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, February 19, 1927.
It is not courage that wins wars nowadays. Courage, was no doubt the chief virtue of a soldier in the days when they fought battles hand to hand. But it was a sort of dogged dumbness that made the German a good soldier long after he was licked. When the Canadians were nearly insane with mud and racket and lice, you could go out on patrol in No man’s Land and hear the German posts singing. Stolid dumbness is a great quality in modern armies. Far greater than courage. The only virtue that approaches it in general serviceability is craft.
Craft won Sergeant Fatty Boarding both his stripes and his decoration. Yet he had no courage and only a little dumbness. He was nervous as a little boy going down cellar1. He started at the slightest sound. It was a treat to see him start violently. Early in his career, he showed he had no courage by being caught jammed head first into a funk hole2 so tightly the captain had to get a working party to dig him loose. And the first week, he made a name for himself by suddenly, in the midst of the evening strafe, giving a wild yell and starting to run. He ran down the communication trench until he got lost in the dark. The file detailed to go after him heard him yodeling pitifully in the midst of a field of weeds half a mile back of the reserve trenches, and he was pathetically glad to be put under arrest. But they took him back up the line.
His appearance before the c.o. became regimental history.
“Well, sir,” said Fatty, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have enlisted. This is all just a bad mistake. Send me back home.”
“My man, you’re in the army now,” said the colonel.
“But do you mean to say,” said Fatty, pop-eyed, “that if a man doesn’t want to stay here he’s go to stay here and run the risk of getting killed?”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fatty.
His punishment, in view of his obvious innocence, was fourteen days and the charge was altered to absence without leave. And it was in the fourteen days at Fatty spent cleaning pails and paving paths around the officers’ huts that he worked out the theory that won him more than most men got out of the war.
Probably his close confinement in the clink3 with that famous old soldier, Provost Sergeant Harkins, showed him some of the fundamentals of soldiering. Harkins never tired of relating his numerous adventures in ‘is Majesty’s service In Hindia, Hafrica, Hafganistan and wot not. And fourteen nights of these yarns was a good general education for Fatty.
Fatty came from a small settlement – you couldn’t call it a village, exactly – in Northern Ontario. He had spent his life mostly sitting around. He was an intense thinker. His favorite amusement was sitting with the upper part of his back and the back of his neck propped against a wall, the rest of him laid out on the ground, while he screwed his face up into an expression of deep concentration. As soon as he was released from the clink, he found a good wall with a southerly exposure and laid himself out to think.
Fatty a Graceful Volunteer
When cook house sounded at five o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty fell in, not somewhere in the first flight, which was his usual position, but at the very end of the line with the batmen4, who, haying eaten most of the officers’ supper, only turned out to cook house for appearance’s sake.
“What’s a matter, Fatty,” called the company wits. “Lost your energy layin’ flagstone pavements?”
When Fatty at last came up to the kitchen, he said in a kindly way to the cook:
“If you need any help cleanin’ up, call on me.”
“Buckshee?5” sneered the cook, who, like all cooks, was a suspicious man.
“No, no! I been workin’ lately and it’s good for me. Just call on me.”
And Abbs, the cook, did. Fatty cheerfully spent the evening as a volunteer, scrubbing up dixies6, carrying water from the distant well. There were half a dozen aspirants amongst the older members of the company who felt they were in line for the job of cook’s helper. But Fatty was so graceful a volunteer, during the rest of the stay in billets, that when Abbs asked, as usual, to be excused duty cooking in the line on the ground of queer pains he had in his stomach, sides, chest, legs and back, the captain, learning that Fatty was the man Abbs wanted to send in his place, agreed.
“That fat fellow is cut out for a cook’s helper,” said the captain.
Thus smoothly did Fatty slip into the job of company cook in the line, a job that kept him strictly on duty in a deep dugout twenty-four hours of the day.
