Hints to Pilgrims

by Charles S. Brooks

We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt.

"Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neck-cloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.

Alas! In my forgetfulness I have skimmed upon the actual plot. You have recalled already how La Signora Madeline descended on the Bishop's Palace. Her beauty was a hard assault. Except for her crippled state she might herself have toppled the Bishop over. But she pales beside the dangerous Carmen.

Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding—flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.

Oliver Twist and Nancy,—merely acquaintances in the original story,—with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver and perhaps the trombone player of the ship's band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island,—observe the cunning of the plot!—who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman—doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then—a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear—tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall.

Was there a serpent in the garden at peaceful Cranford? Suppose that one of the gay rascals of Dumas, with tall boots and black moustachios, had got in when the tempting moon was up. Could the gentle ladies in their fragile guard of crinoline have withstood this French assault?

Or Camille, perhaps, before she took her cough, settled at Bath and entangled Mr. Pickwick in the Pump Room. Do not a great hat and feather find their victim anywhere? Is not a silken ankle as potent at Bath as in Bohemia? Surely a touch of age and gout is no prevention against the general plague. Nor does a bald head tower above the softer passions. Camille's pretty nose is powdered for the onslaught. She has arranged her laces in dangerous hazard to the eye. And now the bold huzzy undeniably winks at Mr. Pickwick over her pint of "killibeate." She drops her fan with usual consequence. A nod. A smile. A word. At the Assembly—mark her sudden progress and the triumphant end!—they sit together in the shadows of the balcony. "My dear," says Mr. Pickwick, gazing tenderly through his glasses, "my love, my own, will you—bless my soul!—will you share my lodgings at Mrs. Bardell's in Goswell Street?" We are mariners, all of us, coasting in dangerous waters. It is the syren's voice, her white beauty gleaming on the shoal—it is the moon that throws us on the rocks.

And then a dozen dowagers breed the gossip. Duchesses, frail with years, pop and burst with the pleasant secret. There is even greater commotion than at Mr. Pickwick's other disturbing affair with the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers. This previous affair you may recall. He had left his watch by an oversight in the taproom, and he went down to get it when the inn was dark. On the return he took a false direction at the landing and, being misled by the row of boots along the hall, he entered the wrong room. He was in his nightcap in bed when, peeping through the curtains, he saw the aforesaid lady brushing her back hair. A duel was narrowly averted when this startling scandal came to the ears of the lady's lover, Mr. Peter Magnus. Camille, I think, could have kept this sharper scandal to herself. At most, with a prudent finger on her lips, she would have whispered the intrigue harmlessly behind her fan and set herself to snare a duke.

I like to think, also, of the incongruity of throwing Rollo (Rollo the perfect, the Bayard of the nursery, the example of our suffering childhood)—Rollo grown up, of course, and without his aseptic Uncle George—into the gay scandal, let us say, of the Queen's Necklace. Perhaps it is forgotten how he and his little sister Jane went to the Bull Fight in Rome on Sunday morning by mistake. They were looking for the Presbyterian Church, and hand in hand they followed the crowd. It is needless to remind you how Uncle George was vexed. Rollo was a prig. He loved his Sunday school and his hour of piano practice. He brushed his hair and washed his face without compulsion. He even got in behind his ears. He went to bed cheerfully upon a hint. Thirty years ago—I was so pestered—if I could have met Rollo in the flesh I would have lured him to the alleyway behind our barn and pushed him into the manure-pit. In the crisp vernacular of our street, I would have punched the everlasting tar out of him.

It was circumstance that held the Bishop and Rollo down. Isn't Cinderella just a common story of sordid realism until the fairy godmother appears? Except for the pumpkin and a very small foot she would have married the butcher's boy, and been snubbed by her sisters to the end. It was only luck that it was a prince who awakened the Sleeping Beauty. The plumber's assistant might have stumbled by. What was Aladdin without his uncle, the magician? Do princesses still sleep exposed to a golden kiss? Are there lamps for rubbing, discarded now in attics?