Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays, and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day—the third of a four days’ journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a little house in a side street.

“Next twelve men,” he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a spotless stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three children—a girl of eight years, a boy of five, a boy of three. They stared with round frightened eyes at les soldats Americains, the first they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at once climbed to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night. First we lifted the packs from one another’s aching shoulders; then, without spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.

For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an12 occasional groan, an oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a forest. Then a voice came from the corner.

“Where is Sergeant Reilly?” it said. We lazily searched. There was no Sergeant Reilly to be found.

“I’ll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint,” said the voice. And with the curiosity of the American and the enthusiasm of the Irish we lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.

He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were off and his bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years of soldiering and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic sweetness, he was softly singing “Ireland isn’t Ireland any more.” We listened respectfully.

“A regular Irishman would shoot him,” and we all joined in the chorus, “Ireland isn’t Ireland any more.”

“Ooh, la, la!” exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to talk at the top of their voices.13 What they said Heaven knows, but the tones were friendly, even admiring.

“Gentlemen,” said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, “the lady who runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don’t crowd or I’ll trun yez all upstairs.”

Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true bourgeoise, with all the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the attic of her house to sleep in—nothing more; no light, no heat. Also, wood is very expensive in France—for reasons that are engraven in letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless—

“Assez-vous, s’il vous plait,” said Madame. And she brought nearer to the fire all the chairs the establishment possessed and some chests and boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was Solange, went out into the snow and came back with heaping armfuls of small logs. The fire blazed merrily—more merrily than it had blazed since August, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was thick with steam from our drying socks.

Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had generously admitted all eleven of us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French was “du pain,” “du vin,” “cognac” and “bon jour.” Those of us who knew a little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for the others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We learned that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle just one month before our arrival in her home. She showed us with simple pride and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she showed us those of her two brothers—one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner of war—of her mother and father, of herself dressed for First Communion.

This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Communion, then Madame’s face cleared.

“Mais oui!” she exclaimed. “Et vous, ma foi, vous etes Catholiques, n’est-ce pas?”

At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this question affirmatively. Tattered15 prayer-books and somewhat dingy scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered their surprise and delight to each other, and every exhibit called for a new outburst.

“Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voilà, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le Sacre Coeur!” (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent as it looks in print).

Now other treasures, too, were shown—treasures chiefly photographic. There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They admired and sympathized; they exclaimed appropriately at the beauty of every girl’s face, the tenderness of every pictured mother. We had become the intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and we her into ours.

Soldiers—American soldiers of Irish descent—have souls and hearts. These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But our stomachs remained—and that they yearned was evident to us. We had made our hike on a meal of hardtack and “corned willy.” Mess call would sound soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through the snowy streets to the temporary mess-shack? We knew our supply16 wagons had not succeeded in climbing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great depression settled upon us.

“Boys,” he said, “this here lady has got a good fire going, and I’ll bet she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?”

“But I haven’t got any money.” “Neither have I—not a damn sou!” said another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.

“I haven’t got any money to speak of, meself,” he said. “But let’s have a show-down. I guess we’ve got enough to buy somethin’ to eat.”

It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of the search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made up for the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins on the table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a Chinese piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money came in all to eight francs.

It takes more money than that to feed twelve17 hungry soldiers these days in France. But there was no harm in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly in explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that we were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and that we wanted her to cook us something to eat.

Now Madame was what they call in New England a “capable” woman. In a jiffy she had the money in Solange’s hand and had that admirable child cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the fire, the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed. Nothing in the way of a food cupboard could be seen. And the only other room of the house was the bare attic.

When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself these articles: 1, two loaves of war-bread; 2, five bottles of red wine; 3, three cheeses; 4, numerous potatoes; 5, a lump of fat; 6, a bag of coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated, exactly the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.

Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then, with a veritable French trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a chain over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed, Madame standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret that I do not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping the potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their part to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.

We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The only absentees were the two little boys, Michel and Paul. And they were really absent only from our board—they were in the room, in the great built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange. Their little bodies were covered by the three-foot thick mattress-like red silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us unblinkingly all the evening.

But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame stopped her chattering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped her chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather searchingly at us. We19 didn’t know what was the matter, but we felt rather embarrassed.

Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was surprised to see that American Catholics did not say grace before eating like French Catholics.

We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an ex-seminarian, he’ll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if a bit of shrapnel doesn’t hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after we had blessed ourselves: “Benedicite: nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen.”

Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we sat down again to eat.

It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation—except on the part of Madame and Solange—but there was plenty of good cheer. Also there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of us—half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an apple pie without stopping to take breath,20 was satisfied. There were toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly—toasts to Madame, and to the children, and to France, and to the United States, and to the Old Grey Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent only to illuminati of Sergeant Reilly’s circle).

The table cleared and the “agimus tibi gratias” duly said, we sat before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by Solange’s foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the evening’s expenditures—totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.

Now when soldiers are unhappy—during a long, hard hike, for instance—they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy, as on the evening now under consideration, they sing to express their satisfaction with life. We sang “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” We shook the kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of “Take Me Back to New York Town.” We informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michel, in fact, the whole village, that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana home. We grew sentimental over “Mother Machree.” And Sergeant Reilly obliged with a reel—in his21 socks—to an accompaniment of whistling and hand-clapping.

Now, it was our hostess’s turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking down some paper-covered books.

There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of pages. Then, after some preliminary coughing and humming, the music began—the woman’s rich alto blending with the child’s shrill but sweet notes. And what they sang was “Tantum ergo Sacramentum.”

Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why we found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem appropriate to all of us—to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fitting. Not one of us then or later expressed any surprise that this hymn, familiar to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to us in this22 strange land and in these strange circumstances.

Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the season was appropriate, one of us suggested “Adeste Fideles” for the next item on the evening’s program. Madame and Solange and our ex-seminarian knew all the words and the rest of us came in strong with “Venite, adoremus Dominum.”

Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies obliged with “Au Clair de la Lune” and other simple ballads of old France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening’s entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections. We sang—as best we could—the Star Spangled Banner, Solange and her mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we attempted La Marseillaise. Of course we did not know the words. Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the song, so we looked over each other’s shoulders and got to work in earnest. Madame sang with us, and Solange. But during the final stanza Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from23 under the red comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier’s widow—we all felt it. And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.

There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchanging, that hang over the green slopes of some mountains I know. I have seen them on the Irish hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they are made of the tears of good brave women.

Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw. Blankets, shelter-halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep. Sergeant Reilly’s hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a corner of his mouth.

“That was a pretty good evening, Sarge,” I said. “We sure were in luck when we struck this billet.”

He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes. Then he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the floor, where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.

“You said it,” he remarked. “We were in luck24 is right. What do you know about that lady, anyway?”

“Joe,” said Sergeant Reilly, “do you realize how much trouble that woman took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn’t make a damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give her. And she’s out about six francs for firewood, too—I wish to God I had the money to pay her. I bet she’ll go cold for a week now, and hungry, too.

“And that ain’t all,” he continued, after a pause broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful neighbours. “Look at the way she cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and the little Sallie there sung for us.

“I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing them Church hymns to me that way. It’s forty years since I heard a hymn sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I sort of realize what we’re fighting for now, and I never did before. It’s for women like that and their kids.

“It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting their singing them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there’s many women like that in France now—telling their beads and singing the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she’s just after treating us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I think that’s why it was called ‘Holy Ireland.’”

THE GENTLE ART OF CHRISTMAS GIVING

If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder and his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends to give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty Yuletide staves—if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of him, among other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a highly original manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other adjectives applied to his manner of generosity—adjectives applied, for instance, by the children whom, around their gayly festooned tree, he surprised with his gift of expert treatment. But the adjective most generally used (not perhaps in adulation) would be “original.” And the use of this adjective would be utterly wrong.

The holly bedecked dentist would not be acting in an original manner. He would not be following the suggestion of his own philanthropic heart. He would be acting in accordance with tradition, a particularly27 annoying tradition, the evil and absurd superstition that a gift should be representative of the giver rather than of the recipient.

Now, I am aware that there is high literary authority for the dentist’s Christmas morning expedition. The dentist himself would be the first to disclaim having originated the idea; if you were to question him he would tell you, as he deftly adjusted his rubber dam in your mouth, that the credit belonged to the late Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Emerson,” the dentist would say as he sharpened the point of his drill, “said that a gift was meaningless unless it was a genuine expression of the giver; it would be unfitting, for instance, for a poet to give his friend a house and lot, and a painter, his friend, a diamond necklace. The poet should give a poem and the painter should give a painting. Therefore it naturally follows that a minister should give a sermon and a school teacher should bestow upon his expectant pupils an extra page of mathematical problems. This,” the dentist would say, “is the gift most expressive of my personality.” And the drill would seek its goal.

Now, there is much to be said in favour of the Emersonian theory of giving. Certainly it has the advantages of cheapness and convenience. Many a28 poet could more easily give his friend a whole ode or a sequence of sonnets or a bale of vers libre than he could give a box of cigars, or a cigar. Many a painter could more easily cover his children’s Christmas tree with his own cubist canvases than with peppermint canes and toy locomotives and dolls and little trumpets. A storekeeper or a manufacturer of any sort can more easily select his gifts from his own stock than he can select them elsewhere. Should a brewer, for instance, desire to help make Mr. Bryan’s Christmas happy, it would be a simpler matter for him to put in that gentleman’s stocking a case of beer than a case of grape juice.

But cheapness and convenience are not the chief reasons for this sort of giving. A poet who gives a poem when he should give a pair of fur gauntlets, a painter who gives a painting when he should give a doll, does so, it often happens, in spite of the fact that he has thousands of dollars in the bank and lives within a block of a department store, which he much enjoys visiting. He gives the gifts that he does give because of his selfishness and conceit. He gives his own wares because they advertise his talent.

The poet knows that his friend will not say, to inquiring admirers of his fur gauntlets, “These were29 given me by Ezra Dusenbury, author of ‘Babylonian Bleatings’ and other Lyrics: Smith, Parker & Co., $1 net.” The painter knows that the infant he has enriched will not say to her young companions: “‘Bettina’ was given me by the illustrious Gaspar Slifestein whose incomprehensiblist canvases are now on exhibition at the Microscopic Mania Gallery, 249 Fifth Avenue, New York City.” These gentlemen take a violent interest in their own work, and when they give presents of that work they are trying to force their friends to share that interest and to extend it to all the world. They are trying to force their friends to become their press agents.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule that a giver should not give his own wares. Any man who deals in wares that are universally delightful may express himself in his gifts to his heart’s content and no one will criticise him. So let no brewer or cigar-maker or money-changer of my acquaintance puzzle his head long in the effort to discover in the marts of the world something appropriate to my peculiar tastes. These honest citizens may be as Emersonian in their giving as they wish.

As I said, there is much to recommend the idea that inspired the hypothetical dentist on his Yuletide30 denting; there is much to recommend the gift-expressing-the-giver theory. It is convenient, it is cheap, it is satisfying to the giver’s conceit. It is in many respects excellent. But it does not happen to be suited to Christmas Day. It is suited to the celebration of Emerson’s birthday, if any one knows the date of that festival.

You see, unselfishness is supposed to be a characteristic of Christmas giving. And unselfishness, true unselfishness, was known to the philosophy of the Transcendentalists as little as it is known to that of the Nietzscheans. He who gives really in accordance with the spirit of the feast gives not to express his own personality, to call attention to his own prowess as a painter or a poet or a candlestick-maker, but to make his friend happy. If his friend remembers him when he enjoys the gift, so much the better. But the essential thing is that he shall enjoy the gift.

James Russell Lowell represented the Founder of the Feast of Christmas as saying: “Who gives himself in his gift feeds three; himself, his suffering neighbour and me.” But in Lowell’s mind when he wrote this was no idea of justifying the poet who thrusts poems into his friends’ Christmas stocking and tips the elevator man with a villanelle. He was31 thinking of sacrificial giving, of giving which necessitates a sacrifice on the part of the giver rather than on that of the recipient. And it is no sacrifice for a poet to give his poem or his book of poems. James Russell Lowell’s distinguished kinswoman, now living in Boston, knows this. If Miss Amy Lowell really loves you she will give you for Christmas an automobile or one of her Keats manuscripts, rather than an autographed copy of “Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds,” or “Men, Women, and Ghosts.”

Few Bishops resemble Mark Twain. But there once was a Bishop who resembled Mark Twain in this respect (and in no other)—he is known to many thousands who do not know his real name. Mark Twain has thousands of friends who never heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. And hundreds of thousands of children yearly are gladdened by Santa Claus, yet have no association whatever with the name of Saint Nicholas of Bari.

Yet the amiable Nicholas (who is the patron of sailors, of prisoners, and of children) is the benefactor of humanity caricatured during December in every shop window and on every eleemosynary corner. His mitre has degenerated into a hat trimmed with doubtful fur; his embroidered cope has become a red jacket. But (except when he32 rings a little bell and begs for alms) he has retained his extra-episcopal function of giving. Saint Nicholas was a master of the art of giving; and since we have taken him so seriously as to transmogrify him into Santa Claus, we should profit by his illustrious example and model our giving upon his.

How and what did Saint Nicholas give? Well, he gave tactfully and opportunely and appropriately. There was the nobleman of Lucia whose three daughters were starving to death. Saint Nicholas gave them marriage portions, throwing purses of gold in at the window at night. When he was in Myra he gave to the poor people all the wheat that was in the ships in the harbour, promising the owners that when they arrived at the port for which they were bound their ships would still be full of wheat; and so it came about. To a drowned sailor and to children who had been killed by a cannibal he gave the gift of life. And to innocent men accused of treason and imprisoned he gave freedom.

His first gift, you see, was money, his second life, his third freedom. And thus he set an example to all the world. Now, it may not be convenient for us to celebrate Christmas by throwing money through the windows of apartments wherein repose33 dowerless young women. Nor are life and freedom gifts for our bestowal. But it is at any rate possible for us to imitate Saint Nicholas’s manner of giving; to give tactfully, opportunely, and appropriately. There was nothing especially characteristic of his episcopal functions in the gifts that Saint Nicholas gave. Nor did he worry about whether or not they reflected his personality. Let us make Santa Claus resemble Saint Nicholas as closely as we can.

This business of expressing one’s personality by one’s gifts has been carried to extraordinary lengths of late years. There are people who actually select for all their friends and relatives things that they themselves would like. If they consider themselves to be dainty—as all women do—they give dainty presents, disregarding the fact that the recipient may suffer acute physical pain at the mere thought of daintiness.

They wish their beneficiaries to say on Christmas morning, “How characteristic of Mrs. Slipslop to give me this exquisite Dresden china chewing-gum holder,” instead of “How generous and discerning of Mrs. Slipslop to give me this pair of rubber boots or this jar of tobacco or this hypodermic syringe!” But what every child and every grown person wants34 to receive is a gift suited to his tastes and habits; it is a matter of indifference whether or not it expresses the personality of the giver. Perhaps it will in his eyes supply the giver with a new and charming personality.

You have hitherto regarded Mr. Blinker, the notorious efficiency engineer, with disfavour. You have regarded him as a prosaic theorist, a curdled mass of statistics. On Christmas morning you find that he has presented you, not with an illuminated copy of “Rules for Eliminating Leisure,” or a set of household ledgers or an alarm clock, but with a cocktail set or a pool table or an angora kitten or some other inefficient object.

At once your opinion of Mr. Blinker changes for the better. He assumes a new and radiant personality. Your Sunday school teacher has always exhibited to you virtues which you respect but do not enjoy; she has seemed to you lacking in magnetism. If she gives you for Christmas a Bible or a tale of juvenile virtue, you will write her a graceful letter of thanks (at your mother’s dictation), but your affection for the estimable lady will not be materially increased. But if your Sunday school teacher gives you a bowie knife or a revolver or a set of the Deadwood Dick novels! then how suddenly will35 the nobility of your Sunday school teacher’s nature be revealed to you!

To elevator men, janitors, domestic servants, newspaper deliverers, and other necessary evils we always give something appropriate—money. And money does not express the personalities of most of us. We—that is, the general public, the common people, the populace, the average man, the great washed and the rest of us—do our duty in this matter, following religiously the admirable tradition of the Christmas box. But our retainers—if they will permit us thus picturesquely to address them—do not. They serve us during the year, and are duly paid for it, but they do nothing picturesque and extraordinary at Christmas time to justify our gifts to them.

As a matter of fact, they are not upholding their part of the tradition. It is not enough for them to bow, and say, “Thank you,” while they feverishly count the money. They should revel romantically, as did their predecessors who established the custom by which they profit. The elevator boys should sing West Indian carols under our windows—especially if our apartment is in the twentieth story. The janitor and his family should enact in the basement a Christmas miracle play.

It is pleasant to think of the janitor attired as a shepherd or as a Wise Man, with his children as angels or as sheep, to picture the Yule log on the janitorial hearth, and to hear in fancy, rising up the dumbwaiter shaft, the strains of “The Carnal and the Crane,” or of the excellent carol which begins:

In some places the newspaper deliverers and the telegraph boys feebly support this tradition by writing, or causing to be written, a “carrier’s address” and leaving printed copies of it with their customers. It would be better, of course, if they were to sing or to recite these verses, but even the printed address is better than nothing. It is a pity to see even this slight concession to tradition disappearing. In bygone days some of the most distinguished of our poets were glad to write these addresses—the late Richard Watson Gilder wrote one for the newspaper carriers of Newark.

And then there are the numerous public servants37 who nowadays receive from the public no special Christmas benefaction—How gracefully they might obtain it by infusing into their occupations a little Yuletide pageantry! As it is, the subway guards celebrate the golden springtime by donning white raiment. Let them on Christmas day be wreathed with mingled holly and mistletoe, and let them chant, in lusty chorus:

And the street cleaners, how comes it that they are unrewarded of the public? Their predecessors, the crossing sweepers of London fifty years ago, exacted tribute from pedestrians not only at Christmas time, but on every day of the year. Let our street cleaners assume holiday garb and manner, let them expect Christmas gifts, but give in turn a Christmas spectacle. Methods of doing this will readily suggest themselves—an appropriate thing would be for them to procure mediæval attire at any theatrical costumer’s, and build great bonfires at38 such points of vantage as Columbus Circle, Times Square, Madison Square, and Union Square. Over these bonfires boars’ heads should be roasted and great bowls of steaming punch should hang. From passersby who partook of their hospitality the street cleaners, through one of their number dressed as an almoner, should request a golden remembrance. These things may yet come to pass. They are not so archaic as seemed in nineteen-thirteen a worldwide war. And the municipal Christmas trees are a good beginning.

But to return to our muttons, or, rather, to our geese and plum puddings, the most important thing for us to remember in the selection of Christmas presents is their suitability to the person for whom they are intended. We may like books, but let us not therefore feel obliged to sustain our literary reputation by giving books to our neighbour who wants a box of cigars or a jumping-jack. We have the precedent, furnished by Saint Nicholas, and we have a higher precedent still. For the first great Christmas gift to humanity was what humanity most needed, and always needs—a child.

A BOUQUET FOR JENNY

So far as I know, in no other library but mine is to be found a book illustrated by Jenny Hand. Therefore, more than much vellum and crushed levant, more than first editions and association copies bearing famous signatures, do I prize a certain fat volume, a foxed and dog-eared and battered volume, which was published by Grigg and Elliot (God rest them!) in Philadelphia at number nine North Fourth Street in 1847. This is a book of poetry, but it is no slender little pamphlet of a thing, the shelter of one bardling’s lyrical ejaculations. Five full-grown poets, two of them men of noble girth, comfortably share this stately tenement. The book’s solid and imposing name is “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirk White.”

A detailed consideration of this volume might, to the profit of the reading public, fill all of one issue of any book-review supplement or literary, so to speak, section printed in America. But for the moment I would write, not of the excellencies of the volume in general, but of the distinguishing feature40 of my copy—its unique virtue, which gives me the right to pity all other bibliophiles now rejoicing in this illustrious Grigg and Elliot imprint. I refer to the illustrations by Jenny Hand.

Messrs. Grigg and Elliot illustrated, to the best of their ability, every copy of this work. They illustrated it with what they doubtless termed “elegant steel engravings.” These steel engravings are indeed “elegant,” also they are “appropriate,” also they are “chaste.” Take down from its shelf your copy of “The Poetical Works of, etc.,” and you will find, facing page ninety-four, a representation of “Morning among the Alps,” painted, the legend tells you, by T. Doughty, and engraved by George W. Hatch. The sun is rising, much as Mr. Belasco might direct, and upon a pleasant little pond in the foreground are three of those famous Alpine early birds known as swan. This picture is designed to accompany Samuel Rogers’ “The Alps at Daybreak,” lines which I may recall to your memory by saying that they begin, “The sunbeams streak the azure skies.” The picture was not intended by the artists to be Alpine in character, but it is a nice picture, very harmonious with the text.

Furthermore, the generous Messrs. Grigg and Elliot, being greatly moved by those lines of the41 ingenious Kirke White which begin: “Behold the shepherd boy, who homeward tends, Finish’d his daily labour.—O’er his path, Deep overhung with herbage, does he stroll With pace irregular; by fits he runs, Then sudden stops with vacant countenance, And picks the pungent herb”—being greatly moved, I say, by these lines, they determined to give them a supplementary embellishment. Therefore they caused one O. Pelton to engrave on steel a picture first “Drawn by Cristall” (as who should say “Painted by Raphael”). This shows us a plump youth, with the vacant countenance celebrated by the poet, standing upon the side of Vesuvius, carrying over his shoulder a large spade, and in his left hand a basket of potatoes. In their sensational journalistic way, Messrs. Grigg and Elliot affixed to this picture the caption, “The Shepherd Boy,” and forthwith the poem was illustrated.

But while you will take pleasure, if you are a worthy possessor of this volume, in these altogether admirable engravings, you will look through your copy in vain for expressions of the genius of Jenny Hand. The Jenny Hand illustrations are two in number, and they are to be found only in my copy.

One of the advantages of illustrating a book with steel engravings is that it necessitates the inclusion42 of blank pages. When a steel engraving occupies one side of a page, there may be nothing whatever printed on the reverse.

There may be nothing printed, I said, on the reverse. But on the reverse anything in the world may be drawn or written. Therein we see the origin of the entertaining practice of extra-illustration. To the eager pencil of Jenny Hand, these virginal white pages, oases among pages of dry verse, offered irresistible opportunities. And my library is therefore the richer.

This book never belonged to Jenny Hand, except so far as anything belongs to one who makes it more beautiful and interesting and useful. The book belonged to Jenny’s sister, Esther. On the fly-leaf is written “Mifs E. C. Hand, with regards of C. F. Q.” Obviously E. C. stands for Esther Conway. Obviously, also, Esther did not herself draw pictures on the beautiful volume of poesy (with gold scroll work all over the cover) which the amorous and tasteful Mr. C. F. Q. presented to her. This delightful work was done by Esther’s younger sister, who in 1847 was aged perhaps thirteen, and should have been and probably was named Jenny. C. F. Q. stands for Charles Francis Quigley. This is not a random guess; it is a wholly logical deduction43 from the portrait of the gentleman drawn by Jenny, who knew him well.

It was one summer afternoon in 1847 that Jenny first began to improve “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White.” At three o’clock Jenny had been out playing—keeping the porch and the front gate well in sight, for she knew that not for nothing had Esther put on her pearl necklace and her blue sash and spent three-quarters of an hour over her hair. Jenny’s suspicions were justified and her vigilance rewarded. At four o’clock the front gate clicked and the gravel walk resounded under a manly tread. Charlie Quigley, in a high stock, a flowered waistcoat, a long black coat, tight blue trousers and a tall silk hat, came to call on Esther. And he brought a gift. Was it a box of candy? If so Jenny would, as a dutiful sister, help to entertain the company. She would wait—Esther was unwrapping the present. No, it was not a box of candy—it was a book. And it was not even a novel, it was a book of poetry, of all things in the world! How could that Charlie Quigley be so silly?

Well, Jenny lost interest in Charlie and his gift for a while. She rolled her hoop and played with the puppy while Esther and Charlie sat on the porch44 and looked at the foolish book. When Jenny came up on the porch, toward sunset, they had gone into the parlour. They had left the book open face downward on a bench, open to Thomas Campbell’s “Song,” beginning “Oh, how hard it is to find The one just suited to our mind”—certain lines of which Charlie had roguishly underscored.

Jenny turned the pages of the book, but found therein little entertainment. At length, however, she came upon “Morning in the Alps,” with its blank and inviting reverse. Among the jackstones in her pocket was the stub of a pencil, and soon that pencil was at its predestined task of depicting the event of the afternoon—for my edification some threescore years later.

Jenny drew a side view of the broad stone steps, with a little of the railings and Grecian pillars. She drew the locust tree, and since she knew that there was a robin’s nest in it, she outlined two little birds against the skyey background. She drew Esther, grand in her hoopskirts, necklace, curls and blue sash—no, it wasn’t blue, it was green plaid, and the fabric was satin, for, as I live, there is a faded corner of it in this very book, sentimentally cut off and placed there by Esther herself! Why was Esther so particular about saving a fragment of that sash?45 Was this really a momentous afternoon? Was this the sash that Charlie’s black broadcloth sleeve surrounded when Esther consented to become Mrs. Quigley? And were they married, and did Charlie’s friends all make flat jokes about his claiming the hand of Hand?

And were all these things going on while the artistic Jenny was busy on the porch? Possibly. Probably. But with such conjectures the author of this serious essay in art criticism has no concern. To return to the account of the picture—Jenny drew next the renowned Charles Francis Quigley. But now her pencil was dipped in a mild solution of venom—imparted to it, I fear, when she thoughtfully placed its point between her small lips. For those same lips had desired chocolates—and the chocolates had turned out to be nothing but poesy. Therefore she sacrificed realism to satire, and made Charlie (really a very nice fellow, whom she came to like very much in later years) something of a fop. She made the cut of his coat too extreme, his hair too curly, his mustache too obviously waxed. She deliberately gave his eye a sentimental expression; she smiled derisively as she padded his pictured sleeve.

And then she gave her drawing its crowning46 charm—she put in the “selbst-portrait.” She drew the little cedar tree that flanked the porch, and she drew herself kneeling beside it—seeing, but not seen by, the rapt Esther and Charlie. Far from being ashamed of this act of sisterly espionage, she gloried in it, and brought all her art to the task of immortalising it.

So in my book the locust tree is forever in leaf and two little birds poise always against the summer sky. And always Charlie, hat in hand, presents to the radiant Esther “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White.” And always the little artist, with long curls hanging over her white frock, laughs at the lovers from behind her cedar tree.

The light was fading now, but Jenny had found another blank page—that preceding the section devoted to Kirke White’s verses. Supper wouldn’t be ready for fifteen minutes, so she started on a picture more difficult than the simple incident just drawn. She chose for her scene Riley’s Riding Academy, where she and Esther spent every Wednesday morning. There was Esther, seated with the sedateness appropriate to her eighteen years, upon the tamest of nags. And there was Jenny, in her fetching habit, perilously poised upon her47 wildly careering steed. With enthusiastic pencil did Jenny depict her own brave unconcern, and Esther’s timorousness. How firmly Esther clutches the reins of her mild beast, how startled is her face as she looks upon her daring and nonchalant younger sister!

