Mince Pie written by Christopher Darlington Morley
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Christopher Darlington Morley >> Mince Pie
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12 MINCE PIE
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
TO
F.M. AND L.J.M.
[Illustration]
INSTRUCTIONS
This book is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read
it anywhere else.
In order to obtain the best results for all concerned do not read a
borrowed copy, but buy one. If the bed is a double bed, buy two.
Do not lend a copy under any circumstances, but refer your friends to
the nearest bookshop, where they may expiate their curiosity.
Most of these sketches were first printed in the Philadelphia _Evening
Public Ledger_; others appeared in _The Bookman_, the Boston _Evening
Transcript_, _Life_, and _The Smart Set_. To all these publications I am
indebted for permission to reprint.
If one asks what excuse there can be for prolonging the existence of
these trifles, my answer is that there is no excuse. But a copy on the
bedside shelf may possibly pave the way to easy slumber. Only a mind
"debauched by learning" (in Doctor Johnson's phrase) will scrutinize
them too anxiously.
It seems to me, on reading the proofs, that the skit entitled "Trials of
a President Travelling Abroad" is a faint and subconscious echo of a
passage in a favorite of my early youth, _Happy Thoughts_, by the late
F.C. Burnand. If this acknowledgment should move anyone to read that
delicious classic of pleasantry, the innocent plunder may be pardonable.
And now a word of obeisance. I take this opportunity of thanking several
gentle overseers and magistrates who have been too generously friendly
to these eccentric gestures. These are Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday,
editor of _The Bookman_ and victim of the novelette herein entitled "Owd
Bob"; Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, literary editor of The Boston _Transcript_,
who has often permitted me to cut outrageous capers in his hospitable
columns; and Mr. Thomas L. Masson, of _Life_, who allows me to reprint
several of the shorter pieces. But most of all I thank Mr. David E.
Smiley, editor of the Philadelphia _Evening Public Ledger_, for whom
the majority of these sketches were written, and whose patience and
kindness have been a frequent amazement to
THE AUTHOR.
PHILADELPHIA _September, 1919_
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON FILLING AN INK-WELL 17
OLD THOUGHTS FOR CHRISTMAS 24
CHRISTMAS CARDS 31
ON UNANSWERING LETTERS 35
A LETTER TO FATHER TIME 41
WHAT MEN LIVE BY 48
THE UNNATURAL NATURALIST 54
SITTING IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR 60
BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES 64
163 INNOCENT OLD MEN 69
A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON 75
BULLIED BY THE BIRDS 81
A MESSAGE FOR BOONVILLE 87
MAKING MARATHON SAFE FOR THE URCHIN 92
THE SMELL OF SMELLS 98
A JAPANESE BACHELOR 102
TWO DAYS WE CELEBRATE 117
THE URCHIN AT THE ZOO 132
FELLOW CRAFTSMEN 139
THE KEY RING 144
"OWD BOB" 150
THE APPLE THAT NO ONE ATE 167
AS TO RUMORS 174
OUR MOTHERS 181
GREETING TO AMERICAN ANGLERS 186
MRS. IZAAK WALTON WRITES A
LETTER TO HER MOTHER 190
TRUTH 193
THE TRAGEDY OF WASHINGTON SQUARE 195
IF MR. WILSON WERE THE WEATHER MAN 202
SYNTAX FOR CYNICS 205
THE TRUTH AT LAST 209
FIXED IDEAS 211
TRIALS OF A PRESIDENT TRAVELLING ABROAD 215
DIARY OF A PUBLISHER'S OFFICE BOY 217
THE DOG'S COMMANDMENTS 219
THE VALUE OF CRITICISM 221
A MARRIAGE SERVICE FOR COMMUTERS 224
THE SUNNY SIDE OF GRUB STREET 226
BURIAL SERVICE FOR A NEWSPAPER JOKE 236
ADVICE TO THOSE VISITING A BABY 238
ABOU BEN WOODROW 240
MY MAGNIFICENT SYSTEM 242
LETTERS TO CYNTHIA
1 IN PRAISE OF BOOBS 245
2 SIMPLIFICATION 250
TO AN UNKNOWN DAMSEL 256
THOUGHTS ON SETTING AN ALARM CLOCK 258
SONGS IN A SHOWER BATH 259
ON DEDICATING A NEW TEAPOT 261
THE UNFORGIVABLE SYNTAX 263
VISITING POETS 264
