Sharp-eyed readers will notice that this comic is called “Birdseye Corners” and not “Birdseye Center”. There was still a transition time between 1925 and 1927 where the name switched between “Life’s Little Comedies” and “Birdseye Center”. It was mostly “Birdseye Center” in 1927, except for this brief period in March and April 1927 where is was “Birdseye Corners”.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 13, 1943.
“How do you like my new hat?” inquired Jimmie Frise, setting his new kelly at a jaunty angle.
“Not bad, not bad,” I admitted. “How do you like mine?”
“Your hats always look the same,” said Jim, “so excuse me not noticing it. Mine’s English.”
“English?” I protested. “Where on earth would you get an English hat nowadays?”
“How do you mean?” inquired Jim.
“Don’t tell me,” I exclaimed, “that they are still making hats in England.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake,’ cried Jimmie, “what do you suppose they’re doing in England? You must be listening to Herr Goebbels on your short-wave radio. You must think England is in ruins. Of course they’re making hats in England. And you can still buy English hats and English clothes and English boots and pretty nearly everything else that is useful not only in Toronto but in New York and Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. In fact, wherever convoys come from, convoys go to. You don’t suppose all those convoys of merchant ships you see in the newsreels are one-way traffic, do you?”
“Well, yes,” I muttered, a little confused, “as a matter of fact, I did think of it as one-way traffic. I guess most people do.”
“That just shows you,” declared Jimmie, “the pity of propaganda. We have to have propaganda, the same as we have to have guns in wartime. But it certainly pulls us all out of shape. So ardently have we swallowed the propaganda about Britain’s war factories that we have unconsciously taken it for granted that all other factories in Britain have simply closed up.”
“I can’t get fishing tackle any more from Britain,” I pointed out.
“Well, naturally,” explained Jim. “For two reasons. One, they aren’t wasting any metal by exporting it. Two, the factories that could make fishing tackle could easily make parts for aircraft, weapons, and so forth. But there are hundreds of factories that don’t fit into war production and hundreds more that, while mainly engaged on war contracts, have plenty of by-products for sale. And above all is the practical consideration of having thousands of ships going away empty from Britain. Good old Britain! She has not only been taking a terrific mauling from Europe. She has not only been taking a bloody nose in her ill-manned outposts of Empire…”
“As the Americans have,” I reminded.
“… but,” concluded Jim, “she has time to figure out that it is bad business to have ships going away empty from her shores. So, despite all her other worries, she has contrived to organize industry so that the ships from America and South America and Africa and all the rest of the places convoys come from do not go home again empty-handed.”
Hats Off to Them
“By golly,” I admitted, “they’re a great people.”
“Where I got this hat,” said Jimmie, “they said they were only allowed 15 per cent. of the dollar volume of hats they normally got in peace-time from Britain. It’s a big department store. But they told me that in their own big store, in the main lines of merchandise, they still imported over one-third of their normal peace-time imports from Britain.”
“No?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” declared Jim. “One-third is still coming, regular as clockwork. First, textiles, mostly woollen, cotton and rayon. Second in volume, pottery. Third, linens from Ireland and Scotland. When we were arguing, the merchandise manager happened along and said that while this big store was getting about a third of their normal pre-war volume, he thought that, across Canada as a whole, it would be more like one-fifth the normal import from Britain was still coming in.”
“Why, that’s amazing,” I cried. “I had no idea.”
“Well, the next time you see a convoy newsreel,” said Jim, “you can think to yourself whether it is going or coming. Because one route is as important as the other. If a ship goes down coming, it can’t go back.”
“More power to them,” I asserted. “They’re a great people. It is 125 years since the last of my forebears left Scotland. Except for a few English, Irish and Scotch who have sneaked in and married into my family when we weren’t looking, we have had no connection with the Old Country for a century and a quarter at the latest. And most of my forebears came out nearly 200 years back. So any sentiments I have about Britain are, you might say, purely sentimental. But I say, hats off to them.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Jim, whose ancestors are French and Scotch a long way, farther back in Canada than mine. “Because I’ve often heard you cussing the English,”
“Not the English,” I protested hotly. “I love the English people. I have been to England dozens of times in my life. I’ve spent months and months of my life wandering in the English country, among the villages, walking, bird watching, shooting and fishing. I’ve got the truest sentiments towards the plain people of England. The trouble is, I dislike too many Englishmen.”
“You love the English,” scoffed Jimmie, “but you dislike too many Englishmen!”
“Well, that’s possible, isn’t it?” I demanded. “Until the tourist traffic from the States got so big in recent years, we used to dislike too many Americans, didn’t we? That was because the main body of visitors from the States were salesmen and rich folk. What is the characteristic of salesmen? Are they quiet, modest, retiring folk? Not them. They are lively, pushful, energetic, breezy, noisy, penetrative. Their job is break down resistance and sell things. So, up until a few years ago, when the motor car brought us millions of average Americans and the motor car allowed us, in numbers, to visit the States, we thought Americans were all breezy, pushful, noisy, selling people.”
“By golly,” mused Jim.
“And what is the general characteristic of rich people?” I inquired. “A certain assurance, isn’t it? And doesn’t that certain assurance give plain folk the impression of arrogance?”
“H’m,” said Jim.
“Well, what was true about Americans, until we found out better,” I suggested, “is probably true of Englishmen. Nothing like the invasion of Americans in Canada has occurred with the English. So it is probable the English who come out to Canada have largely been those with a job in hand. Or the well-to-do. Their character and their manners, for example, bear little resemblance to those of the people of England as a whole. If there is anything drives me nuts, for instance, it is an official Englishman.”
“Psst,” warned Jimmie. “This is wartime. Watch out for colonels and generals.”
“But also,” I painted out. “I am also driven nuts by a professional Irishman, if you know what I mean. One of those Irishmen who tries to be like the Irishman of fiction, stage and screen. I also am driven slightly bugs by a Scotchman who feels it necessary to be forever dour and glum and who makes a point of speaking with the thickest possible burr.”
“H’m,” smiled Jimmie. “And what kind of Canadian gives you a pain?”
“To tell the truth, Jim,” I said humbly, “when I was not quite 30, I learned to shave in the morning without a mirror.”
“Ah, well,” said Jim, “if you don’t set Canadians up as the ideal.”
Made in England
“Jim,” I assured him, “I love the American people, but it took me time to find it out. I love the British people, but I still reserve the right to object to individuals who, because England is an old nation, founded on aristocracy and organized on a system of respecting their betters, try to get by in the world by pretending they are better than they are. If respect for one’s betters is fundamental of the system, how natural that some of them should try to make yards in the game, especially among simple strangers like us, by pretending to be two rungs higher on their own ladder than they really are? The tragedy is, we have no such system; so all their airs, which wouldn’t survive five minutes in their own country, only make them appear silly to us.”
“That’s a curiously interesting explanation,” agreed Jim.
“A plain Englishman,” I stated, “whether he is a banker or a village poacher, is a lovely experience, either at home or abroad. But a roving Englishman, far away among a lot of heathen like us, putting on, for his own gain and amusement, the pretensions of being something different and something more than he really is and when you have been born and raised in a class system, that is a temptation we can’t quite appreciate – then you’ve got a pain in anybody’s neck.”
“But that is true of Canadians going to Britain,” pointed out Jim. “Aren’t there the same silly Canadians going over and giving the English a pain in the neck?”