The only thing Fatty had to worry about now was the trips up to the line and the trips back to the rest areas. But he managed to soften these somewhat. Ordinarily, a working party which is detailed to carry in the rations from the dump where the wagons leave them also carries in the four dixies which the company requires in the line. But Fatty showed himself a gallant worker. When he reached the dump, he picked up all four dixies himself. He put one over his head, hung two in front of him and one behind.
In the dusk, you would see him slowly plodding forward, on his own, far in rear of the company, like an unhorsed knight of old.
“My dear man, those dixies are heavy!” cried the Padre7, one night, meeting Fatty.
“Yeh,” said Fatty. “And thick!”
And he carefully and noisily clanked down into the trench.
It was on a trip in on the Mericourt front that Fatty won his first stripes. In addition to his four empty dixies, he was carrying the sergeants’ primus stove8 which he had cheerfully offered to transport into the line because it just covered the lower part of his abdomen which the dixies that hung in front of him did not quite reach. That night, the Bosch9 had learned of the relief and decided, quite rightly, that it was a good time to raid. The trenches would be full, the old and the relieving troops encumbered with baggage, all unready for a surprise attack. Fatty, nearing the forward trenches, met outcoming troops in the narrow communication, and as he could not pass them, laden as he was with dixies, he studied the night carefully and finding it quite still, decided to risk climbing up into the open and walking along the trench to the front line. As he prowled along, he saw that the communication took a wide bend, and to make the short cut, he angled out into the open meadow. At that moment, the Bosch barrage came down like a thousand of brick.
Wild Yell of “Flammerwerfer!10“
Fatty, leaping for the trench, let the dixie on his head fall forward so that it completely obstructed his vision. In order to keep his mind intent on covering as much of his delicate anatomy as possible with the dixies and the primus stove, he could not concentrate on the direction he must take. He made a couple of frantic circles, shells and splinters whooping and zinging around him, and then, in a complete and directionless panic, the heavy dixie over his head, he decided to run straight on until he should fall into a trench. The raiders had got to the front trench and were flinging bombs and cutting furiously to get through the wire.
Fatty had the smoldering stub of a cigaret in the hand that held the primus stove. A shell splinter, just as Fatty reached the front line trench, made a hole in the brass stove. The escaping gasoline took fire from the cigaret and there was a wild streak of hissing flame. Fatty, with a shriek, hurled the thing from him. With the dixie fallen over his head, he did not know where he flung it. He certainly did not know he had pitched it fair forward into the thickest of the raiders.
“Flammenwerfer!” went a wild yell from out in No Man’s Land. Someone in charge fired a red rocket and the raiders withdrew in haste just as their first men were about to pitch into the trench.
The Fatty they picked up from the bottom of the trench and disentangled from all his dixies, was speechless with fright. One of the lieutenants who had been within a few feet of the spot came and wrung his hand, shouting:
“Good man! Good man! What in hell was…”
By the time they had got him down into his dugout with a nip of rum in him and surrounded by a group of admiring comrades, Fatty was sufficiently recovered to remember that he was an old soldier.
“I seen my duty,” he remarked casually, “and I done it.”
An hour later, the captain had told Fatty that he was promoted to lance corporal and would be attached to one of the platoons just as soon as somebody could be got to take his place as cook.
Two lieutenants and one sergeant had already given Fatty a drink. The captain offered Fatty his water bottle when he made this announcement. With the resultant courage, Fatty looked his captain in the eye and solemnly saluted.
“Say la gerry!” he remarked.
A few weeks later, at the battle of Passchendaele, in which Fatty was deprived of the honor of participating by an untimely attack of violent cramps in his stomach, the company lost most of its n.c.o.’s and Fatty was promoted to corporal. And it was Corporal Fatty Boarding who brought up the rear of his platoon, gladly carrying the haversacks, the heavily stuffed haversacks, shovels, and other impediments of his weaker comrades, when they marched back into the old Loos sector.
“I don’t see how you can walk with all that stuff hung about you,” said the lieutenant.
“Oh, I don’t mind a few small compact things, sir,” said Fatty. “The heavier they are, the better cover they are, after all.”
