Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley

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Now comes a portion of the narrative that exhibits to the full the
deceits and stratagems of the human being. This tie, which we liked
so much, thinking it the kind of thing that would add a certain dash
and zip to our bearing, was eminently a metropolitan-looking kind of
scarf. No one would think to look at it that it had been bought in
Gloversville. And we said to ourself that if we went quietly back to
the hotel and slipped unobtrusively into the washroom and put on
that tie, no one would know that we had just bought it in
Gloversville, but would think it was a part of our elaborate
wardrobe that we had brought from New York. Very well. (We would not
reveal these shameful subterfuges to any one but Pete Corcoran.) No
sooner said than done; and behold us taking the trolley from
Gloversville to Fonda, with the rest of the company, wearing that
tie that flared and burned in the keen wintry light like a great
banner, like an oriflamme of youthful defiance.

And what a day that was! We shall never forget it; we will never
forget it! Was that the Mohawk Valley that glittered in the morning?
(A sunshine so bright that sitting on the sunward side of the smoker
and lighting our pipe, the small flame of our match paled shamefully
into a tiny and scarce visible ghost.) Our tie strengthened and
sustained us in our zest for a world so coloured and contoured. We
even thought that it was a bit of a pity that our waistcoat was cut
with so shallow and conservative a V that the casual passerby would
see but little of that triumphant silk beacon. The fellow members of
our company were too polite to remark upon it, but we saw that they
had noticed it and took it as a joyful omen.

We had two and a half hours in Albany that day and we remember that
we had set our heart on buying a certain book. Half an hour we
allotted to lunch and the other two hours was spent in visiting the
bookshops of Albany, which are many and good. We wonder if any
Albany booksellers chance to recall a sudden flash of colour that
came, moved along the shelves, and was gone? We remember half a
dozen book stores that we visited; we remember them just as well as
if it were yesterday, and we remember the great gusto and bright
cheer of the crowds of shoppers, already doing their Christmas
pioneering. We remember also that three of the books we bought (to
give away) were McFee's "Aliens" and Frank Adams's "Tobogganing on
Parnassus," yes, and Stevenson's "Lay Morals." Oh, a great day! And
we remember the ride from Albany to Kingston, with the darkening
profile of the Catskills on the western side of the train, the tawny
colours of the fields (like a lion's hide), the blue shadows of the
glens, the sparkling Hudson in quick blinks of brightness, the lilac
line of the hills when we reached Kingston in the dusk. We remember
the old and dilapidated theatre at Kingston, the big shabby dressing
rooms of the men, with the scribbled autographs of former mummers on
the walls. And that night we said good-bye to our little play, whose
very imperfections we had grown to love by this time, and took the
3:45 A.M. milk train to New York. We slept on two seats in the
smoker, and got to Weehawken in the brumous chill of a winter
dawn--still wearing our tie. Now can Pete Corcoran wonder why we are
fond of it, and why, ever and anon, we get it out and wear it in
remembrance?

[Illustration]

THE CLUB OF ABANDONED HUSBANDS

AJAX: Hullo, Socrates, what are you doing patrolling the streets at
this late hour? Surely it would be more seemly to be at home?

SOCRATES: You speak sooth, Ajax, but I have no home to repair to.

AJAX: What do you mean by that?

SOCRATES: In the sense of a place of habitation, a dormitory, of
course I still have a home; but it is merely an abandoned shell, a
dark and silent place devoid of allure. I have sent my family to the
seashore, good Ajax, and the lonely apartment, with all the blinds
pulled down and nothing in the icebox, is a dismal haunt. That is
why I wander upon the highway.

AJAX: I, too, have known that condition, Socrates. Two years ago
Cassandra took the children to the mountains for July and August;
and upon my word I had a doleful time of it. What do you say, shall
we have recourse to a beaker of ginger ale and discuss this matter?
It is still only the shank of the evening.

SOCRATES: It is well thought of.

AJAX: As I was saying, the quaint part of it was that before my wife
left I had secretly thought that a period of bachelorhood would be
an interesting change. I rather liked the idea of strolling about in
the evenings, observing the pageant of human nature in my quiet way,
dropping in at the club or the library, and mingling with my fellow
men in a fashion that the husband and father does not often have
opportunity to do.

