Walking-Stick Papers

by Robert Cortes Holliday

The conductor twisted away his face for an instant while he spat tobacco-juice. Thus cleared for action, he returned to the subject of his thoughts. "That's the mother of Cora Splitts," he repeated again. "She's at White Plains tonight, Cora is. Cora and me," he said, as one that says, "ah, me, what a world it is!"—"Cora and me was chums once. Yes, sir; we was chums and went to school together." Some valuable reminiscences of the distinguished woman, dating back to days before the world dreamed of what she would become, by one who played with her as a child, doubtless would have been told, but the conductor was interrupted; a great many people got off, some others got on the car just then, and he went forward to collect fares from these, and the thread was broken.

At my journey's end, I recollect, I went into a public-house. There was a person there whose presence made a deep impression upon my memory. A fine stocky lad, with a great square jaw, heavy beery jowls, and a blue-black, bearded chin; in a blue striped collar. He put both hands firmly on the bar-rail at a good distance apart; straightened his arms taut and his body at right angles with them, so that he resembled a huge carpenter's square; then curled his back finely in, and said, with a significant look at the man behind the bar, "Gimme one o' them shells." A thin glass of beer was set before him; he relaxed, straightened up, and drank off its contents. Then, apparently, feeling that he was observed, he looked very unconcernedly all about the room and appeared to be bored. He then examined very attentively a picture on the wall, and his neck seemed to be temporarily stiff. I can see him now, I am happy to say, as plain as print.

One's mind is, indeed, a grand photograph album. How precious to one it will be when one is old and may sit all day in a house by the sea and, so to say, turn the leaves. That is why one should be going about all the while in one's vigour with an alert and an open mind.

Wives are picturesque characters, too. I mind me of my friend Billy Henderson's new wife. Billy Henderson's wife looks like a balloon. She's so fat that she has busted down the arches of her feet. In order to "fight flesh" she walks a great deal. She walks a mile every day, and then takes a car back home. Her father comes over from Philadelphia once every week to see her, because she is so homesick. For months after she was married she just cried all the time, she was so homesick. She never goes to the movies. The movies make her cry. One time she saw at the movies a hospital scene. It horrified her for days. A friend of hers is about to be married. But she has told her friend that she cannot go to the wedding. Weddings always make her cry so. She just can't read the war news; it is too terrible; it affects her so that she can't sleep a bit. She hasn't read any of it at all, and, she says, she has no idea who is winning the war. She takes some kind of capsules to reduce flesh, which cost six dollars for fifty. She has taken twenty-five. The extension of the draft age being spoken of, she said to Billy:

"Dearie, I'll put you under the bed where they won't get you." She doesn't want to vote, and she can't understand why any one should want to go to poles and vote and all that kind of thing.

Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent cook; she loves Billy Henderson.

XIX

HUMOURS OP THE BOOK SHOP

The panorama before his view is the human mind. He panders to its divers follies, consults its varied wisdom. He stands umbrellaless in the rain of all its idiosyncrasies. Why has he not lifted up his voice? He, the book clerk, that lives among countless volumes of confessions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living Comedie Humaine! Has the constant spectacle of so many books been astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse? Or has he been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr. Whistler's guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered booksellers" of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and its humours. But they were the old boys. They belonged to an old order and reflected another day. "As physicians are called 'The Faculty' and counsellors-at-law 'The Profession,'" writes Boswell, "the booksellers of London are called 'The Trade.'" Let us look into this Trade as it is to-day, we said. So for a space we played we were a book clerk.

There are two, decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in the pages of Anatole France. He is a man of much erudition. And books are his wife and family, food and drink. Then there is the other idea. "Why is it," we report the remark of an important looking gentleman in a high hat, "that clerks in book stores never know anything about books?" (or anything else, was perhaps not far from his thought.) This gentleman, it was readily perceived, had an idea that he had said something rather good. But it was not new. This conception of the book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes—brother to that of the mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage—a stock character. His illiteracy is classic; his ignorant sayings irresistable. He was sired by Charles Keene and damned by Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious humourist employs him periodically. These two ideas of the book business are perhaps reconciled by the popularly cherished sentiment that book sellers are not what they were. Newspapers from time to time print feature articles about the days "When Book Sellers Knew Books." If you ask a salesman in a modern book shop if he has "Praed," you of course expect him to reply, "I have, sir (or madam), but it doesn't seem to do any good."