A GOOD HOME IN THE SUBURBS 270
WALT WHITMAN MINIATURES 272
ON DOORS 292
MINCE PIE
ON FILLING AN INK-WELL
Those who buy their ink in little stone jugs may prefer to do so because
the pottle reminds them of cruiskeen lawn or ginger beer (with its
wire-bound cork), but they miss a noble delight. Ink should be bought in
the tall, blue glass, quart bottle (with the ingenious non-drip spout),
and once every three weeks or so, when you fill your ink-well, it is
your privilege to elevate the flask against the brightness of a window,
and meditate (with a breath of sadness) on the joys and problems that
sacred fluid holds in solution.
How blue it shines toward the light! Blue as lupin or larkspur, or
cornflower--aye, and even so blue art thou, my scriven, to think how far
the written page falls short of the bright ecstasy of thy dream! In the
bottle, what magnificence of unpenned stuff lies cool and liquid: what
fluency of essay, what fonts of song. As the bottle glints, blue as a
squill or a hyacinth, blue as the meadows of Elysium or the eyes of
girls loved by young poets, meseems the racing pen might almost gain
upon the thoughts that are turning the bend in the road. A jolly throng,
those thoughts: I can see them talking and laughing together. But when
pen reaches the road's turning, the thoughts are gone far ahead: their
delicate figures are silhouettes against the sky.
It is a sacramental matter, this filling the ink-well. Is there a
writer, however humble, who has not poured into his writing pot, with
the ink, some wistful hopes or prayers for what may emerge from that
dark source? Is there not some particular reverence due the ink-well,
some form of propitiation to humbug the powers of evil and constraint
that devil the journalist? Satan hovers near the ink-pot. Luther solved
the matter by throwing the well itself at the apparition. That savors to
me too much of homeopathy. If Satan ever puts his face over my desk, I
shall hurl a volume of Harold Bell Wright at him.
But what becomes of the ink-pots of glory? The conduit from which
Boswell drew, for Charles Dilly in The Poultry, the great river of his
Johnson? The well (was it of blue china?) whence flowed _Dream Children:
a Revery_? (It was written on folio ledger sheets from the East India
House--I saw the manuscript only yesterday in a room at Daylesford,
Pennsylvania, where much of the richest ink of the last two centuries is
lovingly laid away.) The pot of chuckling fluid where Harry Fielding
dipped his pen to tell the history of a certain foundling; the ink-wells
of the Cafe de la Source on the Boul' Mich'--do they by any chance
remember which it was that R.L.S. used? One of the happiest tremors of
my life was when I went to that cafe and called for a bock and writing
material, just because R.L.S. had once written letters there. And the
ink-well Poe used at that boarding-house in Greenwich Street, New York
(April, 1844), when he wrote to his dear Muddy (his mother-in-law) to
describe how he and Virginia had reached a haven of square meals. That
hopeful letter, so perfect now in pathos--
For breakfast we had excellent-flavored coffee, hot and strong--not
very clear and no great deal of cream--veal cutlets, elegant ham
and eggs and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more
plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the
eggs--and the great dishes of meat. Sis [his wife] is delighted, and
we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had
no night sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore
against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a
skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for
the stove. The fire kept in all night. We have now got four dollars
and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three
dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in
excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop--so that I hope soon to
get out of trouble.