“True,” said the lieutenant.
It was Corporal Fatty who was on trench duty at the top of Horse Alley, much to the amusement of his subordinates, when the company commander came through the trench and said in a hoarse voice:
“The enemy are not thirty yards from you here. I guess the safest place in the world, right along here, is No Man’s Land.”
“Boys, I Seen a Rabbit!”
And Fatty climbed up on the firestep11 and took a gingerly look out into that eerie darkness.
“I seen a rabbit,” said he, dropping down into the trench. “Boys, I seen a rabbit!”
“A rat, you mean.”
“No, a rabbit. A big fat rabbit, hoppin’ along not eight feet from my nose. Oh, boy, I could almost smell him cookin’.”
All that night, on duty and off, in the trench and in the dugout, Corporal Fatty Boarding could talk of nothing but rabbits.
“I didn’t do nothing but snare rabbits, back home. I have snore thousands of rabbits. Not these issue rabbits, mind, from Australia, but soft, chickeny, white meat rabbits. Fried rabbits, and boiled rabbits, and rabbit stew…”
“Shut up!” roared the dugout.
And in that one night, Fatty took at least a dozen good long looks over the parapet.
“They’s a woods just back there a bit,” he said, after one of his peeps towards morning. “I bet that place is just swarming with rabbits. Now a rabbit cooked in bacon fat, deep…”
The following day, Corporal Fatty was seen working in his concentrated way with pieces of signal wire, making nooses. He collected several yards of old wire. He borrowed a trench periscope and studied No Man’s Land for the better part of the afternoon. When the lieutenant came along and found him staring over, he asked what he saw.
“I see an old bit of a battered-in trench,” said Fatty, “that looks like a-looks just exactly like a sort of a rabbit runway!”
It must truthfully be told that, before taking any steps himself, Corporal Fatty asked several of his men if they would care to go out into No Man’s Land and set a few rabbit snares for him. But in view of the profane answers, he had to spend the night staring, with his eyes barely clear of the parapet, into the night towards the enemy lines.
“Seen any more rabbits?” asked some of the boys.
“Yes. I think I seen a thousand,” said Fatty.
The third night, he could bear it no longer. The company commander himself had said that No Man’s Land was the safest place around there. So about midnight, through a narrow oblique gap cut in the wire to permit patrols to go out, Fatty crawled forth and set three wire snares in the shallow abandoned trench, which ran from the Canadian to the German side.
He returned all of a lather. He had to alt a long time on the fire step before he gained his voice.
“I guess I didn’t do a very good job. I had to set ’em bigger than at home, because these here Belgian rabbits is big. Maybe I won’t get any the first try.”
However, he posted himself to wait and listen for the squeaks and struggles that would tell of a capture.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Then came a sudden loud squeak. A thrashing around, not twenty feet out.
“Gosh!” said Corporal Fatty, Belgian rabbits seemed as big as horses.
But he leaped forth and wriggled into No Man’s Land. There was a shot. A loud yell. A strangled cry. And just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay, in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding holding by his ears a German trooper with a copper wire strangling him around the neck.
Bombs flew. Corporal Boarding seemed so unaware of help being at hand that he struggled furiously with his captive on the bath mats12, though it was curious that he seemed to want to keep his victim not underneath but on top of him.
“Good man! Good man!” gasped the lieutenant, hurrying the corporal towards the company commander’s dugout, the prisoner staggering ahead at the point of Fatty’s bayonet.
“You find out,” said Corporal Fatty, holding the tin mug up gallantly, as he told his story to the company commander. “You find out where the Germans is crawlin’, then you set snares just as if – well, just as if you was snaring rabbits.”
“Great lad!” breathed the company commander, earnestly.
They made Fatty a sergeant forthwith and six weeks later his ribbon came through.
Editor’s Notes: There is a lot of World War One slang in this one…
This is an illustration to accompany a story by Fred Griffin about preparing animals for a fair.
By Gregory Clark, August 6, 1927.
