Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

Mrs. Marlow was very pale. It began to come over me that there was
an alien presence, something spectral and immanent, something empty
and yet compelling, in the mysterious shadow and vagueness of the
chamber. More than once, as Marlow had coasted us along those
shining seascapes of Malaya--we had set sail from Malacca at tea
time, and had now got as far as Batu Beru--I had had an uneasy
impression that a disturbed white figure had glanced pallidly
through the curtains, had made a dim gesture, and had vanished
again.... I had tried to concentrate on Marlow's narrative. The dear
fellow looked more like a monkey than ever, squatting there, as he
took the _Soliloquy_ across the China Sea and up the coast of
Surinam. Surinam must have a very long coast-line, I was thinking.
But perhaps it was that typhoon that delayed us.... Really, he ought
not to make his descriptions so graphic, for Mrs. Marlow, I feared,
was a bad sailor, and she was beginning to look quite ill.... I
caught her looking over her shoulder in a frightened shudder, as
though seeking the companionway.

It was quite true. By the time we had reached Tonking, I felt sure
there was someone else in the room. In my agitation I stole a
cautious glance from the taff-rail of my eye and saw a white figure
standing hesitantly by the door, in an appalled and embarrassed
silence. The Director saw it, too, for he was leaning as far away
from the fire as he could without jibing his chair, and through the
delicate haze of roasting tweed that surrounded him I could see
something wistfully appealing in his glance. The Lawyer, too, had a
mysterious shimmer in his loyal eyes, but his old training in the
P. and O. service had been too strong for him. He would never speak,
I felt sure, while his commanding officer had the floor.

I began to realize that, in a sense, the responsibility was mine.
The life of the sea--a curious contradiction. Trained from boyhood
to assume responsibility, but responsibility graded and duly
ascending through the ranks of command. Marlow, an old shipmaster,
and more than that, our host--a trying problem. If it had not been
for the presence of Mrs. Marlow, I could not have dared. But the
woman complicates the situation with all sorts of delicate reactions
of tact, conduct, and necessity. It is always so. Well. Humph!

But the apparition at the other end of the room was plainly in
trouble. A distressing sight, and I divined that the others were
relying on me. Mrs. Marlow, poor soul, her face had a piteous and
luminous appeal. It was, once more, the old and shocking question of
conflicting loyalties. There was nothing else to do. I shoved out
one foot, and the stand of fire-irons fell over with an appalling
clatter. Marlow broke off--somewhere near Manila, I think it was.

"Charlie, my dear," said Mrs. Marlow, "Don't you think we could
finish the story after dinner? The roast will be quite spoiled. The
maid has been waiting for nearly two hours...."

[Illustration]

THE LITTLE HOUSE

After many days of damp, dull, and dolorous weather, we found
ourself unexpectedly moving in a fresh, cool, pure air; an air
which, although there was no sunlight, had the spirit and feeling of
sunlight in it; an air which was purged and lively. And, so
strangely do things happen, after days of various complexion and
stratagem, we found ourself looking across that green field, still
unchanged, at the little house.

Wasn't there--we faintly recall a saccharine tune sung by someone
who strode stiffly to and fro in a glare of amber footlights--wasn't
there a song about: "And I lo-ong to settle down, in that old Long
Island town!" Wasn't there such a ditty? It came softly back,
unbidden, to the sentimental attic of our memory as we passed along
that fine avenue of trees and revisited, for the first time since
we moved away, the wide space of those Long Island fields and the
row of frame cottages. There was the little house, rather more spick
and span than when we had known it, freshly painted in its brown and
white, the privet hedge very handsomely shaven, and its present
occupant busily engaged in trimming some tufts of grass along the
pavement. We did not linger, and that cheerful-looking man little
knew how many ghosts he was living among. All of us, we suppose,
dwell amid ghosts we are not aware of, and this gentleman would be
startled if he knew the tenacity and assurance of certain shades who
moved across his small lawn that afternoon.