Did the Quigleys and the Hands, I wonder, shed tears over Mr. Southey’s “Account of the Life of Henry Kirke White”? Did they know Francis Boott, of Boston, the young American gentleman who placed, Mr. Southey tells us, a tablet to Henry’s memory in All Saints Church, Cambridge? Were they moved by James Montgomery’s “Prison Amusements; Written during nine months confinement in the Castle of York, in the years of 1795 and 1796”? Mr. Montgomery tells us in the prefatory advertisement, “they were the transcripts of melancholy feelings—the warm effusions of a bleeding heart.” Did they read “Gertrude of Wyoming,” “Theodric; a Domestic Tale,” and the “Pleasures of Hope”?

Did they read the memoirs prefaced to the various selections? If so, I hope they found them as delightful as I do. There is the inexhaustibly fascinating “Memoirs of Charles Lamb,” in which the anonymous critic improves the occasion by reproving48 sternly the Lake Poets, or the “Lakers,” as he calls them. “The thousand Songs,” he tells us, “of our writers in verse of past time dwell on all tongues, with the melodies of Moore. But who learns or repeats the cumbrous verses of Wordsworth, which require an initiation from their writer to comprehend?” Later this gentleman has occasion to refer to “Another School of Poetry,” which “arose in opposition to that of the Lakers.” “Their talents,” he writes, “are before the world. To this new school belonged the late poet Shelley, whose lofty powers are unquestionable; Keats, also now deceased; and Leigh Hunt.” Keats, also now deceased! What porridge fed the writer of this memoir?

Well, my concern is not with the poor hack who edited this book and wrote the memoirs. I hope Messrs. Grigg and Elliot paid him well. And as for Charlie and Esther and Jenny and the robins in the locust tree—well, Charlie Quigley’s dust and his good sword’s rust, and his soul is with the saints, I trust. I hope Esther married him. I’m glad he brought her “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White,” even if Jenny was disappointed. For if she’d made her drawings on the cover of a candy box they would not now be in my library.

THE INEFFICIENT LIBRARY

There are young gentlemen whose delight it is to tell their married and established and venerable friends how to form libraries. Generally, these young gentlemen wear spectacles rimmed with tortoise shell, and the condensed milk of their alma mater is yet wet upon their lips. They peer at your laden shelves and say: “It is better to have one good book than a dozen bad ones. Of any standard work you should have the definitive edition—not necessarily a rare imprint or something in fine binding, but the most modern and comprehensive edition. It is better to have one good anthology than a shelfful of third-rate poets. Go through your shelves and throw away all the rubbish; buy sets of the classics, a volume at a time, and in this way you will gradually build up a useful and really representative library, something appropriate and coherent.”

When a young gentleman talks to you in this wise, the only thing to do is to lead him gently away from the bookshelves and make him sit in a comfortable corner and talk to you about hockey or socialism50 or some other of his boyish sports. He knows absolutely nothing about libraries. Probably he lives in the shadow of Washington Arch, and his own library—on the bureau—consists of the “Life of General Ulysses S. Grant,” inscribed “To dearest Teddy, from Aunt Mag., Xmas, 1916,” and a copy of the New Republic for last August, containing a letter in which he took exception to an editorial on the relation between pragmatism and Freud’s second theory of the semi-subconscious. To-morrow he will sell General Grant to a second-hand book dealer for fifteen cents, and thereby diminish his library by one half. What right has he to tell you what books you shall keep and what you shall destroy?

Now, it would not be so bad if this raving about a library was confined to young persons like him I have mentioned. But the trouble is, there are people of means and reputation for intelligence who are actually putting into practice the evil theories he advances, who are deliberately “building up libraries,” instead of surrounding themselves with books they like. Against this pernicious heresy it is the duty of every honest bibliophile to protest.

We need waste no words on the purchaser of “subscription sets” and many-volumed collections51 of “Kings and Queens of Neo-Cymric Realism and Romance,” and “The Universalest of All Libraries of Super-extraordinary Fiction,” in forty-eight volumes, fifteen dollars down and five dollars a month until the purchaser is summoned to a Better Land. Either these people want books for mere shelf-furniture, or else they are the victims of voracious book agents, and deserve a tear of sympathy rather than a rebuke. Our concern, the concern of those who have at heart the good name of printed literature and the liberty of the individual householder of literary tastes, is with the person who is highly literate and possessed of an account with a bookseller, and is abusing his talent and privilege by “efficiently” building up a library.

When efficiency confined itself to the office and the factory, it was bad enough. When it (loathsome animal that it is!) crawled up a leg of the table and began to preach to us about our food, babbling obscenely of proteids and carbohydrates, we felt that the limit of endurance had been reached. But no sooner do we cuff efficiency from the dining table than it pops up in the library. And this is not to be endured. Efficiency must be plucked down, kindly, of course, but resolutely, from the bookshelves, and put in a covered basket to await the52 coming of the wagon which shall convey it to the lethal of the S. P. C. A.

Except for an efficient family, what could be less interesting than an efficient library? Think of the sameness of it—every study in a block of houses containing the “Oxford Dictionary” and “Roget’s Thesaurus” and the “Collected Essays of Hamilton Wright Mabie” and similar works of reference, with a few standard fictions such as Arnold Bennett’s “Your United States,” and Owen Wister’s “The Pentecost of Calamity”! There would be no adventures among books possible in such libraries. Indeed, efficiency in the library would soon reduce it, if logically developed, to a collection of anthologies and reference books, and possibly some such practical jokes as ex-President Eliot’s “Five Foot Shelf.”

An advocate of the efficient library, a spectacled young gentleman of the type already described, once engaged in some ignoble literary task—book-reviewing I believe it was called—while a guest at my house. The volume of which he was writing a criticism had to do with a single-tax experiment in New Zealand, and therefore he wished to include in his review a quotation from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini.” He did not find the “Life of Benvenuto53 Cellini” on my shelves, and therefore reproached me, and made my library the object of his callow disapproval.

I reasoned with him. He had read Benvenuto, I said, and Benvenuto was waiting for him in the public library if he desired to renew his acquaintance with him. Here, I said, are many volumes of biography and autobiography in place of the one for which you cry. Here is a book entitled “The Life and Labours of Henry W. Grady, his Speeches, Writings, etc., Being in Addition to a Graphic Sketch of His Life, a Collection of His Most Remarkable Speeches and Such of His Writings as Best Illustrate His Character and Show the Wonderful Brilliancy of His Intellect, also Such Letters, Speeches, and Newspaper Articles in connection with His Life and Death as Will Be of General Interest.” Here, I said, is “Colonel Thomas Blood, Crown Stealer,” by Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a highly entertaining book. Here, I continued, as a preface to this collection of the “Essays in Prose and Verse of J. Clarence Mangan,” is an illuminating biographical essay by Mr. C. P. Meehan, together with Mr. J. Wilson’s “Phrenological Description of Mangan’s Head,” and “The Poet’s Own Recipe to Make Tar Water.” Here is—

But my friend rudely interrupted my well-meant remarks, and went in quest of Cellini to the south-west corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, where he found a library more suited to his efficient tastes. In doing this he was perfectly justified. Public Libraries should be efficient. They are places to which you go to get useful but uninteresting information. But there is no more reason for your own library to resemble a public library than there is for your study to resemble your office, or for your dining-room to resemble the Automat, or for every bedroom in your house to bear on its door printed directions to ring twice for your wife to bring you hot water and three times for a clean collar.

The crowning virtue of the successful private library is inefficiency. As an example closely approaching the ideal, as a model to householders who have been allowed a closet or vault in which to keep books, I respectfully present my own library. And in order that the radiance of its inefficiency may be as penetrating as possible, I wish my library to be considered in comparison with its efficient rivals.

Let us therefore assume that the spectacled young gentleman already several times celebrated in this treatise has, without acquiring more sense, got married,55 and perhaps thereby acquired a sufficient competency to warrant his establishing a library. Let us begin our survey of his books with the shelves of poetry. Where is there a good basis for comparison? Ah, here we have it—here is Milton in the efficient library, and here the long-winded old gentleman is found again in my own! Is any comparison between these volumes possible? Would any real bibliophile hesitate a moment in making his choice between the two? The efficient Milton is a tall, sombre-looking volume with a long biographical preface by a man who used to be a poet before he became a college professor, a preface which proves that Milton never went blind, lived in Wales rather than in England, had only one daughter and knew no Latin. At the foot of every page there is a thick sprinkling of notes conveying unnecessary information. There is an appendix of variant readings and an exhaustive, monumental bibliography.

Could anything be more depressing? The only illustration in the book is John himself, in a black cloak, with what seems to be a baby’s bib under his chin, and this picture can scarcely be called a decoration. My “Milton’s Poetical Works,” which was published in New York in 1857 and purchased by me from a stall on Twenty-third Street for a56 quarter, is more entertaining in every respect. In the first place, it has no notes—which alone makes it worth the price of admission. In the second place, the only biographical introduction is “The Life of Milton, by His Nephew, Edward Philips,” a most estimable piece of writing, which begins, “Of all the several parts of history, that which sets forth the lives, and commemorates the most remarkable actions, sayings or writings of famous and illustrious persons, whether in war or peace—whether many together, or any one in particular—as it is not the least useful in itself, so it is in the highest vogue and esteem among the studious and reading part of mankind.” Doesn’t a biography of this sort promise more flavours and exciting things than one written by a college professor, and beginning, “John Milton was born in London, England, December 9th, 1608”?

Furthermore, my Milton is bound in black cloth, with stars and wreaths and baskets of flowers stamped in gold all over it. Furthermore, my Milton has all sorts of highly entertaining steel engravings, most delightfully 1857—Lycidas being shipwrecked on St. Michael’s Mount, and the Warring Angels mustering for battle, and skeletons and devils and angels and “wood nymphs, deck’d with57 daisies trim,” keeping “their merry wakes and pastimes,” and Melancholy, who looks like Queen Victoria in her old age, and the “Goddess fair and free, in heaven yclep’d Euphrosyne,” wearing a very becoming white frock. Furthermore, my Milton was “Presented to Mifs Ellen R. Baxter, by Her Resp’t’l friend, J. Stuart, Oswego, May 4, 1859”—so the violet ink inscription on the flyleaf tells me. And some one has drawn in pencil a very attractive cat on the blank page opposite the opening of “Samson Agonistes.” The efficient library’s copy of Milton lacks all these amiable associations.

My efficient friend possesses a Byron, it is true. But not to be mentioned in the same breath with the volume which stands in my study between Witter Bynner and Bliss Carman. My Byron contains eight contemporary memoirs of the poet, by distinguished fellow-craftsmen, and sixteen pictures—himself, his birthplace, his Newfoundland dog, his daughter, and a dozen landscapes which the publisher happened to have on hand. Also, in the preface of my Byron I find this sentence: “Thus died Lord Byron at the early age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him a name second only to that of the renowned Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a memory which the sublime effusions of his muse58 will endear to all posterity.” My friend’s Byron has nothing to compare with this.

The trouble with my friend’s library is that it has no surprises. Any one who has seen his waistcoat—the V of which is edged with heavy white cord—and his cuff links—which are oval and bear, engraven on their golden surfaces, his initials—could describe his library to a volume. It is obvious; its obviousness is a part of its efficiency.

I suppose Benvenuto Cellini is on a shelf of the efficient library. He must be, since he is in the public library. Probably my efficient friend has also Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” and the “Complete Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.” He has a limp-leather tissue-paper encyclopedia, and an obese dictionary, and a magnificent atlas. And in a corner of his study he has a map of the world in the form of a great globe on a pivot.

I envy him this last possession, for one may amuse himself by spinning a geographical globe, as one entertains himself by spinning a piano stool. But aside from this, there is nothing in my friend’s library that I desire. And my own triumphantly inefficient library—what treasures it contains!

You mention French literature. Do I overwhelm you with a sumptuous Voltaire, or sicken you59 with a sentimentally illustrated “Paul et Virginie”? I do not. I exhibit to you yellow-back volumes of the later verse of Francis Jammes—which are supposed to be going to be bound one of these days—or I show you a play or two of Rostand’s. If you desire to have further dealings with the literature of France, the French department of the university is, for a consideration, at your service. You mention Fraser’s “Golden Bough”? I show you something equally informing and more entertaining, comfortable volumes in which the mythology of Ireland is narrated to us by Jeremiah Curtin and by Seumas MacManus, and I show you a stray volume of Louis Ginzberg’s “The Legends of the Jews.”

I should not try to make the possessors of efficient libraries unhappy. But I do it for their own good, in the hope that I may eventually reform them. And when I look upon my two volumes of “The Evergreen,” a quarterly published in Edinburgh some twenty years ago, numbering among its contributors Fiona MacLeod, Nora Hopper, Douglas Hyde, Standish O’Grady and Rosa Mulholland, and “The Squire’s Recipes,” by Kendall Banning, and “Scottish Heraldry Made Easy,” and Shaemas O’Sheel’s “The Dear Old Lady of Eighty-sixth Street,” and a bound volume of The Gentleman’s60 Magazine for 1761 and “L. Annsei Senecae et Aliorum Tragoediae (Amsterodami, Apud Guiljel: Ians: Caesium)” and a battered edition of Scott’s “Marmion,” enriched by the comments of a Louise Cogswell who owned it in 1810 and wrote approvingly, “and very well told too” under the sub-title “A Tale of Flodden Field,” and Joseph Forster’s “Studies in Black and Red” (very ghastly), and both of Ernest Dowson’s novels and his translations from the French, as well as his poems, and “The American Annual of Photography” for 1916, and “Miss Thackeray’s Works,” complete in one volume, and Layton Crippen’s “Clay and Fire,” and Bithell’s “Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” and Sir Francis Burnand’s “More Happy Thoughts,” and a volume containing “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery Lamb, and Kirke White,” and an inscribed copy of Palmer Cox’s “The Brownies, Their Book”—when I contemplate, among the more commonplace inhabitants of my shelves, these books, then I cannot keep from feeling a sense of superiority to all those who have laboriously “built up” their libraries in accordance with the mandates of strict utility.

My library is inefficient and impractical, entertaining and unexacting. Its members have come to61 me by chance and by momentary inclination. For if a man’s books are to be, as the old phrase has it, his friends, they must be allowed to him because of some fitness on his part subtly felt by them. A man does not deliberately select his friends; there must be a selection by them as well as by him. Unless he is applying the principles of efficiency to friendship. And in that case he has no friends at all.

THE POETRY OF HILAIRE BELLOC

Far from the poets being astray in prose-writing (said Francis Thompson), it might plausibly be contended that English prose, as an art, is but a secondary stream of the Pierian fount, and owes its very origin to the poets. The first writer one remembers with whom prose became an art was Sir Philip Sidney. And Sidney was a poet.

This quotation is relevant to a consideration of Hilaire Belloc, because Belloc is a poet who happens to be known chiefly for his prose. His Danton and Robespierre have been read by every intelligent student of French history, his Path to Rome, that most high-spirited and engaging of travel books, has passed through many editions, his political writings are known to all lovers—and many foes—of democracy, his whimsically imaginative novels have their large and appreciative audience, and his exquisite brief essays are contemporary classics. And since the unforgetable month of August of the unforgetable year 1914, Hilaire Belloc has added to the number of his friends many thousands who care63 little for belles lettres and less for the French Revolution—he has become certainly the most popular, and by general opinion the shrewdest and best informed, of all chroniclers and critics of the Great War.

There is nothing, it may be said, about these achievements to indicate the poet. How can this most public of publicists woo the shy and exacting Muse? His superabundant energy may now and again overflow in little lyrical rivulets, but how can he find time to turn it into the deep channels of song?

Well, what is the difference between a poet who writes prose and a prose-writer who writes verse? The difference is easy to see but hard to describe. Mr. Thomas Hardy is a prose writer. He has forsaken the novel, of which he was so distinguished a master, to make cynical little sonnet portraits and to pour the acid wine of his philosophy—a sort of perverted Presbyterianism—into the graceful amphora of poetic drama. But he is not a poet. Thackeray was a prose-writer, in spite of his delicious light verse. Every novelist writes or has written verse, but not all of them are poets.

Of course, Sir Walter Scott was first of all a poet—the greatest poet who ever wrote a novel.64 And no one who has read Love in the Valley can hesitate to give Meredith his proper title. Was Macaulay a poet? I think so—but perhaps I am in a hopeless minority in my belief that the author of The Battle of Naseby and The Lays of Ancient Rome was the last of the great English ballad makers.

But this general truth cannot, I think, honestly be denied; there have been many great poets who have devoted most of their lives to writing prose. Some of them have died without discovering their neglected talent. I think that Walter Pater was one of these; much that is annoyingly subtle or annoyingly elaborate in his essays needs only rhyme and rhythm—the lovely accidents of poetry—to become graceful and appropriate. His famous description of the Mona Lisa is worthless if considered as a piece of serious æsthetic criticism. But it would make an admirable sonnet. And it is significant that Walter Pater’s two greatest pupils—Lionel Johnson and Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,—found expression for their genius not in prose, the chosen medium of their “unforgetably most gracious friend,” but in verse.

From Walter Pater, that exquisite of letters, to the robust Hilaire Belloc may seem a long journey.65 But there is, I insist, this similarity between these contrasting writers, both are poets, and both are known to fame by their prose.

For proof that Walter Pater was a poet, it is necessary only to read his Renaissance Studies or his interpretations—unsound but fascinating—of the soul of ancient Greece. Often his essays, too delicately accurate in phrasing or too heavily laden with golden rhetoric, seem almost to cry aloud for the relief of rhyme and rhythm.

Now, Hilaire Belloc suggests in many of his prose sketches that he is not using his true medium. I remember a brief essay on sleep which appeared in The New Witness—or, as it was then called, The Eye Witness—several years ago, which was not so much a complete work in itself as it was a draft for a poem. It had the economy of phrase, the concentration of idea, which is proper to poetry.

But it is not necessary in the case of Hilaire Belloc, as it is in that of Walter Pater, to search pages of prose for proof that their author is a poet. Now and then—all too seldom—the idea in this man’s brain has insisted on its right, has scorned the proffered dress of prose, however fine of warp and woof, however stiff with rich verbal embroidery, and has demanded its rhymed and rhythmed wedding66 garments. Therefore, for proof that Hilaire Belloc is a poet it is necessary only to read his poetry.

Hilaire Belloc is a poet. Also he is a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Oxford man, a Roman Catholic, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a practical journalist. He is always all these things.

One sign that he is naturally a poet is that he is never deliberately a poet. No one can imagine him writing a poem to order—even to his own order. The poems knock at the door of his brain and demand to be let out. And he lets them out, carelessly enough, setting them comfortably down on paper simply because that is the treatment they desire. And this happens to be the way all real poetry is made.

Not that all verse makers work that way. There are men who come upon a waterfall or mountain or an emotion and say: “Aha! here is something out of which I can extract a poem!” And they sit down in front of that waterfall or mountain or an emotion and think up clever things to say about it. These things they put into metrical form, and the result they fondly call a poem.

There’s no harm in that. It’s good exercise for67 the mind, and of it comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of the world’s literature is increased.

Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration, than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the Boers. Yet his heart went out to the friends of his university days who were fighting in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an unjust cause; but they were his friends and they were, at any rate, fighting. And so he made something that seems (like all great writing) an utterance rather than a composition; he put his love of war in general and his hatred of this war in particular, his devotion to Balliol and to the friends of his youth into one of the very few pieces of genuine poetry which the Boer War produced. Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung colleges known praise more fit than this

But perhaps a more typical example of Hilaire Belloc’s wanton genius is to be found not among those poems which are, throughout, the beautiful expressions of beautiful impressions, but among those which are careless, whimsical, colloquial. There is that delightful, but somewhat exasperating Dedicatory Ode. Hilaire Belloc is talking—charmingly, as is his custom—to some of his friends, who had belonged, in their university days, to a youthful revolutionary organisation called the Republican Club. He happens to be talking in verse, for no particular reason except that it amuses him to talk in verse. He makes a number of excellent jokes, and enjoys them very much; his Pegasus is cantering down the road at a jolly gait, when suddenly, to the amazement of the spectators, it spreads out great golden wings and flashes like a meteor across the vault of heaven! We have been laughing at the droll tragedy of the opium-smoking Uncle Paul; we have been enjoying the humorous spectacle of the contemplative freshman—and suddenly we come upon a bit of astonishingly fine poetry. Who would expect, in all this whimsical and jovial writing, to find this really great stanza?

Who having read these four lines, can forget them? And who but a poet could write them? But Hilaire Belloc has not forced himself into this high mood, nor does he bother to maintain it. He gaily passes on to another verse of drollery, and then, not because he wishes to bring the poem to an effective climax, but merely because it happens to be his mood, he ends the escapade he calls an Ode with eight or ten stanzas of nobly beautiful poetry.

There is something almost uncanny about the flashes of inspiration which dart out at the astonished reader of Hilaire Belloc’s most frivolous verses. Let me alter a famous epigram and call his light verse a circus illuminated by lightning. There is that monumental burlesque, the Newdigate Poem—A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin of Burford to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, “The Benefits of the Electric Light.” It is a tremendous joke; with every line the reader echoes the author’s laughter. But without the slightest warning Hilaire Belloc70 passes from rollicking burlesque to shrewd satire; he has been merrily jesting with a bladder on a stick, he suddenly draws a gleaming rapier and thrusts it into the heart of error. He makes Mr. Lambkin say:

Here we find the directness and restraint which belong to really great satire. This is the materialistic theory, the religion of Science, not burlesqued, not parodied, but merely stated nakedly, without the verbal frills and furbelows with which our forward-looking leaders of popular thought are accustomed to cover its obscene absurdity. Almost these very words have been uttered in a dozen “rationalistic” pulpits I could mention, pulpits occupied by robustuous practical gentlemen with very large eyes, great favourites with the women’s clubs. Their pet doctrine, their only and most offensive dogma, is not attacked, is not ridiculed; it is merely stated for them, in all kindness and simplicity. They cannot answer it, they cannot deny that it is a mercilessly fair statement of the “philosophy”71 that is their stock in trade. I hope that many of them will read it.

III

Hilaire Belloc was born July 27, 1870. He was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston, and at Balliol College, Oxford. After leaving school he served as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of French Artillery at Toul Meurthe-et-Moselle, being at that time a French citizen. Later he was naturalised as a British subject, and entered the House of Commons in 1906 as Liberal Member for South Salford. British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, the motion that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration. He was always a keen student of military affairs; he prophesied, long before the event, the present international conflict, describing with astonishing accuracy the details of the German invasion of Belgium and the resistance of Liège. Now he occupies72 a unique position among the journalists who comment upon the War, having tremendously increased the circulation of Land and Water, the periodical for which he writes regularly, and lecturing to a huge audience once a week on the events of the War in one of the largest of London’s concert halls—Queen’s Hall, where the same vast crowds that listen to the War lectures used to gather to hear the works of the foremost German composers.

Hilaire Belloc, as I have said, is a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Oxford man, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a practical journalist. In all these characters he utters his poetry. As a Frenchman, he is vivacious and gallant and quick. He has the noble English frankness, and that broad irresistible English mirthfulness which is so much more inclusive than that narrow possession, a sense of humour. Democrat though he is, there is about him something of the atmosphere of the country squire of some generations ago; it is in his heartiness, his jovial dignity, his deep love of the land. The author of The South Country and Courtesy has made Sussex his inalienable possession; he owns Sussex, as Dickens owns London, and73 Blackmore owns Devonshire. And he is thoroughly a soldier, a happy warrior, as brave and dexterous, no one can doubt, with a sword of steel as with a sword of words.

He has taken the most severe risk which a poet can take: he has written poems about childhood. What happened when the late Algernon Charles Swinburne bent his energies to the task of celebrating this theme? As the result of his solemn meditation on the mystery of childhood, he arrived at two conclusions, which he melodiously announced to the world. They were, first, that the face of a baby wearing a plush cap looks like a moss-rose bud in its soft sheath, and, second, that “astrolabe” rhymes with “babe.” Very charming, of course, but certainly unworthy of a great poet. And upon this the obvious comment is that Swinburne was not a great poet. He took a theme terribly great and terribly simple, and about it he wrote ... something rather pretty.

Now, when a really great poet—Francis Thompson, for example—has before him such a theme as childhood, he does not spend his time making far-fetched comparisons with moss-rose buds, or hunting for words that rhyme with “babe.” Childhood suggests Him Who made childhood sacred, so the74 poet writes Ex Ore Infantium, or such a poem as that which ends with the line:

A poet may write pleasingly about mountains, and cyclones and battles, and the love of woman, but if he is at all timid about the verdict of posterity he should avoid the theme of childhood as he would avoid the plague. For only great poets can write about childhood poems worthy to be printed.

Hilaire Belloc has written poems about children, and they are worthy to be printed. He is never ironic when he thinks about childhood; he is gay, whimsical, with a slight suggestion of elfin cynicism, but he is direct, as a child is direct. He has written two dedicatory poems for books to be given to children; they are slight things, but they are a revelation of their author’s power to do what only a very few poets can do, that is, to enter into the heart and mind of the child, following that advice which has its literary as well as moral significance, to “become as a little child.”

And in many of Hilaire Belloc’s poems by no means intended for childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult and highly artificial simplicity of Professor75 A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Take that quatrain The Early Morning. It is as clear and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or “literary” phrasing. It is, in fact, conversation—inspired conversation, which is poetry. It might have been written by a Wordsworth not painfully self-conscious, or by a Blake whose brain was not as yet muddled with impressionistic metaphysics.

And his Christmas carols—they are fit to be sung by a chorus of children. Can any songs of the sort receive higher praise than that? Children, too, appreciate The Birds and Our Lord and Our Lady. Nor is that wonderful prayer rather flatly called In a Boat beyond the reach of their intelligence.

Naturally enough, Hilaire Belloc is strongly drawn to the almost violent simplicity of the ballad. Bishop Percy would not have enjoyed the theological and political atmosphere of The Little Serving Maid, but he would have acknowledged its irresistible charm. There is that wholly delightful poem The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter—a most Bellocian vagabond. “He wandered everywhere he would: and all that he approved was sung, and most of what he saw was good.” Says Peter:

Hilaire Belloc has seen much and loved much. He has sung lustily the things he approved—with what hearty hatred has he sung the things he disapproved!

Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs, drinking songs, battle songs—it is with these primitive and democratic things that he is chiefly concerned.

But there is something more democratic than wine or love or war. That thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his Catholic Faith. He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus because he himself is convinced.77 He does not delve into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the light that is God.”

And therein is Hilaire Belloc most thoroughly and consistently a democrat. For in this twentieth century it happens that there is on earth only one genuine democratic institution. And that institution is the Catholic Church.

