Journeys to Bagdad | Page 5

have gone from the boathouse to a certain little white building across the road to gratify your hot desires. When you opened the door, your contemptible person--I speak with the vocabulary of a sophomore--is proclaimed to all within by the jangling of a bell. After due interval wherein you busy yourself in an inspection of the cakes and buns that beam upon you from a show-case--your nose meanwhile being pressed close against the glass for any slight blemish that might deflect your decision (for a currant in the dough often raises an unsavory suspicion and you'll squint to make the matter sure)--there will appear through a back door a little old man to minister unto you. You will give no great time to the naming of your drink--for the fires are hot in you--but will take your bottle to a table. The braver spirits among you will scorn glasses as effeminate and will gulp the liquor straight from the bottle with what wickedest bravado you can muster.
Now it is likely that you have done this with a swagger and have called your servitor "old top" or other playful name. Mark your mistake! You were in the presence, if you but knew it, of a real author, not a tyro fumbling for self-expression, but a man with thirty serials to his credit. Shall I name the periodical? It was the Golden Hours, I think. Ginger-beer and jangling bells were but a fringe upon his darker purpose. His desk was somewhere in the back of the house, and there he would rise to all the fury of a South-Sea wreck--for his genius lay in the broader effects. Even while we simpletons jested feebly and practiced drinking with the open throat--which we esteemed would be of service when we had progressed to the heavier art of drinking real beer--even as we munched upon his ginger cakes, he had left us and was exterminating an army corps in the back room. He was a little man, pale and stooped, but with a genius for truantry--a pilgrim of the Bagdad road.
But we move on too high a plane. Most of us are admitted into truantry by the accidents, merely, of our senses. By way of instance, the sniff of a rotten apple will set a man off as on seven-league boots to the valleys of his childhood. The dry rustling of November leaves re-lights the fires of youth. It was only this afternoon that so slight a circumstance as a ray of light flashing in my eye provided me an agreeable and unexpected truantry. It sent me climbing the mountains of the North and in no less company than that of Brunhilda and a troop of Valkyrs.
It is likely enough that none of you have heard of Long Street. As far as I am aware it is not known to general fame. It is typically a back street of the business of a city, that is, the ventages of its buildings are darkened most often by packing cases and bales. Behind these ventages are metal shoots. To one uninitiated in the ways of commerce it would appear that these openings were patterned for the multiform enactment of an Amy Robsart tragedy, with such devilish deceit are the shoots laid up against the openings. First the teamster teeters and cajoles the box to the edge of the dray, then, with a sudden push, he throws it off down the shoot, from which it disappears with a booming sound. As I recall it was by some such treachery that Amy Robsart met her death. Be that as it may, all day long great drays go by with Earls of Leicester on their lofty seats, prevailing on their horses with stout, Elizabethan language. If there comes a tangle in the traffic it is then especially that you will hear a largeness of speech as of spacious and heroic days.
During the meaner hours of daylight it is my privilege to occupy a desk and chair at a window that overlooks this street. Of the details of my activity I shall make no mention, such level being far below the flight of these enfranchised hours of night wherein I write. But in the pauses of this activity I see below me wagon loads of nails go by and wagon loads of hammers hard after, to get a crack at them. Then there will be a truck of saws, as though the planking of the world yearned toward amputation. Or maybe, at a guess, ten thousand rat-traps will move on down the street. It's sure they take us for Hamelin Town, and are eager to lay their ambushment. There is something rather stirring in such prodigious marshaling, but I hear you ask what this has to do with truantry.
It was near