SOCRATES: And when Cassandra went away you found yourself desolate?

AJAX: Even so. Of course matters were rather different in those
days, before the archons had taken away certain stimulants, but the
principle is still the same. You know, the inconsistency of man is
rather entertaining. I had often complained about having to help put
the children to bed when I got home from the office. I grudged the
time it took to get them all safely bestowed. And then, when the
children were away, I found myself spending infinitely more time and
trouble in getting some of my bachelor friends to bed.

SOCRATES: As that merry cartoonist Briggs observes in some of his
frescoes, Oh Man!

AJAX: I wonder if your experience is the same as mine was? I found
that about six o'clock in the evening, the hour when I would
normally have been hastening home to wife and babes, was the most
poignant time. I was horribly homesick. If I did go back to my
forlorn apartment, the mere sight of little Priam's crib was enough
to reduce me to tears. I seriously thought of writing a poem about
it.

SOCRATES: What is needed is a Club of Abandoned Husbands, for the
consolation of those whose families are out of town.

AJAX: I have never found a club of much assistance at such a time.
It is always full of rather elderly men who talk a great deal and in
a manner both doleful and ill-informed.

SOCRATES: But this would be a club of quite a different sort. It
would be devised to offer a truly domestic atmosphere to those who
have sent their wives and juveniles to the country for the benefit
of the fresh air, and have to stay in the city themselves to earn
what is vulgarly known as kale.

AJAX: How would you work out the plan?

SOCRATES: It would not be difficult. In the first place, there would
be a large nursery, with a number of rented children of various
ages. Each member of the club, hastening thither from his office at
the conclusion of the day's work, would be privileged to pick out
some child as nearly as possible similar in age and sex to his own
absent offspring. He would then deal with this child according to
the necessities of its condition. If it were an extremely young
infant, a bottle properly prepared would be ready in the club
kitchen, and he could administer it. The club bathroom would be
filled with hilarious members on their knees beside small tubs,
bathing such urchins as needed it. Others would be playing games on
the floor, or tucking the children in bed. It ought to be quite
feasible to hire a number of children for this purpose. During the
day they would be cared for by a competent matron. Baby carriages
would be provided, and if any of the club members were compelled to
remain in town over the week-end they could take the children for an
airing in the park.

AJAX: This is a brave idea, Socrates. And then, when all the
children were bedded for the night, how would the domestic
atmosphere be simulated?

SOCRATES: Nothing simpler. After dinner such husbands as are
accustomed to washing the dishes would be allowed to do so in the
club kitchen. During the day it would be the function of the matron
to think up a number of odd jobs to be performed in the course of
the evening. Pictures would be hung, clocks wound, a number of tin
cans would be waiting to be opened with refractory can openers, and
there would always be several window blinds that had gone wrong. A
really resourceful matron could devise any number of ways of making
the club seem just like home. One night she would discern a smell of
gas, the next there might be a hole in the fly-screens, or a little
carpentering to do, or a caster broken under the piano. Husbands
with a turn for plumbing would find the club basement a perpetual
place of solace, with a fresh leak or a rumbling pipe every few
days.

AJAX: Admirable! And if the matron really wanted to make the members
feel at home she would take a turn through the building every now
and then, to issue a gentle rebuke for cigar ashes dropped on the
rugs or feet elevated on chairs.

SOCRATES: The really crowning touch, I think, would lie in the
ice-box raids. A large ice-box would be kept well stocked with
remainders of apple pie, macaroni, stewed prunes, and chocolate
pudding. Any husband, making a cautious inroad upon these about
midnight, would surely have the authentic emotion of being in his
own home.

AJAX: An occasional request to empty the ice-box pan would also be
an artful echo of domesticity.

SOCRATES: Of course the success of the scheme would depend greatly
on finding the right person for matron. If she were to strew a few
hairpins about and perhaps misplace a latch key now and then----

AJAX: Socrates, you have hit upon a great idea. But you ought to
extend the membership of the club to include young men not yet
married. Think what an admirable training school for husbands it
would make!