It was strange, we aver, to see how little the place had changed,
for it seemed that we had passed round the curves and contours of a
good many centuries in those four or five years. In the open meadow
the cow was still grazing; perhaps the same cow that was once
pestered by a volatile Irish terrier who used to swing merrily at
the end of that cow's tail; a merry and irresponsible little
creature, she was, and her phantom still scampers the road where the
sharp scream of the Freeport trolley brings back her last fatal
venture to our mind. It was strange to look at those windows, with
their neat white sills, and to remember how we felt when for the
first time we slept in a house of our own, with all those Long
Island stars crowding up to the open window, and, waking in drowsy
unbelief, put out a hand to touch the strong wall and see if it was
still there. Perhaps one may be pardoned for being a little
sentimental in thinking back about one's first house.

The air, on that surprising afternoon, carried us again into the
very sensation and reality of those days, for there is an openness
and breezy stir on those plains that is characteristic. In the
tree-lined streets of the village, where old white clapboarded
houses with green or pale blue shutters stand in a warm breath of
box hedges, the feeling is quite different. Out on the Long Island
prairie--which Walt Whitman, by the way, was one of the first to
love and praise--you stand uncovered to all the skirmish of heaven,
and the feathery grasses are rarely still. There was the chimney of
the fireplace we had built for us, and we remembered how the
wood-smoke used to pour gallantly from it like a blue pennon of
defiance. The present owner, we fear, does not know how much
impalpable and unforgotten gold leaped up the wide red throat of
that chimney, or he would not dream of selling. Yes, the neighbours
tell us that he wants to sell. In our day, the house was said to be
worth $3,000. Nowadays, the price is $7,000. Even at that it is
cheap, if you set any value on amiable and faithful ghosts.

Oh, little house on the plains, when our typewriter forgets thee,
may this shift key lose its function!

[Illustration]

TADPOLES

Near our house, out in the sylvan Salamis Estates, there is a pond.
We fear we cannot describe this pond to you in a way to carry
conviction. You will think we exaggerate if we tell you, with honest
warmth, how fair the prospect is. Therefore, in sketching the scene,
we will be austere, churlish, a miser of adjectives. We will tell
you naught of sun-sparkle by day where the green and gold of April
linger in that small hollow landskip, where the light shines red
through the faint bronze veins of young leaves--much as it shines
red through the finger joinings of a child's hand held toward the
sun. We will tell you naught of frog-song by night, of those
reduplicated whistlings and peepings. We will tell you naught of....
No, we will be austere.

On one side, this pond reflects the white cloudy bravery of fruit
trees in flower, veterans of an orchard surviving an old farmhouse
that stood on the hilltop long ago. It burned, we believe: only a
rectangle of low stone walls remains. Opposite, the hollow is
overlooked by a bumpy hillock fringed with those excellent dark
evergreen trees--shall we call them hemlocks?--whose flat fronds
silhouette against the sky and contribute a feeling of mystery and
wilderness. On this little hill are several japonica trees, in
violent ruddy blossom; and clumps of tiger lily blades springing up;
and bloodroots. The region prickles thickly with blackberry
brambles, and mats of honeysuckle. Across the pond, looking from the
waterside meadow where the first violets are, your gaze skips (like
a flat stone deftly flung) from the level amber (dimpled with
silver) of the water, through a convenient dip of country where the
fields are folded down below the level of the pool. So the eye,
skittering across the water, leaps promptly and cleanly to blue
ranges by the Sound, a couple of miles away. All this, mere
introduction to the real theme, which is Tadpoles.

We intended to write a poem about those tadpoles, but Endymion tells
us that Louis Untermeyer has already smitten a lute on that topic.
We are queasy of trailing such an able poet. Therefore we celebrate
these tadpoles in prose. They deserve a prose as lucid, as limpid,
as cool and embracing, as the water of their home.

Coming back to tadpoles, the friends of our youth, shows us that we
have completed a biological cycle of much import. Back to tadpoles
in one generation, as the adage might have said. Twenty-five years
ago we ourself were making our first acquaintance with these
friendly creatures, in the immortal (for us) waters of Cobb's Creek,
Pennsylvania. (Who was Cobb, we wonder?) And now our urchins, with
furious glee, applaud their sire who wades the still frosty quags
of our pond, on Sunday mornings, to renew their supply of tads. It
is considered fair and decent that each batch of tadpoles should
live in their prison (a milk bottle) only one week. The following
Sunday they go back to the pond, and a new generation take their
places. There is some subtle kinship, we think, between children and
tadpoles. No childhood is complete until it has watched their sloomy
and impassive faces munching against the glass, and seen the gradual
egress (as the encyclopaedia pedantically puts it) of their tender
limbs, the growing froggishness of their demeanour.