THE CATHOLIC POETS OF BELGIUM

At a recent meeting of the English Poetry Society, Mlle. Coppin, a distinguished Belgian poetess, who now, like so many of her compatriots, is a refugee in London, said: “I believe we have been too prosperous, too fond of pleasure. We are being purged, and in our adversity we have found our nationality. If ever England, France, and Russia make a new Belgium, we shall be more simple and hard-working.”

Those of us who believe that the character of a nation is, to a great extent, revealed in its literature cannot doubt that Mlle. Coppin’s words are true. Surely the sick fancies of Maurice Maeterlinck (to mention the most conspicuous of Belgian men of letters) could come into being only in a land suffering from over-much civilisation, in a land whose citizens are too sophisticated for common and wholesome delights. Even more than the elaborate obscenities of Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud, Maeterlinck’s morbid studies of mental, spiritual, and physical degradation belong to that sort of literature79 which is called “decadent.” And decadent literature usually is produced for and by people who need to be, in Mlle. Coppin’s words, “more simple and hard-working.”

That the great tragedy which has overtaken Belgium will have a beneficial effect upon its literature is not to be doubted. Of course, the first result is an almost total cessation of creative activity; one cannot handle a rifle and a pen at the same time. But with the return of peace must come the development of a new Belgian literature, a literature which is not an echo of the salon-philosophies of Paris and Berlin, but a beautiful expression of the soul of a strong and brave race.

It is possible that when the poets of a re-created Belgium are singing their clear songs, the world, comparing them with Gilkin, Giraud, Maeterlinck, and the Verhaeren of Les Débâcles and Les Flambeaux Noirs, will say: “Now, for the first time, Belgian poetry deserves the attention of those who are interested in other than the pathological aspects of literature! Not until the land had been purified by blood and flame did the Spirit of Beauty come to dwell in Flanders!”

But this criticism will be unjust. Great literary movements do not spontaneously come into being;80 they develop slowly and surely through the centuries. If all the poetry of Belgium were the work of charlatans and vicious men, then, not even this tremendous war could stimulate it into healthy life. The fame of Maeterlinck’s dismal dramas, and of the least worthy poems of Emile Verhaeren, should not make us oblivious of the fact that Belgium has, and has always had, its small, but brilliant, company of sincere and gifted writers, men who have not debased their art, but have held in honour the sacred traditions of their high calling. He who, neglecting the productions of the symbolists, decadents, and similar phantasists, turns his attention to the authentic literature of the Belgian people, finds a strain of poetry white and beautiful, and as fervently Catholic as the immortal songs of Crashaw and Francis Thompson. It is not the disciples of Baudelaire and Mallarmé who have planted the seeds of poetry that soon shall burst into splendid bloom, but men like Thomas Braun and Georges Ramaekers, men who, serving faithfully their Muse, have never wavered in their allegiance to the Mistress of all the Arts, the Catholic Church.

It must not be thought that these poets write only religious poems. They have, indeed, produced such masterpieces of devotional verse as Braun’s Livre des Bénédictions81 and Ramaekers’ Le Chant des Trois Regnes. But when their poetry is not religious it is not, at any rate, irreligious; they “utter nothing base.” And surely even the lightest of secular poems may do its author’s Catholicism no discredit. As Francis Thompson said of poetry in the eloquent appeal to the “fathers of the Church, pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church” with which his most famous essay begins, “Eye her not askance if she seldom sing directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God though it sings only of its own innocent loves.... Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play, so she play round the foot of the Cross!”

Indeed, what is true of much modern English verse is true also of that of Belgium, there are Catholic poets who seldom in their work refer directly to their faith, and there are infidel poets who have laid impious hands on the Church’s treasures and decorate their rhymes with rich ecclesiastical imagery and the fragrant names of the Saints. So we find, for example, Emile Verhaeren using the first chapters of Genesis as the theme of a poem that is anything but edifying, while that pious Catholic, Thomas Braun, writes a volume of verses about postage stamps.

There are certain optimistic persons who believe that the general use in literature of sacred names and traditions augurs well for the spread of faith. A member of an Anglican religious order, who two years ago delivered a series of lectures in New York City, prophesied a mighty recrudescence of religion among the poets of England, and based his prophecy, apparently, on the fact that Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie and other brilliant young writers have made ballads out of some of the most picturesque of the legends about the Saints. He did not see that Mr. Abercrombie selected his themes solely because of their literary value. There are many poets who eagerly avail themselves of the stores which are the Church’s heritage, who introduce the name of the Blessed Virgin into their verses exactly as they would introduce that of Diana, or Venus or any creature of fable. Personally, I have never been able to enjoy the recital, however skillful, of a sacred story by a poet who did not believe in it, and therefore I cannot grow enthusiastic over the knowledge that many Belgian poets, whose philosophies are hostile to the Church, like to write about monstrances and chalices and altars, and to tell ostentatiously “human” stories about sacred people in general and St. Mary Magdalen in particular.83 I find Thomas Braun’s poems about postage stamps more edifying.

The modern Catholic poets of Belgium may be roughly divided into two groups, the mystics and the primitives. These terms are here used merely for the purposes of this classification, and cannot perhaps be justified by scientific criticism. Among the mystics I would include such writers as Georges Ramaekers, the brilliant editor of Le Catholique, and perhaps Max Elskamp, who use elaborate and complicated symbols, and, in general, may be said to do in verse what the late Joris Karl Huysmans, after his conversion to Catholicism, did in prose. Among the primitives I would place such poets as Victor Kinon and Thomas Braun, who look for their inspirations to the ancient religious life of Flanders, in all its picturesque simplicity, and are more concerned with celebrating the piety of simple Flemish peasants than with endeavouring to penetrate high mysteries.

It is to that valued friend of Belgian letters, Mr. Jethro Bithell, of Birbeck College, London, whose translation of Stefan Zweig’s book on Verhaeren has recently earned him the gratitude of the English-speaking public, that we owe this excellent version of Thomas Braun’s The Benediction of the Nuptial Ring84, taken from this poet’s The Book of the Benedictions. The directness and sincerity of this poem suggest the work of George Herbert.

“That she who shall wear it, keep faith unchanged with her husband and ever live in mutual love.”

In many of Thomas Braun’s poems is to be found a quality suggestive of the folk song. Like the Verhaeren85 of Les Flamandes, Braun writes of those huge, boisterous farmers and merchants who live for us on the canvases of Brauwer and Jan Steen. But he writes of them, it need scarcely be said, in a very different spirit. Verhaeren saw only their gluttony, drunkenness, and coarseness; Braun sees their courage, industry, good-nature, piety. In fact, Verhaeren saw their bodies, Braun sees their souls.

In an essay on Verhaeren recently printed, I called attention to the fact that while Verhaeren wrote of the Flemings with enthusiasm, and with repulsively careful attention to detail, he did not write of them with sympathy. He does not join in the revels about which he writes; he is interested in his loud purple-faced peasants, but with his interest is mingled a certain scorn. Thomas Braun, on the other hand, is thoroughly in sympathy with the life of which he writes; the reader feels that such a poem as The Benediction of Wine, for example, was written by a man who is artist enough to share actually in the strong simple piety of the keeper of the vineyard. The quaintness of Thomas Braun’s poems, which is emphasized by the woodcuts made to accompany them by his brother who is a Benedictine monk, is not an affectation, it is a quality proper to86 the work of a man who, like Wordsworth, sees beauty chiefly in simplicity. Like Coventry Patmore, he has “divine frivolity,” he is acquainted with the mirth of the Saints. In his own beautiful words, he knows how to play in the straw with the Child of Bethlehem.

Georges Ramaekers is a poet whose verse is for the most part too obscure to lend itself readily to translation. He will write a poem, for example, on mushrooms, and the reader will think after several minutes that he is being told merely about the common fungi. Then it comes to him that it is the Tree of Life that these maleficent growths are attacking; then they cover the columns of the Church and actually reach the Host Itself. The poem is, it seems, a denunciation of certain heresies, or of sloth, indifference, and other spiritual evils, but its meaning cannot adequately be given in an English translation.

Here is a similar poem, which, in Mr. Bithell’s translation, shows Georges Ramaeker’s symbolic method at its best and clearest.

Victor Kinon, like that very different poet, Albert Giraud, the chief Belgian disciple of Baudelaire, is of Walloon descent. Mr. Bithell calls this poet a “fervent Roman Catholic,” but the poems which he has selected for translation are entirely secular in theme and treatment. They show, however, that their author is free from the vices of extreme realism and hysteria, which afflict many of his contemporaries. Sometimes it is fair to judge a poet’s whole attitude toward life from his love poems. When decadence and feverish eroticism are in fashion, it is refreshing to come upon a poet sane enough to write so honest and delicate a poem as this of Victor Kinon.

In Victor Kinon’s poetry is shown a knowledge of nature like that possessed by that American poet whose death the world of letters has not ceased to mourn, Madison Cawein. He sketches a landscape in a few vigorous lines, and the picture is vivid and true. This little poem might be a lyrical rendition of a Monet painting.

It is difficult to resist the temptation to read into the Catholic fold many Belgian poets who do not,89 perhaps, belong there. There is scarcely a man of letters in Belgium who does not owe his introduction to literature to the Catholic Church. The Catholic schools and universities of Belgium have given a knowledge of art and poetry to many a poet who now pays for the gift his little stanzas of abuse. But some of them, and among them must be counted Emile Verhaeren, seem to be thinking of their old faith, now that the need of faith has become terribly apparent to them. Verhaeren, especially, seems to be about to stop in his weary flight from the Hound of Heaven. For many years he was a writer of poems that seemed to betray a mind absolutely diseased. There were realistic studies of human vice that seemed like pages of Zola done into verse, and there were extraordinary attempts (of which Stefan Zweig speaks approvingly) to “chisel a new face of God.” But since his retirement to his little cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique, he has written poems that are for the most part exaltations of pure love, as lofty in thought as they are finished in composition. Mr. Bithell’s translation of this little song of wedded love shows that Verhaeren has left far behind him the grossness of Les Flamandes and the morbidness of Les Flambeaux Noirs.

But the poem which indicates most clearly the91 tremendous change that his nation’s tragedy has brought to Verhaeren, is that inspired by the demolition of the Cathedral of Rheims. A year ago, it may be, Verhaeren would have thought of this cathedral merely as a beautiful piece of architecture, as an ancient and lovely landmark. Now that it has suffered from the cannon of an invading army, he remembers suddenly the high use for which it was intended, the destruction of the sacred images and vessels reminds him, in spite of all his sophistry, that these things were not mere works of art. Once more, as in those far-away years when, with Georges Rodenbach, Charles Van Lerberghe, and Maurice Maeterlinck, he learned of literature and life at the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe, he is able to understand that most necessary of all acts, worship. The poem is so significant, so important to all who desire an insight into the psychology of Verhaeren and of literary Belgium, that I venture to quote here my own translation of it. It by no means does justice to the beauty of the original.

Of Verhaeren’s school-fellows at Sainte-Barbe, one, Maurice Maeterlinck, is already enjoying a fame which exceeds his deserts and is not likely to endure. Georges Rodenbach, who died in 1898, wrote, like Verhaeren, of Flemish peasants, but he gave them a romantic glamour which has alienated critics who admire naturalistic poetry. Stefan Zweig has little use for him, and Jethro Bithell speaks of his “weary Alexandrines,” and says that his reputation has waned considerably since his death. But Charles C. Clarke, of the Sheffield Scientific School, in the course of an illuminating article on Belgian literature, says that Rodenbach’s poems have considerable vogue in France. From his discussion of Rodenbach I quote this felicitously phrased paragraph:

Another school-fellow of Verhaeren, Charles Van Lerberghe, can scarcely, I believe, be called a Catholic poet, although, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose disciple he was, his verse is filled with Catholic symbolism. In a country like Belgium, in which nearly all the education is Catholic, and in which nearly every poet is, at any rate nominally, a Catholic, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between writers who have a genuinely devotional spirit, and those who merely like to play with mysticism.97 There are, for example, the amazing poems of Max Elskamp. He writes simple and charming poems about the Blessed Virgin and the Christ Child, and seems, indeed, to have the hardy faith of his Flemish ancestors. But the simplicity of his poems is not always convincing; the reader remembers that the late William Sharpe wrote, as “Fiona MacLeod,” poems that seemed to flame with all the piety of the Gael. And William Sharpe was, as he took care to let the world know, a “pagan.” The feeling that Elskamp’s interest in religion is chiefly literary is strengthened when we learn from Mr. Bithell that most of the sacred names in his poems have a symbolic meaning, that the Blessed Virgin means merely “the pure woman,” and the Christ Child simply “the delicious infancy.” Intellectual caprices like this seldom accompany genuine devotional feeling.

But at any rate there is nothing to disgust or pain the reader in Elskamp’s verse; whether or not he believes in the sacred personages of whom he writes, he does not treat them irreverently. His Catholicism, however, is not so convincing as is that of Thomas Braun and Georges Ramaekers.

It is good to find that in Belgium, a country the literature of which must inevitably reflect from time98 to time the strange fashions of Germany and France, there has been preserved through the years the poetry of Catholic tradition. Belgian poetry must become more and more spiritual; the poets have seen and felt things mighty and terrible, and they can no longer concern themselves with erotic fancies and the nuances of their own emotions. In days to come, historians of literature will perhaps see that on the thought of Belgium as on the thought of all Europe, this war has had a clarifying and strengthening effect. Good still comes from evil, sweetness from force, and honeycomb out of the lion’s carcass. Belgium may say, in the words of one of the truest poets of our time:

To Charles Willis Thompson

Can you lend me $1.00? I wish to go to New Brunswick, N. J. Help me to gratify this strange whim!

To Shaemas O’Sheel

Aline and I are heartily glad of the splendid fortune that has come to you and Blanche. I am sure you will enjoy Washington—it’s a very lovely city as I remember it—I was there for two days at the age of four.

With love from Mayor Gaynor, Cale Young Rice, Alfred Noyes, Madison Cawein, B. Russell Hertz and Harriet Monroe,

I have been thinking a good deal about you for the last day or so, and might therefore have known that a message from you was on its way. The Minaret is a fine adventure, and God knows Washington needs adventures more than any other city in the United States. There is some beautiful writing and some brave and direct thinking in the copies you sent me, and of course I enclose my subscription for a year. I’d support any enterprise of yours, so long as it wasn’t a scheme to make the Kaiser Mayor of Mahwah, New Jersey. I also enclose a poem, with my blessing.

But why do you let your young collaborator—I suppose he is responsible—be so damned vindictive! No poet has any right in the world to knock the work of another poet who is honest. Vachel Lindsey is, in my opinion, a sincere artist, whose work sometimes—as in “The Chinese Nightingale”—glows with genius. That is of course only my own opinion—but it is not merely a matter of opinion, but a matter of absolute fact, that he is an honest man, consistently serving his ideal, earnestly endeavouring to express the beauty that is in him.103 And abuse is not what he should receive from his brother poet.

However, go ahead, and good luck to you. But lay off the hammer! Poets have enough to suffer without being castigated by other poets. Keep out of jail, and give my love to Blanche and Patrick Wilhelm.

To Louis Bevier, Jr.

I am sending you by this mail a copy of my book “The Circus and Other Essays,” which our friend Laurence has just published. I had intended to dedicate it to your father and yourself, but I suddenly discovered that I had never dedicated a book to my own father. So I have dedicated this one to him, and will dedicate to your father and yourself one of the two books coming out in the Spring—either the poems or the interviews.

To Sara Teasdale Filsinger

I don’t know that POETRY could use a Valentine poem, but if it could do so, it ought by all means to use it long after Valentine’s day, for timeliness, the greatest curse of our much cursed magazines, is certainly not one of POETRY’S vices. And how do you like it? It’s the first free verse I’ve written since free verse made a special label for itself—it’s a highly artificial poem, and yet passionately sincere.

I’ve quit being a critic, thank God! I resigned from the Bookman and Book News Monthly, and I no longer review poetry for the Times. I still run the Digest’s “Current Poetry” department, but that’s not criticism, it’s just an exhibition. I merely hold up for admiration the best poetry I can find, saying nothing about inferior stuff. And I can do that without losing my self-respect. But criticism of poetry is no task for an enthusiastic poet, however little he may deserve the title.

Aline is still in hospital, impatient for the new baby. She likes to receive letters.

To Katherine Brégy

It is delightful to find on my desk this morning your letter telling me of the honour in store for me. Of course I am reading with enjoyment the “Opera” in America; how valuable a friend Catholic poetry, that is poetry, has in you!

A verse-maker, I suppose, is an unskillful critic of his own work. But in reply to your question, I will say that I am greatly pleased when people like “Trees,” “Stars” and “Pennies,” when they see that “Folly” is a religious poem, when they praise the stanza fourth from the end of “Delicatessen,” and understand stanza three of section four of “The Fourth Shepherd.”

Before what Miss Guiney calls my “great leap into Liberty” I published a book of verses called “Summer of Love”; but I do not think it would interest you; it is, for the most part, a celebration of common themes. If you have not a copy of “Trees and Other Poems” please tell me and I will send you one. I will send also “Summer of Love” if you wish it, for some of the poems in it, those inspired106 by genuine love, are not things of which to be ashamed, and you, understanding, would not be offended by the others.

Naturally I’m expecting to go to the Wars, being of appropriate age and sex. I was going to Plattsburg to try for a commission, but for many reasons—one of them being that I didn’t want to be an officer in charge of conscripts (the democratic bluff again! says Katherine)—I gave up the idea. So a month ago I enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. We were reviewed by your friend Joffre—in 1824 we were reviewed by Lafayette. We go to training camp in a week or so—where I don’t know—and then we are mustered into Federal service. We may be sent to France, we may be sent to Russia, or it may be Mexico or Cuba—nobody knows.

Please come to New York and let me take you to luncheon. And give Mrs. Coates my love.

To Amelia Josephine Burr

That is a magnificent piece of knitting—I am delighted to own it. Thanks ever so much! And I will thank you ever more for your book of poetry, which you promise to send me. I enjoyed your recent poems in the Outlook—you are one of the few American poets who should be allowed to write war songs. Your letter came up to the specifications of the order—it was highly entertaining and therefore genuinely appreciated. I sympathise with you in your trials in addressing camp audiences, though I don’t know as you deserve any sympathy. I think you have a pretty good time. And I know the audiences do.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of you coming over here as a nurse or something. Nice country, nice war. I wouldn’t be back in the States having meatless, wheatless, boozeless, smokeless days for anything. I am a Sergeant now. I spend my time working at Regimental Headquarters while we are in reserve, and in training and when we are in action I am an Observer in the Regimental Intelligence Section—very amusing work. I had a fine time108 during the recent activities of our regiment, activities of which you probably read in the papers. In the dug-out I wrote a poem I think you’ll like—“Rouge Bouquet” is its name. I expect to remain a Sergeant (unless I’m reduced), for to get a commission I’d have to leave the Regiment and go to a training school for several months and then I would be sent to some regiment other than this. And I’d rather be a sergeant in the 69th than a lieutenant in any other outfit.

Give my love to anybody you meet who would appreciate that commodity. And write often to

To Howard W. Cook

Your letter of May 31 has just arrived. I am afraid that such information as I can send you will reach you too late to be of use, but anyway I’ll do what I can.

You ask first for biographical details. All this109 material you will find in Who’s Who in America, except the information that I am the father of four children, named respectively Kenton Sinclair, Deborah Clanton, Michael Barry and Christopher.

Second, you ask for comments on myself and something about my earlier efforts in poetry. That’s harder to answer. How can I make comments on myself? I’ll pass up that part of the questionnaire, if I may, but I’m willing to write about my earlier efforts in poetry. They were utterly worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a poem called “Pennies” which you will find in my book “Trees and Other Poems.” I want all my poems written before that to be forgotten—they were only the exercises of an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical training. If what I nowadays write is considered poetry, then I became a poet in November, 1913.

Now, as to your other questions. I’ll take them in order. 1. What has contemporary poetry already accomplished? Answer—All that poetry can be expected to do is to give pleasure of a noble sort to its readers, leading them to the contemplation of that Beauty which neither words nor sculptures nor pigments can do more than faintly reflect, and to express the mental and spiritual tendencies of the110 people of the lands and times in which it is written. I have very little chance to read contemporary poetry out here, but I hope it is reflecting the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked soil of this land—courage, and self-abnegation, and love, and faith—this last not faith in some abstract goodness, but faith in God and His Son and the Holy Ghost, and in the Church which God Himself founded and still rules. France has turned to her ancient Faith with more passionate devotion than she has shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning the same lesson from the war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism and pessimism and materialism and the lust for novelty which has hampered our national development. I hope that our poets already see this tendency and rejoice in it—if they do not they are unworthy of their craft.

2. What is American poetry’s influence to-day? Answer—This question I am ill-prepared to answer, but I would venture to surmise that the extravagances and decadence of the so-called “renascence of poetry” during the last five years—a renascence distinguished by the celebration of the queer and the nasty instead of the beautiful—have made the poet seem as silly a figure to the contemporary American as he seemed to the Englishman111 of the eighteen-nineties, when the “æsthetic movement” was at its foolish height.

3. What of American poetry’s future? Answer—To predict anything of American poetry’s future requires a knowledge of America’s future, and I am not a student of political economy. But this much I will tell you—when we soldiers get back to our homes and have the leisure to read poetry, we won’t read the works of Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee Masters. We’ll read poetry, if there is any for us to read, and I hope there will be. I believe there will.

To Thomas Walsh

Where will you be, I wonder, when this letter reaches you? Perhaps in the Brooklyn sanctuary (this term is here used in a purely literary sense) reading reviews of your newest book of verse—pleasant reading indeed, judging by those I have112 seen. Perhaps you will be in your Sabine farm at Lake Hopatkong—if that is the way that strange word is spelled. Perhaps the postman will give it to you just as you parade away from your home, and you will take it with you to the palatial new Columbia University Club, and glance at it over your turtle soup and sherry and steak and mushrooms and corn and sweet potatoes and chaveis—but I’m breaking my heart describing this meal of yours. Soon the mess call will sound and I’ll take my aluminum meat dish and canteen cup, and wade through the mud to the mess-line. And I’ll get a plate of stew and some milkless tea or coffee, and I’ll stand in the mud or sit down in the mud and consume it.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice war and I’m enjoying most of it. Our time at the front—of which the newspapers have by this time informed you—was a wonderful experience. I had the privilege of spending a week as observer in the Regimental Intelligence Section—lively and interesting work. I’d love to see you at an observation post, Tom, you’d get as thin as I now am.

Send me your book, will you, Tom? I enjoy poetry more now than ever before—I suppose it is because I get it so seldom. When I’m writing verse113 and reviewing verse and talking about verse and to verse-makers all the time, I have not the enthusiasm for it I have over here, where most of the poetry is unwritten and undiscussed.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice country. I’d like to buy you a litre of red wine—for a franc and a half—with a dash of syrup in it. Also I could introduce you to the results of the labours of a few accomplished cooks, some of them soldiers, some of them French women.

Fr. O’Donnell quotes you to the effect that Louis is now in this land, or on his way hither. I hope to see him. He ought to be sent to an Officer’s Training School soon—I think that will happen. He is the sort of fellow who ought to have a commission. I might possibly be allowed to go to an Officer’s Training School, but I wouldn’t do so, because if I did so I’d be sent—whether or not I got a commission—to some Regiment other than this. And I take no pleasure in the thought of soldiering in a regiment of strangers. I like the crowd in this outfit very much and would rather be a sergeant—as I am—here than be a lieutenant in any other Regiment.

If you are ever minded to send me papers, please let them be Times Book Reviews or other sheets of114 a decidedly literary flavour. Occasional copies of The Bookman would be welcome. I like a bit of concentrated literature now and then.

Remember me, please, to your sisters and brothers and to any of my other friends whom you may meet. And believe me

To Robert Cortes Holliday

I have not the time now to write you the letter I’d like to write—chiefly about your characteristic and delightful Tarkington book, which I greatly enjoyed and expect to enjoy during many re-readings. What I write now is merely a note in answer to your letter of April 12. This you will please communicate to Mr. Doran and regard as final.

The only way I can give you any material for a book is as I am doing now—sending you every six months or so some verses or an introspective essay which you can syndicate and eventually turn into a115 book. I sent you a prose sketch “Holy Ireland” (which represents the best prose writing I can do nowadays), another prose sketch, and (by way of Aline) a poem, “Rouge Bouquet,” which you ought to be able to do a good deal with. It is probably the best verse I have written. I never planned doing war-correspondence work—if I had I’d have come over as a correspondent instead of as a soldier. Many circumstances, including the censorship, the rules governing a soldier’s conduct and other things, prevent me from trying to make a consecutive narrative now, even if I so desired. I am a poet at present trying to be a soldier. The experience may naturally be expected to result in a book—of some kind, at some time. I am not going to try to “cover” the war or my Regiment’s share in it. But the title “Here and There With the Fighting Sixty-ninth” may probably be taken as well as any other to cover what, if I survive, I shall probably, in the course of time, write. My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.

To tell the truth, I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory. I116 am a Sergeant in the Regimental Intelligence Section—the most fascinating work possible—more thrills in it than in any other branch except possibly aviation. And it’s more varied than aviation. Wonderful life! But I don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian life—unless I become a fireman!

Please give my love to Stella and believe me always your affectionate and grateful friend

To Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J.

I have to thank you for three letters, for two poems, for the proof sheets of your book and for your beautiful Christmas gift, which I treasure and have with me always. The poem “To Rose in Heaven” is so exquisite that I cannot write or speak all my deep appreciation of it. But I know that it is not my personal feeling alone that makes me consider it one of the noblest elegiac poems in our language. I wish that I were still in the book-reviewing game—I’d like to express my opinion of117 your new book. My column in the Literary Digest is now conducted by Mrs. Edwin Markham. However, I occasionally send in some clippings and comment, and I’ll try to get some of your book quoted. I congratulate you on your book; it is an achievement for which you must be deeply grateful; of course none of us rhymers can really be proud if we’re true to the traditions of our craft. You see, I’m not in “The Proud Poet” mood now. I’m neither proud nor a poet—I’ve written only one poem since I sailed, a little thing called “Militis Meditatio.”

We all are well and happy—I do not think that any one of us can honestly say that he has not enjoyed this Winter. The trials and hardships of the life are so novel as to be interesting. But I imagine that one enjoys very little his tenth year of soldiering. It is especially pleasant to be in France and the part of France that we are in. I am surprised, I acknowledge, by the passionate Catholicity of the people. Even “Holy Ireland” can scarcely be more Catholic than rural France.

Tell my friends my address and urge them to write to me. Pray for me, and believe me always

It is very comfortable to dwell in so genuinely Catholic a land as this; to be reminded in every room of every house, and at every cross-road of the Faith. I do not know when you last visited France, and perhaps you are already familiar with conditions here, but I do not cease to be surprised and delighted to see the number of people receiving Holy Communion not only on Sunday, but every day. And you will find soldiers of this Regiment in church whenever and wherever there is a priest to say Mass. I think that most of us are better Catholics now than when we were at home—certainly we should be.

