Armed with this saw, I went round sawing things, or rather trying to. I could not exactly saw with it, but I could haggle the edges and corners of wood, producing a gnawed, frazzled effect. My quest for stuff suitable to exercise my handicraft on led me into the spare, or company room, where I found material to my liking. I was raking away at the legs of a rosewood center table—had one leg pretty well damaged to my liking and was preparing to start on another—when some officious grown person happened in on me and stopped me with violent words. If I had but been left undisturbed for half an hour or so I doubtless would have achieved a result which now after a lapse of thirty-odd years would have thrilled a lover of antiques to the core of his being. But this was not to be.
My present recollection of the incident is that I was chided in a painful physical way. The latter-day system of inculcating lessons in the mind of the child according to a printed form chart of soothing words was not known in our community at that time. The old-fashioned method of using the back of a hairbrush and imparting the lesson at the other end of the child from where the mind is and letting it travel all the way through him was employed. I was then ordered to go outdoors where there would be fewer opportunities for engaging in what adults mistakenly called mischief.
Regretting that the nurse that morning had seen fit to encase me in snug-fitting linen breeches instead of woolen ones, I wandered about carrying my saw in one hand and with the other hand from time to time rubbing a certain well-defined area of my small person to allay the afterglow. In the barnyard I came upon an egg lying on the edge of a mud puddle under the protecting lee of the chicken-yard fence. I can shut my eyes and see that egg right now. It was rather an abandoned-looking egg, stained and blotched with brownish-yellow spots. It had the look about it of an egg with a past—a fallen egg, as you might say.
Some impulse moved me to squat down and draw the toothed blade of my saw thwartwise across the bulge of that egg. For the first time in my little life I was about to have dealings with a genuine antique, but naturally at my age and with my limited experience I did not realize that. Probably I was actuated only by a desire to find out whether I could saw right through the shell of an egg amidships. That phase of the proceedings is somewhat blurred in my mind, though the dénouement remains a vivid memory spot to this very day.
I imparted a brisk raking movement to the saw. It is my distinct recollection that a fairly loud explosion immediately occurred. I was greatly shocked. One too young to know aught of the chemical effect on the reactions following the admission of fresh air to gaseous matter, which has been forming to the fulminating point within a tightly sealed casing, would naturally be shocked to have an egg go off suddenly in that violent manner. Modern military science, I suppose, would classify it as having been a contact egg.
Not only was I badly shocked, but also I had a profound conviction that in some way I had been taken advantage of—that my confidence had in some strange fashion been betrayed. I left my saw where I had dropped it. At the moment I felt that never again would I care to have anything to do with a tool so dangerous. I also left the immediate vicinity of where the accident had occurred and for some minutes wandered about in rather a distracted fashion. There did not seem to be any place in particular for me to go, and yet I could not bear to stay wherever I was. I wished, as it were, to get entirely away from myself—a morbid fancy perhaps for a mere six-year-old to be having, and yet, I think, a natural one under the circumstances.
I had a conviction that I would not be welcomed indoors and at the same time realized that even out in the great open where I could get air—and air was what I especially craved—I was likely to be shunned by such persons as I might accidentally encounter. Indeed I rather shunned myself, if you get what I mean. I was filled with a general shunning sensation. I felt mortified, too. And this emotion, I found a few minutes later, was shared by the black cook, who, issuing from the kitchen door, happened upon me in the act of endeavoring to freshen up myself somewhat from a barrel of rain water which stood under the eaves. She evidently decided offhand that not only had mortification set in but that it had reached an advanced stage. Her language so indicated.
And now, after more than three and a half decades, here on Fifth Avenue more than a thousand miles remote from those infantile scenes, I was gleaning another memorable lesson about antiques. I was learning that junk ceases to be junk if only it costs enough money, and thereafter becomes treasure.
Having had this great principal fact firmly implanted in my consciousness, I shortly thereafter embarked in congenial company upon the auction-room life upon which already I have touched. We went to sales when we had anything to buy and when we had nothing to buy—somehow we did not seem to be able to stay away. The joy of bidding a thing up and maybe of having it knocked down to us undermined our pooled will power; it weakened our joint resistance.
“And sold to——” became our slogan, our shibboleth and our most familiar sentence. By day we heard it, by night it dinned in our ears as we slept, dreaming dreams of going bankrupt in this mad, delirious pursuit which had mastered us and spending our last days in a poorhouse entirely furnished in Italian antiques.