SOCRATES: My dear fellow, let us not discuss it any further. It
makes me too homesick. I am going back to my lonely apartment to
write a letter to dear Xanthippe.

[Illustration]

WEST BROADWAY

Did you ever hear of Finn Square? No? Very well, then, we shall have
to inflict upon you some paragraphs from our unpublished work: "A
Scenic Guidebook to the Sixth Avenue L." The itinerary is a frugal
one: you do not have to take the L, but walk along under it.

Streets where an L runs have a fascination of their own. They have a
shadowy gloom, speckled and striped with the sunlight that slips
through the trestles. West Broadway, which along most of its length
is straddled by the L, is a channel of odd humours. Its real name,
you know, is South Fifth Avenue; but the Avenue got so snobbish it
insisted on its humbler brother changing its name. Let us take it
from Spring Street southward.

Ribbons, purple, red, and green, were the first thing to catch our
eye. Not the ribbons of the milliner, however, but the carbon tapes
of the typewriter, big cans of them being loaded on a junk wagon.
"Purple Ribbons" we have often thought, would be a neat title for a
volume of verses written on a typewriter. What happens to the used
ribbons of modern poets? Mr. Hilaire Belloc, or Mr. Chesterton, for
instance. Give me but what these ribbons type and all the rest is
merely tripe, as Edmund Waller might have said. Near the ribbons we
saw a paper-box factory, where a number of high-spirited young women
were busy at their machines. A broad strip of thick green paint was
laid across the lower half of the windows so that these immured
damsels might not waste their employers' time in watching goings on
along the pavement.

Broome and Watts streets diverge from West Broadway in a V. At the
corner of Watts is one of West Broadway's many saloons, which by
courageous readjustments still manage to play their useful part.
What used to be called the "Business Men's Lunch" now has a tendency
to name itself "Luncheonette" or "Milk Bar." But the old decorations
remain. In this one you will see the electric fixtures wrapped in
heavy lead foil, the kind of sheeting that is used in packages of
tea. At the corner of Grand Street is the Sapphire Cafe, and what
could be a more appealing name than that? "Delicious Chocolate with
Whipped Cream," says a sign outside the Sapphire. And some way
farther down (at the corner of White Street) is a jolly old tavern
which looked so antique and inviting that we went inside. Little
tables piled high with hunks of bread betokened the approaching
lunch hour. A shimmering black cat winked a drowsy topaz eye from
her lounge in the corner. We asked for cider. There was none, but
our gaze fell upon a bottle marked "Irish Moss." We asked for some,
and the barkeep pushed the bottle forward with a tiny glass. Irish
Moss, it seems, is the kind of drink which the customer pours out
for himself, so we decanted a generous slug. It proved to be a kind
of essence of horehound, of notable tartness and pungency, very like
a powerful cough syrup. We wrote it off on our ledger as experience.
Beside us stood a sturdy citizen with a freight hook round his neck,
deducing a foaming crock of the legitimate percentage.

The chief landmark of that stretch of West Broadway is the tall
spire of St. Alphonsus' Church, near Canal Street. Up the steps and
through plain brown doors we went into the church, which was cool,
quiet, and empty, save for a busy charwoman with humorous Irish
face. Under the altar canopy wavered a small candle spark, and high
overhead, in the dimness, were orange and scarlet gleams from a
stained window. A crystal chandelier hanging in the aisle caught
pale yellow tinctures of light. No Catholic church, wherever you
find it, is long empty; a man and a girl entered just as we went
out. At each side of the front steps the words _Copiosa apud eum
redemtio_ are carved in the stone. The mason must have forgotten the
_p_ in the last word. A silver plate on the brick house next door
says _Redemptorist Fathers_.

York Street, running off to the west, gives a glimpse of the old
Hudson River Railroad freight depot. St. John's Lane, running across
York Street, skirts the ruins of old St. John's Church, demolished
when the Seventh Avenue subway was built. On the old brown house at
the corner some urchin has chalked the word CRAZY. Perhaps this is
an indictment of adult civilization as a whole. If one strolls
thoughtfully about some of these streets--say Thompson Street--on a
hot day, and sees the children struggling to grow up, he feels like
going back to that word CRAZY and italicizing it. The tiny
triangle of park at Beach Street is carefully locked up, you will
notice--the only plot of grass in that neighbourhood--so that bare
feet cannot get at it. Superb irony of circumstance: on the near
corner stands the Castoria factory, Castoria being (if we remember
the ads) what Mr. Fletcher gave baby when she was sick.