The test of civilization, is whether you can get from your house to your berth in the Montreal flyer1 without getting wet.
At Birdseye Centre, Hamilton, Orillia, Waubashene, if it is raining, you get wet.
You know at once that you are not in a metropolis. For you have to stand out on the station platform and let her rain.
One thing that could be said about the Old Union Station2 is that it was metropolitan. From your side drive to your berth in the sleeper you enjoyed the full fruits of civilization. You kept dry.
The tragical announcement that we are now working up to is that for the next couple of years Toronto is not going to be a metropolis. Waubashene, Myrtle, Petrolia can all give Toronto the merry laugh of sisterhood.
For with the final switch-over from the Old to the New Union Station Toronto is going to find itself standing out on the platform in the good old-fashioned way.
Raincoats, fur coats, umbrellas and mufflers will now be the essential tools for catching a train. There are winter nights ahead when Toronto will sigh for the good Old Union Station with its roof.
This is bad news for Toronto, we know. After all the years of waiting, after all the official openings of the New Station by Mr. Church and Mayor Foster and everybody that wanted their names inscribed in enduring stone, it will be a shame to discover that the New Union Station. for quite a while at any rate, will be just a magnificent waiting-room. For all practical purposes, such as catching trains, you will go in one door out of the wet and out the other door into the wet.
Those of us who still think that we are going to have a station a la New York or London or Chicago, where you find the trains pulled up and waiting practically in the drawing-room, are going to be disappointed.
We’ll Be Out in the Open
The Old Union Station is not being torn down because we are about to move into the New Union Station. It is being destroyed because the viaduct is going to crash through it. We are going into the New Union Station only because we are losing the old one.
In other words, our move into the famous New Union Station is in the nature of a temporary expedient.
The viaduct is a vast elevated road of solid concrete about as wide as a ball park. On it, some day, the train tracks will be laid so that you and I may motor under it rather than constantly dispute the way with the trains. They have completed the viaduct back of the new station. But there are no tracks on it. It has been completed in this short block so that we won’t have to go back to the Old Union Station later when they wish to build the viaduct behind the New Union Station.
So for a couple of years, nobody knows how long, we will emerge from the back door of the New Union Station, walk across the wide cement viaduct, descend temporary steps to the same old ground level we are using to-day, and get on our trains from a temporary plank pavement, and from beneath narrow high roofs, also temporary, that are laid, like long arbors, between each set of tracks.
If you look eastward the next time you are out in the open at what used to be the Old Union Station, but is now a strange and unfamiliar pile of tattered old buildings, you will see the steps and stairways being built where we will walk out over the viaduct and down to the trains. Unquestionably, they will be covered steps. Unquestionably the plank platform amongst the tracks will be sheltered as best it can be with narrow temporary roofs. But it would only be quibbling with Coboconk3 and Port Hope to say that we will not be out in the open.
Furthermore, it will be a long haul for hand-baggage. There Bowmanville will have it on us. Because at Bowmanville you just drive up to the platform and there you are.
But the red caps will probably make a great killing during the years Toronto has to walk over its viaduct. From Front street, where you have to get out of your taxicab, to the far edge of the viaduct, where you commence the steps down to the train tracks, it will be twice as far as it is now, under the tunnel.
In the New Union Station – Toronto’s magnificent new waiting-room – you can get any number of things. You can get an eyefull. You can breathe. You can get lunch, have your hair cut, get a beauty treatment, buy books, a soda, drugs. In the dining-room you can dance. But you can’t get a train.
If It Rains We’ll Get Wet
They are nibbling the old station away.
The next time you go down to the station you won’t know the old place. And if it is raining, as it most likely will be, you will get wet..
Never more will you take the Montreal flyer from Track 3. Track 3 is only a parking place for coaches now.
The old roof – the one we bade good-by for the first time many a year ago, is gone. Suddenly, at last, it is gone. And several hundred outraged pigeons flutter about the ancient towers we never saw before, wondering what the dickens men keep putting things up for only to pull them down.