“Quite,” I said. “Quite. But there are four times as many English to draw your saps from as there are Canadians. Our army in England can correct that impression in England, But we haven’t any English army in Canada to let us see what the true, hall-marked, genuine English are like.”
“Quite,” said Jimmie. “Quite.”
“Hey,” I said sharply. “Where do you get that ‘Quite, quite’ stuff? That English hat of yours has gone to your head.”
“Me!” cried Jim. “You said it first. You said ‘Quite’ twice, just a second ago.”
“I did not,” I exclaimed indignantly.
“You did so,” declared Jim. “And you said it very English, too. You said ‘quaite, quaite’.”
“I did not,” I snorted.
“Let’s see your hat,” said Jim shrewdly. I handed him my new hat, to take the place of one I lost quite recently in a motion picture theatre.
Jim examined inside the hat, and suddenly let out a yell.
“Why, this hat is made in England! Look.”
And sure enough, on the reverse side of the inner band, opposite the label of the store where I had bought it, were the small gilt words: “Made in England.”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” I said.
To Heck With Bickering
“Look,” said Jim. “To heck with all this bickering about the English and the Canadians and the Scotch and Americans. If we are going to be impressed only by what irritates us, we are never going to have any peace in our hearts, much less on earth.”
“Then,” I said, “hats off to the English. I love their green and pleasant land.”
“They stood in the gate for us,” said Jim. “Without them, we would now be under the dominion of Germany.”
“This sceptred isle,” I quoted,
“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea….
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm.
this England…“
“What is that?” inquired Jim huskily.
“Mr. Shakespeare,” I said, also huskily.
“It is 4 o’clock,” said Jim. “Look: I have two sticks, two walking sticks. We have these hats. Outside, the fine March breeze blows. Two blocks away is a little Tea Shoppe. Let us take our sticks. Let us go and walk in the March breeze. And drop in and have a spot of tea in a Tea Shoppe.”
“Dammit,” I cried, “I’m with you.”
So, with chins up and chests out, and swinging our sticks in the best British tradition, we stepped forth into the hale winds of March to remember England.
And just a few doors north from Jim’s, a gust of wind caught my new fine hat, Made in England, and lifted it merrily into the air and lodged it in the branches of a maple tree.
“What ho!” cried Jim heartily.
“Just a second,” I said, manoeuvring into position.
I threw my walking stick with unerring aim at the hat. It touched the hat but failed to dislodge it. And the stick, sliding artfully back amid the twigs, caught and hung.
“Just a second,” said Jim, also picking a good spot.
And he threw his stick, more, I believe, to release the stick stuck in the tree than my hat.
A Mixed-Up World
The stick slid amid the branches and then slowly started down, finally hanging within a foot of mine.
“Now,” I said irascibly.
And at that moment, a lady’s voice broke in. A very haughty English voice.
“Go away from there, you brutal men,” she said loudly.
Jimmie and I turned to her with astonishment. She was a ruddy English lady and fairly vivid with indignation.
“Go away at once,” she commanded, like a major-general, “or I shall call the authorities.”
Drawing myself up like a lieutenant-general, I demanded with an equally haughty air:
“Madam, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Leave that squiddle,” she commanded, “alone.”
“Squiddle?” inquired Jim anxiously.
“Oh, don’t pretend,” cried the lady, who had one of those middle-aged voices that crack on the high notes. “I saw you from my window. I saw you hurling sticks at that poor black squiddle.”
“Aw,” squurl!” cried Jim, comprehending.
Neither Jim or I had noticed the blasted squirrel in the tree. It was my hat and Jim’s sticks we were intent upon.
“Go away at once,” said the lady.
“Madam,” I said patiently, “my hat blew off and lodged in this tree. We have been throwing our sticks trying to dislodge it. Do we look like men who would throw a hat at a squiddle?”
“One never knows what to expect,” said the lady no less and no more ruddy, “in this country. I shall get you a laddaw.”
And she led us over to her side drive where she loaned us her ladder. And under her personal supervision, we erected the ladder and rescued my hat and both sticks. Then she superintended the return of the ladder to her side drive, all very authoritative and efficient.
And as we proceeded, with hats a little tighter on our heads, towards the Tea Shoppe, Jim said:
“There, you see? You can never go by appearances.”
“It is an extremely mixed-up world,” I submitted.
By Gregory Clark, March 13, 1920.
The descriptions of the opening of the Ontario Legislature that appeared in the daily newspapers were written for The General Public. The following description of that ceremony is written for The Man on the Street, and is therefore addressed–
Dear Bill-
To get a picture of the opening of the Legislature you must imagine yourself in a large and prosperous Presbyterian or Methodist church of the late Victorian style of church architecture and decoration.
The Chamber in Queen’s Park, has not an arched roof, and instead of pews it has little old-fashioned, leather-topped desks. But in all respects it suggests, on opening day, a church gathering.
This may be due to the preponderance of women, dressed in their Sunday clothes. Or to the ornate brass chandeliers hanging from the fancy ceiling. Or to the numerous high court judges, justices and such officials as Mr. Speaker and the sergeant-at-arms, who wear black flowing gowns and those white two-piece bibs, and who, therefore, can’t be distinguished from ministers of the Gospel.
It is like the induction of a new preacher. The downstairs part, known as the “floor of the House,” is absolutely jammed with women, who fidget and whose multi-colored garments bewilder the eye. The galleries on all four sides are steep, at an angle of about 60 degrees. And they, too, are jammed with moving, fluttering women.
Down the centre aisle is a very churchy strip of dark red carpet leading to the Speaker’s throne; you might say pulpit.
The air is stuffy. A subdued buzz of feminine conversation fills the wide room.
You expect to hear the pipe organ boom gently forth every moment.
Instead, from the vestry, or whatever the Parliamentary term is for the rooms behind the Speaker’s chair, emerge the wives of the Cabinet Ministers. Mrs. Glackmeyer1, wife of the sergeant-at-arms, welcomes each lady and escorts her to one of the front pews. The Ministers’ wives are thus placed in a conspicuous position, and the effect on the crowded congregation is precisely that of the arrival of the family of the new pastor at the induction service. Much rustling, much craning of necks and leaning forward and whispering among the rows and tiers of spectators.
A Burst of Applause
The church-like atmosphere is broken for a moment by the entry of Mrs. Drury2, wife of the new Prime Minister. She is greeted by a burst of applause. But the arrival of ten dignified judges and justices in their ministerial garb restores at once the churchy illusion.
Three o’clock draws nigh. You begin to worry. Here are these hundreds of ladies jammed into the members’ benches. There is hardly room for Mr. Glackmeyer, the sergeant-at-arms, to hurry up and tie down the aisle, in preparation — Why so many women? Fifteen of them to one man!
Then, the door at the far end from the Speaker’s throne swings wide and in strides a dapper lieutenant. Following is Mrs. Lionel Clarke, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, on the arm of Mr. Drury. The congregation Irises to its feet and applauds.
A moment of waiting, then the doors again swing wide, and up the purple carpet come the Lieutenant-Governor and the Prime Minister, again followed by a gorgeous array of generals, colonels and majors.
The House is on its feet. The ladies are thrilled. The craning, leaning. bobbing, rustling has grown furious.
Here the illusion of a church ceremony begins to fade.
