A Past That Came Home In a Taxi

The Ruse of a Rootless Dweller in the City that Has No Attics

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

SINCE God lifted this continent above the waters and so clad its plains and valleys that it could be a homestead for a numberless multitude, it must fill Him at times with mingled surprise, amusement and exasperation to note how many of us arc perversely scrouged together in a monstrous determination to live crowded on Manhattan Island and there only— there or not at all.

It is to be sure an enchanted isle. When one of us makes a home on it, that home is just around the corner from the Metropolitan when they are singing Coq d' Or. We can sec a harlequinade when the coryphees are still young and we can go to What Price Glory? before its lusty laughter is forbidden because America has gone to war again. In all the land there is no ball like the Beaux Arts ball and in no other town can one run down to Mr. Morgan's library and look at the manuscript of The Christmas Carol whenever one happens to feel like it.

NOMADIC NEW YORK.

BUT notes are missing from Manhattan's symphony. We whose homes are on it can go from spring to spring without once hearing the neighborly, communal music of a lawnmower. We never have a chance to stand at sundown, hose in hand, and water the brave beds of nasturtiums and phlox and blue delphinium which we ourselves have planted. We don't even know the names of the nice-looking people next door and it does not matter much, because before long the moving vans will back up callously for their furniture—or ours. For above all we have no yesterdays, no reminders from one day's dawn to the next that ever folk have walked before in the streets where now we walk. Here we are today, indeed. But in our cramped and hurried habitations there is no murmur of a year gone by to suggest a little hopefully that here we may also be tomorrow.

In the fly-by-night flats where we hang our hats and try to sleep, there is no space for the chance memorabilia of a family. Among the other dwellers in this city whom I happen to know, I can think now of only two families or three who are living this spring where they lived four springs ago. And none of us mounts a dubious ladder to hang a picture in October without a gray foreboding that it will have to come down again in May. For, as like as not, we shall be on the move again in May, perhaps because the rent has leaped beyond our reach, perhaps because the house itself is to make meek room for a new steel thrust at the amused stars.

So we become tentative in our living and take to thinking of the little odds and ends of possession as so much afflicting impedimenta. We grow expert in the reduction of all our portable property to the severe dimensions of a suitcase and the very copies of Punch and the American Mercury that might be fun to look over again some day go hastily out the backdoor not many days after they come in the front. For this is true of our Manhattan—it is a town without any attics. Wherefore it has no more orientation in time than an airedale has. And the man who dwells within its gates is like the luckless fellow who must improvise the concerto of his life on a violin of which the strings are fastened only at one end.

As, with the pace and agility of a mountain goat, I have moved nimbly from flat to flat in recent years, I have found myself thus eagerly jettisoning each time all the dear litter of valueless things that might help to weave a little something of yesterday into the composition of today. And then one day—I think at the time I must have been astride a waiting trunk—I found myself staring bleakly at the fact that I had carried along only two small things out of the days when I was the age of Penrod Schofield.

"I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER—"

OF these talismans, one was a yellowing photograph of mv grandfather standing beside the potted chrysanthemums which, behind the sun windows of his long living room, he used to shelter from a thwarted and resentful November. In the picture he is winding a burnished clock that towered above him, the color of old Burgundy—a clock for which, of course, there would be no room in my Manhattan dugout. 'Flic other talisman was the frayed and thumb-marked copy of Pluckleberry Finn which my grandmother gave me on the day that I was ten years old. There has been no birthday since when I was ever minded to say: "Well, I won't want to react that again." Any other book, perhaps. But not Huckleberry Finn.

There was nothing else in the knapsack and a sudden appreciation of the meagerness of these Lares and Penates made me wish that I lived in a house with more than two dimensions, made me homesick for the kind of dwelling that records the regimented days as might some inexorable diarist, stirred within me a nostalgia for such a home as would have space and time in it for one of those rooms which, decorated by the casual processes of accumulation, become, through the years, a kind of tribal scrap book.

Into such a room the most biddable son of the house is thrust sulking when Aunt Minnie comes visiting from South Framingham and must needs have his bedchamber while she is fussily with us. 'Ehe kind of room that can whisper the story of a family, it is as gossipy as the telltale kitchen middens which the first Aryans left behind them for the heady dissipation of the archaeologists.

THE ATTIC BEDROOM

UP to its unconsidered wall, for instance, has drifted the photograph of Uncle Ned when he slicked down his hair and wore a choking collar and used to go back to the Hamilton reunions oftener than he docs in these later and duller Junes. And there is the ash receiver with cigar bands patiently pasted beneath its glass convexity. And the patent rocker of glossy oak and black leather of which the banishment to this catch-all room still rather puzzles and hurts Great-Aunt Emmeline. And the copy of Taylor's John Aden's Courtship still framed in parched passepartout. And the once cherished Dore edition of Dante's Inferno, its glossy margins smeared by the thumbs of three generations. And still lying in a pin tray, because no one has ever had the bold initiative to throw it away, is a celluloid lapel button saucy with the legend "Abcr Nit". Why, the room is a midden built of the detritus of social progress. It has accumulated all the ugliness of an ugly age. But I think that to one waking drowsily in such a room of a Sunday morning it can have a kind of graciousness and that if there be such a room in a man's house, he may have more of a sense of the continuity of life than we Manhattanites have. And perhaps he is on that account a better citizen when it comes to looking after youngsters and watching the school builders and feeding the neighbors who are hungry.