The towers that are revealed now – and soon they will be nibbled away – are surprisingly stately. We had no idea they were there. If we had known what a cathedral style the Old Union Station really had, perhaps we wouldn’t have. spoken so rudely of it, the last couple of generations. But the great canopies over the tracks hid the towers. Hid the station. It was the canopies we did not like, after all.
The viaduct is ready to be shoved through the old station. It is now right up against the east end of the doomed pile. When it starts to move it will smash right into the towers, right across Track 3 and crush to flinders that old staircase we used to wind down in a great hurry; and the old dim restaurant with its glass covered sandwiches.
So out beyond, far beyond old Track 6 which was the uttermost limits we had to go even when bound for North Bay, they have spread huge pavements of planks, and all over the place are signs directing you to Track 7, Track 8 and even Track 9!
These plank pavements run away to the eastward, in back of the New Union Station. You can see staircases being built up into space. You can see dinky little narrow shelters being erected all along the tracks, We know what it means.
The switch-over from the Old to the New is going to take place soon – before, they hope, the crush of homing holidayers and Exhibition visitors. They are working up to that peak now. The viaduct having marched right up to the eastern edge of the old station, three tracks, the first three, have had to be closed, and are now used for parking only. They have therefore taken some of the freight tracks from beyond the outermost of the old passenger tracks. When your train is on Track 9 you begin to think Toronto is getting to be a big girl now. Some of the older folks don’t like it, however.
“Track 9!” exclaimed an old lady with several bundles. “Good gracious, how far is that!”
“Just through the archway, lady, and across that platform.”
“Why on earth don’t they leave things alone? Always changing things, until a body hardly knows where to turn!” growled she.
A Theatre of Real Drama
When you tamper way so delicate an organization as a railway-terminal, there are bound to be consequences, like repairing a clock, and having a couple of wheels left over. But they are getting on very nicely. Perhaps the trains are not made up quite so early as they used to be. The result is, it is not the passengers but the mail, express and baggage lads who do the most worrying. Each of these departments has half a dozen truck loads of bags and boxes and trunks to rush aboard when the train pulls in. Maneuvering the trucks against each other and in the narrow lanes between the tracks – for borrowed freight tracks have not the space between them that regular passenger tracks have – it’s quite a job. All postmen think the mails are more important than express, and what the baggage men think about the urgency of baggage would warm the heart of a passenger. When your train is made up and you have a few minutes to spare stroll up forward and listen to the boys trying to adhere to that regulation of the railroads which reads that profane language on the part of employes will not be tolerated. Has his majesty’s mail right of way over the personal baggage of his majesty, the traveling citizen? And if express costs so much more than the carriage of either mail or baggage, should not express get priority, and so give its money’s worth?
The switch-over itself will take place without ostentation. The last train will be made up in the old station. The last passenger will hurry, staggering under his bags, down the dim underneath tunnel. The last “All aboard” will ring out mournfully in the upstairs waiting-room with its high reverberating ceiling. And from then on the taxis and the private cars will call at the handsome pillared main doorway of the New Union Station. All is being got in readiness. The ticket sellers will be in cages like bank tellers. The information girls and boys will be in their circle out in the middle of the vast floor of the new waiting-room. The telegraph desks, the lunch counters, all will be manned as if by magic. For the people who have the parts to play have been studying their parts and the scenery has been set for six years.
Everybody who wants to say good-by to the Old Union Station should do so without delay. There should be some ceremony of farewell. For all its shabbiness, the Old Station had tremendous sentimental significance. It was the first glimpse of home, the last glimpse of home. It is hallowed by a million farewells, a billion kisses of parting and of restoration. It has been the theatre of countless dramas, tragic and comic. In this tattered old theatre the boys said good-by for the South African war. Its walls rang with “Johnny Canuck” and the city thrilled as the train bearing two, three, four hundred heroes pulled slowly out. That was drama. But it was the same old theatre that heard no songs at all when hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, in endless trains, in trains running on priority orders, went steaming unromantically eastward again, and leaden footed girls and women and elderly men walked slowly out of the old station to go home and wait interminably for yellow telegrams which started “His Majesty regrets to inform you…”
The little boys who have carried their toy pails and sand shovels through the old station are grown to men who have carried their bags and despatch cases through the same old gate.