The bevy of generals and colonels group themselves standing gracefully about the Speaker’s chair, in which sits the Lieutenant-Governor3. These doughty soldiers represent the majesty and force of the Government. They are all armed with swords, though it is safe to say, Bill, that these swords have never hurt anything yet, unless it was the wallpaper at home. General Sir Henry Pellatt, who was among the military escort, seems ill at ease. Does he fear for his liege, the Lieutenant-Governor, in this unprecedented assembly? Anyway, he tries seventeen different postures in the fifteen minutes he is in the chamber, first on one leg, then on the other; but not even the last one seems to suit, and he appears relieved when the Lieutenant-Governor leads the way out.
I was disappointed about the members. I thought we’d see some fun when the members arrived and found those hordes of women occupying their benches. But it appears that the members don’t sit in their proper places on opening day. They seclude themselves almost invisibly along the sidelines and behind pillars. Opening day is the ladies’ innings. When the Speaker calls for votes on some formal matter of ritual, he says-
“All in favor, say ‘Aye’!”
And you hear “Ayes” said shyly from all over the chamber. This immediately causes a great flurry among the spectators. For many of the ladies, who have been glaring at some impudent and insignificant male who has been trying to catch a glimpse of the proceedings, are horrified to hear him utter the “aye” of a member.
Not Much Punch in It
They talk about the ceremony still being observed, Bill, but it Is all very perfunctory and half-hearted. They seem to hustle it through, as if it embarrassed them. They don’t put any punch into it. You would see ten times the ceremony at any small-degree lodge meeting.
Nobody wears any regalia but the new Speaker, Mr. Parliament. And all he has on is the three-cornered black hat, the bib-and-tucker, the black, braided coat and Minister’s gown. You should have seen the expression on Mr. Tom Crawford, who was standing back in an obscure corner. Tom Crawford is not only an ex-Speaker of the Legislature, but a great Orangeman; and what he doesn’t know about ceremonial! Still, it wasn’t all the hustled ceremonial that brought the wistful expression to Mr. Crawford’s face.
The only other items of ceremonial are the great gold mace, which is a kind of a big club; the funny little sword worn on one pantleg by the old gentleman who carries the mace; and the business of having Mr. Clarke, the Lieutenant-Governor, solemnly march out of the room while the scattered members elect the Speaker, (which was all pre-arranged, anyway, as Mr. Parliament was all dressed up in those fancy clothes beforehand), and then solemnly return to the throne.
The only members in their desks were Premier Drury and Mr. Raney on the one side, and Mr. Dewart on the other. They carried on all the conversation, except the speech from the throne, which Mr. Clarke delivered.
It is all over in exactly one-half hour.
Then the session adjourns. A sneaky smell of coffee, tea and sandwiches has been creeping up into the Chamber the last few minutes, just as at a church social. When the adjournment is moved, the congregation rises, buzzes and files slowly in the direction of the smell.
A big part of the crowd, Bill, seemed to be present to size up the new Farmer-Labor Government. Some of them seemed disappointed when no breaches of urban etiquet were made. It is funny how the professional blatherskite class imagines no outsiders can engage in Government. There were several known has-beens scattered through of the House, whose faces betrayed a mixture of envy and curiosity. They grew pallid and limp as they searched in vain for one grain of hayseed, one wisp of straw, at which to grasp for conversational material for the next few weeks. But not one slip was made. The portrait of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie out in the corridor, cynical of expression enough, seemed to glow with unholy glee as the professionals filed dejectedly past him.
The Prime Minister was the most at ease of all the leading characters in the act. You could hear his voice clear, sharp-cut, and assured, while Mr. Dewart’s was high and muffled, and the others were indistinct.
Best-Dressed in House
And the lady spectators, many of whom were not members wives, but the usual representation of Toronto at this function, were a little taken back when the Ministers’ wives, with all ease and grace, took their place in the conspicuous centre of the scene. They were the best-dressed ladies in the House; not the most brilliant nor the most dazzling, but the most tasteful and dignified. What the Toronto ladies expected of the ladies of the U.F.O-Labor Government is hard to say. But by their neck-craning and staring, it appears they were taken aback.
Another item of interest, Bill, was the conduct of Mayor Church. Yes. he was there. He arrived at the main door just a moment before the entry of the Lieutenant-Governor. He didn’t get a hand, so I suppose his nerve left him, and he stayed by the door all the rest of the ceremony. The expression on his face as the gubernatorial party and escort of generals swept up the aisle with him on the side lines was rich. Here was a function at which he was merely a spectator. He must have felt strange. And it was a unique sight for Torontonians, too, after all these years. He was up by the throne the minute the session adjourned, but the crowd was too quick for him, and he only shook hands with fifteen or twenty.
The newspapers all talked about the “gowns” of the spectators. I counted one section of the House, and found 20 blouses. 11 suits and only three gowns.
But I think we’ll have to take a hand in this ceremonial business, Bill. If they are going to have ritual why not have it good? Take the bowing to the Lieutenant-Governor and Mr. Speaker, for instance, as they sit in the throne. Why, it would cause a scandal in our lodge. We’ll have to initiate some of these officials and show ’em what a real obeisance is like.
Editor’s Notes:
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 9, 1946.
“PFFTHFF,” said Frise.
“Which?” I inquired.
“Thipff,” said Jim. “Thoop! Something blew in my mouth. Felt like a pigeon feather or something…”
“Just a little soot,” I assured him. “There’s black on your lip.”
“Pffthff,” repeated Jimmie, wiping his mouth.
“Here, pay attention to your driving!” I warned. “You’re steering all over the street.”
“Well, if you had something blown in your mouth,” complained Jim, “you wouldn’t like it either.”
“Aw, just a flake of soot,” I submitted. “From one of the big factory chimneys.”
“It felt as big as a Plymouth Rock feather1,” said Jim, still wiping.
“You can’t be fussy,” I philosophized, “and live in cities. It’s a wonder more things don’t blow into our mouths. Worse than hen feathers.”
“Doubtless,” said Jim, winding up the car window, “we do have a lot of pretty gruesome things blown in our mouths and noses without ever knowing it. When you look at these city streets, in the month of March, with all the accumulated filth of four months of winter beginning to lie revealed, it makes you think, eh?”
“What careless, dirty, sloppy creatures human beings are,” I mused. “Tossing away cigarette butts, packages, candy wrappers. Airily flinging away on to the public domain, any junk they have no use for…”
“Look up there!” pointed Jim.
From the upstairs window of a house we were passing, a woman was leaning out and beating a large mop against the bricks, down wind. A trail of dust, hair, and other light debris floated in a cloud into the public air, and into whatever windows were down wind.
“We’re really,” I submitted, “not much advanced since the days of Queen Elizabeth, when everybody just opened the upstairs windows and dumped the sewage and the garbage out into the street. That was what gutters were for, in the old days.”.
“What’s the difference, actually,” added Jim, “between a lady of Tudor times dumping the slop pail out the upstairs window, and that lady back there beating out her mop into the open street?”
“Thipff,” I said. “Thpooie! Jim, do you see anything…?”
I leaned out so Jim could look at my mouth.
“I just felt something,” I said, “blow into my mouth then. Do you see any hair or wool or anything?”
Jim slowed the car and examined me.
“Just a little soot, by the look of it,” he said.
“Thank goodness,” I cried. “I half fancied I had caught something that woman was shaking out of her mop. Thpew! Fffptt!”
I got out my hankie and wiped off my tongue.
“In days to come2,” asserted Jim, “when public health and sanitation is as well looked after as it should be, these days we live in will be regarded with exactly the same horror with which we look back on Henry the Eighth’s time. When you think of our garbage wagons plodding up the windy streets, with the boys hoisting up those battered, ramshackle containers we know as garbage cans…”
“Leaving a trail behind them,” I cut in, “of little bits of garbage, dirt and filth along the streets, to be rolled over and squashed by traffic, to be ground into particles, to dry and be picked up by the breeze and wafted far and wide.”
