Journeys to Bagdad | Page 5

to have been a freshman at Yale some eighteen years
ago and were at all addicted to canoeing on Lake Whitney, and if,
moreover, on coming off the lake there burned in you a thirst for
ginger-beer--as is common in the gullet of a freshman--doubtless you
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