My own work is growing steadily more interesting. For a while I worked, as you know, in the Adjutant’s Office, having special charge of recording and reporting statistics. But this I gave up recently to enter (as a Sergeant) the Regimental Intelligence Section. This is much better for me, since it is open-air work of an intensely interesting kind, and I think that I am now more useful to the Regiment. My newspaper training, you see, has119 made me a competent observer, and that is what I am nowadays—an observer of the enemy’s activities. I have already some strange stories to tell, but for telling them I must await a time when censorship rules are abrogated. I have written very little—two prose sketches and two poems since I left the States—but I have a rich store of memories. Not that what I write matters—I have discovered, since some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not the tremendously important thing I once considered it. You will find me less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope, a man.

Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may love God more and that I may be unceasingly conscious of Him—that is the greatest desire I have.

To Reverend James J. Daly, S.J.

I hope that I interpret your letter of September 20th correctly in thinking that it means that you will permit me to write to you occasionally, and120 that you will write me in return. Of course I know that your work occupies much of your time, and that you have pleasanter uses for your leisure than writing letters to some one you have not seen. So do not feel obliged by courtesy to answer me at length.

I am glad that you like some of my work. My present occupation is that of assistant editor of The Churchman, an Anglican weekly paper. It is a Church Newspaper, with some literary features. Did Grey tell you that I was not of your Communion? I hope that this knowledge will not shut me out of your regard.

Your remarks, in your letter, on the fact that many of our most famous writers to-day are anti-Christian, are certainly justified. Still, do you not think that a reaction is coming? Already we have Chesterton, and Belloc, and Bazin, and Miss Guiney, and Fr. Vincent McNabb, and a number of other brilliant writers who not as theologians but purely as literary artists express a fine and wholesome faith. People are beginning to tire of cheap eroticism and “realism” and similar absurdities.

The cards are rather laconic, but they are supposed to convey the information, as you thought, that my family is the larger by one. I have already a little boy, who will be four next March. His name is Kenton Sinclair. I married when I was twenty-one, immediately after my graduation from Columbia. Then—since you have twice asked for biographical information—I taught school in Morristown for a year, came to New York, went to work on the Standard Dictionary, and after three years took my present position on The Churchman.

Do you know the Rev. Michael Earls? I recently received a copy of his book of verse. He is a member of your Society—I think he is at Georgetown. The poems about children are very delicate and sympathetic—one called, I believe, “An Autumn Rose-bush” is admirable.

I see Grey frequently—I hope to take breakfast with him to-morrow. A number of us have the custom of breakfasting on Sunday mornings on the excellent Irish bacon to be procured at Healy’s, on 91st St. When you return to New York, you must122 join us. Do you know Thomas Walsh? He is with us occasionally—you should know him, and his translations from the Spanish, and his verse. I hope you are coming East soon.

I do not like to burden my friends with my troubles, but you have certain opportunities that I lack, so I am asking you the greatest favour. Please pray for the healing of my little daughter Rose. She is dangerously ill with infantile paralysis. This is a disease that has appeared among mankind only recently, and physicians are uncertain how to treat it. She is staying in New York with her mother to be near the doctor and I am staying here nights to take care of my other child. Of course the maid is here during the day so the house is kept up. But Rose cannot move her legs or arms—She was so active and happy only last week—she cannot even cry—her voice is just a little123 whimper—the danger is of its reaching her lungs and killing her. I cannot write any more. You know how I feel. Pray for her.

There is not, it seems, any danger of the death of Rose now. And she has regained her strength. Her arms and legs have been left paralysed but her hands and feet move. It will take a year’s time for us to know whether or not this paralysis is permanent.

I am deeply grateful to you for your compliance with my request. I know that your prayers were of value in keeping her alive. Apologies for the brusqueness of my letter asking your aid, are, I think, not necessary—you were the only man to whom I could appeal for the special help needed, and I was in bitter grief and anxiety.

And we have acquired a humility that is, I think,124 good for us. Well, these are things not readily expressed—accept our heart-felt thanks.

This is to express our gratitude for your prayers. They have helped us in our trial—they are helping—and I know that in part to your efforts Rose owes her life and we our peace of mind. For fifteen or sixteen years she will, the doctors say, remain paralysed, unable to move her arms or legs. But her mind is active and we will keep her happy. I think that there are compensations, spiritual and mental, for the loss of physical power.

My wife and I are studying Catholic doctrine and we hope to be received this Autumn.

You may be amused by the circular which I enclose.125 You know, we have been having a plague of white-slave plays in New York this season—“The Lure,” “The Fight” and the rest; and now they are giving white-slave moving pictures—“The Traffic in Souls” they are called. I think that “The Drama as a Factor in Sex Education” is ridiculous—and I’m going to say so. Most of the other people who are to speak at the Academy of Medicine are very serious-minded settlement workers, ready to save the world by means of eugenics and inexpensive divorce. So I don’t think I’ll make myself very popular. But I hope to have a lot of fun.

My wife and I are very comfortable now that we are Catholics. I think we rather disappointed Father Cronyn (the Paulist who received us) by not showing any emotion during the ceremony. But our chief sensation is simply comfort—we feel that we’re where we belong, and it’s a very pleasant feeling.

I wonder if the enclosed verses will shock you. I am very much bored by the praise of suicide so common in “æsthetic” circles. Many of my friends like to think themselves “decadents” and they are most enthusiastic over the work of such third-rate versifiers as the late Richard Middleton, who killed himself at the age of thirty. It seems to me that suicide126 is the most absurd of all sins. There is, undoubtedly, pleasure in many sorts of evil; many crimes are reprehensible but not ridiculous. But suicide is a stupid sort of sin—the criminal gets no fun at all out of it. I have tried to put this idea into verse—and you should have heard the criticisms when the poem was read aloud at a meeting of the Poetry Society!

I am grateful to you for your sound criticism of “To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself.” It had previously been criticised by “pagans” who thought that suicide was romantic and charming. You gave me just what I needed—an analysis of its “philosophy.” Of course I’ll leave it out of my new book of verse, or else, as you suggest, make it the utterance of someone not myself.

You will be glad to hear of our Christmas present from Soeur Therese. Rose can lift her left forearm. I know that you have been getting her aid for127 us. Please tell us how to show our gratitude to her and to you.

A picture of Rose and her mother is going to you for Christmas. I hope that it may be a mirthful feast for you. We can honestly say that we have never before been so happy.

At last I have leisure to thank you for your Christmas gifts. I did not know that such beautiful cards were made. How is it that in Prairie du Chien—a place of which the name suggests Indians and tomahawks and Deadwood stage-coaches—you can procure better cards than I can get in New York? The medals are highly valued—the workmanship on them is admirable—they will be worn properly as soon as I can afford to buy some silver chains—and that will be next Tuesday.

Of course you understand my conversion. I am beginning to understand it. I believed in the Catholic position, the Catholic view of ethics and æsthetics,128 for a long time. But I wanted something not intellectual, some conviction not mental—in fact I wanted Faith.

Just off Broadway, on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to the Times Building, there is a Church, called the Church of the Holy Innocents. Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name is strangely appropriate—for there surely is need of youth and innocence. Well, every morning for months I stopped on my way to the office and prayed in this Church for faith. When faith did come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralysed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny still feet know beautiful paths. You understand this and it gives me a selfish pleasure to write it down.

I was very glad of your criticism of “The Young Poet Who Killed Himself.” I need some stricter discipline, I think, and it’s hard to get it. I enjoy Father Cullem’s direction very much, he is a fine old Irishman with no nonsense about him. But I need to be called a fool, I need to have some of the conceit and sophistication knocked out of me. I suppose you think this is “enthusiasm”—that much heralded danger of converts. Perhaps it is, but I don’t think so. I know I’m glad I live two129 miles from the Church, because it’s excellent for a lazy person like myself to be made to exert himself for religion. And I wish I had a stern mediæval confessor—the sort of person one reads about in anti-Catholic books—who would inflict real penances. The saying of Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it’s a delight.

Forgive this egotistical letter! I am praying that the New Year may bring you much happiness.

If you read my “Some Mischief Still” I hope the strong language of my janitor didn’t shock you. I’ve written to my long-suffering confessor to ask whether or not I can let characters in my plays and stories “cuss” when they feel so disposed. I fear that I introduced a new sin to him—vicarious profanity.

You asked me several questions recently. Let me see if I can answer them. In the first place, you asked me why I addressed the Holy Name Society130 of Suffern, New York. The answer to that is, why not? I go to Sacred Heart Church in Suffern. My parish church is in Ramsey, New Jersey, but we Mahwah Catholics (those of us who go to Church) are allowed to go to Suffern, which is much nearer. Ramsey has only a small Mission Church, to which comes the priest from Hohokus.

Furthermore, I tolerate no levity on the name Suffern! especially from a dweller in Prairie du Chien (named after a ridiculous vermin) who has been visiting a place called Pilsen (named after a beer) and conducting a retreat in a place called Peoria (obviously a corruption of Peruna, a patent medicine of ill repute).

You ask me if I know what a retreat is. I do, because long before I was a Catholic, before I was a wild-eyed Socialistic revolutionary, I was a ritualistic Anglican, and I went twice up to Holy Cross Monastery at West Park. This is an Anglican institution, which observes a modification of the Benedictine rule. And there I learned about imitation retreats, anyway. I must go to a regular retreat sometime.

I don’t expect to take any vacation this Summer, but I’m going to spend several Saturdays fishing. I hope you do not scorn that wholesome and unliterary131 diversion. Most writers of my acquaintance consider it lamentably base.

I hope you were satisfied with your efforts at Peoria. I did what you asked. By the way, when you pray for the Kilmers, please include a new Kilmer, who is coming, we hope, in October. He—or she—will have Barry among his or her names, after the family from whom my wife is descended.

We are now back in Mahwah, thank God! It’s the chief thing I thank Him for, of all the splendid things He’s given me—this home of mine. My children are all well, and my wife. Prayer has given Rose the almost normal use of one arm and the power to sit up. And prayer will do more.

This is a postscript, to say that the smug young person portrayed in the Citizen resembles me only “as the dew resembles the rain.” I am fat and gross,132 and I have “elastic and rebellious hair,” like M. Baudelaire’s cat. Someday I’ll have a decent picture and courageously send it to you. In my young youth, I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe. And therefore—

Your suggestion as to a lecture tour is characteristically kind. I am already on the books of a lecture manager named Feakins, who manages Chesterton, Barry Pain and other people. I’ll probably lecture before Catholic organizations as well as secular ones, because I need the money, but I don’t want to for reasons you will, I know, understand. In the first place, I don’t want in any way to make money out of my religion, to seem to be a “professional Catholic.” In the second place, I have delight chiefly in talking veiled Catholicism to non-Catholics, in humbly endeavouring to be an Apostle to Bohemia. I have no real message to Catholics, I have Catholicism’s message to modern pagans. So I want to lecture chiefly to Pagans.

The Prairie du Chien correspondent of the Police Gazette has cabled that you are to read a paper at133 the St. Paul Educational Conference. Congratulations! And I’ll try to help you to the extent of my power—but you don’t need help as I do.

I am sorry that you received exaggerated reports of my accident. All that happened to me was the fracture of a couple of ribs, and I have been very comfortable in a delightful hospital. My secretary comes out several times a week, so I am keeping up with my work.

This is to say that I am rapidly recovering my health, and hope to be in my office in a week. I134 had a fine time in the hospital, a comfortable place run by particularly amiable Sisters of Charity. It may interest you to know that I had received the Blessed Sacrament half an hour before the train struck me, and that to this fact I attribute my escape from death—since at the place where I was struck several men have been killed, being thrown forward and under the wheels, instead of, (as I was), to one side.

Your letter was opened and read by one Private Kilmer, a hardened military cuss, unused to literary activities. This is the first literary labor he has essayed for a month, aside from studying Moss’s Manual of Military Training and the art of shooting craps.

We’re still in New York—at the Armory from 9 A. M. to 4.30 P. M., but we usually get home at night. Young Louis is in the same company as myself. We probably will go to Spartansberg, North Carolina, about Aug. 17, but we may be here till135 October, or we may go to France to-morrow. Nobody knows. I find that there are many Catholics in the Seventh. It’s amusing that our training camp is in North Carolina—nothing to drink and no Jesuits! Bishop is a Benedictine mitred abbott—it’s in Belmont Abbey.

Before mobilisation I finished editing “Dreams and Images,” an anthology of Catholic verse written since (but including) Patmore. Terrible rush job, but pretty good book. Do you mind having it dedicated to you? Wanted to include some of your stuff, but didn’t have time to get any. Have dedicated it to you, but can change it, if you wish. Don’t hesitate to say so! Can’t hurt my feelings! Hard military character, seriously considering acquisition of habit of chewing tobacco.

This is an absurd note, but I find myself very stupid at writing. Perhaps after drill becomes easier, I’ll have more of a mind left at night. Fr. Dwight honoured me by asking me for a sonnet on St. Ignatius for America, but I fell down on the assignment. I could not write even a limerick on St. Ignatius in my present mental state! But it’s a comfortable life physically—mentally too, I guess, and as for spiritually, why, pray for yours affectionately,

I never expected to write to you on lined paper or Y. M. C. A. paper—uses of adversity! The Y. M. C. A. gives us poor “dough boys” the only place we have to sit down and read and write—so far the Knights of Columbus have not been in evidence in this highly papistical camp. I am, as you know, a member of the 165th Infantry, U. S., formerly the 69th New York. I have recently been transferred from Co. H. to Headquarters Co., and exchanged my 8 hours a day of violent physical exercise (most deadening to the brain, a useful anodyne for me, coming as it did after my grief) for exacting but interesting statistical work. I am called Senior Regimental Statistician, but in spite of all these syllables still rank as a private. My work is under the direction of the Regimental Chaplain, Fr. Francis Patrick Duffy. The people I like best here are the wild Irish—boys of 18 or 20, who left Ireland a few years ago, some of them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps137 and country jails. I have got some of the songs down and hope to get more—“The Boston Burglar”—“Sitting in My Cell All Alone”—they are fine, a veritable Irish-American folk-lore. Before I was transferred to Headquarters Co., I slept in a tent with a number of these entertaining youths, and enjoyed it tremendously. We sang every night from 9 to 9.30. Now I am in more sophisticated but less amusing company—ambitious youths, young office men, less simple and genial than my other friends.

I get to New York for part of Saturday and Sunday. Aline is staying with her mother in New York. It is good that I am not with the 7th Regiment in Spartanburg—as it is I can telephone to Aline every night. I will send you a picture of Rose soon. Her death was a piercing blow, but beautiful. It happened at the best time. Aline was there and I and our parish priest. Rose was happy but did not want to get well. “I’ll drink it in another house,” she said, when the nurse coaxed her to take some broth. Perhaps she meant the new house in Larchmont which we move to in October. And perhaps not. There was a Mission in our parish-church, just a couple of blocks from the house, and while Rose died the voices of the Sisters138 singing “O Salutaris Hostia” could be heard in the room. I thank you for your letter, beautifully interpretative. Certainly Rose makes Heaven dearer to us.

Headquarters Company, 165th U. S. Infantry,
Camp Albert E. Mills, New York.
October 28, 1917.

I hope you don’t mind being typewritten to by an unskillful typist. I have learned all I know of this art since I became a soldier. It is ridiculous for a newspaperman to learn typewriting in the army, but I never had the time to learn it before—I found it better to have an expert typist for a secretary and dictate my stuff to him. I used to turn out four or five thousand words an hour when Watts was working for me. I haven’t much speed as yet but I ought to be pretty good at it when I get back. There are two things I always wanted to learn—how to typewrite and how to serve Mass. I’m learning the one and I’m going to get Fr. Duffy to let me pinch-hit for his orderly at Mass some mornings. So I’ll be an accomplished cuss when I139 come back from the Wars—I’ll know how to typewrite and to serve Mass and to sing the Boston Burglar.

Numerous philanthropic citizens are sending cigarettes to soldiers, and pipe-tobacco (in which last bounty I often share). But some enlightened person should start a nation-wide campaign for sending cigars to Senior Regimental Statistical Representatives. I am Senior Statistical Representative of the 165th U. S. Infantry, I am!

When I next visit Campion, I will teach you (in addition to “The Boston Burglar”) an admirable song called “Down in the Heart of the Gas-House District.” I sing it beautifully. Its climax is, “If you would meet good fellows face to face, Just hang around Jimmy Cunningham’s place, For it’s down in the heart of the Gas-house district, In Old New York.”

I received two most welcome letters from you recently. One had to do with the case of ——. It contains excellent advice, and I am carrying it in my pocket, intending to clip your name and the name of the college from it and to give it to him. I am deeply grateful, my dear Father, for your great and characteristic kindness in this matter. I think we’ll yet see him practicing and teaching philosophy. You see, in his veins is a dangerous mixture of bloods—like my own—German and Irish, perhaps that accounts for his troubles. Gaelic impetuosity and Teutonic romanticism—no, sentimentality—no, self-pity—no, what is it that makes Germans German? I mean Sturm und Drang, Sorrows of Werther and that sort of thing. Well, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. But all people with any German blood have a bit of it. And highly diluted it’s rather nice. Which reminds me that Father Duffy says I’m half German and half human.

I wrote a poem called “Rouge Bouquet.” I’ll ask Aline to send you a copy—it’s long—and you remind her. It will tell you of an incident which will indicate to you that handling statistics in Regimental Headquarters isn’t the dry task you imagine it. The statistics aren’t dry—they’re wet—and141 red. Also, I’m attached to the Regimental Intelligence Section, which is exciting. I had a very thrilling week not long ago—I’m not allowed to write about it yet. I’ll tell you about it some day. By the way, it was at that time—Feb. 26, that you wrote to me. I wasn’t in the office then, I was out working as an observer—finest job in the army! By the way, I’m a Sergeant now. I’ll never be anything higher. To get a commission I’d have to go away for three months to a school, and then—whether or not I was made an officer—I’d be sent to some outfit other than this. And I don’t want to leave this crowd. I’d rather be a Sergeant in the 69th than a Lieutenant in any other regiment in the world. Get Aline to send you a copy of “Holy Ireland”—it will explain, somewhat.

Please give my love to anybody who will accept it. Remember me with special fervour to Sister Eugene and Sister Stanislaus. I enjoy reading the Campion, and am glad to see the newspaper has become a reality.

You speak of French anti-clericals in your letter. They all must be in Paris. I haven’t found any in my rather extensive wanderings around France. As a common soldier, I have the privilege of intimacy with the French peasants—and I find them142 edifyingly good Catholics. Pray for me, dear Father James.

I am sending you with this letter some verses that will, I think, interest you. They are my first attempt at versification in a dug-out—a dug-out not far from the event of which the verses tell. I have sent a copy to Aline, but since the trans-Atlantic mails are so uncertain, will you be so kind as to write to her asking if she has received it?

Somewhere within a radius of five miles from where I write now slumbers (for it’s long after bedtime for soldiers who keep regular hours) one Drury Sheehan. Every day he meets someone from my outfit and asks after me and says he’s coming to see me. And some days ago I—riding on a truck—passed and was passed several times by his outfit. And I paged him, so to speak, unavailingly. Also numerous letters from the States tell me that young Father Charles O’Donnell is somewhere near. We’ll have a great reunion one of these days. I wish you’d be in it! But one of these nights I’ll143 jump off a freight at Prairie du Chien, break a pane of glass in a basement window and go to sleep in the Bishop’s room. The Brother will be aghast next morning at discovering a ragged mustachioed shaven headed soldier in such a place—I’ll try to explain to him that I’m an adopted alumnus of Campion—I’ll probably use French in my excitement—and he will promptly shoot me. Then I’ll spend two months in the Campion Infirmary, which is, I am told, a very nice place.

I am having a delightful time, but it won’t break my heart for the war to end. I feel much comforted and strengthened by many prayers—those of my wife and little children, those of many dear friends, mostly priests and Sisters. I value highly my share in your Masses. Always pray hard, my dear Father, for

I thought you’d like to see how I looked after six months of soldiering. I’m having a lot of fun (I’m a Sergeant in the Regimental Intelligence Section now, you remember) but I haven’t been to Mass144 for three weeks! It so happened that I was away from churches (except the ruins thereof) and from Fr. Duffy. So you’ll have to be praying doubly hard for your affectionate friend,

To Mrs. Kilburn Kilmer

The sweater arrived, and it certainly is a magnificent specimen of knitting, and the wristlets are wonderfully purled—whatever purling may be. Probably I shall need both sweater and wristlets for many weeks, for although it is Spring now, it often is cold.

Under separate cover I am sending you my warrant as Sergeant. I thought you might like to have it framed to hang in the Old-Fashioned Room. The “drafted” in the corner means that the regiment was drafted into Federal Service; that is, made a part of the United States Army instead of a part of the New York State National Guard.

I suppose that you have read in the newspapers of the Regiment’s recent activities. Now we are taking it easy in a very pleasant little town. I hope we may stay here at least a month, as it is hard to work when the Regiment is moving about the country. I had a week’s respite from office work some time ago and spent it doing what is called “observation” work for the Regimental Intelligence Section. It was most interesting.

Did Aline tell you of Kenton’s success in school? It seems that he won a gold medal for being the best pupil in the school. I was delighted to learn it. So nearly as I can remember, I was not an especially keen student when I was his age, although I became one later.

There is practically no chance of my rising any higher in the Regiment than Sergeant, and I am perfectly content. To become an officer I would have to go to school away from the Regiment for several months, then if I failed to pass my examinations and win a commission, I would be sent to some other Regiment than this, and if I succeeded I would be sent as an officer, not back to the 69th, but to some other outfit, and I want very much to stay with the Regiment. I have many good friends here, and I would feel lost in any other military organization.

I am looking forward to receiving the photographs you have had taken. By this time you must have received the one I sent you. I hope you like it.

Your letters are very gratefully received, and I am looking forward specially to receiving the cake and the candy you sent me. Everything else you have written of in your letters has arrived in good condition, and a day or two ago I got five big jars of excellent tobacco from the Dickens Fellowship ... a most intelligent gift.

As to your “War Mother” poem, I hesitate to tell you how much I like it, because I am afraid you may think I am trying to flatter you. It certainly is the best poem you ever wrote—beautiful, original and well sustained. I have seen no recent war verse I like so well. There is no question but what you will sell it to some good magazine. I certainly congratulate you, and congratulate the magazine fortunate enough to print your poem.

I am very glad to hear of the deserved success156 your songs made at Lakewood, and in general of your triumphs at the Dickens Fellowship, and elsewhere. I wish I could have witnessed them, but I will be seeing more of the same sort next winter. That is what we like to hear about over here—triumphs and celebrations, and in general the pleasant and prosperous course of civilian life.

Of course we soldiers are undergoing hardships and privations—we expect to, but we don’t spend our time advertising them. But in the States when you find they must do without quite as much wheat, or meat, or something of the sort, instead of just going without and keeping their mouths shut, they advertise their remarkable abstention by having “wheatless days” and “meatless days,” and all that sort of hysterical rubbish, and fill the papers with the news, thereby disgusting us soldiers and undoubtedly comforting the enemy. I think I will start a “strawberryless, ice creamless, sodaless day” for the army. It would be as sensible as what the people at home have been doing. If you (I don’t mean you personally, of course) have to eat hardtack instead of butter-raised biscuits, why eat the hardtack and shut up about it, but don’t be such an ass as to have a “butter-raised biscuitless Monday,” and don’t shut down on theatres and amusements;157 and don’t deprive people of their honest drink. Merely making stay-at-homes dismal does not help the soldiers a bit. England’s early “Business as Usual” scheme was more practicable, and this is something of a concession for me to make. There is quite a sermon on economics for you! Kindly read it to my father, whom it will edify and instruct. A recent letter from him shows that he utterly misunderstands my point of view on this subject, the result of lamentably careless reading by him of one of my letters in which I contrasted the gaiety and common-sense of the French, through years of starvation and ruin, with the wail which a little self-denial brought from the States.

I presume by this time you have received the humorous photographs of myself I sent you.

I am delighted to know of the Kilburn Hall project. By all means buy the Hall; it will be an excellent investment. Property is now very cheap in158 England, and prices will rise as soon as the war is over. I hope to be able to spend my summers in France after the war, and I have the place in mind—only about a day’s run from London. I am absolutely in love with France, its people, its villages, its mountains, everything about it. America would do well to copy its attitude in the war. It has suffered tremendous hardships with dignity and humour and kept its sanity and faith. America, to judge by the papers, grows hysterical over a little self-denial; can’t do without an extra lump of sugar in its tea without a band and speeches and “sugarless” Sundays. It is funny and rather pathetic to us soldiers. But I honestly think, although it may seem conceited to say so, that when we soldiers get back from the war we will do the spiritual and intellectual life of the States a lot of good. France has taught us lessons of infinite value.

I am having an absolutely Heavenly time since I joined the Intelligence Section. I wouldn’t change places with any soldier of any rank in any outfit. This suits me better than any job I ever had in civil life.

The cake is not yet here. I will soak it in wine all right, don’t worry about that. Speaking of wine, enclosed find some flowers given me by a very159 nice wine-shop girl in a city near here. “Madelon” is a perfectly respectable song, but “Madelon” is not a gun or anything else of the sort; it is the name of the girl who serves wine to the soldiers, as the song clearly states.

There is a chance that I will be able to get to England on a seven days’ leave in a few weeks. In that case I shall probably spend most of my time in London, with a possible visit to Oxfordshire, where my friend Mrs. Denis Eden lives. I wish there was something I could do for you to expedite the purchase of Kilburn Hall, but since the Archbishop of Yorkshire is in the States you should, yourself, be able to make a deal with him. English real estate is a wise investment these days; it will go up fifty per cent in a year’s time. I wish I could afford to buy some property in this country. I certainly would like to live here. If the States go “dry” I honestly think I will move my family over here. I can write for American papers without living in160 America. Then if you move to Kilburn Hall I will be only a day’s trip away from you, and you will love rural France almost as much as you love rural England.

I received three letters from you yesterday and to-day, the first I have had from you in a long time. Your letters always come in bunches like that. And this morning I received two admirable boxes of Mirror Candy, in perfect condition. I certainly was delighted to get it, as it is a long time since I have had any candy. My gratitude is so great that I even will refer to it as “Sweets.”

I was also glad to get your picture, taken on shipboard. You must send to Larchmont another copy of the picture of yourself looking at my photograph, which you sent me some weeks ago, as I had to remove it from its mount and cut it down to make it fit into my wallet. All the rest of the fellows in the Intelligence Section (there are nine of us, nearly all161 college graduates, and men of some standing—editors, brokers, etc.), have pictures of their mothers, but none of them so good looking as mine.