Wherefore, though I knew that a true home must be brewed as your crafty housekeeper on the Mohawk Valley keeps always a little of October's batter to mix with April's in the buckwheat crock, nevertheless I looked wildly about me for some simple, swift way in which to bless my Manhattan flat overnight with the flavor of a home. And in the spangled New York twilight the great idea knocked at the door. Next day I might have been seen prowling the shabby shops which linger on the periphery of Astor Place where the riots used to be held. And I came home that afternoon with a past in a taxicab. For this past I had expended the sum of $19.50. And it looks down on me now from the shelf—thirty, intermittent, second hand volumes, Si. Nicholas and Harper's Young People for the years when I was beginning to read.

Some there are, now paunchy, perhaps, and "sufficiently decayed," who will rise at this point to inquire acidly why there should not also be a shelf of memorabilia from the files of the Youth's Companion. Yet it does seem a pity, after all these gently healing years, that the old, old quarrel should thus break out afresh. Of course there wras never such contempt and such animosity as the boy who got Harper's Young People every week felt for the boy on whose doorstep across the street the postman regularly deposited the Youth's Companion—unless, perhaps, it was the contempt and animosity felt for Harper's young people by the subscriber to the Youth's Companion. I remember with almost painful clarity a discussion that broke out on the street corner between these two great factions in American life and how difficult it was for the Guelphs to make the rugged qualities of Captain King's Cadet Days and the fine, hearty stories of Kirk Munroe quite atone for the mollycoddling to which Margaret E. Sangster, as Postmistress of the Young People, subjected her dear, dear little readers, writing to her so laboriously in those primitive days when the nauseous word "kiddies" had not yet infected the American language. I remember specifically how, after the Ghibbclincs from across the street grew violent, the bleeding lips of one of the Guelphs could only mutter "Kirk Munroe, Kirk Munroe" as he was borne, battered, through his own front door.

As an heir to all these murmurous memories no mere eldest son can possibly compete with the usually unenvied youngest of five, who, while he might have arrived long after there was any hope of his being regarded as glamorous or eventful, and though he might not know until after many humiliating years the glory of having a suit or a cap begin its career on his own unconsidered person, was still rich in this —that he entered not only into possession of the magazines of his own time but into all the tattered and sometimes home-colored numbers accumulated in the attic through the years when those big stifls, his brothers (since graduated to Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins), had themselves been beginning to read.

If you were such a one you can enjov a long span of reminiscence by spending an afternoon on the floor surrounded by the past that came home in my taxi. Your own associations will reach back from Rich Dale, say, to the beginnings of Little Lord Fauntleroy whose long curls, velvet pants and ruffled collar afflicted so many Penrods and inspired such sardonic rescue parties as those conducted by Stephen Crane. He used to lead strange, beruffled lads to the nearest barber shop and have them shorn at his own expense, just as our own Ring Lardner is said (mendaciously, I am afraid) to have tried to lure Master Coogan to a coiffeur's last fall when those two notable American tourists came face to face in Paris. For my own part, I seem to remember at least one American home of the early nineties where there was no need of such neighborly intervention. For on the occasion when one large, pumpkin-shaped head adorned with five bristling cowlicks, first sought to rise above the ruffled collar of Lord Fauntleroy, there ensued from the big stiffs aforesaid such Homeric laughter that the aspiration was abandoned forthwith and e'er that day's sun had set, the costume—collar, green velvet pants and all—was the proud possession of a dusky contemporary whose mother waddled around every Monday to do the wash.

You can browse through the instalments of the The Tinkham Brothers' Tidemill or Dorymates or Toby Tyler. You can note how fine and prodigal an art department served the Young People in the late eighties when the same issue, besides tossing off a little something by W. D. Howells, would have not only a double page water color bv Alice Barber before she was Alice Barber Stephens but also a half dozen exquisite pen and ink sketches made by Howard Pyle for some "Wonderclock" tale of his own telling. You can linger over the pleasant verses which Katherine Pyle used to write for each of those tales and recall, suddenly, how loudly the big stiffs laughed that day you read aloud one of them and by your pronunciation of the phrase "bare-necked Gretchen" conveyed the surprising information that Gretchen had no clothes on her at all.

Then you can pause to note with amusement that in the very time when, as Thomas Beer relates, Emma Willard was committing little short of mayhem in her wrath at Mr. Gilder for allowing so lewd a word as "rape" to stray into 'The Century, St. Nicholas was innocently printing a short story that was flagrantly incestuous in its implications and Harper's Young People was luxuriating in a serial called An Old Field School Girl vastly enjoyed by youngsters who only now would understand the sadistic nature of its flagellant emotions.

Or you can look among the prize contests and the letters to the editor for some familiar name, to be rewarded perhaps by such a smile as was my own one rainy afternoon when, in an issue of loyally suppressed date, I came upon a letter written by a little girl in England to tell dear St. Nicholas how she had been out in her pretty garden that morning and seen a great big frog behind a great big rock. It was the signature that entertained me. For the letter was signed Beatrice Herford. Then you may stumble on the drawing with which Master Lee Simonson, act. 14, won a prize. Or the second prize in photographv which went to Joseph D. Taylor, whose middle name was Deems.

Or you can pause over the illustrations for Davy and the Goblin and think again what a pity it was that the small Guy Carryl for whom that tale was originally told lived only long enough to show' the world what a brilliant a fellow he was and how great a man he might have become.

Or you can recall with a start that W. J. Henderson has not always been a music critic but used to write a lot of stuff for boys to read and you can note with something of a grin the extraordinary mixture of affection, admiration and hero worship to which the editors of the Young People during the nineties used to subject the recent Crown Prince of Germany when he, too, was by way of being the merest tot.

THE FAVORITE

But, all in all, I think the most heart warming experience which these reunions can afford is to roam through a volume casually and come suddenly upon the page whereon was printed for the first time something about the Seonnee hills and the Waingunga valley and the wolves who, from their cave, saw coming towards them—and towards you, too, and immortality—a dimpled, brown , unfrightened manchild named Mowgli.