bearers."

Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down Fifth Avenue."

"It's Fifth Avenue," said Flannel s.h.i.+rt, "everything up above Fifty-ninth Street--and what it stands for, that I want to get away from."

"Easy, Flannel s.h.i.+rt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue doesn't interest me much either. It's too lonely. Everybody is always away. The big stone buildings aren't homes: they are points of departure, as somebody called them. And they were built for kings and persons of s.p.a.cious lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a 'bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts." Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a sh.e.l.l? Even a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a wonderful street it would be if persons really lived there, and looked out of their windows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their tapestries and rugs across the outer walls. Actually," added Flint, "I prefer to walk on the East Side. It is gayer."

"There is poverty, of course," he went on after a moment, "and suffering. But the streets are not depressing. They have fun on the East Side. There are so many children and there is no loneliness. If the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems designed as a post for leaping. Any vacant wall--if the street is so lucky--serves for a game. There is baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch--not stretched out, for there isn't room, but rolled up like a jelly cake. One must hop to the middle and out again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon he spends his grudge upon an enemy--these drawings can be no likeness of a friend. Or love guides the chalky fingers. And all the time slim-legged girls sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the younger fry."

"But, my word, what smells!"

"Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. Down on these streets we can learn what dogs think of us. But every Sat.u.r.day night on Grand Street there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts from an old woman. They aren't much good to eat--wee nuts, all sh.e.l.l--and they still sit in the kitchen getting dusty. It was raining when I bought them and the woman's hair was streaked in her face, but she didn't mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. Everything on G.o.d's earth was for sale. On the cart next to my old woman's, there was hardware--sieves, cullenders--kitchen stuff. And on the next, wearing gear, with women's stockings hung on a rope at the back. A girl came along carrying a pair of champagne-colored shoes, looking for stockings to match. Quite a belle. Somebody's girl. Quill, go down there on a Sat.u.r.day night. It will make a column for your paper. I wonder if that girl found her stockings. A black-eyed Italian.

"But what I like best are the windows on the East Side. No one there ever says that his house is his castle. On the contrary it is his point of vantage--his outlook--his prospect. His house front never dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look out of--not openings for household exhibits--ornamental lamps or china things--at every window there is a head--somebody looking on the world. There is a pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes--a recipe for onions--a hint of fas.h.i.+on--a cure for rheumatism. The street bears the general life.

The home is the street, not merely the crowded s.p.a.ce within four walls. The street is the playground and the club--the common stage, and these are the galleries and boxes. We come again close to the beginning of the modern theatre--an innyard with windows round about.

The play is s.h.i.+nny in the gutters. Venders come and go, selling fruit and red suspenders. An ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen children on its tailboard."

Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," he said at length, "that those persons who try to tempt these people out of the congested city to farms, don't see how falsely they go about it. They should reproduce the city in miniature--a dozen farmhouses must be huddled together to make a snug little town, where all the children may play and where the women, as they work, may talk across the windows. They must build villages like the farming towns of France.

"But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? From here even the narrowest fancy reaches out to the four watery corners of the earth.

No nose is so green and country-bred that it doesn't sniff the spices of India. Great s.h.i.+ps lie in the channel camouflaged with war. If we could forget the terror of the submarine, would not these lines and stars and colors appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of the far-off seas?

"Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand barrels, oil maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing at fat attention to go aboard.

Except for numbers it might appear--although I am rusty at the legend--that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves for roguery when the s.h.i.+p is out to sea. Doubtless if one knocked upon a top and put his ear close upon a barrel, he would hear a villain's guttural voice inside, asking if the time were come.

"Then there are the theatres and parks, great caverns where a subway is being built. There are geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on dizzy lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus), a roar of traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating--always eating.

There has been nothing like this in all the ages. Babylon and Nineveh were only villages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though all the cities of antiquity had packed their bags and moved here to a common spot."

"Please, Flint," this from Colum, "but you forget that the faces of those who live in the country are happier. That's all that counts."

"Not happier--less alert, that's all--duller. For contentment, I'll wager against any farmhand the old woman who sells apples at the corner. She polishes them on her ap.r.o.n with--with spit. There is an Italian who peddles ice from a handcart on our street, and he never sees me without a grin. The folk who run our grocery, a man and his wife, seem happy all the day. No! we misjudge the city and we have done so since the days of Wordsworth. If we prized the city rightly, we would be at more pains to make it better--to lessen its suffering.

We ought to go into the crowded parts with an eye not only for the poverty, but also with sympathy for its beauty--its love of suns.h.i.+ne--the tenderness with which the elder children guard the younger--its love of music--its dancing--its naturalness. If we had this sympathy we could help--_ourselves_, first--and after that, maybe, the East Side."

Flint arose and leaned against the chimney. He shook an accusing finger at the company. "You, Colum, ruin fifty weeks for the sake of two. You, Quill, hypnotize yourself into a frazzle by Sat.u.r.day noon with unnecessary fret. You peck over your food too much. A little clear unmuddled thinking would straighten you out, even if you didn't let the ants crawl over you on Sunday afternoon. Old Flannel s.h.i.+rt is blinded by his spleen against society. As for Wurm, he doesn't count.

He's only a harmless bit of mummy-wrapping."

"And what are you, Flint?" asked Quill.

"Me? A rational man, I hope."

"You--you are an egotist. That's what you are."

"Very well," said Flint. "It's just as you say."

There was a red flash from the top of the Metropolitan Tower. Flint looked at his watch. "So?" he said, "I must be going."

And now that our party is over and I am home at last, I put out the light and draw open the curtains. Tomorrow--it is to be a holiday--I had planned to climb in the Highlands, for I, too, am addicted to the country. But perhaps--perhaps I'll change my plan and stay in town.

I'll take a hint from Flint. I'll go down to Delancey Street and watch the chaffering and buying. What he said was true. He overstated his position, of course. Most propagandists do, being swept off in the current of their swift conviction. One should like both the city and the country; and the liking for one should heighten the liking for the other. Any particular receptiveness must grow to be a general receptiveness. Yet, in the main, certainly, Flint was right. I'll try Delancey Street, I concluded, just this once.

Thousands of roofs lie below me, for I live in a tower as of Teufelsdrockh. And many of them s.h.i.+eld a bit of grief--darkened rooms where sick folk lie--rooms where hope is faint. And yet, as I believe, under these roofs there is more joy than grief--more contentment and happiness than despair, even in these grievous times of war. If Quill here frets himself into wakefulness and Colum chafes for the coming of the summer, also let us remember that in the murk and shadows of these rooms there are, at the least, thirty sailors from Central Park--one old fellow in particular who, although the hour is late, still putters with his boat in the litter of his dining-room. Glue-pots on the sideboard! Clamps among the china, and lumber on the hearth! And down on Grand Street, snug abed, dreaming of pleasant conquest, sleeps the dark-eyed Italian girl. On a chair beside her are her champagne boots, with stockings to match hung across the back.

Runaway Studies.