Some time when you are exploring in the Britannica, by the way,
after you have read about Tactics and William Howard Taft, turn to
the article on Tadpoles and see if you can recognize them as
described by the learned G.A.B. An amusing game, we submit, would be
to take a number of encyclopaedia descriptions of familiar things,
and see how many of our friends could identify them under their
scientific nomenclature.

But it is very pleasant to dally about the pond on a mild April
morning. While the Urchiness mutters among the violets, picking blue
fistfuls of stalkless heads, the Urchin, on a plank at the
waterside, studies these weedy shallows which are lively with all
manner of mysterious excitement, and probes a waterlogged stump in
hope to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short
while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be
kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible
in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole
search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the
same time, with much coughing and smother.

The tadpoles, once caught, are taken home in a small yellow pail.
They seem quite cheerful. They are kept, of course, in their native
fluid, which is liberally thickened with the oozy emulsion of moss,
mud, and busy animalculae that were dredged up with them in clutches
along the bottom of the pond. They lie, thoughtful, at the bottom of
their milk bottle, occasionally flourishing furiously round their
prison. But, since reading that article in the Britannica, we are
more tender toward them. For the learned G.A.B. says: "A glandular
streak extending from the nostril toward the eye is the lachrymal
canal." Is it possible that tadpoles weep? We will look at them
again when we go home to-night. We are, in the main, a kind-hearted
host. If they show any signs of effusion....

[Illustration]

MAGIC IN SALAMIS

Why is it (we were wondering, as we walked to the station) that
these nights of pearly wet Long Island fog make the spiders so
active? The sun was trying to break through the mist, and all the
way down the road trees, bushes, and grass were spangled with
cob-webs, shining with tiny pricks and gems of moisture. These damp,
mildewy nights that irritate us and bring that queer soft grayish
fur on the backs of our books seem to mean high hilarity and big
business to the spider. Along the hedge near the station there were
wonderful great webs, as big as the shield of Achilles. What a
surprising passion of engineering the spider must go through in the
dark hours, to get his struts and cantilevers and his circling
gossamer girders properly disposed on the foliage.[*] Darkness is no
difficulty to him, evidently. If he lays his web on the grass, he
builds it with a little tunnel leading down to earth, where he hides
waiting his breakfast. But on such a morning, apparently, with
thousands of webs ready, there can hardly have been enough flies to
go round; for we saw all the appetent spiders had emerged from their
tubes and were waiting impatiently on the web itself--as though the
host should sit on the tablecloth waiting for his guest. Put a
finger at the rim of the web and see how quickly he vanishes down
his shaft. Most surprising of all it is to see the long threads that
are flung horizontally through the air, from a low branch of a tree
to the near-by hedge. They hang, elastic and perfect, sagged a
little by a run of fog-drops almost invisible except where the
wetness catches the light. Some were stretched at least six feet
across space, with no supporting strands to hold them from
above--and no branches from which the filament could be dropped. How
is it done? Does our intrepid weaver hurl himself madly six feet
into the dark, trusting to catch the leaf at the other end? Can he
jump so far?

[* Perhaps the structural talent of our Salamis arachnids is
exceptional. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the famous
Engineers' Country Club is near by. Can the spiders have
learned their technology by watching those cheerful scientists
on the golf greens?]

All this sort of thing is, quite plainly, magic. It is rather
important to know, when you are dealing with magic, just where
ordinary life ends and the mystery begins, so that you can adjust
yourself to incantations and spells. As you make your green escape
from town (which has magic of its own, but quite different) you must
clearly mark the place where you pierce the veil. We showed it to
Endymion lately. We will tell you about it.

There is a certain point, as you go out to Salamis on the railroad,
when you begin to perceive a breath of enchantment in the landscape.
For our own part, we become aware of a subtle spice of gramarye as
soon as we see the station lamps at East Williston, which have tops
like little green hats. Lamps of this sort have always had a
fascination for us, and whenever we see them at a railway station we
have a feeling that that would be a nice place to get off and
explore.

