“It is curious how difficult hats are,” continued Professor Maturin, after a pause that I forbore to break. “I doubt if any one, except Fortunatus, ever had a perfect one. The Greeks were wise in having little to do with them—suppose all Greek statues had their straw bonnets tied under the chin! Indeed, hats are chiefly developments of the last five centuries, and, it is said, baldness with them. Yet, Synesius wrote ‘In Praise of Baldness;’ Caesar prized the privilege of continually wearing a laurel crown because it hid his, and I do not know why else the academic mortar-board comes down so far behind. I will not wear a ventilating hat like Rossetti’s, although I long for summer and the straws that America has done so much to popularize.
“I am too thin for the comfortable Tennysonian sombrero. I enjoy, as a dressing-gown, a cowled Capuchin robe that I once had made on Lake Orta, because of my theory that the flowering of the monastic mind in the Middle Ages was due to the germinating heat of hoods. But, generally, I would emulate an acquaintance who usually carries his hat in his hand, or another who actually owns none, were that not too conspicuous. Even Leigh Hunt’s charming essay on ‘Hats, Ancient and Modern’ has no help for me—although I believe I might like a cocked hat or a chapeau.
“I can take comfort in a coat,” he continued, “if it is loose; and in overcoats, if they resemble Socrates’ cloak, or the cloak that Petrarch bequeathed to Boccaccio. Indeed, I should welcome a return to shawls. I am uncomfortable in any neckwear but black, or in any but reindeer gray gloves. I should disesteem trousers had I not once inadvertently worn a striped pair with evening clothes—since then I have respected their power. In shoes I emulate Wellington’s care, for, like William Morris, I need rather large ones. And I enjoy canes as much as Wellington did umbrellas.”
“All of which,” said I, as we reached Professor Maturin’s door, “even if unvaried, is sufficiently sober, appropriate, and individual.”
“And simple enough,” concluded he, “for Frederick the Great or Newton. But, most of all, I wish that the Germans would extend their investigations in the hygiene of clothing. If we knew more about that, we might trust its architecture and ornamentation to any discriminating tailor.”
XII
Questions at Issue
THE Sindbad Society at its last meeting—on the night of the full moon, according to custom—met within the hospitable doors of the Ollapod Club. There, in the room with the roses on the ceiling, we had for dinner caviare with limes, a thin mushroom soup, duck roasted over spice-wood, Turinese pepperoni of chilies and preserved grapes, Leghorn coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats.
The archaeologist was hot against such modern abuses as motor boats in Venice, and motor cars on what he called the finest roads in the world—those from Nice to Genoa, Amalfi to Sorrento, and Ragusa to Gravosa. But when the diplomat begged him also to ban the ancient and dishonorable dogs from Constantinople, he became resigned to life’s little ironies, and, in response to a general request, described quite wonderfully how, after years of fruitless digging, he had found a royal tomb in Egypt, and entered its hot silence, to find its stately presences, its furniture and linen, its sacrificial bread and incense and flowers, all with their sense of yesterday enduring through the ages.
This prompted the musician, who was reared in Turkey, to tell how an Arab sheik he used to visit in the desert always bore with him the same atmosphere of untold centuries. The colonel followed, queerly enough, by saying that in his aeroplane tests he always had the same impression of the endless duration of time. Then some one broke the happy spell, as people will, with something clever and distracting, although the joke was good enough—James Howell’s on people who “travel much but see little, like Jonah in the whale.”
At that the talk scattered, the colonel describing Coromandel and Malabar, the biologist a boat he was building, the mountain-climber planning for Alaska, and the painter for Japan, until the psychologist asked the last why he was going there.