Walking-Stick Papers | Page 4

the more attached is he to his cane. Canes are indispensable to
the simple vanity of the Bohemian. One of the most memorable

drawings of Steinlen depicts the quaint soul of a child of the Latin
Quarter: an elderly Bohemian, very much frayed, advances wreathed in
the sunshine of his boutonniere and cane. Canes are invariably an
accompaniment of learning. Sylvester Bonnard would of course not be
without his cane; nor would any other true book-worm, as may be seen
any day in the reading-room of the British Museum and of the New
York Public Library. It is, indeed, indisputable that canes, more than
any other article of dress, are peculiarly related to the mind. There is an
old book-seller on Fourth Avenue whose clothes when he dies, like the
boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be pried loose from
him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory of man. None
has ever looked upon him in the open air without his cane. And is not
that emblem of omniscience and authority, the schoolmaster's ferule,
directly of the cane family? So large has the cane loomed in the matter
of chastisement that the word cane has become a verb, to cane.
There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine),
a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a
flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had lived a portion of his life in
South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant afternoon up
and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed, steel-ferruled
swagger-stick. "What's the use of carrying that ridiculous thing around
town?" some one said to him one day.
"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men),
"why, that's to stab scorpions with."
They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his
cane.
"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day,
"was advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men. Surgeon William
J. McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover,
and himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross
flag on his walking-stick."
Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and
colourful chapters in the history of canes. "The officers picked up their

canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth. Captain A.
Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme,
shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane. As an emblem
of rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword.
Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our
streets undoubtedly is due to their canes. One never sees a British,
French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane.
We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales
without a cane as without a leg. With our own soldiers the cane does
not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here. I have a friend,
however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder. The
other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and,
perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and
with a cane in his hand. It is also to be observed now and then that a
lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military
touch to swing a cane.
Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the cane.
The shepherdess's crook might be regarded as the precursor of canes
for ladies. In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole flourished
it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses and
grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and
knotted with a bow of ribbon. The dowager duchess of romantic story
has always appeared leaning upon her cane. Do not we so see the rich
aunt of Hawden Crawley? And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe,
certainly, was supported in her domination of the old order of things by
a cane. The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or
a corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.
In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks--in the
country. And here the thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes a
nice point. It is not etiquette, according to English manners, for a
woman to carry a cane in town. Some American ladies who admire and
would emulate English customs have not been made acquainted with
this delicate nuance of taste, and so are very