Peccavi, or, in the perhaps more pungent idiom of Cicero, I have sinned. I now make confession and, as far as may be, atonement. I reveal my guarded secrets, at last, without reserve.
I am still, I believe, the only antiquer ahead, sui generis, or, to adopt the scintillating Italian phrase, alone in my class. Rather, now that these lines have seen the light, fui, non sum. I have been, as the Latins put it, not I am. For it will be enough to whisper my revelations; there will be, to-morrow, I realize, more antiquers ahead than one can shake a stick—if the reader will indulge me in the solecism of ending a sentence prepositionally—at.
To this I am resigned. Long enough have I enjoyed the sole entry to an entire tense; long enough have brother and sister antiquers rummaged in the traditional and commonplace haunts of the antique, the past; long enough have they ventured no farther than the abode of the antiquer—the present. To-morrow, forsaking these well-trodden precincts, they will join me in the virgin, but pregnant, future.
Like me, they will stoop no longer to the facile, shameful processes of searching, in cobwebbed bins and attics, for antiques which any novice must recognize, at a glance, as old. Like me, they will even smile at the enthusiasms of those who scratch in the dust and crow, like barnyard fowl, at each inevitable discovery. Like me, they will know the pure joy of explorations and discoveries among the boundless stores of to-morrow’s antiques.
I must begin at the beginning, with my birth. My destiny was predetermined by the ancestry of which I sprang. My parents, both of sturdy native stock, were by instinct mated to produce the original antiquer ahead. It was inevitable, I apprehend. It was to be. It was.
My father, worthy fellow, had no clear knowledge of his natural talent. My mother, I sometimes fancy, was remotely, dimly conscious of her gift. I can recall, as yesterday, the exalted look with which she witnessed the removal, from our stately parlor, of the array of commonplace antiques with which it had been furnished, the joy with which she and my father arranged, instead, those potential antiques which only the gropings of their common hunger recognized for what they were.
Even I, then in plaid kilts, did not at once share their delight, their understanding. I found the red plush surface of that priceless varnished oak sofa a harshly ticklesome affair; I was, to be sure, impressed by the new frosted globes adorning the gasolier, the intricate arabesques of the plaster rosette on the ceiling, from which it sprouted downwards; I need not say, surely, that these globes, tinted a glorious winey purple, decorated with protuberant knobs and profound depressions, were none other than those very treasures of the Obenchain collection, famous in four hemispheres as the sole surviving set of admitted Roscoe Conkling gas-glass. They were, and I must marvel helplessly before the phenomenon of instinct which urged my father, a simple-minded barber in the town of Yonkers, to choose, unerringly, for the tastes of fifty years beyond!
His taste, untutored by any device of art, was all but infallible. He left me this, and with it the store of masterpieces which have, discreetly vended, placed me beyond the reach of that financial anxiety which, especially after the invention of the safety razor, clouded his declining days. My unhappy father! It was his lot to begin his profession in the full flower of the Whisker Period, and to survive those troubled years only to confront the ignoble age of the tubed cream and the tame, inglorious two-edged blade. It is impossible for me to think of him save with a filial tear, and yet how cheerful he was! How his place of business invited and allured the intellectual society of Yonkers of his day! How the racked, lettered mugs gleamed in the gas-lights! And how the air, of a Saturday night, was gay with innocent mirth and pungent anecdote!
Thus I began, equipped by lavish Nature as if to recompense in me the leanness of my paternal lot. Our house, long before I grew to trouserable age, was filled to flowing with such a collection as not even the indefatigable burrowings of the ineffable Rapp and Heller could, in these degenerate times, assemble. In the parlor—incredible as it may sound—stood, not one, but two Ulysses Grant cuspidors, one nicked a trifle, but the other flawless—the priceless forget-me-notted Grants, I mean, not the relatively common gilt-edged type. They were even then my father’s chiefest pride; I—gratified in other boyish whims—was never suffered to use either of them except by stealth. He treasured them, born antiquer that he was, undreaming that the pair would one day yield his son a thousand-fold their modest cost. I owe him for them; my mother, herself no less percipient in other lines than he, would have discarded them when, after the unforgetable visit of Moody and Sankey, my father forewent his self-indulgence in tobacco; but his taste was true. He clung to them with a dogged, blind attachment for which I bless him still.
