WELCOME SWEET SPRINGTIME

FLASHBACK

Celebrations of the Season

THE COMING OF SPRING, BY P. G. WODEHOUSE

Spring is here! What magic in those words. We look out of our window at the heaped-up snow, which Street Cleaning Commissioner Fetherston has been unable to clear away; we turn on a little more steam heat; and we say to ourselves, "Well, Spring is here. Hurrah!"

What a gay, happy season it is. On every side the book-stalls are bright with next December's Christmas numbers of the magazines. The latest costumes, designed by some lunatic in Paris with a grudge against the human race, cause us to renew the vow we swore on New Year's Eve to avoid the demon Rum. Hats which we have only seen before in nightmares smite the eye wherever we go. We hear the joyous note of the automobile salesman honking to his mate. The traffic policemen discard their ear-muffs. The panhandler emerges from Blackwell's Island where he has been spending the winter and parades the streets once more. In Central Park swarms of happy children are digging their heels into the young grass and not doing a thing to it. Out in Brooklyn is heard the whirr of the wheels of a hundred thousand baby carriages. In a million stores a million commuters are buying the flower seeds which will shortly fill their gardens with bindweed. Brimstone and molasses flow in a gurgling stream down a million happy young throats. For it is Spring!

It has often seemed to me a remarkable thing, considering the effect which the season has on us, that no poet has ever conceived the idea of dealing in verse with the subject of Spring. Even if you are a vers libre bard and can afford to despise rhymes, you cannot deny that there is something about this particular time of the year which is poetic and stimulating. And if you are one of the old-fashioned poets who like to have a poem rhyme, Spring is simply made for you. It rhymes with wing, sing, sting, bing! Gosh ding! fling, Ming (if you should happen to want to write of Spring in ancient China), ring, cling, and other admirable and useful words. It is strange indeed that the theme should have been so consistently neglected by the merry songsters throughout the ages.

Spring is the season of hope. Directly the calendar informs us that it is once more in our midst, we shed our winter flannels and don our flimsy gents' suitings and stride out upon the Avenue, hoping that we shall not contract double pneumonia.

And not even the fact that this hope is never realized can daunt us. The only exceptions to this rule are theatrical managers, who very wisely wear their fur-lined overcoats all the year round.

... What a thrilling promise of love it brings! Soon, all over New York, bankers will be spending the better part of their lives on the Follies Roof. And soon the fashionable young polo player will be wooing his best friend's wife. And the serious-minded businessman will be offering the usual tribute of gardenias to the coy and diffident coryphees in one of the thousand and one Russian ballets now devastating our fair Island of Manhattan.

And, over the whole scene, Cupids—flying Cupids, dancing Cupids, musical Cupids, winged Cupids, robust Cupids—will be whirling about and adding to the chaos and confusion of Love's triumphal merry-goround....