And, of course, after you pass East Williston there is that little
pond in which, if one went fishing, he could very likely pull up a
fine fleecy cloud on his hook. Then the hills begin, or what we on
Long Island consider hills. There are some fields on the left of the
train that roll like great green waves of the sea; they surge up
against the sky and seem about to spill over in a surf of daisies.

A quiet road runs up a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green
channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you
feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road,
if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an
attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in
effect: it always reminds us of a stage set for "As You Like It,"
the Forest of Arden. There are some gigantic oak trees and even some
very papier-mache-looking stumps, all ready for the duke, "and other
Lords, like Foresters," to do their moralizing upon; and in place of
the poor sequestered stag there is a very fine plushy cow, grazing,
hard by a very agreeable morass. At the back (_L.U.E._) is
discovered a pleasing ruin, the carcass of an ancient farmstead,
whose stony ribs are thickset with brambles; and the pleasant
melancholy of an abandoned orchard rounds off the scene in the
wings, giving a fine place for Rosalind and Celia and the leg-weary
Touchstone to abide their cue.

Choosing the left-hand arm of the X, and moving past wild rose
bushes toward the even richer rose-garden of the sunset, the
fastidious truant is ushered (as was our friend Endymion the other
evening) upon a gentle meadow where a solitary house of white stucco
begs for a poet as occupant. This house, having been selected by
Titania and ourself as a proper abode for Endymion and his family,
we waited until sunset, frogsong, and all the other amenities of
life in Salamis were suitable for the introduction of our guest to
the scene. This dwelling, having long lain untenanted, has a back
door that stands ajar and we piloted the awe-struck lyrist inside.
Now nothing rages so merrily in the blood as the instinct of picking
out houses for other people, houses that you yourself do not have to
live in; and those Realtors whom we have dismayed by our lack of
enthusiasm would have been startled to hear the orotund accents in
which we vouched for that property, sewage, messuage, and all. Here,
we cried, is the front door (facing the sunset) where the postman
will call with checks from your publishers; and here are the
porcelain laundry tubs that will make glad the heart of the
washerwoman (when you can get one).

Endymion's guileless heart was strongly uplifted. Not a question did
he ask as to heating arrangements, save to show a mild spark in his
eye when he saw the two fireplaces. Plumbing was to him, we saw, a
matter to be taken on faith. His paternal heart was slightly
perturbed by a railing that ran round the top of the stairs. This
railing, he feared, was so built that small and impetuous children
would assuredly fall headlong through it, and we discussed means of
thwarting such catastrophe. But upstairs we found the room that
caused our guest to glimmer with innocent cheer. It had tall
casement windows looking out upon a quiet glimpse of trees. It had a
raised recess, very apt for a bust of Pallas. It had space for
bookcases. And then, on the windowsill, we found the dead and
desiccated corpse of a swallow. It must have flown in through a
broken pane on the ground floor long ago and swooped vainly about
the empty house. It lay, pathetically, close against the shut pane.
Like a forgotten and un-uttered beauty in the mind of a poet, it lay
there, stiffened and silent.

[Illustration]

CONSIDER THE COMMUTER

When they tell us the world is getting worse and worse, and the
follies and peevishness of men will soon bring us all to some
damnable perdition, we are consoled by contemplating the steadfast
virtue of commuters. The planet grows harder and harder to live on,
it is true; every new invention makes things more complicated and
perplexing. These new automatic telephones, which are said to make
the business of getting a number so easy, will mean (we suppose)
that we will be called up fifty times a day--instead of (as now) a
mere twenty or thirty, while we are swooning and swinking over a
sonnet. But more and more people are taking to commuting and we look
to that to save things.

Because commuting is a tough and gruelling discipline. It educes
all the latent strength and virtue in a man (although it is hard on
those at home, for when he wins back at supper time there is left in
him very little of what the ladies so quaintly call "soul"). If you
study the demeanour of fellow-passengers on the 8:04 and the 5:27
you will see a quiet and well-drilled acceptiveness, a pious
non-resistance, which is not unworthy of the antique Chinese sages.

Is there any ritual (we cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue
the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and
seasoned qualities of manhood? It is well known that the fiercest
and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been
commuters. It was a Division composed chiefly of commuters that
stormed the Hindenburg Stellung and purged the Argonne thickets with
flame and steel. Their commanding officers were wont to remark these
men's carelessness of life. It seemed as though they hardly heeded
whether they got home again or not.

