I have been reading lately, and I have come on a sentence with which I am in disagreement. I shall not tell the name of the book (mere mulishness!) but I hope you know it or can guess. It is a tale of children and of a runaway perambulator and of folk who never quite grew up, with just a flick of inquiry—a slightest gesture now and then—toward precious rascals like our Patch-Eye and the Duke. Its author stands, in my opinion, a better chance of our lasting memory than any writer living.
If you have read this book, you have known in its author a man who is himself a child—one from whom the years have never taken toll. And if you have lingered from page to page, you know what humor is, and love and gentleness. I think that children must have clambered on his familiar knee and that he learned his plot from their trustful eyes.
Someone has been reading my very copy of this book, for it is marked with pencil and whole chapters have been thumbed. I would like to know who this reader is—a woman, beyond a doubt—who has dug in this fashion to the author's heart. But the book is from a lending library. She is only a number pasted inside the cover, a date that warns her against a fine.
Her pencil has marked the words to a richer cadence. I like to think that she has children of her own and that she read the book at twilight in the nursery, and that its mirth was shared from bed to bed. But the pathetic parts she did not read aloud, fearing to see tears in her children's eyes. Before her own at times there must have floated a mist. She is a gracious creature, I am sure, with a gentleness that only a mother knows who sits with drowsy children. And now that it is my turn to read the book—for so does fancy urge me—I hear her voice and the echo of her children's laughter among the pages.
It is a book about a great many things—about David and about a sausage machine, about a little dog which was supposed to have been caught up by mistake. But when the handle was reversed out he came, whole and complete except that his bark was missing. A sausage still stuck to his tail, which presently he ate. And it proved to be his bark, for at the last bite of the sausage his bark returned. And David took his salty handkerchief from his eyes and laughed. There is a chapter on growing old—marked in pencil—a subject which the author of this book knew nothing about, never having grown old himself. And there is another chapter about a spinster, also marked. This chapter sings with exquisite melody, but breaks once to a sob for a love that has been lost. But the book is chiefly about children.
There is one particular sentence in this book with which I am not in agreement. "... down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once...." I cannot believe that. I cannot believe we run but once. In the heart of the man who wrote the book there lives a child. And a child dwells in the heart of the woman of the lending library.
We are too ready to believe that childhood passes with the years—that its fine imagination is blunted with the hard practice of the world. Too long have we been taught that the clouds of glory fade in the common day—that the lofty castles of the morning perish in the noon-day sun. The magic vista is golden to the coming of the twilight, and the sunset builds a gaudy tower that out-tops the dawn. If a man permits, a child keeps house within his heart to the very end.
And therefore, as I think of those whittled daggers with their spot of blood, of that popping pistol, of the captain's horrid hook, of the black craft flying the skull and crossbones in the attic, I know, despite appearance, that I am young myself. I snap my fingers at the clock. It ticks merely for its own amusement. I proclaim the calendar is false. The sun rises and sets but makes no chilling notch upon the heart. Once again, despite the weary signpost of the years, I run on the laughing avenues of childhood.