“The city of the future,” declared Jimmie, “will supply the householder with official cartons, sanitary cartons, in which all refuse from sweepings to food waste will be placed and sealed. These sealed containers will be picked up every other day by travelling incinerators which will burn the refuse under intense electric heat…”
“Haw,” I snorted, “you mean atomic atomizers3. A neat little truck with a small quantity of atomic energy, which will consume the refuse so that not even any smoke or steam is injected into the public air.”
“We’ll Lose Our Smokes”
“The public air!” cried Jim. “What a perfect expression. The public air. Air is about the only thing that is truly public. You can’t confine it. Or if you do, it goes bad. It isn’t like land or water, which people can own or control. Air belongs to all men alike. And there ought to be some recognition of that fact. Anybody who pollutes the air should be taken in hand as a public enemy.”
“Well, when you toss a cigarette butt out the car window,” I submitted, “as you did just now, you are a public enemy. That cigarette butt is fragile, and the nearest thing to dust. In a few minutes, under the rush of this morning traffic, that cigarette will be ground under a car’s wheel and pulverized. The wisp of paper will float off in the breeze. The scattered little grains of tobacco will join the indescribable and complex mass of dirt and dust that swirls forever over the earth. Any germs from your mouth that might have adhered to the wet end of the butt will be set free to carry, infection…”
“I haven’t any infection!” protested Jimmie.
“How do you know?” I inquired. “It takes 48 hours for the infection of the common cold to assert itself in you. How do you know you haven’t got the mumps, quincy, croup, or even leprosy and don’t know it yet? But you tossed that cigarette butt out into the public air as cheerfully and thoughtlessly as that woman back there was beating out her dirty mop!”
“Cigarette butts are the least of our worries,” came back Jim. “It’s far worse things we should put our minds on.”
“No, Jim,” I countered. “We’ve got to start with ourselves. We’ve got to stop tossing cigarette butts into the public air before we begin trying to correct the offences of others.”
“Listen,” said Jim, slowing the car he could argue better, “if we start with cigarette butts, the next thing somebody is going to argue about is smoking4. They are going to say that it is a public offence to fill the public air with cigarette smoke. That is the thin edge of the wedge. Once you start reforming, somebody comes along with a better reform. We begin with cigarette butts. Somebody comes along and takes away our smokes.”
“Common sense is all I suggest,” I asserted. “It stands to reason a little tobacco smoke, puffed into the air and vanishing instantly, is far different thing from a wet, sticky cigarette butt flung out at random into the public domain.”
“Common sense,” decreed Jim, “does not enter into the realm of public affairs. If you are going into the reform business, I warn you, be very careful where you start.”
My eyes were caught, at that instant, by a startling spectacle. We had passed out of the residential district and were entering the downtown area. And from the tall chimney of a factory, right ahead of us, there suddenly billowed up the biggest, blackest, oiliest boil of smoke I ever saw. It was like an explosion of smoke. And it fairly wallowed out of the tall stack.
“Whoa, Jim!” I cried, seizing his arm. “Slow down! Just take a look at that smoke!”
Jim ran to the curb and stopped. We sat and gazed at the spectacle. Against the gray March sky, the jet black smoke poured almost like a liquid. In vast, fat coils, it rolled thickly, heavily. It created a giant smudge across the sky and dissipated itself slowly. The buildings beyond were blocked from view.
“For Pete’s sake!” breathed Jimmie.
“In this day and age,” I enunciated. “Talk about capitalistic insolence!”
“Why,” cried Jim, “that’s an absolute outrage. Fouling the air. Blackening the property for miles around. An injury not merely to the public health but to private property!! Something ought to be done!”
“The owner of that factory,” I declared hotly, “is the perfect example of the lawless adventurer. He could put a smoke abater on that chimney…”
“He doesn’t even need that,” interrupted Jim. “All he has to do is feed the furnace properly. A little coal at a time. Build up a fire, little by little, adding a little coal at a time. And the fire consumes the smoke.”
“Maybe it isn’t the capitalist’s fault at all,” I suggested. “Eh? Maybe it’s the fault of some lazy beggar of a fireman5. A proletariat.”
“Proletarian,” corrected Jim. “Some lazy proletarian who can’t be bothered attending a fire properly, but comes along once every few hours and dumps a whole load of coal on.”
“And wastes the best of the coal,” I agreed, “by sending it up the chimney in smoke!”
“Correct,” cried Jim. “What is all that black smoke coiling so oily into the air? It’s pure chemical gas, full of carbon and valuable heating elements, being wasted in the air.”
“Let’s Do Something!”
“A waste to his employer,” I summed up, “and an offence against the public. Jim! Let’s act. Enough of this talk. Let’s act!”
“How?” demanded Jim.
“Let’s go in,” I said, “and catch that fireman red-handed. Let’s drag him out to take a look at what he’s doing with that chimney. And then, let’s tell him a thing or two about wasting fuel and ruining the public health and damaging private property all around the neighborhood.”
Jim glanced at his watch.
“We should be at the office,” he said.
“It won’t take 10 minutes,” I protested. “Jim, if we have the public interest at heart, we’ve got to DO something about it. There are enough people willing to talk about it. Let us DO something!”
“First let us speak to the manager,” suggested Jim.
We drove down and parked opposite the factory. We walked across the street, dodging the morning business rush traffic, and entered the front office doorway.
There was only a secretary in view, taking off her hat.
The building was icy cold.
“Is the manager about?” I inquired.
“He won’t be down till around 10,” said the young lady, shivering and rubbing her hands.
“Is there a foreman or superintendent we could see?” suggested Jim.
“No,” said the young lady, “we aren’t back in production yet, you see? A skeleton staff comes on around 10 o’clock. We’re re- organizing the plant…”
“I’ll tell you,” I said very kindly, “we’re a committee of citizens interested in public health and such, things, see? And we noticed the awful clouds of smoke, terrible black smoke, coming from the smoke-stack of this factory.”
“I see,” said the young lady, drawing herself up very stiff.
“We don’t wish to make trouble, of course,” I added, “but if we could just see the fireman, whoever he is. The janitor?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t the authority,” said the young lady coldly.
“Still, you wouldn’t put anything in our way.” I submitted, “if we just dropped in and had a chat with the fireman? We wish merely to explain to him that he is not only creating a public nuisance, a public menace, but he is also wasting his employer’s fuel. If he stoked the fire a little at a…”
“Take that door to the left,” said the young lady, rubbing her hands and hunching up her shoulders.
The door led down a staircase to the basement. We could hear furnace sounds along the passage-way. And we walked along to the furnace-room where we discovered an elderly gent with a shovel patting ashes into ash cans.
The furnace was one of those old-fashioned monsters set in a pit.
“Good-day,” we said pleasantly.
“Good-day to you,” agreed the old boy, relaxing.
“Look,” I said, “you’ll excuse us for coming in on you like this. But we only have your interest at heart.”
“Life insurance?” asked the old boy.”
“No,” said Jim. “Smoke. Do you realize what a terrific smoke barrage you are creating? Will you come outside a minute and take a look at your chimney?”
“Aw,” said the old boy, “run along!”
“Pardon me,” I began firmly and loudly, for the old boy was making a racket with his shovel. “We haven’t seen the manager of this place yet. We’ve come to you, first. It’s for your own good. We happen to be a committee of citizens…”
“Self-appointed,” put in Jim, not too loud.