You would be amused at some of the scenes when your picture is exhibited. Tired from a long hike from a stay in the trenches, I am having an omelet, and some fried potatoes, and some vin rouge, beau coup, le vin rouge in some French peasant’s little kitchen. It is a cottage such as you and I often visited in Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire; a low grey stone building with rose trees against the wall, a tiny garden, and a geometrically neat path. The kitchen floor is of stone, the table without a cloth, but shining from much polishing. The only thing to distinguish it from the typical English rural cottage is the crucifix on the wall, and the wooden shoes at the door. (People wear sabots out of doors, cloth slippers in the house, leather shoes on Sunday). Well, after such a repast as I have described, I take out my wallet to pay my bill, and the sharp eyes of little Marie, or little Pierre, intently watching this strange soldat Americaine espy the picture. At once an inquisitive, but delighted, infant is on my knee demanding a closer inspection of the picture; the Maman must see it, and Grandpere, and Veuve Vatre from across the street (the162 man of the house can’t see it; he is away from home on the errand that brought me across the sea). Well, they all say “Elle est jolie, ma foi, et jeune aussi.” These comments have been made on your picture many times in many towns, which I will one day show you on a map of France.

I have not much anxiety for my father, for I look on his condition as a state of rest really necessary to a mind so constantly busy. But I am glad that from you I have inherited the power of readily escaping from worry and work; of entering with enthusiasm into whatever mirth I find around me; in finding good and true and merry friends everywhere. I think that some of this quality would have helped my father very much, and increased his bodily and mental health. I worried grievously about you for a while, and wished I could have been with you when my father was taken ill, but I don’t worry now—you are too spirited and courageous for anybody to worry about. I certainly admire you more than ever, and look forward eagerly to regular banquets at Henri’s and Rector’s with you.

I want you to meet all the Regimental Intelligence Section—a fine bunch of brave men, and good comrades. We have taken big chances together,163 and it has made us the best of friends. You will like them all and they will like you.

To Kenton Kilmer

I hope that by this time you have entirely recovered from your illness. I remember that I had whooping-cough when I was about your age. If you are back in school, send me some of your monthly reports. The address you must put on letters to me is just what you see at the top of this sheet, except that you must put before it “Private Joyce Kilmer.”

There is a school in the building where I work, much like the school you attend, except that there are no nuns here for teachers. When the weather is wet, the children wear wooden shoes instead of rubbers. They go to school at eight in the morning and don’t leave until five. You wouldn’t like that, would you?

This letter ought to reach you about Christmas time. I am not sending you anything at once, but I will later. And I know that your mother and all your grandparents will give you things, and so will Saint Nicholas.

Be a good boy, and pray to St. Francis and Our Lady to help you. You ought to go to Mass every morning, since you live so near the church. Take care of Deborah and Christopher and Michael, and do all you can to make things easy for your Mother.

To Kenton Kilmer

Your plan for ending the war is very good. I showed your letter to Sergeant Russell, who fought in the Spanish-American war, long before you were born, and he said that your plan was the one that the American Army would adopt.

I am glad to see that you can write and typewrite so well. I hope that you will get Fr. Morris to teach you how to serve Mass, we live so near the church that you can easily serve his Mass and get your breakfast and get to school on time, and if you are165 a priest when you grow up you will be glad you had such practice when you were young.

Take care of Deborah and Michael and Christopher and your mother and don’t forget to pray for

To Deborah Kilmer

About a month ago, I sent you a rubber doll. If you didn’t get it, let me know and I’ll send you another one.

Yesterday morning about six o’clock I climbed down the mountain to go to Mass. And just outside the village where the church is, I met a young lady and walking beside her was a pleasant young pig with a pink nose.

And the young lady and the pig threw back their166 heads and laughed heartily and went on to breakfast. And I went on to Mass.

To Mrs. Joyce Kilmer

This is what is technically known as a hurried scrawl. It is to the effect that I have arrived, in excellent health and spirits. I have recently read the Censorship Regulations, and am in doubt about what I can say—God help the people who have to interpret them! I mailed a postcard two weeks ago, which you should now receive. Also I’ll try to cable you soon, if it is allowed. I have not yet consulted the adjutant on the subject, but so far as I have been able to find from a diligent study of the censorship regulations, I am allowed to say that I love you. Accordingly, I state it, with considerable enthusiasm. Also, I have a certain regard for Kenton, Deborah, Michael and even Christopher. I hope to write you again very soon. You know my address—same as before, only American Expeditionary Forces. I enclose some verses which may167 entertain you. The brief one is a memory of the days when I used to drill. I don’t feel that way about a typewriter—which instrument I now use with accuracy and speed. Send me some magazines now and then, and Times Review of Books. And love me exceedingly.

I am having a delightful time out here—absolutely beautiful country and very nice people. I am short of money, but I believe we’ll be paid soon and I’ve borrowed 80 francs from Fr. Duffy. That isn’t as much as it sounds—you get 5 francs and 70 centimes for a dollar at the Y. M. C. A. I enclose a bill I received for two enormous boxes of cakes I hired an old lady to make for me. I furnished the sugar—you know there was a bag of it in the box of groceries my mother sent me just before I left. I meant the cakes for dessert for Thanksgiving dinner, but with the help of my friends I’ve already eaten most of it. There is a rumour to the effect that we are to have duck for dinner to-morrow, and168 the Regiment is much more excited about it than about the good news of the War in yesterday’s paper. We get the Paris editions of the London Daily Mail, New York Herald and Chicago Tribune, and before long I suppose we’ll see the magazines when the Y. M. C. A. opens up its local tent. I never thought I’d regard the Y. M. C. A. with such esteem—I wish the Knights of Columbus had a chance to do as much work for us.

I haven’t written anything in prose or verse since I got here—except statistics—but I’ve stored up a lot of memories to turn into copy when I get a chance. The Colonel occasionally speaks of my historical work, but I doubt if it will be feasible to publish any part of it except some very general stuff until the war is over. I asked Thomas Hughes Kelley to send me a history of the 69th published some years ago, and another copy to you, to make sure. I think it will be useful in preparing the introductory chapters.

I love you very much indeed and see you clearly always and have a conviction that I will be with you soon—sooner than you expect.

I was delighted to receive the other day (December 7th, the day after my birthday) a batch of letters, including two from you. I am glad Kenton is getting along well; I was worried about his illness. It is fortunate you were able to get a good nurse.

You ought to be receiving some money from the government soon. I made over half my pay to you, and the government is supposed to add to it so much for you and so much for each youngster. The whole thing will come to about $57 a month, I believe! I personally am not in need of money—I am getting a book of traveller’s cheques from my father and before I heard he was sending it I wrote to John Timpson Co., and asked them to open an account for me in some Paris bank. Also we are paid in francs, which makes us feel wealthy, as there are 5.70 of them in a dollar. And I could live comfortably without any spending money—all there is to buy is candy and canned stuff and wine and an occasional meal when the business of my department takes me to a nearby town.

Fr. Garesché’s poem certainly is beautiful; by far the best thing he has done. I am enclosing a letter from Sister —— which I think you will enjoy. Delightful old person, nearly blind, but tremendously170 energetic. Harriet Monroe was one of her pupils. Probably you remember her book on Fr. Tabb.

Your Christmas presents probably will reach you in time for Easter. I hope to get a pair of wooden shoes for Deborah.

I am having a fine time. My statistical work occupies me in the evening as well as all day, but it’s interesting, and will be increasingly important, since the Statistical Department really is the only link between the soldier and his family.

I hope as soon as we get settled I’ll be able to do some writing, I’ve been too busy so far. I love you very much, and always think of you.

In your letters you spoke of sending me some stuff. Send anything you think of as soon as you think of it—don’t wait to find out if I want it, because the mails take too long. Just now I want snap-shots of you and the children, especially Deborah, and tobacco. I love you.

I hope you are getting the letters I send you from time to time. I got one admirable batch of letters from you by way of birthday present—they came on the day after my birthday. Perhaps I’ll get another171 batch for Christmas—it’s December 17th now, and we should receive another mail soon. I hope to send you a photograph soon. I believe personal pictures may be sent through the mail. It will be a beautiful sight. I got a Sing Sing haircut recently and am growing a corsair moustache. This is the pleasantest war I ever attended—nothing to do but fall in, fall out, pound a typewriter 13 hours a day and occasionally hike across France and back carrying a piano. However, I do really enjoy it, and the work is different in kind from newspaper work, and so a rest from it. By the way, I sent you some time ago a poem called “Militis Meditatio.” Please send a copy of it to a magazine and tell them to send the check for it to you. I hope to be able to do some writing as soon as we get settled and I get some of my statistical work out of the way. You ought to get your allotment this month, with additions from the Government (I hope you and the children are not yet in the poorhouse, or at any rate that you have struck a comfortable poorhouse). Send me pictures of yourself and the children, especially Deborah. I have made a nuisance of myself telling my bored friends about her intelligence in naming her doll “Hugh and Mrs. Leamy.” Also send me some tobacco, enough to fill a bedsack (also love me172 as intensely as possible; I love you more than ever before and think of you all the while)....

The enclosed clippings may amuse you—after you read them you’d better send them to Bob Holliday. They came with a raft of letters a couple of days ago. It’s very nice the way feasts seem to be marked—I last heard from you just before my birthday, and I got three letters from you by way of Christmas present. There must be a lot of parcels awaiting me, judging from information in your letters and those of my father and mother. We may get the packages to-night, in which case I’ll have some hours hard work, for all the Adjutant’s office helps in assorting mail. But I don’t think the packages will come until after Christmas. I suppose that you and the children are in New Brunswick now, and will go to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s and pray for a vagrant verse-maker who is trying to be a soldier. We may have a Midnight Mass in the church here to-night. Fr. Duffy has had a choir practising for it, and we possess a tenor soloist. He is an Italian, a barber when not singing or soldiering.

I have allotted half my pay to you, and the Government’s addition to that will bring it, I believe, up to about $60—enough to pay the rent. But don’t worry if there is delay in receiving it. It takes a long time, usually, to set things like that in motion. I recently read that a veteran of the Civil War had just received a check for $12 from Washington, representing his pay for his last month of service.

I am glad you are sending me some tobacco—I suppose it’s in the five truck loads of Christmas packages said to be awaiting us at a town some miles away. I have been able to get American tobacco, I am glad to say, but not my favourite brand. Also I’ll be glad to get the cigars my father has sent me—I have smoked all of Fr. Duffy’s. But be sure that tobacco or anything else you send me, such as Michael and Deborah, is very securely wrapped and tied, as the journey is hard on packages and many of them go to pieces.

I am hoping to get more letters from you soon—write as often as you can. I’d rather get a letter from you than anything else now possible. (I love you more than ever before).

Virginia is an excellent State. One evening last week I met by chance a Sergeant Interpreter named Nicholson Barney Adams. And he didn’t know my name and I didn’t know his—he is not connected with the 69th. And he said, “I see by the Times that Joyce Kilmer has enlisted.” And furthermore, thereafter, he put me up in his place—he and two other fellows have a room together—and I had admirable things to eat and drink, and slept in a bed, for the first time in over three months. And he came from Lynchburg, Virginia.

You will find with this letter $50 in American Express checks. Put the place and date in the upper right-hand corner when you cash them. You see, I had written to John Timpson for some money before I got a book of checks from my father, so I find myself having more money than I need.

I wrote this letter—the first part of it—this afternoon. Now it is evening, and five ambulance-loads of mail have arrived and I have helped distribute it. I got a November Harpers from my father and a copy of Frances Huard’s “My Home In the Field of Mercy” from Doran. To-morrow we get 14 more ambulance loads, they say—I hope I get some packages, but I especially desire letters from you.175 My last letter from you—dated Dec. 12—contained a very noble poem by you—“High Heart.” I was delighted to get it, I felt admitted to a realer intimacy than I had known since I crossed the ocean. Please send me all your poems, sad or spirited. I cannot write verse, but enjoy reading it more than ever before. And you happen to be my favourite poet.

I bought a copy of Conan Doyle’s new “Sherlock Holmes” book in a nearby town recently, in the Conrad edition. A French publisher named Conrad has taken over the Tauchnitz business—you remember the Tauchnitz books, don’t you? Also I’ve been reading Harry Leon Wilson’s, “The Spenders”—an entertaining imitation of Mr. Howells, and rereading “The Cardinal’s Snuff Box”—most delightful.

I love you very much, and I am very sorry for you—you aren’t having the amusing adventures I am having—but you’re able to write nice things, and that’s a consolation. I hope to see you and your admirable babies soon.

Two or three days ago I received from you an admirable letter, dated December 12, and yesterday arrived our long errant Christmas mail—many trucks of it—and in it several letters from you dated about Thanksgiving. It is strange that my letters take so long to reach you, but you must have some of them by now. I certainly was glad to get ten cans of tobacco from you, I have wanted a pipe full of that excellent tobacco for months. I got a thousand stogies from Fr. Daly, a box of cigars from my father, another from John B. Kennedy and another from one Romaine Pierson, one of my father’s friends, who sent me also a large can of tobacco. Also I got a lot of jelly and candy from my mother and a little book of “Maxims of Fr. Faber” from Eleanor Rogers Cox, and enough scapulars to sink a ship.

It certainly gives me the keenest delight to read your poetry. The poem about the Christmas Tree has —— backed off the map. Also “High Heart” is very noble poetry. I envy you your power of writing poetry—I haven’t been able to write a thing since I left the ship. Also I envy you your power of being high hearted and, wholly legitimately, aware of your own high heartedness. Not that I177 am low spirited—I am merely busy and well-fed and contented. I am interested but not excited, and excitement is supposed to be one of war’s few charms. The contentedness is not absolute, of course, for I have, when away from you, always a consciousness of incompleteness. But I have not had the painful and dangerous times I expected to find as soon as we reached this country.

I am keenly interested in the novel you and Margaret are writing. But don’t plunge too deep into occult studies in getting dope for it. Don’t attend any seance of any kind or use Planchette or try automatic writing or make any experiments of a supernatural kind. If you do, I swear that if I do get shot I won’t haunt you—and I’m conceited enough to think I can’t make a worse threat.

By the way, Kenton’s suggestion that you send me a checkerboard is excellent. I’d like it very much.

I am enclosing a letter from Helen Parry Eden which should be put in the autograph-letter file. A good way to keep author’s letters is to paste special178 envelopes for them on the inside of the covers of author’s books. Do not use the original envelopes for this purpose. But probably this plan is unsafe in a library frequented by wild babies. But at any rate try to get the stuff stowed away safely and neatly. Bob Holliday could advise you intelligently as to the proper preservation of autographed letters.

It is about a week now since I heard from you, and I am eagerly awaiting to-day’s arrival of mail. I work in the place to which the mail is brought for assortment, so I get my letters without much delay—that is, delay after they reach the Regiment. The first delayed batches of mail are still arriving—I get a November letter one day, a January letter the next, a December the next.

Send me by all means all the verse you write—I find I enjoy poetry more these days than I did when I made my living largely by making it and writing and talking about it. But I wish I could make it as I used to—I have not been able to write any verse at all except “Militis Meditatio” which I sent you. I wrote a brief prose sketch which is still in process of censuring—the censorship regulations may or may not be so interpreted as to exclude it. I think I’ll be allowed to print it, however, as it is really179 not a writing on military subjects, but an introspective essay written by a sort of soldier. If it gets by, it will go immediately to George H. Doran to be censored.

The second package of tobacco has arrived. The package containing it was broken, but in the bottom of the mail bag I found all ten cans of tobacco. I certainly am glad to get it—after ten years this kind still seems to me to be the best tobacco in the world.

I am not especially delighted with the circumstances of my work just at present. I am perfectly comfortable, have good meals and quarters and my work is not at all hard. But I want to get into more interesting and important work—perhaps it will be all fixed up by the time I write to you again. I love you.

It is a long time since I have heard from you—about three weeks. But I suppose that I will receive a number of letters at once. I do not yet know whether or not you have received the two batches of American Express Company checks, amounting180 in all to $100.00, which I sent you some time ago. But I am not worrying about it, if the checks are lost it still is possible to recover the money. I sent you two lots of prose and verse recently, and in the envelope containing this letter is a quaint supplement to one of my little sketches—that called “Breakfasts.” It is a letter to Kenton from the little girl who lives in the house by the Fountain, where Farrell and Driscoll and I used to eat every morning in our last station. I showed Solange (an excellent, demure and pious infant) Kenton’s photograph, and told her that he studied French in school. He is supposed to answer in French, tell him—of course his French teacher must help him. I saved the censor trouble by clipping from Solange’s letter the name of the town honoured by her presence, but I guarantee (with St. Anthony’s aid) the safe delivery to her of any epistle he may entrust to me.

The town we are in now has no Solange—or has revealed none to me as yet—but in a certain Cafe which I much frequent is Antoine, aged two, who can salute in the French manner, comme ca (illustrated) or in the American manner, comme ca, (illustrated). No, not with the left hand! good Heavens, child! Sacre bleu! nom d’um nom!181 Quelle dommage! Well, if you are going to cry about it, you needn’t salute at all. Here, shut up and drink the dregs of my vin rouge et sirop. Fini, bebe!

Also there is an admirable child named Jean who has six months. He wears a lavender cloak with a hood attached. His home is a barber shop, the most beautiful and extraordinary barber shop in the world. His father the barber has gone to the Wars—remain madame, grandpere, and M. Biebe. It is a very modern barber shop, with mirror-walls, and powdered soap in silver salt cellars. Grandpere sits by the stove all day long and says that there are many American soldiers in the town. Madame exhibits le petit Jean and asks if it is ever as cold as this in America. I shave with six razors if I desire, and wash in beaucoup de l’eau chaud. And Madame deftly swinging le petit Jean over her left shoulder opens a secret drawer under a mirror and proffers me a tiny tube of fixative for my moustache.

I have a delightful delusion now and then—I see you walk into the Adjutant’s office, past the Sergeant Major’s desk, and to me. The building in which we work was once a palace—but its inlaid floor never supported a duchess (gold powdered182 though her hair were, and light her laughter as champagne bubbles) so precious as this fleeting vision of you.

Sorry to use this absurd paper—but none other is accessible. I’m in a hospital at present—been here for three days with a strained muscle. It has been delightful to sleep between sheets again—I have rested up beautifully, I go back to the regiment to-morrow.

I sent you two batches of copy recently—or three, rather. Hope you get them—but if you don’t, I’ll write some more—like Caterina, you know when she was defending her husband’s castle against the enemy. The enemy took her six children as hostages. “Surrender the castle, or I’ll kill the children!” said he. “Go ahead, kill ’em!” said Caterina. “I can make more!”

As to your plan of renting a house at Shirley—wherever that is—for the Summer, go ahead, if you183 must—I don’t think there is any chance of my getting home this Summer. If I do come home, I’ll cable you in time for you to get back to Larchmont before my arrival. Larchmont is just about far enough from New York. Not for many a year will I consent to spend a day in any place more rural. I have had enough of wildness and rawness and primitiveness—the rest of my life, I hope, will be spent in the effetest civilization. I don’t want to be more than an hour’s distance from the Biltmore grill and the Knickerbocker bar. And God preserve me from farms!

I receive your letters frequently and regularly, and they are delightful, stimulating, typical. To-day I returned from a week’s sojourn in a charming hospital (a strained muscle, now healed, sent me there) and I found two letters from you awaiting me, the latest dated February 12. Let me congratulate you on your aviation poem—most beautiful184 and true, the most intellectual poem you have made. By all means put it in your book.

I received Francis Carlin’s wholly heavenly book just before I went to the hospital, and have read it many times with delight. When you see him, give him my homage. He should be walking goldener floors than those of a mortal shop—he should rather be over here with us, whatever his convictions may be. For it is wrong for a poet—especially a Gael—to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear, and to be sleeping soft in a bed when there’s a cot in a dug-out awaiting him, and the bright face of danger to dream about, and see.

I treasure your picture, and Christopher’s shadowy profile—send me more photographs. Love me constantly, never let a day pass without going to church for me.

I enclose some verses that you may like very much. That is, I think I enclose them—I have yet to consult with our Regimental censor as to whether185 or not I may send them. If the place name is cut out, put in its stead any French proper name that rhymes and do with the poem as you will. Perhaps the best thing to do with it will be to hand it to Bob for publishing.

As to my book—why don’t worry about it—we all will live just as long and just as happily and probably be just as wealthy—or poor—if it is never written. I am cheerfully neglecting it, for many reasons. One is, of course, the censorship, which prevents the sending out of articles sufficiently topical and specific to be interesting. Another is a military regulation which forbids an officer or enlisted man from acting as a correspondent or writing for publication on a military subject. This will not, I suppose, prevent the publication of such of my verses and essays as are inspired by my experiences. But it will prevent my making for serial publication any consecutive record of events. What I will do will be to assemble, after the war is over, or after I have returned from it, such random essays or rhymes as I have made and bind them together with a thread of reminiscence—partly introspective, partly—what is the word? extraspective? external, at any rate. I shall write nothing that has any news value. I believe in my vanity that it will186 be a most charming book, not without its high lights of something more than charm. It really is the sort of book I’d like greatly to read, and I think that it will reach a public tired of the many war-narratives. And don’t think people won’t read it after the war is over! They will! The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over—a century after it is over! And that is the sort of book I am going to make. A journal intime, but as close to literature, as carefully thought and wrought as I can do. It will be episodic—chaotic, perhaps—no glib tale, no newspaper man’s work—but with God’s help, a work of art. So clamour not for copy! My enclosures of some weeks ago may have pleased you, but you’ll like this better.

Which for no reason brings me to the subject of growing middle-aged, an experience which you are enjoying, I trust; I know I enjoy it. What an advantage we have over our children! While they, to their embarrassment, grow up—voices changing, legs and arms becoming too obvious, self-consciousness and shallow romanticism seizing them—we gracefully, comfortably, grow down. Perhaps it is as a protective measure that I, a private soldier, grow vain—as snails develop shells—but I confess187 it is with consummate pleasure that I contemplate my senility and, may I say, mediævality. I picture myself at forty, rotund but eminently presentable, moustache and hair delicately grayed, tailored admirably, with the leisurely power no young man may have. I picture myself at sixty, with a long white moustache, a pale gray tweed suit, a very large Panama hat. I can see my gnarled but beautifully groomed hands as they tremblingly pour out the glass of dry sherry which belongs to every old man’s breakfast. I cannot think of myself at seventy or eighty—I grow hysterical with applause—I am lost in a delirium of massive ebony canes, golden snuff-boxes, and daily silk hats.

And as for you! My God! what a vision! That dear autumnal hair silvering—the mouth of my delight exquisitely etched with honourable lines—each one the record of a year’s love—those eyes richer in their mystery—but I cannot write of this—for the thought might give me power to sweep away the years and make me find you, when I come back from the Wars, becapped and tremulous and leaning on two sticks! NO! I don’t want you to be old now—I want you to be the innocent sophisticated young woman you are in the little picture I carry (traditionally!) over my heart. But I want to watch you188 grow old—if I can watch you and at the same time hold you in my arms.

This letter is written to you from a real town—written, in fact, above ground. You may be surprised to know that recent letters to you were not written in these conditions. They were written in a dug-out, but I was not permitted to tell you so at the time. In a dug-out, also, were written the verses I sent you some two weeks ago—you may remember their damp-clayey flavour. I slept and worked (the latter sometimes for twenty hours at a time) in this dug-out for a month, except for one week when I was out on special work with the Regimental Intelligence Section. You don’t begrudge me that week, do you? I cannot now describe it, but it was a week of wonder—of sights and sounds essential, I think, to my experience. For there are obligations of experience—or experiences of obligation—to be distinguished from what I might call experiences of supererogation or experiences of perfection—but what rubbish this is! Let us rather consider189 my present great luxury, and the marvels of which it is composed. In the first place, one room (not a cot in a crowded barrack, not a coffin-like berth in a subterranean chamber) but a real room, with windows and a large bed and a table and chairs and a practical wash stand. The bed I share with one L—— D——, an amiable gamin, about to be made a Corporal. I am a Sergeant—with stripes some five days old. (It is the height of my ambition, for to be commissioned I’d be sent to school for three months and then, whether or not I succeeded, be assigned to another Regiment. And I’d rather be a Sergeant in the 69th than lieutenant in any other outfit.)

To continue—I also eat from a table excellent meals, with a napkin on my knees. I have soldiered pretty hard for some months now, taking everything as it came, and I think I’ve honestly earned my stripes. Now I’m going to have an easier life—not working less hard, but not seeking hardships. So I am paying seven francs a day for meals, and six francs a week for my share in a bed-room. And it’s delightfully refreshing. Also, I yesterday had a hot shower-bath—very much a novelty!

This morning I received two letters from you, to my great joy. The pictures of the children are excellent.190 I am glad to see Deborah’s hair so long and lovely. Do, by all means, send me pictures of yourself and Deborah in a leather case, as you promise. I can imagine no possible gift I’d rather receive. Mail is coming here every day now, so I look forward to frequent messages from you.

What a cheerless place the States must be these days! Don’t send me American papers (except the Times Book Review) for they depress me, showing me what a dismal land you live in. This meatless, wheatless day business is very wearying. It can do no earthly good—it is merely giving comfort to the enemy, who undoubtedly know all about it. I wish—aside from the obvious greatest reasons—that you were here in France—you’d like everything, but especially the gentle, kind, jovial, deeply pious people. Time enough—to resume—for wheatless days when the enemy takes your wheat. Until then, carpe diem!—that is, eat buckwheat cakes with plenty of syrup.

I am disgusted with all I read in the American Magazines about the Americans in France. It is all so hysterical and all so untrue. It isn’t jealousy that makes me say this—I have no desire to compete with newspaper-correspondents—but it annoys me to see the army to which I belong and the country191 on and for whose soil we are fighting so stupidly misrepresented.

I hope you received “Rouge Bouquet”—if you did receive it I know you liked it. General —— (I forgot, I mustn’t name generals lower in rank than Major-Generals) had twelve copies of it made. I sent it to you two weeks ago—you should be receiving it now. The newspapers by now have re-revealed its meaning to you, if any explanation was needed. It was read at an evening entertainment at one of our camps at the front. Father Duffy read it, and taps was played on the cornet before and after. I couldn’t get down to hear it—I was further front, at work in the dug-out that night.

I think most of my war book will be in verse. I prefer to write verse, and I can say in verse things not permitted to me in prose. You remember—no, probably you don’t—Coventry Patmore and his confessor. The confessor objected to the passionate explicitness of some of Coventry’s devotional poems—they dealt with things esoteric, he said, and should be set forth in Latin, not in the profane tongue. And Coventry replied that for most people poetry was an incomprehensible language, more hidden than Latin—or more hiding.

And speaking of Coventry Patmore, the best192 way to fry potatoes is to have deep oil or butter violently boiling in a great pot, to slip the slices of potatoes into it and stir them persistently, never letting them touch the pot’s bottom, to lift them out (when they are golden brown) by means of a small sieve, and to place them on paper so that the grease may be absorbed.

The best news I’ve had since I reached France is about Kenton’s medal. I’m going to write to-day and tell him so.