Where Varick Street runs in there is a wide triangular spread, and
this, gentle friends, is Finn Park, named for a New York boy who was
killed in France. The name reminded us also of Elfin Finn, the
somewhat complacent stage child who poses for chic costumes in
_Vogue_. We were wondering which was a more hazardous bringing up
for a small girl, living on Thompson Street or posing for a fashion
magazine. From Finn Square there is a stirring view of the Woolworth
Tower. Also of Claflin's packing cases on their way off to Selma,
Ala., and Kalamazoo, Mich., and to Nathan Povich, Bath, Me. That
conjunction of Finn and Bath, Me., suggested to us that the empty
space there would be a good place to put in a municipal swimming
pool for the urchins of the district.

_Drawn from the wood_, which legend still stands on the pub at the
corner of Duane Street, sounds a bit ominous these wood alcohol
days. John Barleycorn may be down, but he's never out, as someone
has remarked. For near Murray Street you will find one of those
malt-and-hops places which are getting numerous. They contain all
the necessary equipment for--well, as the signs suggest, for making
malt bread and coffee cake--bottle-capping apparatus and rubber
tubing and densimeters, and all such things used in breadmaking. As
the signs say: "Malt syrup for making malt bread, coffee, cake, and
medicinal purposes."

To conclude the scenic pleasures of the Sixth Avenue L route, we
walk through the cool, dark, low-roofed tunnel of Church Street in
those interesting blocks just north of Vesey. We hark to the merry
crowing of the roosters in the Barclay Street poultry stores; and we
look past the tall gray pillars of St. Peter's Church at the flicker
of scarlet and gold lights near the altar. The black-robed nuns one
often sees along Church Street, with their pale, austere, hooded
faces, bring a curious touch of medievalism into the roaring tide
that flows under the Hudson Terminal Building. They always walk in
twos, which seems to indicate an even greater apprehension of the
World. And we always notice, as we go by the pipe shop at the corner
of Barclay Street, that this worthy merchant has painted some
inducements on one side of his shop; which reminds us of the same
device used by the famous tobacconist Bacon, in Cambridge, England.
Why, we wonder, doesn't our friend fill the remaining blank panel on
his side wall by painting there some stanzas from Calverley's "Ode
to Tobacco?" We will gladly give him the text to copy if he wants
it.

[Illustration]

THE RUDENESS OF POETS

The poet who has not learned how to be rude has not learned his
first duty to himself. By "poet" I mean, of course, any imaginative
creator--novelist, mathematician, editor, or a man like Herbert
Hoover. And by "rude" I mean the strict and definite limitation
which, sooner or later, he must impose upon his sociable instincts.
He must refuse to fritter away priceless time and energy in the
random genialities of the world. Friendly, well-meaning, and
fumbling hands will stretch out to bind the poet's heart in the
maddening pack-thread of Lilliput. It will always be so. Life, for
most, is so empty of consecrated purpose, so full of palaver, that
they cannot understand the trouble of one who carries a flame in his
heart, and whose salvation depends on his strength to nourish that
flame unsuffocated by crowding and scrutiny.

The poet lives in an alien world. That is not his pride; it is his
humility. It is often his joy, but often also his misery: he must
dree his weird. His necessary solitude of spirit is not luxury, nor
the gesture of a churl: it is his sacrifice, it is the condition on
which he lives. He must be content to seem boorish to the general in
order to be tender to his duty. He has invisible guests at the table
of his heart: those places are reserved against all comers. He must
be their host first of all, or he is damned. He serves the world by
cutting it when they meet inopportunely. There are times (as Keats
said and Christ implied) when the wind and the stars are his wife
and children.

There will be a thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy
of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant
folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has
his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in
this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters
to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that
he consorts first of all with his own imagination.

As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that
men are sharply cut in two classes: those who understand, those who
do not. With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with
effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness. With these,
perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost. With the others he can
never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those
moments of rare intuition when truth came near. There is rarely any
doubt as to this human division: the heart knows its kin.