“…a committee of citizens interested,” I pursued, “in public health.”
“Run along, now,” said the old boy, commencing on the ashes again.
“I suggest,” I shouted above the racket, “that you at least listen to what we have to say. Otherwise, we will take steps that will astonish you.”
That always gets them.
“What’ll you do?” he demanded belligerently.
“Are you aware of the smoke nuisance you are creating?” I came back.
“I’ve heard little else,” he declared, “for 30 years.”
“Do you realize,” I insinuated, “that for 30 years you have been advertising to the whole world that you are a punk fireman?”
“Is that so?” he scoffed.
“Only a dope,” I pursued, “would heap coal on a fire so that half of it goes up in smoke.”
“Is-that-so?” he admired.
“If you lay the coal on,” I informed him, “a little at a time, so that the fire builds up and consumes the gases, little by little, there is no smoke.”
“You don’t say?” he sneered, wide-eyed.
“May I demonstrate?” I asked politely, ignoring his bad manners.
“Certainly,” he replied, handing me the shovel.
I removed my coat. I seized the shovel. I tripped open the fire door. I took a moderate scoop of coal.
“Observe now,” I said. “Watch how this small shovelful is instantly seized upon by the fire, the gases consumed, and the fuel embodied immediately, as it were, in the fire.”
“Well, well, well,” said the old boy, relaxing back into his chair.
At which moment, we heard footsteps of the stairs and a man who looked like a gas-meter reader, with a small ledger under arm, appeared at the furnace-room door.
“I warned you, Peters,” he said sharply.
“What can I do?” said the old boy, getting hurriedly out of his chair. “When citizens’ committees keep coming down and showing me how to fire my own furnace.. .”
“What’s this?” said the stranger.
“Don’t blame me,” said the old boy, Peters. “Blame these guys. I’m tending my furnace, when they come down and interfere. They insist on stoking her…”
“Peters,” said the stranger severely, “never before have such billows of smoke come from your furnace. We’ve had 40 complaints inside the last 20 minutes.”
“You’re a Menace”
“Am I stoking it?” demanded Peters sadly. “Or is this little guy?”
“What are you doing here?” demanded the gas-meter man bitterly.
“I came down-we came down,” I expostulated, “when we saw those clouds of smoke, to protest, and to show this man how to feed a furnace properly…”
“Yah, that’s their story,” said old Mr. Peters.
“I think, gentlemen,” said the stranger acidly, “if you will leave matters of this kind in the hands of the civic authorities…”
“We didn’t make that smoke,” I stated pleasantly. “Why, I had only laid on a couple of small shovels…”
“Good-morning, gentlemen,” said the stranger, opening his book.
“Come on,” muttered Jimmie, helping me into my coat.
So we stamped upstairs.
“You see how it is,” said Jim.
“I didn’t know there was a civic department working on smoke,” I protested.
“Probably the health department,” said Jim. “Or maybe the police.”
We crossed over into the car. Jim started her and gave her the gun. We pushed out into the traffic.
At King St. a motorcycle cop appeared beside us. He rode level and then drew ahead, his hand up.
“He’s signalling you, Jim,” I warned.
We drew into the curb.
The cop parked in front of us and walked back.
Jim ran down the car window for him.
“Are you aware,” he asked pleasantly, “that there is a by-law referring to excessive exhaust smoke from motor cars?”
“Eh?” cried Jim.
“Do you know,” continued the cop cheerfully, “that this old stoneboat of yours kicks up so much smoke from the exhaust that you are apt to cause a fatal accident any day?”
“Smoke?” queried Jim, giving me an agonized side glance.
“I came up behind you.” said the cycle cop, “just when you pulled away from the curb a couple of blocks back, and I couldn’t see my handle-bars in front of me. I tell you, you’re a menace to traffic. How about getting that exhaust looked at? How about getting some gaskets? How about checking your oil consumption? Eh?”
“Okay,” said Jim, “okay, officer, I’ll attend to it right away.”
So we drove on to the parking lot, not even thinking.
Editor’s Notes:
By Gregory Clark, March 9, 1929.
“ALL swing out in your places ALL!
Allemany left with the lady on your left,
RIGHT to your honey and grand right and left,
Your right foot up and your left foot DOWN,
Hand over hand and so on around,
And hurry up boys or you’ll never git around!
And grab that calico and roll ‘er all around!”
If any of Toronto’s Hill-billies think they have a monopoly of whoopee, they have another blush coming.
You will not see whoopee at the Silver Slipper or the Palais Royale1: nor at the elite ballrooms where those who dwell north of the parliament buildings commit their shuckings or comings-out; nor at King St. Childs nor anywhere those young people gather whose watchword is whoopee.
If you want to see real whoopee being made. you must go to one of those more democratic dance halls where the country square dance is being reintroduced.
When Henry Ford announced. four or five years ago, that the old-fashioned square dances had more in them than all the foxtrots, one steps and waltzes in the world, we all reflected that a man who was as right about motor cars as Mr. Ford must be wrong on all other subjects. We newspapermen were blamed at that time for making a rather feeble attempt to create a diversion by trying to revive a folk-habit that was as dead as the oil lamp.
But Henry was right again. The square dance, the country dance, is coming back.
Not in the country, where it never went out. But in the city. In literally dozens of Toronto dance halls, three or four square dances are part of every regular program. Three years ago, if anyone had suggested a square dance in such sophisticated company as you will find in a College St. or Dufferin St. dance hall, he would have been amongst the police court complainants the next morning. But in three short years the country dance has come home with a whoopee and a bang. You will see in Toronto to-day any amount of young men and women who never were farther into the country than Agincourt and whose ancestry has never tasted pump water for five generations trying to forget the languor of the one-step and concentrating with all their might on “rollin’ her around for the good of the floor.”
A week or two ago, the Vegetable Growers Association rented the Silver Slipper for a Wednesday night and invited the country gentry from all around to come in to town for a little real old time whoopee. An orchestra that can do hoe-down till the rooster crows was put in the place of that skilful spine-chiller of saxophone and highwayman guitar. A caller stood on a high platform ready to call off the figures and reels. And from Malton and Brampton, Georgetown and Kleinburg, Cooksville and Bolton, came the farmers by the hundred, to foregather in this palace of the modern dance. And the silken hangings and the jazz decorations shuddered and quivered and turned pale as the building rocked and thundered to the healthy dances in which men are gents and ladies are honeys.
That is the beginning. There were enough Toronto Hill-billies present that night to see the out-of-town people making real whoopee. And they went away entertaining curious and exciting thoughts. It will not be long now until square dances will appear even on the highly waxed floors where you can’t “Tamarack ‘er down on the old white pine” without spoiling the polish. It will only be a little while until no debutante will feel she is really “out” until she has participated in a country dance and touched the hands of all her multitude of guests in the really stately and very beautiful measures of an old-fashioned barn dance.
The National Dance of Canada
This writer has seen all kinds of national dances. In the course of newspaper work, a man is tipped off to go and see all kinds of Slav and Czechoslovak national dances being done “right here in Toronto.” And it is supposed to be very quaint and colorful. But the story we have been neglecting for years has been right at our door. The national dance of Ontario, of Canada and of America. For the same dances are done in Quebec and Alberta and Colorado as are done in Ontario. For stamping, they make the Russian dance seem sissy. For whirling, they make the Dervish dances seem timid. For whoopee, they seem to be proof that there is something in the air of a city that takes the ginger and life out of the best of us.