It is several hours since I wrote the first paragraph of this letter. I have been to supper (I am hitting the mess-line these days, for my money gave out and I didn’t want to borrow any more) and ridden in a motor-cycle-side car all over the countryside—through a dozen little villages, every one full of French and American soldiers, with a sprinkling of coolie labourers, in quest of a certain village193 which holds two companies of a certain outfit with which I had to have a conference. The village was hard to find (their names all sound alike, and old French ladies, when interrogated as to direction, always point in a direction in which there is no road and say something that sounds like “Honk! honk! Ba! ba!”) and also the night was cold. I have enjoyed many rides more. Returning to the office (I sleep in the same building) half frozen and weary, I found that not two truck-loads, but two sacks of letters had been delivered, and that I had received three letters. I leaped at the letters—one was an invitation to a Ladies’ Day at the Columbia University Club, another was from my mother, another from Fr. Garesché. None from You! You accused me in one of your letters of writing to you when I was depressed—well, I’m depressed now, all right! I’ll wait until to-morrow morning to finish this letter, I guess, or else I’ll give you real cause for complaint. Not that I blame you, or think you haven’t written often—it’s the mail system’s fault. Good night!

I hope Kenton has learned to serve Mass by this time. I wrote to him a long time ago and told him to see Fr. Morris about it, but I fear that he would be too shy to do this unless some pressure were194 brought to bear. If you would ask Fr. Morris to teach him how to serve Mass, and persuade him to ask Kenton to come to see him about it, so that the initiative would seem to come from Fr. Morris, I think things would work out well. I pray for Kenton to have the grace of a vocation to the priesthood—I hope he may have a Jesuit vocation—and I think it is good to do all we can toward the fulfillment of this desire—this is, I think, a supplementary way to “sway the designs of God.” I think of the children often and can visualise them well in spite of my long absence from them, that is, all except young Christopher. I am aware of Kenton’s gravity and of his thoughtful and radiant smile, of Deborah’s vivacity and exquisite colouring (she is like one of her mother’s gay thoughts), of Michael’s magnetic rotundity, of his blue eyes, of his charming habit of toppling over like a toy tumbler of lead and celluloid. And of Rose I am nearly always conscious, delightfully, when I am awake and often when I am asleep, and especially when I am in the church—which is twice every day, to receive Holy Communion immediately after Reveille and to pray for a few minutes in the evening. We have a magnificent old church in this town, as near to where I am now as the church is to our house in195 Larchmont. And right by the tower-door is a big statue of St. Nicholas of Bari, in his episcopal robes, and hopping around his feet are two little bits of babies he saved and brought back to life after they’d been cut up and pickled. Very nice! You’d like it! Pray to St. Nicholas for me, and to St. Stephen, St. Brigid, St. Michael, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Teresa, and all our other good friends in Heaven, and love me.

I am glad of the auspicious beginning of Eleanor’s romance. I would so regard it, for I cannot understand the interpretation which makes marriage the termination instead of the beginning of a splendid adventure. If there should ever be the perfect novel of love, it would begin rather than end “And they were married.” Would the phrase continue: “And lived happily ever after”? I doubt it—but that depends upon the definition of happiness. I know that you dislike the symbolism which is the basis of Coventry Patmore’s greatest poems, but I think you will admit that there is this truth in196 his idea—the relationship of man and wife is like that of God and the soul in that it must be purified and strengthened by suffering. Also—to put it on a lower plane—Eleanor is enough of a poet to take some enjoyment out of being the wife of a soldier gone to the wars—or Irish enough, which is the same thing.

As to the matter of my own blood (you mentioned this in a previous letter) I did indeed tell a good friend of mine who edits the book-review page of a Chicago paper that I was “half Irish.” But I have never been a mathematician. The point I wished to make was that a large percentage—which I have a perfect right to call half—of my ancestry was Irish. For proof of this, you have only to refer to the volumes containing the histories of my mother’s and my father’s families. Of course I am American, but one cannot be pure American in blood unless one is an Indian. And I have the good fortune to be able to claim, largely because of the wise matrimonial selections of my progenitors on both sides, Irish blood. And don’t let anyone publish a statement contradictory to this.

Speaking of publishers, please be very careful that there is nothing in the book you and Margaret wrote to offend, in the slightest degree. I would197 go so far as to say that if the spirit of the book is not obviously and definitely Catholic—readily so recognised by Catholic readers—it would grieve me to see it published with your name attached—grieve me deeply. I don’t want anyone to say of you, “There is nothing about that novel to show she is a Catholic.” I don’t think Catholic writers should spend their time writing tracts and Sunday-school books, but I think that the Faith should illuminate everything they write, grave or gay. The Faith is radiantly apparent in your last poems. It is in Tom Daly’s clowning as it is in his loftier moods. Of course anyone would rather write like Francis Thompson than like Swinburne. But I can honestly say that I’d rather write like John Ayscough than like William Makepiece Thackeray—infinitely greater artist though Thackeray be. You see, the Catholic Faith is such a thing that I’d rather write moderately well about it than magnificently well about anything else. It is more important, more beautiful, more necessary than anything else in life. You and I have seen miracles—let us never cease to celebrate them. You know that this is not the first fever of a convert’s enthusiasm—it is the permanent conviction of a man who prayed daily for months for the Faith before that grace was given198 him. The Faith has done wonderful things for you, but I think since I have been in France it has done more for me. It has carried me through experiences I could not otherwise have endured. I do not mean that it has kept me from fear—for I have no fear of death or wounding whatever. I mean that it has helped me to endure great and continued hardships. These hardships are now past—they belong to last December—but I cannot forget what made me live through them and bear myself like a man. Therefore—for this and a multitude of other reasons, among which let me put that it is my most earnest request—be zealous in using your exquisite talent in His service of Whom, I am glad to have said, Apollo was a shadow. If what you write does not clearly praise the Lord and his Saints and Angels, let it praise such types of Heaven as we know in our life—God knows they are numerous enough.

Does this sound like the writing of the least desirable of your aunts? Forgive me if it does, and heed my request even if it seem unreasonable—the request, I mean, not to sign your name to the book if it is not Catholic in spirit. I can honestly offer “Trees” and “Main Street” to Our Lady, and ask her to present them, as the faithful work of her199 poor unskilled craftsman, to her Son. I hope to be able to do it with everything I write hereafter—and to be able to do this is to be a good poet.

Speaking of Poetry, I have read with exquisite relish, several times, the copy of the Bulletin you sent me. And always I stop reading—prevented from continuing by irresistible mirth. God help us! Let all the world, especially all of it that deals in thought, beat its breast and repeat after me “God help us.” Here are young men battling in a strange land to win back for the people of that land their decent homes. Here are French peasants (old men, children and women) kneeling at mass in a church with a yawning shell hole through the tower. Among them are American soldiers. And other American soldiers (God rest their brave young souls) rest in new graves by a fair road I know. We hear the crash of shells, the tattoo of machine guns, we see unearthly lights staining the black sky. And—Oh, God help us! Send me more bulletins! I want to read more about Mr. —— whose “mystic” (of course!) poems, seem to ... “to challenge comparison with the works of Tagore.” I want to read more about ... chaunting to crowds of old ladies who stink of perfume and cold cream and gasoline, while a young female shakes her shanks200 and “gives a visual embodiment of the poet’s idea.” I want to read about A ... “What a privilege to be at once a poet and a fairy godmother!” And I want to read about W ... going West and—just being himself! God forgive me for being a Pharisee, and keep me from judging others! But I do love to read about these things and then go across the street and drink a large drink with Joe Brady, meanwhile singing a coarse ballad entitled “The Old Gray Mare.”

We’re going to be paid to-morrow, I’m glad to say, so I’ll be able to have a few meals indoors. This roadside picnic stuff is all right in fair weather, but French weather is not always what it should be. I hope your allotment is arriving, but I doubt it. I think we’ll collect it in our old age. I read recently that a Civil War Veteran had just succeeded in collecting some pay due him in 1862—perhaps we’ll be as lucky. We’ll buy a carton of cigarettes for Christopher’s youngest son with the first payment.

Your poem “Experience” has lodgment in my brain and heart and soul. “She walks the way primroses go.” Simple—isn’t it? that line—to make it nothing much was required—genius merely. Thank God there’s you in a world of ——s and ——s. Do you mind being considered the “one just201 man”? Figuratively I kiss your hand—it was absurd of me to preach to you who are my mistress in the art of devotion as in the art of poetry.

Some mail came to-day and in it was a package containing ten boxes of tobacco, Merci bien! (when I get back I’ll talk just like —— or ——.) I received a box of admirable cigars yesterday (they were originally awarded to Father Daly in payment for a contribution to America, and he kindly directed that they be sent to me).

We are in a new town now (new to us, that is) a little bit of a place. We have been recently in a rather large town, where I lived very comfortably. I am comfortable here (especially since yesterday afternoon, when I had a hot shower bath and had my clothes sterilized) but not luxurious. But I’m looking forward to a much easier and vastly more interesting time for the rest of my stay in France. I have asked to be relieved from my office job, and my request has been granted. I hope on Monday (this is Saturday night) to become a member of the Regimental202 Intelligence Section, and the Adjutant tells me I am to be transferred as a Sergeant, although I was willing to give up my stripes for the sake of getting into this work. So henceforth I’ll be peering at the Germans through field glasses from some observatory instead of toiling in a dug-out or crowded office. You wouldn’t want me to come back round-shouldered and near-sighted, would you? Well, that would be the result of keeping on this statistical job much longer. The intelligence work is absolutely fascinating—you’ll be glad I took it up.

You would have liked the gutter-babies in our last town. About a dozen of them used to come out at meal times and besiege our mess-line. They brought their dad’s canteens to be filled with coffee, and they accepted, politely, bread and karo. They were very nice, and fat, as all French babies are. I don’t know whether the French are so devoted to my dear patron St. Nicholas of Bari, because they love children, as he does, or are devoted to children because they love him. Anyway they have the nicest children there are outside of Larchmont Manor and Heaven (these words mean nearly the same thing) and they treat them most enthusiastically. Large crowds of men and women stand for half an203 hour in a busy city street watching a young baby learn to walk, the baby being decorated, for the occasion, with his big sister’s broad-brimmed hat. And also nearly every church has a statue or window representation of St. Nicholas of Bari with the three babies he restored to life. It helps me to feel at home. I hope you and Kenton pray to him often, he is a very generous saint and has treated me beautifully.

I had a quaint experience to-night. There is no priest now in this town, but there is a fine old church, with God in it. Since there is no priest, I can’t get my daily communion, but I go in occasionally to say my prayers. Well, to-night there was a very old lady in the church. She was so crippled with age and rheumatism that she could not kneel, so she was huddled up on a bench near the rail. And she had a white cap on, and she carried a tall staff with a crutch top such as witches use. She was very pious, and prayed audibly, making pious ejaculations, like an old Irish lady. For some time she didn’t know anyone else was in the church. But when she found I was there, she waited until I had said my beads and then she came over to me (rising with great difficulty and putting on the heavy wooden shoes that lay beside her). Then she extended204 to me her beads. The link between two of them was undone, and she asked me to mend it. I tried to do so, but my clumsy fingers had little success. So I gave her my rosary in exchange for hers—which I can easily mend with a pair of pincers—and she was very grateful. But I feel that I got the best of the bargain, for there may be a special sort of a blessing attached to beads worn by the gnarled fingers of one so near God. I could make a rhyme out of this experience, but it would seem a profanation. You see some of the possible interpretations of it, don’t you?

The news about D—— is interesting—well, he is trying to serve his conscience, and I am trying to serve mine, and that’s all a gentleman can do. And since we’re both suffering, I believe we’ve both followed the right course. There are many ways to Heaven, but only one Lamp—as I once said in some verses.

But as to suffering—don’t be pitying me! It’s you that are doing the suffering, you with no exhilaration of star-shells and tattoo of machine-guns, you without the adventure. I feel very selfish, often.

For Heaven’s sake, don’t tell me about how bad tea rooms are! I admit that I used to scorn them. Now I could live in one, enthusiastically. I wouldn’t mind at all the closeness, the bad service, the soiled table linen. Why, Max’s Busy Bee sounds better to me now than Sherry’s used to sound.

“She walks the way Primroses go” reechoes in my soul. What a delightful poet you are! Send me some more poems, at once, please.

It’s time I heard from you again. Some mail came to-day, but I got nothing from you. You should write me long letters often. By all means take up Fr. Hayes’ lecture offer. You can make your lectures chiefly readings. Get Dr. Pallen to help you make a circular, and put on it testimonials from whomever he suggests. Get Bob Holliday’s advice as to form of circular. You will find valuable suggestions as to engagements in my correspondence files, wherever they are.

Young —— is in a nearby town—an amiable child indeed he is. I saw him twice, and he presented me with a bag of cakes and a box of cigars.206 He reminds me very much of Kenton, but is in many respects his inferior. I’d like to see Kenton and Fr. Daly and Deborah and Michael and Christopher and Sister Emerentia and some Bass’ Ale and some dry sherry and a roast of lamb with mint sauce and Blackwood’s Magazine and the bar in the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago and a straw hat and the circus. And I really wouldn’t mind seeing you.

Your friends are a bit impertinent, I think. I don’t claim to be a learned French scholar (although I have talked French every day for six months). But I do claim to know the name of the place where I lived in constant danger of death for six weeks, where many of my friends gave their lives for their country. It is Rouge Bouquet, not Rouge Bosquet. I’ll be deeply grieved if it appears in print incorrectly. Also, I wish the grace in “Holy Ireland” to stand as I wrote it. It is just as Frank Driscoll said it on that unforgettable night—it is the grace used in Jesuit houses. Please207 see to this, and don’t let all the world revise my mss. I rather expected you’d like the poem better, but perhaps the reason the fellows in the Regiment liked it so much is because we all felt keenly the event it memorizes.

The above is rather stern and brusque, isn’t it? Well I wrote it in rather stirring times—now only memories. I am resting now, in a beautiful place—on a high hilltop covered with pine and fir trees. I never saw any mountain-place in America I thought better to look at or from. I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good, kind trees. A great improvement on living in a dug-out and even (to my mind) an improvement on a room with a bed in a village. I am not on a furlough, I am working, but my work is of a light and interesting kind and fills only six out of twenty-four hours. So I have plenty of time for writing, and have started a prose-sketch (based on an exciting and colourful experience of the last month) which I will send you soon.208 Everything I write, I think, in prose or verse, should be submitted to Doran first.

I wish I could tell you more about my work, but at present I cannot. But there are advertised in the American magazines many books about the Intelligence Service—get one of them and you’ll find why I like my job. The work Douglas is doing is not allied to mine. Only I suppose he’ll have a commission. I won’t work for one, because I don’t want to leave this outfit. I love you more than ever, and long for the pictures you promise me. You will be amused by the postcards I enclose.

Say, the stuff about your not appreciating “Rouge Bouquet” was written before I got your delightful letter of April 18, admirable critic!

I have just received your letters of April 1st and April 5th. “Moonlight” is noble, like its author. As to being worried about you because it expresses pain, why, I’d be worried only if you did not sometimes feel and express pain. Spiritual pain (sometimes physical pain) is beautiful and wholesome and209 in our soul we love it, whatever our lips say. Do you not, in turn, worry because of my foolish letter to you from the hospital. At that time I was just an office hack—now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there is—you’d love it! It is sheer romance, night and day—especially night! And I am now therefore saner than when I wrote to you from the hospital. I’ve had only a week of this work—but I’m already a much nicer person.

As to the picture I sent you, why, surely I have a moustache, and not a “morning pout.” Mechante. A long moustache I have (illustration of moustache) comme ca. Also, I have thick hair which stands up (illustration) comme ci. I had my head shaved last November, you know, and it had a good effect. My letter is thrilling, isn’t it, with all these martial details? A veritable cross-section of battle, a flower from No Man’s Land. Well, I am sending some battling picture-postcards soon which you will find amusing, I think—portraits, in two striking histrionic poses, of myself. You know now, from my previous letters, that I am no longer (I thank God!) doing statistics, so gently, but widely210 and most firmly, correct the statement that I have a bullet-proof job. I had one, but succeeded, after two months’ intriguing, in getting rid of it. It wasn’t a shell-proof job—nothing in a real regiment is. (Such jobs are in the Ordnance or Supply Departments, back of the lines.) It wasn’t shell-proof, I say, and if I should be squashed by a shell, wouldn’t you hate to have it said that I was nobly holding my post in the office, or bravely manning my typewriter? Now, I’m doing work I love—and work you may be proud of. None of the drudgery of soldiering, but a double share of glory and thrills. But it is not so glorious and thrilling as you.

I don’t know just what kind of a mental picture you have of my present life—to be accurate it would need to be rather kaleidoscopic, for my activities and the spheres of them vary frequently and greatly. But this afternoon you (or perhaps not you, but readers of Empey and Private Peat and the rest of that mob of war writers—thank God, let me Pharisaicly say, that I am not one of them—would211 do so) would have been amazed at the martial picture before you, had you seen me. Just outside the edge of the forest of firs and spruce in which we fourteen men live is a lovely meadow. There, among the knee-high buttercups, lay in the May sunshine all afternoon three warriors—myself being one. Whiles we smoked and gazed at the lovely valley miles below us—whiles we took turns in reading aloud from—what do you suppose? The Oxford Book of English Verse! We read Gray’s Elegy, the first chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, “They told me, Heraclitus,” that witch poem of William Bell Scott, “Love in the Valley,” “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Keith of Ravelston,” and half a dozen other poems, all of which brought you most poignantly and beautifully before me. No, they didn’t bring you before me—you are always before me and with me and in my heart and brain—but it’s dangerous to write this—it draws so tight the cords that bind me to you that they cut painfully into my flesh. Well, we are to be together sometime, inevitably, and soon in terms of eternity. For we are absolutely one, incomplete apart, and in Heaven is completeness. How unhappy must lovers be who have not the gracious gift of faith!

There is to be an Homeric banquet at our house212 one day—the day when I exhibit to my comrades the glory of my life—yourself. You will like them all—Watson (a gifted artist from Richmond, who is now at work on a fine drawing which must accompany Rouge Bouquet in Scribner’s), Bob Lee, Titterton (my especial friend), Beck, Mott, Kerrigan, Levinson—say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. They are all men of education, and breeding, and humour, and we have fine times. Dangers shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion—a fine hearty roaring mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle, or a truly timed bombardment with eight-inch guns. I don’t know that this last figure will strike you as being particularly happy, but it would if you’d had the delight of going to war.

Right here I had to pause to discuss theology with Watson, Titterton, Levinson and Jongberg. Jongberg is up here for a brief spell; he is a Swedish-Irishman, and now he is posing for St. Michael for Watson, using a bayonet for a sword. Levinson (in full uniform, including belt and helmet) is being model for the soldiers leaving Rouge Bouquet213 for Heaven. He is a quaint little French-Jewish-American, with whom we have a lot of fun. They all trooped into the room where Titterton and I sit writing to our respective sweethearts, to ask about the style of St. Michael’s sword and that of his halo. These questions settled, Watson became enamoured of the idea of angels saluting, and devised a whole manual of arms for angels—as “Angels, attention! Wings raised, by the numbers. 1 up! 2 down! Wings flap! Hey you down there! what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know enough to keep your hands down when you flap your wings? Awkward squad for you to-morrow!” Then they went back to their work.

Well, I don’t know how long the Intelligence Section is to stay in this lovely summer resort of a place, but it’s certainly fine while it lasts. And I am very fortunate to have such a crowd as this to work with. I never was with so congenial a company in civilian life. Fr. O’Donnell came up to see us yesterday—he is stationed not far away. Fr. Duffy has an assistant—Fr. Kennedy—a Jesuit, thank God! I have not met him yet. He is a brother of the publishers of Barclay Street. I have a new stripe—an inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff for six months service. Let you be214 proud of that too, please, and let my children be proud of it. That is all the news except that I love you.

To-day I was made very happy by receiving two nice little ridiculous letters from you—one of which considered itself to be long. As to Sr. Mary Leo—if you happen to be writing to her (you will be, for I told her to ask you for “Rouge Bouquet”) ask her by all means to tell you how her grandmother taught her geography. It’s an absolutely delightful story, and she’s a delightful old saint.

You say Tad will go “in a few months.” I’m glad I’m not Tad. There are many reasons for this, of course, but I mean I am especially glad I’m not to go in a few months. I’m glad I’m a Sergeant in the 69th, a volunteer regiment, the bravest and best regiment in the army. I’m glad I have a golden service chevron on my left arm—that means six months service in France, and is better than two bars on my shoulder, which would mean only three months stay at Plattsburg. If I get an honorable wound that will unfit me for soldiering but not for civilian work, that civilian work will not be hack-writing.215 It may be straight reporting, or editing, or writing (Evening World at $80 a week, for instance) a weekly essay-column, or dramatic criticism (this last appeals to me strongly). Also I’ll do less lecturing and more oratory—bombastic, thundering, literary, Henry Woodfin Grady oratory! It is exciting, and lecturing isn’t, especially.

Meanwhile I find myself approving your plan of getting literary work, although doing it makes me feel like a coloured man approving his wife’s plan of taking in washing. You relieve my mind greatly by your willingness to keep your name off the book. I thought I would acknowledge to you the pleasure I got from “A Wind Rose in the Night.” It is a holy and dear poem.

Please see that Kenton learns to serve Mass, won’t you? Sorry to keep teasing you about this, but you never write anything about it.

Your poem “To a Sick Child” is beautiful, and “cookies” is the making of it. I love you.

I didn’t get your letter expressing enthusiastic approval of “Rouge Bouquet” until I had received216 two others just mentioning it. I certainly am glad the poem “got” you, as it got me. The Regiment—and soldiers outside the Regiment as high as a Brigadier General—are wonderfully enthusiastic. The Brigadier General had twenty-four copies made to send his friends. Of course we are especially moved by it because the event is so close to us. But to appreciate it you should have heard taps played and at a soldier’s funeral. P. C. ought to know the distinction between peacemakers and pacifists. I wonder he didn’t include St Michael in his catalogue of pacifists. We are peace-makers, we soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives to bring back peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of France, whom anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the last six months) must pity and admire and love. They are an invaded people—and invaded people always are right. The careful study of certain ghostly villages (I cannot forget them) has taught me where I would have stood in the 60’s and that is on the side of the invaded Southern States. God keep me from ever being ordered to take part in an invasion of a peaceful land! So long as I am helping drive out the invader, I know I’m right—and all questions of international politics are of no importance whatever.217 Here are nice old ladies, fat babies, jovial humorous men, and little girls just after making their First Communions. They’ve been driven out of their pretty sleepy little villages. They want to get back and mend the shell holes in the roof and go to school and take their place drinking red wine of an evening according to their tastes and ages. Well, we men of the 69th are helping to give these people back their homes—and perhaps to prevent our homes from one day being taken from us by the same Power—of whom nothing at all worse need be said than that it is an invader. And St. Patrick and St. Bridgid and St. Columkill and all the other Saints are with us—they are no more pacifists than they are Roycrofters! And God keep us from Washington Square! No Man’s Land is a damn sight healthier place—I have tried both, and I know what I’m talking about.

And as for you, you young flippertigibbet, you won’t be middle-aged, you say? Well, we’ll see about that! I’ll probably come back with one eye, one arm, one leg and a horrible temper, and turn your hair white in a day. Stop calling any child of ours “Billy.” When you referred to “Billy” in previous letters I thought you meant some rather unfortunately named dog or cat. Now I am annoyed218 to find out you meant Michael. The habit of so designating him probably started humorously—please stop it at once.

I have not read “The Tree of Heaven,” to which you refer in a recent letter. But I have read Carnival—and if when I get back to the States I find that you really think such books are “fine,” as you say in your letter, I’ll grab a baby (probably young Michael) and start for whatever South American Republic or other bellicose land has need of the services of a ranting, roaring, slashing, dashing young Sergeant, fresh from the ranks of the quarrelsome Irish, veteran of the Great War.

I enclose three bits of verse by various hands. “A Nun’s Prayer for a Soldier” is by dear old Sister Mary Leo. The flattering sonnet was sent to me by Sr. Mary Emerentia, having been copied from a paper published by the girls of St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. I destroyed Sr. Emerentia’s letter before I copied down the author’s name, so I couldn’t write to thank her, unfortunately.219 “The Green Estaminet” I want carefully preserved, for it must go in every anthology made by you or me or anybody we know. I like it better than any war poem I’ve read since I became a soldier, and I deeply regret that I didn’t write it. Many and many a jovial evening I have spent in just such bistrals as the poet describes. Dear old Madame—she always has that “strange disease,” and she finds that white bread is good for it—and in exchange for that white bread (from army kitchens) she gives the delicious soft-crumbed brittle-crusted war-bread, better than any bread in the States. “The great round songs begin”—they do, indeed! “Bing Bang Bingen on the Rhine!” “Down in the Heart of the Gas House District,” “Sidewalks of New York,” and always “Madelon,” in which the French soldiers in the corner enthusiastically join. Cecil Chesterton told me he always judged a country by its drinking-places. Well, here are the merriest, bravest drinking places in the world. If the States go dry, I’m going to bundle all you young critters over here to live—a comfortable, humorous, Catholic country. Honestly, the only drawback to living in this country is the absence of you and your gang. I’d like a house on the very mountain top I now inhabit, and I know you’d220 enjoy it tremendously. I’m perfectly serious about this, and look forward to bringing you here.

A terrible thing, this war, what with a pine forest to live in, all the latest novels to read, and bridge every evening. And now I am preparing for a short week-end in a certain nice small city, an hour’s walk through the forest and across the mountains. It is a lovely forest in which to wander of a June day—so deliberately European—a forest whose tall evergreen trees and smooth brown floor suggest all the folk tales I ever heard your dear voice beautify for our children’s delight. Reaching this certain town, I have interesting things to do—to collect my pay for one thing. To get mail—I hope from you. To go to confession to Fr. Duffy or Fr. Kennedy, S. J., our new assistant chaplain, or to some curé with thin hands and long white hair. To drink a bottle of beer at the Sergeants’ Club—among my brother noncoms, French, Italian and American, in horizon blue, green and olive drab respectively. To221 mail to you this letter and a splendid drawing for “Rouge Bouquet,” by Emmett Watson, of ours. To dine sumptuously on steak and fried potatoes and Pinard at a merry bistral on a side-street, where Madame la patronne will present me with a sprig of lilies of the valley, which I (imagine a boutonierre with an American uniform!) will present to the baby of the tailor’s daughter. To attend the movies—two sous! To sleep between clean sheets in a hotel-bedroom—half a franc! And to-morrow to be (gold service stripe flashing in the sunlight, trench-stick jauntily swinging) a part of the many-coloured Sunday afternoon procession along a certain broad avenue. Then back to my forest-lodge for supper.

So far, I have told about six people about your rejoicing in the fact that the possession of a kitten justifies you in purchasing a bird-cage. An absolutely222 delightful character-revelation—that is, the revelation of a delightful character. And the most genuine sample of you I have had since last November.

I am writing this letter in the end of one of our barracks, which its partition cuts to make an airy office for the Supply Sergeant of Headquarters Company. You’d like him very much—a very beautiful person of about my age, a playwright by profession, educated in Paris. At the other end of the long table sits a bridge party, of which the members are the Supply Sergeant (Lemist Esler is his name), Howard Young (who was a Marine before he became a fighting Irisher), Sergeant Kenneth Russell (a wealthy and charming business man of very literary taste, who knows most of the living poets we know and revels in the Oxford Book of English Verse), and Tom O’Kelly, who has the most beautiful tenor voice you ever heard. He is a professional singer from Dublin, with very tightly curled close-cropped hair, a reddish brown face, and the build of a prize-fighter. In the lulls of the game he sings snatches of “Digging for Gould” and other nice ballads. Admirable person.