See them as they stand mobbed at the train gate, waiting for
admission to the homeward cars. A certain disingenuous casualness
appears on those hardened brows; but beneath burn stubborn fires.
These are engaged in battle, and they know it--a battle that never
ends. And while a warfare that goes on without truce necessarily
develops its own jokes, informalities, callousnesses, disregard of
wounds and gruesome sights, yet deep in their souls the units never
forget that they are drilled and regimented for struggle. We stood
the other evening with a Freeport man in the baggage compartment at
the front of a train leaving Brooklyn. We two had gained the
bull's-eye window at the nose of the train and sombrely watched the
sparkling panorama of lights along the track. Something had gone
wrong with the schedule that evening, and the passengers of the 5:27
had been shunted to the 5:30. As fellow mariners will, we discussed
famous breakdowns of old and the uncertainties of the commuter's
life. "Yes," said our companion, "once you leave home you never know
when you'll get back." And he smiled the passive, placable smile of
the experienced commuter.

It is this reasonable and moderate temper that makes the commuter
the seed wherewith a new generation shall be disseminated. He faces
troubles manifold without embittered grumbling. His is a new kind of
Puritanism, which endures hardship without dourness. When, on
Christmas Eve, the train out of Jamaica was so packed that the aisle
was one long mass of unwillingly embraced passengers, and even the
car platforms were crowded with shivering wights, and the conductor
buffeted his way as best he could over our toes and our parcels of
tinsel balls, what was the general cry? Was it a yell against the
railroad for not adding an extra brace of cars? No, it was
good-natured banter of the perspiring little officer as he struggled
to disentangle himself from forests of wedged legs. "You've got a
fine, big family in here," they told him: "you ought to be proud of
us." And there was a sorrowing Italian who had with him a string of
seven children who had tunnelled and burrowed their way down the
packed aisle of the smoking car and had got irretrievably scattered.
The father was distracted. Here and there, down the length of the
car, someone would discover an urchin and hold him up for
inspection. "Is this one of them?" he would cry, and Italy would
give assent. "Right!" And the children were agglomerated and piled
in a heap in the middle of the car until such time as a thinning of
the crowd permitted the anxious and blushing sire to reassemble them
and reprove their truancy with Adriatic lightnings from his dark
glowing eyes.

How pleasing is our commuter's simplicity! A cage of white mice, or
a crated goat (such are to be seen now and then on the Jamaica
platform) will engage his eye and give him keen amusement. Then
there is that game always known (in the smoking car) as
"pea-knuckle." The sight of four men playing will afford
contemplative and apparently intense satisfaction to all near. They
will lean diligently over seat-backs to watch every play of the
cards. They will stand in the aisle to follow the game, with
apparent comprehension. Then there are distinguished figures that
move through the observant commuter's peep-show. There is the tall
young man with the beaky nose, which (as Herrick said)

Is the grace
And proscenium of his face.

He is one of several light-hearted and carefree gentry who always
sit together and are full of superb cheer. Those who travel
sometimes with twinges of perplexity or skepticism are healed when
they see the magnificent assurance of this creature. Every day we
hear him making dates for his cronies to meet him at lunch time,
and in the evening we see him towering above the throng at the gate.
We like his confident air toward life, though he is still a little
too jocular to be a typical commuter.

But the commuter, though simple and anxious to be pleased, is
shrewdly alert. Every now and then they shuffle the trains at
Jamaica just to keep him guessing and sharpen his faculty of judging
whether this train goes to Brooklyn or Penn Station. His decisions
have to be made rapidly. We are speaking now of Long Island
commuters, whom we know best; but commuters are the same wherever
you find them. The Jersey commuter has had his own celebrant in
Joyce Kilmer, and we hope that he knows Joyce's pleasant essay on
the subject which was published in that little book, "The Circus and
Other Essays." But we gain-say the right of Staten Islanders to be
classed as commuters. These are a proud and active sort who are
really seafarers, not commuters. Fogs and ice floes make them blench
a little; but the less romantic troubles of broken brake-shoes leave
them unscotched.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14