George W. Wade is the premier caller in Toronto. He and his hoe-down orchestra have been quietly riding along for two or three years on the mounting crest of the country dance’s popularity. To start with, most of their engagements were out in the towns. Their largest dances were in St. Catharines, Beamsville and such places as Columbus. Their competition in the smaller towns and villages were the old-time fiddlers and the local callers. But when a city band of hoe-down musicians and a caller who had picked up his art during his youthful travels all over Canada and the northern states began to compete with the limited musical accompaniment of the countryside, the return of the country dance to the city was coming in sight.
To-day, this band is one of many bands qualified to provide the stuff that makes the square dance. And amongst several dance halls that are specializing in country dances in Toronto, Mr. Wade’s company stages a regular weekly dance which attracts hundreds.
The night we attended this old-time dance, there were five hundred and fifty people dancing on the floor of the good-sized association hall. They were packed into every corner. There was not room for another set. Many were turned away.
Outside the hall were parked cars that were muddy with the highways from away up country. Yes, actually! There were country people who drove thirty and forty miles into Toronto to attend a barn dance in a city dance hall! After all, what is thirty miles to anybody now? An, hour or so in the car.
It used to be, a few years ago, a sort of good-humored idea for city folks to drive out into the country to attend an old-time dance. Now it is the fashion for the country people to drive into the city to attend an old-time dance!
It was a great sight. The public hall filled up rapidly with people of all ages. That sameness of age that is characteristic of city dance halls was strikingly absent. Grandmothers came and sat on the chairs along the side of the floor. They did not dance, but their families and friends formed their sets of four couples out on the floor where the old folks could watch them, with much clapping and much smiling and laughter. Middle-aged people were there to dance. Young people danced with them.
The very first thought that entered our heads as we looked down on the assembling throng of people was that this was some sort of a family gathering. There were parents and children uncles and nieces. You could see that. Family parties. And family parties, as you know well, the modern dance had just about scotched.
It’s a Real Old Hoe-Down
Well up at the far end of the floor, on the platform, sat the six musicians, a piano, two fiddles, a banjo and a guitar. And most important of all, the caller. Mr. Wade, leaning nonchalantly – and nonchalance is an essential part of the caller’s art as is the weirdly exciting rhythm of his voice – leaning gracefully against the piano.
The caller cried:
“Partners for a square dance.”
And in great excitement and laughter, with the fluttering of bright colored dresses, very different from the pale elegance of a ballroom’s color, with its ivories and golds and georgettes, the sets were formed. A set is four couples. And they form in a square, couples facing couples.
Then with a great bang. the orchestra started up its lively, old-fashioned and familiar strain. Above the loud shuffle and rhythm of the dancers’ feet, there rose the clear, droning baritone of the caller. In haunting, broken rhythm, with strange stresses and accents on certain words, some of it sung for a brief instant, some of it droned in perfect time to the music, some of it almost shouted, the control of the country dance proceeded.
For the caller actually makes the dance. Figure by figure, step by step, he intones the instructions for every single movement amongst these five hundred and more men and women all dancing for their lives and all doing it perfectly together:
“ALL swing out in your places ALL!
Allemany left with the lady on your left,
RIGHT to your honey and grand right and left,
Your right foot up and your left foot DOWN,
Hand over hand and so on around,
And hurry up boys or you’ll never git around!
And grab that calico and roll ‘er all around!”
The quick, flickering tune of the music. the vast swish, swish, of the dancers’ feet, punctuated with stamps when the caller demands it. Each set weaving, in and out, bowing to each other in quaint little gestures of “footin'” and ending with a swing – each gent seizing his lady and whirling her around.
The pattern of all these square dances is the same. The first “change” as it is called, puts each couple through the same figures. one after another. Then comes the second change of the dance, in which the caller puts not each couple but pairs of couples or four dancers through the same figures in turn.
And then comes the third and last phase, the “break-down.” This is the climax of the dance, in which the caller, with great smoothness and never a slip. puts not the couples but the entire set of eight through their figures, at ever increasing pace, with louder music, with cries and laughter from the dancers, through swift figures, more intricate than ever, until the dance ends in a great, whirling exciting whoopee. And instead of the little patter of polite hand-clapping that marks the end of the modern dance, there rises a tumult of cheers and girls’ laughter. No encore for that. Just cheering the caller and the fiddlers and themselves for a great old hop-down.
“The Gents Their Black and Tan”
In between the country dances, these city functions insert a fox trot or a waltz. And how stupid and dull it looks compared to the picturesque, leaping, exciting mass of movement that had been on the floor a moment ago. The pairs, all young folk, dawdle around, the floor, looking blankly over each other’s shoulders. The modern dance, if it is exercise, is an exercise for the legs from the knees down. The country dance is an exercise for every muscle in the body, up to the facial muscles and the scalp..
After having in recent years seen people pay money to sit in Massey Hall to watch Russians and Sticko-Bohunkians2 and other nationals perform their national dances, we suggest that somebody rise up in our midst and put on an exhibition of native Canadian country dances. The least the Exhibition could do would be to set up amplifiers all over the Exhibition grounds, and on a special gala day, bust loose with music and a caller, and create the spectacle of “sets” forming up all over the lawns and pavements of the whole Exhibition grounds to do square dances on the green.
The Black and Tan is one that brought the most tremendous cheers at this country dance we attended on Bathurst St.
“Head couples out to the right and balance there,” was the first instruction of the caller. And the big room grew all alive with motion and color. Then the swing of the tune:
The ladles cross their lily white hands,
The gents their black and tan,
The ladies bow and the gents bow-bow
And turn them all around.”
And away they go, for five full minutes of increasing excitement and verve.
“Jump right up and come right down,
Hop up straight and come down eight,
Hurry up boys you’ll all be late,
Roll ’em all around on the garden gate!”
Or another version:
Hop right up and never come down,
Your band over heel and never come down,
Heavy on the white pine and ALL come down,
Tamarack ‘er down on the old pine floor,
Grab your honey and swing ‘er some more!”
And he has them coming down light on their toes until he calls them ALL to come down; and the beat of that tune is enough to make even a city slicker vault out of his side-line chair and join the fun.
Allemany left means to turn from your partner to the lady on your left, hook your arm through hers, swing around her and then take your own partner’s hand and swing past her, grand chain, right and left. first your right hand and then your left, weaving your way in and out past the others in your set, and when you reach your own partner again, you seize her with an expression of joy and “roll ‘er all around for the good of the floor.”
“Balance all” means that every couple does few little jig steps, facing their opposite couple.
Why Not Barn Dances for Debs?
But the king piece of the whole night of dancing was the “old-fashioned barn dance.”
The dancers formed in two huge circles. Ladies the outer circle facing in and gents in the inner circle facing out.
There was no calling out for this number. The orchestra played that well-known air, “Wall I Swan.”
And here was the whole measure:
Each couple hand in hand, all facing one direction, took two slow paces forward, two back, waltzed three steps. ran three quick steps for ward, three steps back, the gents side-stepped two slow paces inward away from their partners then took three quick faces outward again and took the next girl forward in the circle.
In effect, here was a great ring of people, moving slowly and rhythmically, closing in, opening out, like some gigantic flower moving its petals, and all the time, the gents moved forward, the girls staying on the same place, but each gent dancing for a few bars with a different gal in turn.