I am with the Regiment now—the Intelligence Section is back from its Post, the beautiful place from which I wrote you many letters. Now we are in very flat country, the flattest I ever saw. Very violent flowers, chiefly scarlet poppies and small blue things, cornflowers, I believe. Gloriously hot, with good swimming nearby, and the best sort of shower-bath, obtainable by merely sitting under the spout of a pump while an obliging friend turns the handle.

Your letter of May twenty-sixth came after I had received a June letter. I am delighted to hear of Kenton’s confirmation and of his choice of a name—St. Stephen is a gallant gentleman and a true friend and does wonderful things for me.

I’m not very enthusiastic about that group picture of office-workers in which I appear—I like myself better as I am now, a soldier instead of a clerk, visiting the office only occasionally—to work on my history. And I’m ever so much happier now than when the picture was taken.

Is Kenton serving Mass yet? Please have him do so. And please send me my Anthology—I believe restrictions no longer keep packages from soldiers. I love you.

227

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES

A BALLAD OF NEW SINS

Prelude

I—Water-colour

Pushing my way through the chattering throng of my brown-clad mates to the rail of the troop-ship, I look at still water, greasy and opaque. A touch of sunlight makes it splendid with rainbows, a great prismatic expanse, beautiful, more beautiful than clear water could be. Broken oars shatter the rainbow, bringing a black, clumsy rowboat close to our ship’s side. Around the black boat the rainbow settles. The rower rests his oars and lifts graceful entreating arms. He wears pale blue overalls. In the stern of his boat is a little girl in a cardinal cloak. On her head is one of the caps that make the French sailors look so gay and gentle, a flat, round, blue thing with a red pompom. She claps her hands when cooks lean through the portholes and throw loaves of bread to her father.

II—Breakfast

I may breakfast in either of two ways. I may, as I pass a steaming field-kitchen, hold out by its long handle a shining aluminum basin. John Wilkert231 will put into it a big ladleful of rice, and Leo Maher will pour golden syrup over it. Also, before I leave the line I shall have three long strips of broiled bacon and two thick slices of white bread, and a canteen cup full of hot, sweet coffee. The breakfast room is a meadow or the roadside across from the barracks. There is good company, hungry and mirthful. And over our heads noisy battalions of crows maneuver, advancing, retreating, hoarsely shouting down to us news of what awaits us beyond the frozen hills.

Or I may go to the House by the Fountain. Pierre’s “permission” is over, so he will not come in from the stable to smoke my tobacco and tell me of life and death in the trenches. Grandpere sits by the fire, now and then blowing it to flame by forcing his scant old breath upon it through a long hollow tube, and toasting for me a thick slice of war-bread. Madame superintends the heating of the big iron pot of this morning’s milk and the three-legged pot of coffee. Now my bowl—a little precious sugar in the bottom—is filled with hot milk. Madame deftly pours black coffee into it, and it becomes richly brown. I break my toast into it and eat eagerly—more eagerly than does demure little Francine, who sits opposite me, her school books232 beside her on the bench. She has large innocent brown eyes like her father’s. Her hands are so tiny that I am surprised at her dexterity with the large pewter spoon. I am afraid that if I stare at her I shall embarrass her and make her spill cafe au lait on her immaculate pinafore. On the great stone mantel over the fire are a spent seventy-five millimetre shell curiously engraved with wreaths of roses, a pink china pig and a brass crucifix. A bugle sounds by the barracks. I give Madame her half-franc. I take my belt and rifle. “Bon jour, Monsieur,” says Madame, “A demain!” Some day instead of “a demain” they will say “au revoir.”

233

“TRY A TIN TO-DAY”

“And now,” said John Potts, whirling around on the piano-stool and throwing his lank forelock back with a jerk of his head, “we will interpret Grace Mallon’s soul!”

“Oh, wait till she comes, John!” boomed the Rev. Morris Gildell. “She was at the Karl Marx Forum in our parish-house last night, and she said positively she’d be down here this afternoon.”

“Yes, do wait!” said Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur, placing her fat hands, covered with rings set with semiprecious stones, over those of the pianist. “Do wait! It will be wonderful for her to hear it!”

The host of the occasion was Edwin Marmaduke, painter. He was at present engaged in spooning Arabian incense out of a cocoa-tin and putting it into a large bronze thurible, which hung before a plaster replica of Rodin’s “Le Baiser.” The incense caught fire, and dense clouds of fragrant smoke filled the little studio. Then Marmaduke turned his pale but agreeable face to his guests.

“No, do it now!” he commanded. “Perhaps you and Arthura will bring her with it.”

So John Potts struck a few minor chords, and Arthura Lewis lifted her pale-green mantle in both thin arms, smiled at the low ceiling, closed her eyes, and danced. She did not really dance. She merely bent and kicked and gestured, approximately in rhythm with the music.

She was not really Miss Arthura Lewis, either. Her first name, which she had discarded as too usual, was Alice and her last name was Potts, for she was the pianist’s wife. They were known to live together in the little apartment across Patchin Place from Marmaduke’s studio, but the fact of their marriage was scrupulously kept a secret from the other members of their emancipated circle. No liaison was ever hidden from the world more zealously than was the regularity and mid-Victorian respectability of this seeming “free comradeship.”

So John Potts played and Arthura danced, and the theme they were interpreting was Grace Mallon’s soul. Edwin Marmaduke’s eyes were turned toward Arthura, but he did not see her. Nor did he see Grace’s soul. He saw her eyes—very gray and lovely—and her hair, which was golden-brown and had an indefinable air of mirth about it.

Marmaduke loved Grace better than cigarettes, or incense, or art; better even than the school of235 painting of which he was the acknowledged master, the school which proudly accepted a name first derisively given it—the Incomprehensiblists. So, while Arthura twisted and turned and John Potts hammered out discords, he thought of Grace’s beauty and charm.

To do him justice, he did not think of her great wealth. In fact, he did not like to think of her wealth, for that wealth came from her father’s success in a most unesthetic business. Grace was the daughter of “Try a Tin To-day” Mallon, who was known in the world of canned goods as the Salmon King.

There was no vulgar hand-clapping after the artists had finished their interpretation of Grace’s soul; but the Rev. Morris Gildell rattled his spoon against the sides of his teacup, while Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur sighed ecstatically and clanked her chain of heavy amber beads. Even in the act of lighting a cigarette, John Potts started dramatically and pointed toward the open window.

“La voilà!” he exclaimed. “We have summoned her! I hear the rumble of her chariot-wheels.”

There did indeed come from the cobbles of Patchin Place the whir and snort of an automobile. Soon the great gong on the wall clanged viciously,236 causing Arthura Lewis to shudder and clasp her long, white hands to her eyes. Edwin Marmaduke sped down the four flights of stairs that intervened between his studio and the street door.

“Dear Grace!” said Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur. “I hope she came alone. I can’t stand that friend of hers—what is his name?—that Watson person.”

“He is a terrible bromid,” said Arthura Lewis, lighting a cigarette. “He’s so very—so very, shall I say, salmony!”

“But what has Mr. Watson to do with salmon, anyway?” asked John Potts. “Does he catch them, or what is it?”

“Nothing so exciting as that,” said the Rev. Morris Gildell, with a great chuckle. “He merely celebrates them. He is the advertising manager of the Mallon Salmon Company, and his chief claim to immortality is that he invented the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ slogan. You know those great pink pictures of ridiculous-looking fish that we see in public vehicles and on the highways and byways, each one holding out a can bearing the legend, ‘Try a Tin237 To-day’? Watson is responsible for those mutilations of the landscape.”

“Does Watson paint them himself?” asked Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur. “He looks capable of it.”

The Rev. Morris Gildell issued another of those shouts of laughter which made the women’s clubs believe him masculine and hearty.

“Excellent!” he cried, putting an approving hand on Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur’s fat, bare shoulder. “Oh, excellent! No, Watson doesn’t paint them, but he does worse—he inspires them. He persuades some poor devil of an artist to make these hideous caricatures of the truth. He is the Mæcenas of the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ school of painting.”

After waiting for the murmur of amusement to die down, the Rev. Morris Gildell continued:

“Grace brought Watson to the Feminist Conference at our church last week, and several people asked me what a rare, free spirit like her could see in such a clod. I suppose she feels that she must go around with him occasionally because he is so useful to her father. But I hope she doesn’t think of marrying him!”

“Marrying him!” exclaimed Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur, Arthura Lewis, and John Potts in unison. “I hope not!”

“Why,” said Arthura Lewis, “it would be a tragedy for an emancipated woman like Grace to marry at all! Not to speak of marrying such a soulless, brainless animal as that David Watson! I’d as soon see her—”

But the conversation was interrupted by the opening of the studio door and the entrance of Grace and their young host.

Edwin Marmaduke seemed somehow to look younger than before. He had lost a little of his expression of languor and disdain; and Grace was the very personification of radiant girlhood. In spite of her knowledge of her own good looks and good clothes, she was charmingly deferential to these people, whom she considered intellectuals. Her naively respectful greeting to the Rev. Morris Gildell seemed for the moment to restore to that drawing-room revolutionist some strange lost dignity.

Men and women alike greeted the young girl with genuine friendliness. When her gray motor-cloak had been hung over the corner of an easel, and she had been seated on one of the few real chairs the studio boasted, and served with sweet biscuits, a cup of tea, and a cigarette, then the great event of the afternoon occurred—the unveiling of Marmaduke’s portrait of her.

The blinds were drawn—for the Incomprehensiblist painting is best appreciated in semidarkness. The incense-pot received some new fuel; John Potts played something “very golden” on the piano; and Edwin Marmaduke reverently drew back the gay Indian scarf that covered his masterpiece.

For a detailed description of Edwin Marmaduke’s “Soul Study in B-Minor—for G. M.,” the reader is referred to the introduction to the catalogue of the “Seven Rebels” exhibition at the Stein Galleries, or to the admirable essay “Incomprehensiblism—a Step Forward,” which appeared in that sprightly but short-lived weekly review, the Ultimate Democracy. This at least was obvious—that the portrait was large and mauve; this at least was generally agreed upon—that it was wonderful.

The Rev. Morris Gildell defiantly, Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur cooingly, Arthura Lewis prayerfully, Grace Mallon respectfully, Edwin Marmaduke himself modestly—all said it was wonderful. And after Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur had embraced the young painter, and his other guests had clasped his hand, and they had all said “Wonderfull”240 many, many times, they clattered down the uncarpeted stairs to the street.

All, that is, but one—Grace Mallon. She still remained in the old Italian chair, holding an empty cup and an unlighted cigarette. She looked out of the window into dusty Patchin Place, and one slender, unjeweled hand lay on the sill. It was an attractive hand although the sun had turned it a shade darker than that of Edwin Marmaduke. It seemed firm and soft at the same time.

Edwin was, after all, human, and therefore he seized it; but Grace withdrew it from his grasp—not very abruptly, however.

“Now, Edwin,” she said, “you must be very proper and mid-Victorian and all that sort of thing, since I’m being a reckless, forward young woman and staying here in your studio all alone with you. Now sit down there like a good boy and listen to me. Heavens! I wonder what David would say if he knew I was doing this!”

“Why do you care what David Watson would say?” asked Edwin, gently swinging the thurible to and fro before his goddess. “He’s busy with his ‘Try a Tin To-day’ pictures. He isn’t thinking about you or anything else that is beautiful.”

“Stop swinging that incense thing around. You241 make me nervous!” Grace replied irrelevantly. “I hate that stuff; it makes me think about when I had whooping-cough. Of course I don’t care about what David thinks, silly! Last night he came up to the house, and he said something that hurt me very much.”

She paused interrogatively. Edwin put the extinguished thurible on a teakwood stand, dusted his fingers on a yellow silk handkerchief, and sat down on a cushion at Grace’s feet.

“Really, Edwin,” she said, “I sometimes think that you are almost too skilful in repressing your emotions. I said he hurt me very much.”

“My dear Grace,” he said, “what would you have me do? Challenge him to a duel? Of course I’m tremendously sorry; but why do you talk to such an animal as Watson?”

“You men are pretty much alike, after all,” she said. “What David said that hurt me was just like what you are saying about him. He made fun of242 you and your painting—of course, that hurt me terribly—and then he actually had the nerve—the impudence to forbid me to come to your studio! Think of it! David Watson, whose only idea of art is a stupid fish holding a tin of dad’s salmon and saying ‘Try a Tin To-day’—that man to tell me what to do and what not to do! I’ll tell you what I did. I forbade him ever to come to my home or to speak to me again! When I came down here this afternoon, I stopped at dad’s office purposely. I know David was watching me when I left, and I said to Leon, ‘Take me to Mr. Marmaduke’s studio in Patchin Place’—loud, so he’d hear me!”

“That’s my brave little comrade!” he said. “And soon we shall be married, sha’n’t we? Remember, you’ll keep your maiden name, and you won’t promise to honour or obey me, or any of that cruel rubbish. Gildell will use that lovely, ‘Polyrhythmic Ritual for a Free Mating,’ and there’ll be just the people we love best present. Arthura will dance, and it will all be wonderful!”

“Edwin,” she said, “I haven’t told you yet why243 I stayed here to-day. I told dad to come here at six o’clock.”

“Mr. Mallon coming here at six o’clock!” said Edwin, rising to his feet. “Why, it’s five minutes to six now!”

“Yes, I told him, idiot!” said Grace, springing up from her chair. “How else do you suppose he knows? Do you think he read my burning passion written on my brow? Have some sense! Did you never hear of a girl telling her own father that she was engaged?”

“Of course!” said Edwin. “Of course! I understand. But what did he say, why is he coming here?”

“That’s just it,” said Grace, drawing on a white glove hurriedly and splitting it in the process. “I told him last night, right after David went away; and he said he didn’t like artists and didn’t like you—don’t be angry, Edwin, he’s only seen you three times. I told him you were really a great painter, and he said that he wanted me to be happy, and that he’d have a talk with you and see what you were made of.”

“See what I am made of!” said Edwin with a sneer. “Why, does he think—”

“Now, Edwin, please, please, please, don’t say anything bright!” said Grace. “You know dad has had only me to talk to since mother died, and he isn’t used to bright people. He doesn’t like them. Now be sensible, and—here he comes now!”

They had not heard the great motor-car swing around the corner of Jefferson Market and come to a stop at the entrance to Patchin Place; but they heard the clang of the gong on the studio wall, and together they went to the street-door and brought the Salmon King up the rickety stairs to the studio.

III

James Mallon was what is called a captain of industry. That is, he was one of those men who are always shown by the realistic cartoonists to be grossly fat, with very small heads, tremendous cigars, and suits of clothes covered with a chaste pattern of dollar-marks.

He no more looked the part, however, than you look the part of the Common People. He was slender, graceful, and modestly dressed; he had a neat, white mustache, thin gray hair, and a mildly245 humorous expression. He loved his motherless daughter, his business, golf, pinocle, Smithfield ham, buckwheat cakes and maple-sirup, dry Sauterne, and detective-stories. He did not wear spats.

Mr. Mallon sat in the Italian chair, and after a brief survey of the room, turned to his postulant son-in-law a puzzled but amiable face.

“Mr. Marmaduke,” he said, “don’t you think that you and I could talk a little more comfortably if I sent this youngster of mine home? Run away, Grace, and have Leon take you straight to the house. I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Grace gave her father that birdlike peck which is the traditional filial kiss, and ran down-stairs in accordance with his directions. She went to her car, and called Leon from his conversation with her father’s chauffeur. There arose a rumble and a rasping roar, and her car sped over the cobblestones to the corner and up Sixth Avenue.

Oh, woman, in our hours of ease, what a double-faced hussy you are, anyway! Grace’s car went away—presumably home—but Grace stayed behind. She had left the street-door of the house ajar. She tiptoed up the stairs to the top floor, where her father and her lover were engaged in important private discourse.

She came to a halt about three steps from the top, and perched in the dust with her golden-brown head on a level with the broad streak of light which marked the bottom of the studio door. A shameless eavesdropper, she listened greedily.

“I have heard your paintings praised highly by critics whose opinions I respect,” it said. “The fact that I myself fail to appreciate their merit is by no means to your discredit. I am not a connoisseur, and I am very old-fashioned in all my tastes. But I must say frankly that your success as a painter of ultramodern pictures scarcely seems to me to qualify you to marry my daughter.”

“I love your daughter and she loves me. That makes our union necessary and right.”

But instead he said, in a low, tense voice which she had never heard him use before:

“But I may say without boasting that my art is not a failure, even financially. I have sold six paintings since last May, and the smallest check I received was for one hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“Indeed?” her father replied courteously. “I am247 glad to hear it, Mr. Marmaduke—very glad to hear it. I did not know that the public was sufficiently fond of these new and unusual forms of art to invest money in them. I see that I was wrong. But you must forgive me, Mr. Marmaduke, if I say that in my opinion the demand for—what is it you call them? I am getting old, and my memory is not what it was—ah, yes, thank you—the demand for Incomprehensiblist paintings is not likely to be of great duration. The public is fickle, sir; it has no use for last year’s novelties. Can you expect to invent new methods of painting yearly for its pleasure? You would have found it more profitable, in the long run, to paint in the traditional manner.”

Edwin did not speak for several seconds. Then he said, with an air of deliberation:

“No, Mr. Mallon. I think you are wrong. I tried painting in the traditional manner, and I made much less money than I am making now. Except for commercial work, the only sort of painting that pays to-day is—well, what you would call freak painting.”

“Ah!” Grace heard her father say. “Exactly—except for commercial work! There is a field for a young man! I cannot blame you for being an idealist;248 but you wish to marry my daughter, and I confess that I should prefer to see her married to a successful commercial draftsman—say, an artist connected with some sound advertising agency—than to—well, to an Incomprehensiblist.”

The listening girl smiled at her father’s words. Edwin Marmaduke and advertisements! It was an amusingly fantastic combination.

She heard Edwin cross the room and open a door. Then he seemed to be taking something from a closet. There was clattering and grating, as if canvases were being moved about.

“Before I show you these,” he said, “I must ask you to promise to treat this matter as strictly confidential.”

“Of course I promise, Mr. Marmaduke,” said her father. “But really I am not competent to judge your work—”

Edwin made no oral answer. From the sounds that came to her Grace conjectured that he was lifting and placing one of his paintings on an easel. She wondered which one it was—certainly it could not be her portrait!

Frantic with curiosity, Grace rose from the step and tried to look into the room through the keyhole. The presence of a key made her effort unavailing. She heard the rustle of pictures hastily turned, and her father’s iteration of “Good Lord!”

“Now,” he said, “you see that my work has some practical value, don’t you? You recognise these drawings, don’t you?”

“Recognise them!” said Mr. Mallon. “I should say I did. Do you mean to tell me—”

“Yes,” said Edwin. “They’re my work, all of them. Watson let the Parker Company handle their campaign, and I’ve done all their high-class work for the past three years.”

The Parker Company! Grace dimly remembered hearing that name. Yes, David Watson had said something about the Parker Company.

“I don’t sign any of this stuff,” said Edwin, “but it’s all mine. I originated that idea of the fish holding a can in his fin. I make all the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ pictures.”

She was at first too stunned to move. Vaguely she heard her father’s laugh, vaguely she heard him congratulating Edwin and inviting him to the250 house. Then, with a sense of walking in her sleep, she found herself at the foot of the stairs, fumbling at the catch of the street-door. She walked all the way home.

But it was a composed and apparently happy young woman who entered the Mallon house an hour later. Her father had already returned, and not even the fact that dinner had been delayed by her tardiness could account for his air of excitement.

“Grace,” he said, “I was pleasantly surprised by that young man, that Edwin Marmaduke. He is no mere freak painter—he is a first-class commercial artist. He doesn’t want it known, but—I should never have guessed it, it is a tremendous joke on me—he is the man who originated our ‘Try a Tin To-day’ posters! Did you know that?”

“It’s a fact,” said her father. “He showed me the drawings. Of course, that changes things. I told him to call this evening—how does that strike you?”

Grace seemed passionately interested in her grapefruit. She looked steadily at it as she answered.

“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid I won’t be in this evening. You see, I met David Watson on the way251 home to-day, and he asked me to go to see ‘The Boomerang’ with him to-night, and I said I’d go.”

“Oh!” said her father. “Then I’d better telephone Marmaduke to come to-morrow evening instead—or will you?”

“No,” said Grace serenely. “To-morrow night won’t do, either. David is coming to call.”

Her father looked at her over his glasses. Then he took them off, polished them with a small piece of chamois, replaced them, and looked at her again.

252

SOME MISCHIEF STILL

Characters

Maxwell Johnson
Mrs. Maxwell Johnson (née Helen White)
Lionel Morris
John Ryan
A Policeman
Place: New York; the upper West Side.
Time: The present.

SCENE—The living room of a six-room apartment. On one side is a mahogany pianola; at the back is a doorway with a heavy portière, drawn aside to show a portion of the hall with a wall telephone. At the right of the doorway is a life size statue of a nude woman, the distance from her feet to her waist being four times that from her waist to her head, which is very small and has no features except a prominent nose. Her arms are stretched out at right angles to her body, and she has been painted a vivid purple.

It is evening; the electric lamp is lit and there is a faint light in the hall.

253

Maxwell Johnson, a man of about thirty, is lying in slippered ease on a chaise-longue, smoking a cigar. Mrs. Johnson is seated facing him on the bench by the pianola. She is a very pretty young woman, rather too highly coloured, wearing an extremely décolleté gown of pale green charmeuse, a long string of large jade beads and a broad silver bracelet. She has a profusion of bright yellow hair. One knee is crossed over the other, revealing green silk stockings and silver slippers.

Maxwell

But Anarchists don’t ride in automobiles, do they, Nellie?

Helen

Max, I do wish you wouldn’t tease me about things that are sacred. If you don’t want to get an automobile, just say so, but don’t try to make fun of things you can’t possibly understand!

Maxwell

But, Nellie—

Helen

It’s hard enough for me to put up with your staying home and lying around and reading the paper while I go out night after night without you, and254 wear myself out at the Settlement and the Ferrer School and making speeches and addresses and everything in the subway and back in it, and losing, all the elation and social consciousness and everything, without having Anarchism and beauty and truth and everything that really means anything to anybody who tries really to think just made a joke of!

Maxwell

Good heavens, Nellie, I’m perfectly willing to buy the automobile; and I’m not criticising any of your hobbies! I—

Helen

Hobbies! Does one wear one’s self out for a hobby? Does one die for a hobby? Is the vote a hobby? Is the Woman’s Movement a hobby? Is Futurism a hobby? Is the Church of the Social Revolution a hobby? Is preaching the great truths of sex to one’s unborn children a hobby? Is—

Maxwell

All right, all right; let me slip in a word, won’t you? I’m not knocking any of your—devotions. I’ll get the automobile if you want it. I simply want you to make up your mind whether you want me to get it, or to use the two thousand for a bungalow255 at Amaranth, or wherever that crazy summer colony is.

Helen

It would be lovely to have our own place at Amaranth—though I suppose you’d only come out for weekends—you know it’s the most wonderful place, with the most wonderful scenery, and only really interesting people are allowed there, poets and sculptors and people who really do things; and there’s to be a pageant this summer and Lionel Morris says he wants me to do my barefoot dance; but I do wish we had a car—it would be wonderful just to get into one’s own car all the time and go anywhere, and I could take parties of interesting people out on tours to Ellis Island and the Night Court—

Maxwell

The Night Court! Yes, I think if you run the car you will go on a tour to the Night Court pretty soon, and you’ll have a special cop to take care of you, too. But you decide to-night whether you want the car or the bungalow, see? I’m game to spend two thousand dollars on one or the other, but you’ve got to decide. (From the dining room comes the loud clink of the steam radiator.) There’s that256 radiator again! (The telephone bell rings.) And there’s the ’phone! (He goes into the dining room and is heard muttering and pounding at the radiator, which continues to clink. Helen goes to the telephone.)

Helen

Hello!... Yes; what is it?... Yes, I am Miss White. (She turns and looks nervously toward the dining room.) Yes, this is Mrs. Johnson, Sam. It’s all right; I know what he wants. Tell Mr. Morris to come right up. (Helen and Maxwell reënter the living room at the same time. The radiator still clinks, but less loudly, with longer intervals of silence.)

Helen

Max, Mr. Morris is coming up to take me to the Mortons’ studio warming.

Maxwell

Studio warming, hey? Well, I’m going down to get Ryan to come up and arrange a dining room warming. It’s no use telephoning to him; he’ll just promise to fix the radiator and then go back to his chair and fall asleep. I’ll go down and drag him up by the throat. (He goes out through the hall door, and is heard to open the outer door and speak257 to someone.) How are you, Mr. Morris? Walk right in! The madam’s waiting for you.

Lionel (off stage)

Ah, thank you, Mr. Johnson, thank you.

(Enter Lionel. He is a handsome, slender young man, very pale, with brown hair brushed straight back.)

Lionel (lifting both of Mrs. Johnson’s hands to his lips)

Ah, Miss White! Dear Comrade White!

(This hand-kissing and dearing business leads the audience to think that Mr. Lionel Morris is the villain of the play, a destroyer of homes, a desperate character. As a matter of fact, he is nothing of the sort. He is quite harmless, being a sociable young man of limited education who likes to take part in those radical movements which attract women. He writes obscene poetry and paints pictures and makes sculptures that would be disgusting if they were not so funny. He is a rather interesting hybrid, being part donkey and part tame cat.)

Helen

Dear Comrade Lionel! See where I put your “Emancipation of Woman.”

(She leads him to the purple statue.)

258

Lionel

Ah! I never can interest myself in any of my work that is more than a day old. A poem or a picture that I have made bores me when the first flush of creation has passed. I feel toward it as I suppose a father felt toward his children, in those mediæval days when one had children. (He touches the outstretched hand of the statue.) But, dear Comrade White! Why do you make my “Emancipation of Woman” live with a Hiroshige colour print? A Toyokune I can endure, but a Hiroshige absolutely spoils the melody of her composition. Better the soft lyrical wall for a background, or perhaps a simple hanging of passionate black satin. Do you mind if I take this abomination down?

Helen

Surely, surely; you are always so right about everything! Do change anything and everything that will make it more comfortable for your wonderful statue. She has meant so much to me since she came....

Lionel

I know, dear comrade.

(He has moved the pianola bench to the wall and is standing on it taking down the Japanese print259 when Maxwell and John Ryan come in. Ryan is a janitor, and looks like a janitor. He is in his shirt sleeves and wears a battered black derby. He is smoking—no, not a short clay pipe!—a cigarette. He takes off his hat when he sees Mrs. Johnson, but instantly replaces it.)

Maxwell (as he leads Ryan to the dining room)

Come in here, Ryan. Did you bring your monkey wrench with you?