[Illustration]
Yes, let us clear the typewriter off the table: an ink-well is a sacred
thing.
Do you ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a
public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried,
in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune?
What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and
sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. And the ink-wells on hotel
counters--does not the public dipping place of the Bellevue Hotel,
Boston, win a new dignity in my memory when I know (as I learned lately)
that Rupert Brooke registered there in the spring of 1914? I remember,
too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the
Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above
on the same page.
Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has
done honor to the ink-well. His _Apology for the Bottle Volcanic_ is in
his best flow of secret smiling (save an unfortunate dilution of Riley):
Sometimes I dip my pen and find the bottle full of fire,
The salamanders flying forth I cannot but admire....
O sad deceiving ink, as bad as liquor in its way--
All demons of a bottle size have pranced from you to-day,
And seized my pen for hobby-horse as witches ride a broom,
And left a trail of brimstone words and blots and gobs of gloom.
And yet when I am extra good ... [_here I omit the transfusion
of Riley_]
My bottle spreads a rainbow mist, and from the vapor fine
Ten thousand troops from fairyland come riding in a line.
I suppose it is the mark of a trifling mind, yet I like to hear of the
little particulars that surrounded those whose pens struck sparks. It
is Boswell that leads us into that habit of thought. I like to know what
the author wore, how he sat, what the furniture of his desk and chamber,
who cooked his meals for him, and with what appetite he approached them.
"The mind soars by an effort to the grand and lofty" (so dipped Hazlitt
in some favored ink-bottle)--"it is at home in the groveling, the
disagreeable, and the little."
I like to think, as I look along book shelves, that every one of these
favorites was born out of an ink-well. I imagine the hopes and visions
that thronged the author's mind as he filled his pot and sliced the
quill. What various fruits have flowed from those ink-wells of the past:
for some, comfort and honor, quiet homes and plenteousness; for others,
bitterness and disappointment. I have seen a copy of Poe's poems,
published in 1845 by Putnam, inscribed by the author. The volume had
been bought for $2,500. Think what that would have meant to Poe himself.
Some such thoughts as these twinkled in my head as I held up the Pierian
bottle against the light, admired the deep blue of it, and filled my
ink-well. And then I took up my pen, which wrote:
A GRACE BEFORE WRITING
On Filling an Ink-well
This is a sacrament, I think!
Holding the bottle toward the light,
As blue as lupin gleams the ink:
May Truth be with me as I write!
That small dark cistern may afford
Reunion with some vanished friend,--
And with this ink I have just poured
May none but honest words be penned!
OLD THOUGHTS FOR CHRISTMAS
[Illustration]
A new thought for Christmas? Who ever wanted a new thought for
Christmas? That man should be shot who would try to brain one. It is an
impertinence even to write about Christmas. Christmas is a matter that
humanity has taken so deeply to heart that we will not have our festival
meddled with by bungling hands. No efficiency expert would dare tell us
that Christmas is inefficient; that the clockwork toys will soon be
broken; that no one can eat a peppermint cane a yard long; that the
curves on our chart of kindness should be ironed out so that the "peak
load" of December would be evenly distributed through the year. No
sourface dare tell us that we drive postmen and shopgirls into
Bolshevism by overtaxing them with our frenzied purchasing or that it is
absurd to send to a friend in a steam-heated apartment in a prohibition
republic a bright little picture card of a gentleman in Georgian costume
drinking ale by a roaring fire of logs. None in his senses, I say, would
emit such sophistries, for Christmas is a law unto itself and is not
conducted by card-index. Even the postmen and shopgirls, severe though
their labors, would not have matters altered. There is none of us who does
not enjoy hardship and bustle that contribute to the happiness of
others.
There is an efficiency of the heart that transcends and contradicts that
of the head. Things of the spirit differ from things material in that
the more you give the more you have. The comedian has an immensely
better time than the audience. To modernize the adage, to give is more
fun than to receive. Especially if you have wit enough to give to those
who don't expect it. Surprise is the most primitive joy of humanity.