What a beautiful and stately sort of a dance for a deb dance! How could a girl more gracefully and graciously meet all the men! How completely social the old-fashioned barn dance is. The modern dance is mean and stingy and anti-social. The barn dance and the other round dances, meet everybody up with everybody else. “I run the old mill (two slow steps forward) Over to Reubensville (two slow steps back) My name’s Joshua Ebenezer Spry” (three brief waltz steps).
Then the three little running steps, hand in hand, the three steps back, then the gents making their two slow sideways steps from their partner and three quick steps forward to their new partner.
Anybody who can whistle that simple old tune can do these steps, and that’s all there is to the old-fashioned barn dance, except that when a roomful of happy, solemn people are doing it, there is a lilt, a grace and a swing to it that has the mysterious effect on your eye that a marching regiment has, as if once upon a time long ago, man had rhythm in him and had lost it. But finds it, for a little while in the old country dances.
George Wade says that the square dances were bound to come back again when musicians became numerous enough to overflow the city markets and overrun into the country music market. In the city, people see so much of each other that when they dance, they want to dance alone, in isolated couples, as if they were apart from all the world. But in the country, they are glad to be together and they want to dance in company.
As soon as orchestras began to visit the country, the folks were livened up and they danced. But not the lonely dances. The company dances.
The logical procedure, as for these musicians, is to bring back to the city some of the spirit and excitement of these social dances. All the older people, all the people whose youth was spent in the country who had not learned the modern dances, were pining for their fun. And it came. It’s here. Hundreds of people are doing it.
And it is whoopee unconfined.
Editor’s Notes:
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 2, 1935.
NEW YORK
“Wake up, wake up,” hissed Jimmie Frise through the curtains of my lower berth. “We’re coming into New York.”
“That’s where we started for,” I growled, being one of those few who can sleep in a berth or anywhere else.
“The dawn coming up over New York, come on, let’s see it,” urged Jim.
“I’ve seen it before,” I assured Jim. “Miles of six-storey red tenements. Miles of bleak factories with ten-foot steel fences around them. If I like to wake up in New York at all, it is downtown.”
“You’ve got no soul,” said Jim sadly. “This is one of the wonder cities of the world. Seven million people live here. It is one of the cores, one of the ganglia1, of the human system.”
I slid up the blind.
Just as I expected. Zipping by were vast drab red blocks of high tenement houses and spectral streets in the dawn, like streets excavated in Babylon or Pompeii. A terrible sameness. The same bottle of milk on all the window sills, and the same plate with something wrapped in newspaper. The same quilts flung half way out high windows by early birds already risen.
“Ugh,” I said.
I got up and staggered down to the washroom. There a half a dozen others were ahead of me, snorting, swizzling and gargling.
“New York,” I stated loudly, “gives me the jitters.”
Nobody paid any attention and Jimmie warned me with a shake of the head, his toothbrush twisting his face all out of shape.
“New York gives me an inferiority complex,” I announced, there being no basin empty for me. “I get the same feeling all New Yorkers have. I get intimidated.”
One or two of the gentlemen, drying themselves on scanty towels, gave me a cold look.
“The people of New York are all intimidated,” I repeated, sitting ready with my razor and things. “Their colossal buildings intimidate them. Those monstrous buildings all leaning backward, as if to ignore the millions of slaves crawling about their feet. The speed of New York intimidates them.”
All the gentlemen began coughing, snorting, gargling and snuzzling extra loud to drown me out.
“The people of New York,” I announced, “go about with lowered eyes, hurrying, timid, cold, scared. They are scared by the advertising cards in the subway trains. Cards that frighten them about their cough, warn them about their hair falling out, begging them to be careful of their skins. You can’t raise your eyes in New York, without being scared by something. New York is scared.”
Unseeing Myriads
Just then a gentleman surrendered his basin and I was next. When I was through washing, I sought Jim back in the car.
“Hah,” I said, “I told those New Yorkers a few things, eh? I’m not going to let them get away with the idea that their big town impresses me.”
“Those were all Toronto men in there,” said Jim. “Just before you came in, the porter remarked that everybody in his car this trip is a Toronto man.”
“Well, anyway, I said what I think,” I affirmed.
“You’re just a little excited,” said Jim. “Your approach to New York scares you. So you talk big.”
“I’ve been in New York before,” I asserted.
“And hid in your hotel all day except for little walks nearby the hotel, and a trip by taxicab to a theatre at night, and then, back home to bed.”
“I’ve been around,” I said.
“I bet you never were at Forty-second and Fifth Ave., at five p.m.,” declared Jim, “when the traffic is so thick you could walk across the street on the tops of the cabs! I bet you never yet risked your life in a subway!”
But the porter arrived and we entered a black tunnel where the train roared and thundered, and you felt very uneasy, hoping the engineer wouldn’t miss any switches in the dark.
Thus we came to the fabulous city. The new Ilium2 with its topless towers. Thus we had our suitcases snatched by redcaps who led us at top speed out of the station as if the devil were come to town. Thus we were bundled into taxicabs with their radios blaring, and driven, in a sort of gargantuan, buffalo stampede of cabs, up a broad avenue where the entire traffic was racing, hub to hub and nose to tail, amidst a din of noise rising blasphemously unto the clean, virginal towers, spires, obelisks of serene beauty that aspired to the very sky.
Thus we were, with a lurch of brakes, spewed out at our hotel, where they are never surprised, but always seem to expect you; where all the bell hops seem always to have seen you before; and where, after the first trip in the elevator, they always remember your floor and tell it to you, with a smile.
Thus into the glorious and incredible streets, where a nation of all nations, white, gray, black, brown and all colors, mob past you at top speed, sightless eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left at all the incomparable beauties – the beauty of a window, a vast crystal window set in the foot of a very cathedral of a building, and in that stately vast window, one gown. A fragile, a silver gown.
Windows of incomparable grace, with one hat, one tiny pair of shoes. And windows of delicatessen stores as florid, resplendent, opulent, as if they were the windows of the jewels of Ophir3. And jewelry stores with – one diamond!
Yet to neither right nor left, nor up at the shimmering castellated towers in the sky nor down to the cold and bitter earth, did these passing myriads look.
And in this fabulous city, Jimmie and I walked alone, as if we and we alone were living, breathing, sentient in it.
To tackle stores we went, and saw fishing tackle beyond all dreaming. To book stores and print stores, where we saw prints and paintings and pictures in the care of speechless men and women. Our legs ached with walking, and our eyes smarted with looking.
They Can But They Don’t
We tried to go by subway from 44th St. and Madison Ave. down to Park Pl., and we ended up twenty miles away at the Bronx zoo. We tried to go from the zoo back to our hotel and landed at Park Pl.
We saw a store window with nothing but alligators in it. We saw a man singing only one hymn for a living. It was “Rescue the Perishing,” and he sang it in the morning, and he sang it still, ten miles away at evening, but on the same street, holding before him in the wintry wind an empty cap.
In a magnificent store where they sold flowers, there was in the window one white rose.
Jim led me, on foot, in taxicabs, by underground and by elevated, on bus and on tram car, round and round that incredible mulberry bush which is New York. We lunched at a restaurant where you slip five cents in a slot and your food, beautifully cellophaned, pops out at you on a chromium-plated tongue of steel which secretly slips back again when you take your food from it.
Nobody tried to sell us the Empire State building, so, while we were admiring its unholy height, I selected a few particularly gigolesque4 New Yorkers and tried to sell it to them. But it was no good. They merely looked at me with agate eyes, humorless, remote.