The world, as he sees it around him, is almost unconscious of its
unspeakable loveliness and mystery; and it is largely regimented and
organized for absurdity. The greater part of the movement he sees is
(by his standard) not merely stupid (which is pardonable and
appealing), but meaningless altogether. He views it between anger
and tenderness. Where there might have been the exquisite and
delicious simplicity of a Japanese print, he sees the flicker and
cruel garishness of a speeding film. And so, for refreshment, he
crosses through the invisible doorway into his own dear land of
lucidity. He cons over that passport of his unsociability, words of
J.B. Yeats which should be unforgotten in every poet's mind:

Poetry is the voice of the solitary man. The poet is always a
solitary; and yet he speaks to others--he would win their
attention. Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done
by a solitary man. And being an alien from the strange land of
the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to
sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the
cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing,
being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the
solitary. People listen to him as they would to any other
traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is
courtesy even as he himself is courteous.

Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity--and, indeed,
their only chance of being permitted to live--and to make
friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they
would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and
preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly
they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech
perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the
most precious, because he comes from a land--the poet's
solitude--which no other feet have trodden and which no other
feet will tread.

So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as
Mrs. Quickly apologized) to "allicholy and musing." Oh, it is not
easy! As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem:

The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

[Illustration]

1100 WORDS

The managing editor, the city editor, the production manager, the
foreman of the composing room, and the leading editorial writer
having all said to us with a great deal of sternness, "Your copy for
Saturday has got to be upstairs by such and such a time, because we
are going to make up the page at so and so A.M.," we got rather
nervous.

If we may say so, we did not like the way they said it. They
spoke--and we are thinking particularly of the production
manager--with a kind of paternal severity that was deeply
distressing to our spirit. They are all, in off hours, men of
delightfully easy disposition. They are men with whom it would be a
pleasure and a privilege to be cast away on a desert island or in a
crowded subway train. It is only just to say that they are men whom
we admire greatly. When we meet them in the elevator, or see them at
Frank's having lunch, how full of jolly intercourse they are. But in
the conduct of their passionate and perilous business, that is, of
getting the paper out on time, a holy anguish shines upon their
brows. The stern daughter of the voice of God has whispered to them,
and they pass on the whisper to us through a mega-phone.

That means to say that within the hour we have got to show up
something in the neighbourhood of 1100 words to these magistrates
and overseers. With these keys--typewriter keys, of course--we have
got to unlock our heart. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this
hour. Speaking of Milton, the damp that fell round his path (in
Wordsworth's sonnet) was nothing to the damp that fell round our
alert vestiges as we hastened to the Salamis station in that drench
this morning. (We ask you to observe our self-restraint. We might
have said "drenching downpour of silver Long Island rain," or
something of that sort, and thus got several words nearer our
necessary total of 1100. But we scorn, even when writing against
time, to take petty advantages. Let us be brief, crisp, packed with
thought. Let it stand as drench, while you admire our proud
conscience.)

Eleven hundred words--what a lot could be said in 1100 words! We
stood at the front door of the baggage car (there is an odd irony in
this: the leading editorial writer, one of the most implacable of
our taskmasters, is spending the summer at Sea Cliff, and he gets
the last empty seat left in the smoker. So we, getting on at
Salamis, have to stand in the baggage car) watching the engine rock
and roar along the rails, while the rain sheeted the level green
fields. It is very agreeable to ride on a train in the rain. We have
never known just why, but it conduces to thought. The clear trickles
of water are drawn slantwise across the window panes, and one
watches, absently, the curious behaviour of the drops. They hang
bulging and pendulous, in one spot for some seconds. Then, as they
swell, suddenly they break loose and zigzag swiftly down the pane,
following the slippery pathway that previous drops have made. It is
like a little puzzle game where you manoeuvre a weighted capsule
among pegs toward a narrow opening. "Pigs in clover," they sometimes
call it, but who knows why? The conduct of raindrops on a
smoking-car window is capricious and odd, but we must pass on. That
topic alone would serve for several hundred words, but we will not
be opportunist.

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