Surprise is the first reason for a baby's laughter. And at Christmas
time, when we are all a little childish I hope, surprise is the flavor
of our keenest joys. We all remember the thrill with which we once
heard, behind some closed door, the rustle and crackle of paper parcels
being tied up. We knew that we were going to be surprised--a delicious
refinement and luxuriant seasoning of the emotion!
Christmas, then, conforms to this deeper efficiency of the heart. We are
not methodical in kindness; we do not "fill orders" for consignments of
affection. We let our kindness ramble and explore; old forgotten
friendships pop up in our minds and we mail a card to Harry Hunt, of
Minneapolis (from whom we have not heard for half a dozen years), "just
to surprise him." A business man who shipped a carload of goods to a
customer, just to surprise him, would soon perish of abuse. But no one
ever refuses a shipment of kindness, because no one ever feels
overstocked with it. It is coin of the realm, current everywhere. And we
do not try to measure our kindnesses to the capacity of our friends.
Friendship is not measurable in calories. How many times this year have
you "turned" your stock of kindness?
It is the gradual approach to the Great Surprise that lends full savor
to the experience. It has been thought by some that Christmas would gain
in excitement if no one knew when it was to be; if (keeping the festival
within the winter months) some public functionary (say, Mr. Burleson)
were to announce some unexpected morning, "A week from to-day will be
Christmas!" Then what a scurrying and joyful frenzy--what a festooning
of shops and mad purchasing of presents! But it would not be half the
fun of the slow approach of the familiar date. All through November and
December we watch it drawing nearer; we see the shop windows begin to
glow with red and green and lively colors; we note the altered demeanor
of bellboys and janitors as the Date flows quietly toward us; we pass
through the haggard perplexity of "Only Four Days More" when we suddenly
realize it is too late to make our shopping the display of lucid
affectionate reasoning we had contemplated, and clutch wildly at
grotesque tokens--and then (sweetest of all) comes the quiet calmness of
Christmas Eve. Then, while we decorate the tree or carry parcels of
tissue paper and red ribbon to a carefully prepared list of aunts and
godmothers, or reckon up a little pile of bright quarters on the
dining-room table in preparation for to-morrow's largesse--then it is
that the brief, poignant and precious sweetness of the experience claims
us at the full. Then we can see that all our careful wisdom and
shrewdness were folly and stupidity; and we can understand the meaning
of that Great Surprise--that where we planned wealth we found ourselves
poor; that where we thought to be impoverished we were enriched. The
world is built upon a lovely plan if we take time to study the
blue-prints of the heart.
Humanity must be forgiven much for having invented Christmas. What does
it matter that a great poet and philosopher urges "the abandonment of
the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy"?
Theology is not saddled upon pronouns; the best doctrine is but three
words, God is Love. Love, or kindness, is fundamental energy enough to
satisfy any brooder. And Christmas Day means the birth of a child; that
is to say, the triumph of life and hope over suffering.
Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the stupid,
harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live
according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of
good will. We grant ourselves the complete and selfish pleasure of
loving others better than ourselves. How odd it seems, how unnaturally
happy we are! We feel there must be some mistake, and rather yearn for
the familiar frictions and distresses. Just for a few hours we "purge
out of every heart the lurking grudge." We know then that hatred is a
form of illness; that suspicion and pride are only fear; that the
rascally acts of others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human
relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may
have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we
looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia!