“Everybody in New York,” I said, as I padded painfully and breathlessly alongside of Jimmie, “is small. I have seen only a half a dozen big people all day, amongst the seven million I have seen so far. And they all looked like visitors.”
“Now that you come to mention it,” agreed Jim, “I noticed that, too.”
“Do you suppose,” I asked, “that there might be anything in my theory that the very size and majesty of the city makes the people timid and humble, and that they are actually growing smaller with each generation?”
“All the big people,” said Jim, “have been killed off by traffic. You’ve got to be small and nimble in New York.”
We nimbled our way from the Bowery to Morningside Heights, from the basement of five-cent stores to the needle tip of a fabulous building that points a final, accusing finger at heaven.
And thus we came, at five p.m., to Fifth Ave. at Forty-second St., where the cabs are jammed so thick you can walk across their roofs from one side of the street to the other.
“There you are,” said Jim. “On their roofs, from this side of the street to the other.”
But when I asked a cab driver to let me climb up the side of his cab to make the start, he refused. While we were arguing how much I should pay him for the privilege, whistles screamed, lights flashed, the mighty throb of sound changed its majestic tone, and away went the tide of traffic, rushing and whirling. And Jimmie and I fled across, with five hundred others, under the sheltering wings of ten policemen.
“There you go,” I said, “there you go, Jimmie. You can walk across the roofs of the cabs. But you don’t. That’s New York for you. You can, but you don’t.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Jimmie, “that in all this day, amidst all this splendor, after speeding a mile a minute down in the bowels of the earth and roaring along in the elevated above the roofs of a city, after all those stupendous stores full of fishing tackle and pictures and gowns and guns and alligators, after this glorious day spent rubbing your lonely elbows with ten million others, strange, swift, passing, forever mysterious and unknown, all you can say about New York is that they can, but they don’t!”
Deadliest Complex
“In all this day,” I said, “I haven’t seen a single soul that seems to call to me across the deep.”
“You’re hungry,” said Jimmie. “That’s all’s the matter with you. You need to eat. Now, after showing you the city as it should be seen, I am going to do you a great favor. I am going to take you to the greatest restaurant in America, and one of the five greatest restaurants in the world.”
“Ah, oysters,” said I.
“Oysters, if you like,” said Jim, steering me westward into a district where the buildings were smaller and the lights brighter. “But I advise you to save your capacity for more delectable things. They have a creamed fillet of sole that princesses have wept over. They have a pot roast which is acknowledged to be the greatest stroke of genius in the entire history of cooking.”
“Oysters,” I said. “And little soda biscuits.”
Through the streets all bright with red signs, past huddled little stores wedged in between theatres, every third door a theatre door, with congested cabs patiently, tooting their way all in one direction, packed from curb to curb, we bowed into the winter night wind and came at last to Vincent’s5.
It was a small and cosy restaurant. The lights were tender. The music was faint. The waiters, all pot-bellied and with thin gray hair slicked in two curls on their heads, swayed like adagio dancers among the white linen of the tables.
The menu was as big as a newspaper.
“Oysters,” said I, “and little soda biscuits.”
But Jim, with frequent dreamy gazes about the room, murmured to himself as he read the menu.
The restaurant was filled with people, and Jimmie told me they were the greatest people in New York, actors, owners of banks and radio stations, authors and playwrights, genius of every sort.
“Genius,” I remarked, “sure slurps its food.”
For they were bobbing and bending to the succulent dishes: their talk, their manners, their laughter was eager but not so eager as their forks and teeth.
“They make me hungry to look at them,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have something more than oysters.”
Jimmie raised his head with shining eyes and a flush on his brow. Reverently he nodded to the waiter. The waiter bowed, ear bent down to Jimmie, his pencil poised. “Baked,” said Jim, with a catch in his voice, “baked Boston scrod!6“
“Baked Boston scrod,” said the waiter, flicking a shrewd appraising glance at Jim, as if to say, “ah, a gourmet.”
“Oysters,” I said, “and little soda biscuits. And then some baked Boston scrod.”
Jim watched me engulf the oysters. I chew my oysters. Jim would watch me manipulate the beauties – Cape Cods, they were – into the cocktail sauce and then up to my mouth. Then he closed his eyes and shuddered while I chewed.
“I’ll say this for New York,” I sighed, as the waiter whisked away the empty shells, “their oysters are good.”
Then came the scrod.
From under glowing dull silver covers, the waiter revealed a vast plate with a magnificent light brown square of fish.
And beside the fish, heaped in a pile, like matches in a poker game, was my deadliest enemy!
My deadliest enemy, potatoes Julienne!
They are little measly French fried potatoes, about the size of a match.
They are brittle and hot and dry.
They are deadly, vicious, ruinous.
Liberated At Last
I thrust my chair back and half rose.
“Jimmie,” I said bitterly, “this is to much! This is the end! I’ve had a feeling all day that something like this would happen, that New York would, in the end, heap a final humiliation upon me.”
“What is it?” asked Jimmie astonished.
“Potatoes Julienne,” I rasped. “Potatoes Julienne, my inferiority complex personified. I hate them. I hate them. They and they alone have stood between me and my social rise. If it had not been for those measly, vicious little potatoes, I might have been a great man. I might have attended scores of dinners at Government House. I might be joined the York Club7. I might have been a member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club8.”
“Sit down, sit down,” whispered Jimmie, glancing around.
“It is not, as you might have supposed,” I said, “the fact that I look silly in a dress suit that has kept me from rising in society. It is those, those devilish little potatoes Julienne. And to think it was New York that sought out my deepest humiliation like this!”
I covered my face with my hands.
“Eat,” said Jim.
“My only nightmare,” I quavered, “is a vast platter of potatoes Julienne, and away on the far side of the heap, a great concourse of beautiful girls and handsome young men in dress suits, mocking me!”
“What’s the matter with them?” demand Jim.
“Try to eat them,” I cried.
So Jim tried and I tried. They served in a heap, lying end for end. If you put your fork under them sideways, you lift your fork and not one single little sticklet of potatoes Julienne comes up.
You look at your fork in amazement, and try it end ways. You slide the fork under them and lift. And one or at most two of the insignificant sticks comes out of the heap.
I tried a spoon. It was no better. Jimmie began to get red and perspire and cast anxious glances around the neighboring tables.
“Ah,” I said.
The sugar bowl was at hand, and in it, the sugar tongs. I seized the sugar tongs and took a grab at the potatoes Julienne.
And as I raised the tongful to my mouth I looked up and fair into the eyes of Vincent himself, the lean aristocratic proprietor of this famed house.
I signalled to him.
“Vincent,” I said, in a low voice, “forgive me, but will you tell me, in mercy’s name, how do you eat these potatoes Julienne?”
Vincent bowed.
“Wit,” he said, “your feengers!”
“Fingers!” I gasped.
“Feengers,” said Vincent, “like diss.”
And he took a pinch of potatoes Julienne from my plate, lifted them, and popped them into his mouth.
“Princes,” he said, “keengs, dukes, barons, all the people of the great world, eat potatoes Julienne, only like that.”
I rose.
I shook hands with Vincent.
I stepped around and slapped Jimmie on the back with one hand and shook his hand with the other.
“Jimmie,” I said, “it took New York to liberate me from a complex that has had me down for twenty-five years!”
And for the rest of the trip I embraced New York with my arms as wide as I could stretch them.
Editor’s Notes: This story also appeared in So What? (1937).
These illustrations accompanied an article by Canon F. G. Scott, “Canada’s Best Loved Padre”.
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