(Ryan mutters something unintelligible. They go out into the dining room, from which come occasional murmurs of conversation and sounds of hammering.)

Lionel (from the pianola bench)

Do you know, I am not at all glad to see that man.

Helen

Who? Max?

Lionel

No, indeed! That dreadful janitor! Do you know, Miss White—that janitor—

Helen

Don’t talk so loud! Max doesn’t like me to be called “Miss White.” You know he’s funny and260 old-fashioned, and though he’s willing for me to be a Feminist and to give money to the cause and everything, it makes him positively rage to hear me called “Miss White.” I tell him that a woman doesn’t give up her soul and her name and everything like a chattel mortgage just because she’s married, but he says that I’ve got to be called “Mrs. Johnson” because I’m no more Miss White than he is.

Lionel (getting down from the bench and putting the colour print on the pianola)

Ah, well, he’ll wake up one of these days and learn what Feminism really is. Even the business men must wake up some time. There was a broker that marched beside me in the suffrage parade this year—a broker or a pawnbroker, I never know which is which.

Helen

But what about Ryan? Why don’t you like him?

Lionel

That janitor! Do you know, he is simply a degenerate!

Helen

A degenerate? Like Lombroso?

261

Lionel

No. Worse than that. He actually has nine children! Last week when I went around with Comrade May Robinson Dannenberg and Comrade Rebecca Idleheimer selling “Plain Facts about a Great Evil” and working up enthusiasm for the suffrage rally at the Church of the Social Revolution, I made a special effort to interest the janitors and their wives. We went into every basement from here to 125th Street, and we saw some things that made my heart bleed. And in the basement of this very house I saw this man Ryan rocking a cradle and drinking beer out of a tin pail. His wife was cooking something disgusting on the gas stove and nursing a baby with her left hand. Comrade May Robinson Dannenberg was treated with absolute discourtesy by them; in fact, the woman told her to “go to hell”!

Helen

But then, those people, you know, they never do anything or read anything or anything. They are just like animals.

Lionel

Yes, but you and I have got to keep them from being animals! That’s what Social Consciousness262 means. I won’t say duty—I hate the word—but it’s your right to change the lives of those people and you absolutely must exercise that right, just as you absolutely must vote. There is that woman—a woman, the creature of all our dreaming—(He points to the statue.)—who might be out among the fields and the trees and the brooks and the birds and all the great and beautiful things of life, a sentient, social being; and what is she? What do we find her doing? Having a baby in a coalhole!

Helen

I see what you mean. That dreadful janitor! I know; I tried to get her to come to my class in the Ferrer School, and she said she had too much work to do.

Lionel

Exactly! Too much work to do! The thing that has crushed the souls and spirits and hearts of women throughout the generations! But we must stop all this. You must stop it. You must speak to the man—to Ryan—

Helen

I speak to Ryan? What shall I say to him? He won’t come to the Ferrer School.

263

Lionel

The Ferrer School must come to him! You must go to him and say: “Ryan, woman is no longer your bond slave! You must have no more babies. You are killing your wife with soul-deadening drudgery. No janitor should have children; no janitor should have a wife. You must put Mrs. Ryan in a model tenement somewhere, and let her lead a normal, intellectual life. Society will care for the children. There are plenty of places where they can go and be studied by scientists and develop, perhaps, into useful members of the community. You will do your work as before, but you must keep Mrs. Ryan away from this drudgery somewhere where she can really live her life.” Will you do this?

Helen

Why, yes, I suppose I ought to.... (She picks up her cloak which has been lying on a chair and puts it on, with Lionel’s assistance.) It’s time we started, isn’t it? But wait a minute! Max!

Maxwell (coming in from the dining room)

Going? I hope you have a good time.

Helen

Yes, we’re going, but, Max, I want you to do264 something for me. You know Ryan better than I do and you can talk to him. Mr. Morris says that he’s been abusing his wife, and he thinks we ought to get him to put her into a model tenement where she can develop her soul. He’s been overworking her and all that sort of thing, so you talk to him about it, will you? Mr. Morris knows a place where she can go, and we can put the children somewhere, and he can go on with his work, and it will be better for everybody. So you talk to him about it, will you?

Maxwell

Ryan? Abusing Mrs. Ryan? Good heavens, I had no idea of this. Of course I’ll talk to him about it. I’ll put a stop to that, Nellie. Good-bye. Enjoy yourself. And you talk over that plan of ours with Mr. Morris and decide whether you want a bungalow or an automobile.

Helen and Maxwell

Good-bye.

(They go out. Ryan comes in from the dining room.)

Ryan

I guess that radiator’ll be all right now, Mr. Johnson. There was a lot of air in the pipe and the265 valve was rusted tight, so I had a little trouble loosening it up.

(He starts out.)

Maxwell (frowning and looking at the floor)

Wait a minute, Ryan. I want to talk to you about something. (Ryan comes toward him and stands waiting.) Ryan, I hear—don’t you think—er—will you have a cigar?

Ryan

Why, yes, thanks.

(Maxwell goes into the dining room and brings out a humidor. He places it by the lamp on the table and opens it. Both men take cigars and light them.)

Maxwell

Ryan, what I want to talk to you about is the way in which you—it’s about what I hear about the way you—Sit down, sit down!

(He sits on the chaise-longue and Ryan, looking somewhat puzzled, sits on a chair on the other side of the table.)

Ryan

What was it you want to see me about, Mr. Johnson? Any complaint?

266

Maxwell

Oh, no, not at all! Or, rather, yes, I have a complaint. It’s rather a hard thing. I must say I’m surprised to hear about the way you treat your wife.

Ryan (rising from his chair)

What are you trying to give me? You mind—

Maxwell

Now, that’s all right, Ryan; I’m not trying to start anything. I’ve lived in this apartment for five years and you know me. But they’ve been telling me that you don’t treat your wife right, and I thought I’d tell you about it.

Ryan

Anybody that told you that, Mr. Johnson, is a liar, I don’t care if it’s man, woman or child.

Maxwell

Now, Ryan, will you just listen to me for a minute? This thing was sort of put up to me, and I’ve got to do it. Probably these people are all wrong. Just sit down and talk to me a minute. Have a drink?

Ryan (sulkily, sitting down again)

Yes, thanks. (Maxwell brings in from the dining267 room a bottle, a siphon and two glasses.) Ain’t you got any ice?

Maxwell

Oh, yes, that’s right.

(He goes into the dining room again and comes back with a plate of cracked ice. Meanwhile Ryan pockets several cigars and pours a generous portion of whiskey into the glasses. Maxwell sits down again, and as the men talk they drink, refilling their glasses from time to time.)

Ryan

Now just what did these fresh guys say about me, Mr. Johnson? You know there’s such a thing as a libel law in these here United States.

Maxwell

Well, I’ll tell you, Ryan. I don’t know whether there’s anything in it or not, and these people may have it all wrong, but they said that you were treating Mrs. Ryan very badly.

Ryan

I beat her up, I suppose?

Maxwell

No, they didn’t say anything like that. It’s this268 way, Ryan: These people are making a sort of special study of people that work hard for a living, and they say—I don’t know whether they’re right or not—that you’re not treating Mrs. Ryan right to make her work so hard and have so many children and all that sort of thing.

Ryan

Mr. Johnson, if any man but you was talking to me like that, I’d knock his block off, the big boob! Why, whose business is it how many children I have? What do they expect she’s going to do? Lie on a couch an’ have me bring her ice cream all day long? I been married thirteen years next month, an’ if anybody wants to know how I treat my wife I refer them to her, I do.

Maxwell

Well, Ryan, as I said, I’m inclined to think that these people that were talking to me were a bit hasty. But see here; listen to me a minute. These people want to do you a good turn. You’ll admit, I suppose, that it isn’t the finest life in the world for Mrs. Ryan to be staying down there in the basement all day and all night washing clothes and cooking meals and tending to the children. She’s sick every now and then, isn’t she?

269

Ryan

Now and then.

Maxwell

Well, the idea is this: These people are what they call philanthropists—that is, they’re trying to make the world better, to make people happier. Now, they’ve built a very nice tenement house; it’s called a model tenement; it’s almost as good an apartment house to live in as this one. What they say is, that you can put Mrs. Ryan there, in a nice suite of rooms, with hot and cold water and a bathroom and electric light and everything for very little money—say five dollars a week. You can come there to sleep nights and you can get your breakfast and supper there with her in what they call the community dining room. You see, they do all the cooking for you and charge you just what the food costs for the meals. Your wife won’t have any more cooking to do, and they’ll give you better meals in that dining room than you’ve ever had before, believe me.

Ryan

I see. What about the washing?

Maxwell

Well, they have a big laundry in the place and do270 all your washing for you for about half what a regular laundry would cost you. That sounds like a pretty good thing, doesn’t it?

Ryan

A pretty good thing, and I suppose there’s nursemaids and governesses for all the children, too, hey?

Maxwell

Why, as a matter of fact there are—but not exactly in the way you mean. You see, they run a sort of a boarding school, too, the people that run this model tenement do, and they take care of all the children there—keep ’em night and day, feed ’em and dress ’em and teach ’em trades and all that sort of thing. They let them come to see you on Sunday, but you’re relieved of all responsibility and your wife of all the trouble.

Ryan

I see. But what’s to become of my job when I’m going off to this here model tenement to sleep nights? Don’t you know that a janitor has to sleep in the building he’s taking care of?

Maxwell

Well, you’re not in love with your job, are you? You’d be willing to do some other work where there271 was a chance of advancement and better pay, wouldn’t you?

Ryan

Sure I would. Where am I going to get it?

Maxwell

Why, as to that, I guess Mr. Morris or I could get you a job somewhere. You’re a big husky fellow and pretty steady, I know. I could get you a job in the shipping department of a factory I am interested in, if you wanted it.

Ryan

What would the hours be?

Maxwell (laughing)

Why, you’re going pretty fast, Ryan. I don’t know just what the hours would be yet, but I suppose they’d be from half past eight to six or something like that. That’s easier than your hours now, isn’t it?

Ryan

Much easier. Now, what has all this got to do with my wife having too many children?

Maxwell

Why, these people think that Mrs. Ryan has had too many children. Some of these people are doctors,272 and they say it’s bad for a woman’s health to have so many children.

Ryan

I see. Well, what would you like to have me do about it?

Maxwell

About the model tenement?

Ryan

No, about my wife having any more children.

Maxwell

Well, you know—you see I’m not—what they think is— Oh, damn it, I don’t know about this part of the thing, Ryan. It’s out of my line. I’m not a philanthropist. I’m just talking for these people because they know I know you. About that question you’ll have to talk to Mrs. Dannenberg or Mr. Morris.

Ryan

Mr. Morris—he’s the little guy that was standing on a chair when I came in to-night, ain’t he?

Maxwell

Yes.

Ryan

Is he a doctor?

273

Maxwell

No, I don’t think he is.

Ryan

He came into my place the other day selling some sort of a little doctor book.

Maxwell

I know; he does that because he’s a philanthropist.

Ryan

Do people make a living by being philanthropists?

Maxwell

No—well, as a matter of fact, many people do make a pretty fat living out of it, but Mr. Morris doesn’t. He’s a sculptor—a man that makes statues, you know.

Ryan

Oh, I know what a sculptor is, all right. What statues did Mr. Morris make?

Maxwell

Why, he made that statue over in the corner, for one thing.

(Ryan goes over and examines the purple statue.)

274

Ryan

Do you like this statue, Mr. Johnson?

Maxwell (laughing)

I’m not a judge of such things, Ryan. But people who know about art say that it’s very good indeed.

Ryan

Is it a good likeness?

Maxwell

It’s not supposed to be a portrait; it’s a sort of a fancy statue. It represents the “Emancipation of Woman”—woman freed, you know.

Ryan

Freed from what?

Maxwell

Why, from overwork, and excessive child-bearing and all that sort of thing, you know.

Ryan

Well, that lady’s freed from child-bearing, all right. She’s perfectly safe on that score. (He goes back to his chair and pours out another drink.) But now let’s get back to your friends’ proposition.275 I’m to get a day job and come home nights—is that right?

Maxwell

That’s right.

Ryan

The children are taken off my wife’s hands, and she doesn’t have to do any more cooking or washing or anything, hey?

Maxwell

That’s it, Ryan.

Ryan

And the place we’d live would be pretty much like this apartment, would it?

Maxwell

Just as comfortable, at any rate.

Ryan

My wife would have no work to do; I’d work in the daytime and come home nights—there’d be no kids to take care of—it would be pretty much like the life that you and your wife have, wouldn’t it, Mr. Johnson?

Maxwell

Ah—why, yes, Ryan, pretty much the same. What do you think of the proposition?

276

Ryan

Well, I’ll tell you. Of course I wouldn’t like to have the children go away—though they are a lot of trouble—but I suppose they’d be better taken care of than we could do, so, if that was all there was to it, I’d say go ahead. And it’d be all right for me, too, if I was a bachelor. But it’s on account of my wife that I feel I’ve got to say, “Excuse me!”

Maxwell

Why, you don’t begrudge your wife a little rest, do you, Ryan?

Ryan

Would I begrudge the old woman a little rest? Yes, by God, I would, if a little rest meant having nothing to do all day except sit around and talk to her friends and run around town. It’s just on that account that I say nix to your whole proposition. Now you think I’m a slave driver, I suppose. Well, I ain’t, Mr. Johnson, but I’ve lived with a woman thirteen years, and what I’m telling you I didn’t get out of no books—it’s facts!

Listen, Mr. Johnson. What you want us to do is to live just the sort of life that you and your wife live—no children to take care of, no washing nor cooking nor nothing. Well, what I say is, excuse277 me! That may be all right for you and your wife—she don’t need no housework nor children nor nothing to keep her busy. Her time is full of all sorts of useful things—I know that. (Maxwell stirs uneasily and looks at the floor.) But with Annie, my wife, it’s a different proposition altogether. She’s one of them women—and there’s a lot more of them than you think—that can’t stand living in a nice regular apartment with nothing to do. I know because we tried it when we was first married. It’s like what the old fellow said: “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do”!

Maxwell

True enough! And—

Ryan

Listen, Mr. Johnson. When we was first married, Annie was one of these here idle hands they tell of. She was an idle hand for three years, and Satan, as the old fellow said, certainly found some mischief for her to do. Not anything real bad—there’s no real harm in Annie—but it was mischief all right. For the first three years we was living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn. I wasn’t a janitor, then; I was driving a truck. I was out all day and278 I got home every night at six or seven o’clock. All Annie has to do is to get my breakfast and supper and keep the place clean. Does she do it? Sure she does, for the first four or five weeks! Then she gets to making friends with other women in the building and going out to matinees and vaudeville and all that sort of thing. That’s all right—I can afford it—I don’t care if she has a good time; but then what does she do? I give her two dollars in the morning to go out and buy a good supper for me when I come home. I come home and she ain’t in yet, and the lady in the next flat gives me the groceries that she’s sent home. And what is they? A little chipped beef and a box of Saratoga chips and some baker’s bread. About fifty-cent’s worth. When she gets home I ask her where she’s been. Why, Mrs. Eindorfer has took her to a spiritualist meeting, and she’s spent the rest of that money to look into a glass ball or have her fortune told or some such foolishness.

Now this goes on for nearly three years. It ain’t all spiritualists’ meetings; it’s all sorts of things. She makes all sorts of friends, women and men, too; I had to beat a couple of ’em up. The flat wasn’t kept up; I run into debt; my meals wasn’t cooked right or on time, and Annie was half sick all the279 time just from running around entertaining herself. I ain’t blaming her. She wasn’t to blame. And what was to blame? The apartment house was to blame. When Peter was born, after we’d been married three years, and I gave up trucking and moved out of that apartment house and got a job as janitor, everything was all right. And everything’s been all right ever since.

Maxwell (thoughtfully)

And the apartment house was to blame?

Ryan

Believe me, Mr. Johnson, the only part of an apartment house to live in is the basement, where you can have a regular home. I been a janitor for ten years, and I seen these apartment houses do queer things to families. They don’t seem to have no children when they live in apartment houses, that’s one thing. And there ain’t no coal to bring up and the washing goes out, and there ain’t nothing for them to do but just make fools of themselves. And sometimes there’s a good many divorces been caused by these here apartment houses. And there’d be a good many more divorces if a lot of husbands knew what went on when they was downtown at business.

280

Understand me, Mr. Johnson. I don’t mean you and your wife at all. You ain’t that sort of people, but what I do say is for my wife, and for a lot of women with more education and more money than she’s got, the only sort of life is doing housework and taking care of children all day long. So Annie and me will stay down in the basement, much obliged to you, unless we go out of New York to live in a little house in the country sometime. And Annie’ll have just as much work to do there. She’s one of them women that wasn’t meant to be idle. And now I guess I’ll go downstairs.

(He rises and goes toward the door. Maxwell sits silent for a moment and then rises a little unsteadily. He holds out his hand to Ryan for a second and then drops it and starts.)

Maxwell

Ryan, I—er—why, I guess you’re right, after all. I’ll tell my friends what you said.

Ryan

All right. No hard feelings, I hope.

Maxwell

Not at all; that’s all right. Good night, Ryan.

281

Ryan

Good night, Mr. Johnson.

(He goes out.)

Maxwell

There’s a man that’s master in his own home, at any rate. (He lights a cigar and walks around the room with his hands in his trousers pockets, coming to a halt in front of the purple statue. He looks at it reflectively.) Satan finds some mischief still—(A pause)—for idle hands to do. For idle hands to do. For idle hands to do. For idle hands—

(The doorbell is rung violently. Maxwell starts and runs out into the hall. He returns with Helen, who is very much out of breath. As she runs into the room the combs drop from her hair, which falls over her face and shoulders. She throws herself on the chaise-longue. Maxwell sits beside her and tries to push her hair back from her face.)

Nellie! What’s the matter?

(Helen sobs without answering.)

Helen

It’s those nasty Martins and that nasty policeman and that nasty Lionel Morris.

(The bell rings again. Maxwell goes to the door and admits Lionel.)

282

Lionel

Oh, I’m awfully glad you got back all right, Miss White. I jumped into a taxi as soon as that brute of a policeman came, and then I met all the rest of the crowd at the studio and everybody said, “Where’s Miss White?” So I came right up here to find out if you’d got home.

Maxwell

For God’s sake, will somebody tell me what’s happened?

Lionel (sitting on the pianola bench)

Why, you see—

Helen

Be still. You see, Max, we were all at the Mortons’ studio, and Adrian Wolfe made a speech about those nasty striking miners in California or wherever it is that everybody is wearing mourning for and parading and all that and this—and Mr. Morris said: “Let’s walk up to Union Square and hold an open air meeting to protest.” So we went up there and I made a speech and there was a crowd and I saw a policeman there, but I thought it would be all right, and then Mr. Morris made a speech and he said something about trampling on a bloodstained flag, and the policeman told him to stop, and283 he called the policeman a myrmidon, and some more policemen came and broke up the meeting, and he ran away and wouldn’t help me; and I ran down into the subway, and I don’t see how he dares show his face in here!

Maxwell

I’ll talk to him presently, but quiet down a little. You’d better go in your room and fix up your hair.

(Helen rises to go out. She stops in the doorway and turns to Maxwell.)

Helen

I won’t go to that nasty Amaranth this summer, Maxwell.

Maxwell

No, you won’t go to Amaranth.

Helen

Then will you get an automobile?

Maxwell

No, I won’t get an automobile.

Helen

Then what—

Maxwell

I am going to take that two thousand dollars and buy, with the assistance of the building and loan284 association, a small house in a city called Joplin, in the State of Missouri. It will not be a large house, but I think that you will not find the time hanging heavy on your hands. My brother has a wholesale grocery there, and I dare say he will take me into the business, especially as I have a little money to invest. And I’ll come home to luncheon every day. Missouri is a fertile State. My brother has six children.

Lionel

But, Miss White—Mr. Johnson!

(Helen goes down the hall to her room. Maxwell walks up to Lionel.)

Maxwell

My wife’s name is not Miss White but Mrs. Johnson—Mrs. Maxwell Johnson, of Joplin, Missouri. Get that? Do you know what keeps me from dropping you down the elevator shaft?

Lionel

What—what do you mean?

Maxwell

It’s the janitor. Yes, Ryan, the fellow down in the basement with nine children that you and Mrs. What’s-her-name wanted to segregate. He told me285 all about you to-night. You’re nothing but a by-product! The apartment house is the real devil in this pretty little play—the apartment house is responsible for Feminism and Socialism and Anarchism and Eugenics and pups like you. You’re just a sort of bad substitute for the movies—that’s all you are. The apartment house breeds the whole bunch of you—the apartment house and its artificial, lazy, good-for-nothing life.

(Lionel starts toward the door hurriedly, but stops as if shot when the telephone bell rings close to his ear. He comes back into the room and Maxwell goes to the telephone.)

Maxwell

Hello!... What’s that?... Yes, this is Mr. Johnson.... No, I don’t think so. Hold the wire and I’ll see. (With his hand over the transmitter he looks into the room.) Nellie!

Helen (coming into the living room with her hair in a long braid, wearing a blue tea gown)

Yes, Max?

Maxwell

What is your name?

Helen

Why, Helen, of course, stupid.

286

Maxwell

Helen what?

Helen

Helen Johnson.

Maxwell

Not Miss Helen White?

Helen

No! No! No!

Maxwell (smiling)

Well, that’s all right, then. There’s a cop down-stairs with a warrant for the arrest of a Miss Helen White and a Mr. Lionel Morris, charged with making incendiary speeches in Union Square. They think that Morris’s taxicab stopped at this building, and the policeman is going through all the apartments. He’ll be here in a minute. (In the receiver.) All right, Sam, it’s all right. Thanks for tipping me off. (Maxwell reënters the room and sits on the pianola bench. Helen reclines, with some dignity, on the chaise-longue. Lionel crouches behind the purple statue.)

Maxwell (meditatively)

Satan finds some mischief still—

287

Helen

What are you saying, Max?

Maxwell

Oh, I was just thinking of the janitor. I had quite a talk with him after you left.

(The doorbell rings, and Maxwell admits a large policeman.)

Policeman

Excuse me, sir; it’s just a matter of form. I’m looking for a couple of them Anarchist-Suffrage-I. W. W. bugs. It’s just a matter of form. The man’s name is Lionel Morris and the woman’s name is Helen White. Are you Lionel Morris?

Maxwell

No; my name is Maxwell Johnson. The janitor knows me, and so do a lot of people in the building.

Policeman

Thank you, sir. It’s just a matter of form. Now, madam—it’s just a matter of form—are you Helen White?

Helen

No, I am not Helen White. I am Mrs. Maxwell Johnson.

288

Policeman

Thank you, madam, thank you; it’s just a matter of form. You see these parties is incendiaries; they called me a mermaiden. Now, just two more questions—it’s just a matter of form: Is Miss Helen White here?

Helen

No, Helen White is not here.

Maxwell

And I’m glad she isn’t here, officer.

Policeman

You may well be that, sir; you may well be that. Now, is Lionel Morris here?

(There is a pause, during which the purple statue shakes slightly.)

Maxwell

Well, what do you think about it, officer? Take a look around the place. Want to look in the dumb waiter or down the kitchen sink?

Policeman

Oh, I know he’s not here, Mr. Johnson, and I’m sorry to have troubled you. Much obliged to you. Good night, sir.

289

Maxwell

Have a drink before you go?

Policeman

Well, I hadn’t ought to, but I guess I will, thanks.

(Helen pours the whiskey and Maxwell and the policeman lift their glasses.)

Policeman

Well, here’s how, sir.

Maxwell

Here’s Joplin!

Helen

Oh, I’ll drink that.

(She takes a sip from Maxwell’s glass.)

Policeman

What’s that, something new?

Maxwell

No, it’s old as Adam and Eve.

Policeman

Well, it’s a new one on me. Thank you, sir. Good night.

Maxwell

Good night. (The policeman goes out. After290 the door slams shut, Lionel stands up, but remains behind the purple statue.) Hadn’t you better go to some other apartment house? The cop’s gone down the elevator. He’ll be gone by the time you get downstairs. (Lionel goes out and as he turns he brushes against the purple statue, which topples on its pedestal. He bangs the door shut after him violently, and the statue falls to the floor and breaks into several pieces. Maxwell and Helen look at it for a moment and then turn to each other and laugh.)

Helen

Oh, look what’s happened to the “Emancipation of Woman”!

CURTAIN

Sergeant Joyce Kilmer Frontispiece
	PAGE
Joyce Kilmer, Age 5	120
Joyce Kilmer’s Grave	222

	PAGE
ESSAYS
Holy Ireland	11
The Gentle Art of Christmas Giving	26
A Bouquet for Jenny	39
The Inefficient Library	49
The Poetry of Hilaire Belloc	62
The Catholic Poets of Belgium	78
LETTERS
To Charles Willis Thompson	101
To Shaemas O’Sheel	101
To Louis Bevier, Jr.	103
To Sara Teasdale Filsinger	104
To Katherine Brégy	105
To Amelia Josephine Burr	107
To Howard W. Cook	108
To Thomas Walsh	111
To Robert Cortes Holliday	114
To Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J.	116
To Reverend James J. Daly, S.J.	119
To His Mother	144
To Kenton Kilmer	163
To Deborah Kilmer	165
To His Wife	166
MISCELLANEOUS PIECES
A Ballad of New Sins	227
War Songs	230
“Try a Tin To-Day:” A Short Story	233
Some Mischief Still: A Play in One Act	252

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Joyce Kilmer

JOYCE KILMER POEMS, ESSAYS AND LETTERS IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME TWO: PROSE WORKS

CONTENTS—VOLUME TWO

ILLUSTRATIONS

ESSAYS

HOLY IRELAND

THE GENTLE ART OF CHRISTMAS GIVING

A BOUQUET FOR JENNY

THE INEFFICIENT LIBRARY

THE POETRY OF HILAIRE BELLOC

II

III

IV

V

THE CATHOLIC POETS OF BELGIUM

LETTERS

To Charles Willis Thompson

To Shaemas O’Sheel

To Louis Bevier, Jr.

To Sara Teasdale Filsinger

To Katherine Brégy

To Amelia Josephine Burr

To Howard W. Cook

To Thomas Walsh

To Robert Cortes Holliday

To Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J.

To Reverend James J. Daly, S.J.

To Mrs. Kilburn Kilmer

To Kenton Kilmer

To Kenton Kilmer

To Deborah Kilmer

To Mrs. Joyce Kilmer

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES

A BALLAD OF NEW SINS

Prelude

I THE SIN OF SOUTH BEND

II THE WICKEDNESS OF WASHINGTON

III THE IMMORALITY OF INDIANAPOLIS

WAR SONGS

I—Water-colour

II—Breakfast

“TRY A TIN TO-DAY”

II

III

IV

SOME MISCHIEF STILL

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

JOYCE KILMER
POEMS, ESSAYS
AND LETTERS
IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME TWO: PROSE WORKS

I
THE SIN OF SOUTH BEND

II
THE WICKEDNESS OF WASHINGTON

III
THE IMMORALITY OF INDIANAPOLIS