So at Christmas we tap that vast reservoir of wisdom and strength--call
it efficiency or the fundamental energy if you will--Kindness. And our
kindness, thank heaven, is not the placid kindness of angels; it is
veined with human blood; it is full of absurdities, irritations,
frustrations. A man 100 per cent. kind would be intolerable. As a wise
teacher said, the milk of human kindness easily curdles into cheese. We
like our friends' affections because we know the tincture of mortal acid
is in them. We remember the satirist who remarked that to love one's
self is the beginning of a lifelong romance. We know this lifelong
romance will resume its sway; we shall lose our tempers, be obstinate,
peevish and crank. We shall fidget and fume while waiting our turn in
the barber's chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a
few hours, what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve,
to pages which those who speak our tongue immortally associate with the
season--the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as long
as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a
pound cake is full of fruit. A pound cake will keep moist three years; a
sponge cake is dry in three days.
And now humanity has its most beautiful and most appropriate Christmas
gift--Peace. The Magi of Versailles and Washington having unwound for us
the tissue paper and red ribbon (or red tape) from this greatest of all
gifts, let us in days to come measure up to what has been born through
such anguish and horror. If war is illness and peace is health, let us
remember also that health is not merely a blessing to be received intact
once and for all. It is not a substance but a condition, to be
maintained only by sound regime, self-discipline and simplicity. Let the
Wise Men not be too wise; let them remember those other Wise Men who,
after their long journey and their sage surmisings, found only a Child.
On this evening it serves us nothing to pile up filing cases and rolltop
desks toward the stars, for in our city square the Star itself has
fallen, and shines upon the Tree.
CHRISTMAS CARDS
By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and
10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to
rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers
design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to
the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.
This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have
nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.
After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found
not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true
romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around
us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in
snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a
blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of
mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they
were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in
Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and
circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled
in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?
Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket
of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and
holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but meager
flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest, 'tis
actual, 'tis tangible and potable. And where, among all the Christmas
cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our
triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar
against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves
with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around
us?
It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination;
that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it
is. Certainly a visitor from another sphere, looking on our fantastic
and exciting civilization, would find little reflection of it in the
Christmas card. He would find us clinging desperately to what we have
been taught to believe was picturesque and jolly, and afraid to assert
that the things of to-day are comely too. Even on the basis of
discomfort (an acknowledged criterion of picturesqueness) surely a
trolley car jammed with parcel-laden passengers is just as satisfying a
spectacle as any stage coach? Surely the steam radiator, if not so
lovely as a flame-gilded hearth, is more real to most of us? And instead
of the customary picture of shivering subjects of George III held up by
a highwayman on Hampstead Heath, why not a deftly delineated sketch of
victims in a steam-heated lobby submitting to the plunder of the
hat-check bandit? Come, let us be honest! The romance of to-day is as
good as any!
Many must have felt this same uneasiness in trying to find Christmas
cards that would really say something of what is in their hearts. The
sentiment behind the card is as lovely and as true as ever, but the
cards themselves are outmoded bottles for the new wine. It seems a cruel
thing to say, but we are impatient with the mottoes and pictures we see
in the shops because they are a conventional echo of a beauty that is
past. What could be more absurd than to send to a friend in a city
apartment a rhyme such as this:
As round the Christmas fire you sit
And hear the bells with frosty chime,
Think, friendship that long love has knit
Grows sweeter still at Christmas time!
If that is sent to the janitor or the elevator boy we have no cavil, for
these gentlemen do actually see a fire and hear bells ring; but the
apartment tenant hears naught but the hissing of the steam in the
radiator, and counts himself lucky to hear that. Why not be honest and
say to him:
I hope the janitor has shipped
You steam, to keep the cold away;
And if the hallboys have been tipped,
Then joy be thine on Christmas Day!
We had not meant to introduce this jocular note into our meditation, for
we are honestly aggrieved that so many of the Christmas cards hark back
to an old tradition that is gone, and never attempt to express any of
the romance of to-day. You may protest that Christmas is the oldest
thing in the world, which is true; yet it is also new every year, and
never newer than now.
ON UNANSWERING LETTERS
[Illustration]
There are a great many people who really believe in answering letters
the day they are received, just as there are people who go to the movies
at 9 o'clock in the morning; but these people are stunted and queer.
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