Young people who passed through it on the springing feet of youth have come back through it with failing steps or in boxes.
A theatre of the true drama of life, more than any other single building in the city, it has taken part in the happiest moments of the people. The setting forth to adventure, the coming home.
And one day, within the next few weeks, suddenly, in accordance with a notice fastened to its front, it will be left flat.
Editor’s Notes:
By Gregory Clark, June 18, 1927.
Mr. Bodkin, who works in our office, carries a handbag.
He has carried it for years, and with his handbag, umbrella and his rubbers on, he is so serious and dignified a personage, none of us has ever ventured to jolly him about the bag.
As far as we know, he never carries anything in it. It just seems to be a habit of long standing, and he would as soon go out with no collar and tie on and come to business without his faithful old handbag.
Now it so happens that he parks his car three blocks away from the office, half a block from one of the new liquor stores.1
And that handbag has taken on a new and horrible significance.
The first day liquor was on sale, Mr. Bodkin came down Church street and saw the line-up. And being an old newspaperman, the instinct to stop, look and ask naturally halted him.
He is a shy sort of man, however, who depends on his powers of observation rather than his tongue, and he stood about for all of five minutes before he spoke to one of his neighbors in the crowd, to ask what the line-up was for and where everybody was going, because everybody was carrying a bag of some description.
“Booze,” replied the neighbor. “This is the opening day.”
You can imagine Mr. Bodkin’s horror. He has been a prohibitionist since birth, a tremendous worker for the dries, the author of many a strong article and influential pamphlet on the liquor traffic.
And here he had been standing, bag in hand, in the liquor store line-up for five long minutes while curious crowds of onlookers stared.
He got out of there so fast, he was limp when he reached the office.
We helped him out of his coat, and he flung the old handbag to the floor.
“If it hadn’t been for that!” he cried, with a mortified air.
We gathered around him.
And he told us of the tragedy.
“Five long minutes I stood there!” he wailed. “Goodness knows who saw me. Hundreds and hundreds passed by and paused to look. Amongst them must have, been scores of acquaintances, and probably the telephones wires are at this moment being burned up with the scandal that Bodkin, the great prohibition worker, was amongst the first to line up for his liquor!”
We soothed him.
“Boys,” said Bodkin, “do me a favor. Help me out of this mess, will you? Pass the word around amongst your friends that I was standing there in all innocence, as a newspaper man. That’s good fellows!”
“But,” said Jimmie, “that handbag. It will be hard to explain away that handbag.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Bodkin.
For two days, he came to work without the handbag, but he was like a lost soul. He wandered around like a man who has forgotten his pipe. The rest of us could do no work, with him wandering around. He would sit and stare moodily at the place beside his desk where he used to park the handbag.
“I don’t enjoy the walk anymore.” he confided to me. “I have carried that bag for twenty years, and I think it has become part of me. Little did I dream the liquor business would ever strike me in a vulnerable spot. Its ramifications are so insidious, reaching into a man’s most sacred life. Curse the liquor traffic, I say!”
Jimmie had the inspiration.
“Look here,” said he to Bodkin, “just have the words ‘MSS Only’2 inscribed in gold letters on the bag, good and big.”
So Bodkin has his bag again and all is well. He has the words “MSS Only” in letters two inches freshly gilded on the faithful old bag. And he comes down Yonge instead of Church street now.
“It’s a much finer way to come anyway,” he says.
There must be hundreds and hundreds of people who have been made self-conscious since the liquor stores opened, lawyers, doctors, salesmen, who have to carry bags in the daily vocation.
But they can all follow Mr. Bodkin’s lead. Doctors can quite excusably work in a little free advertising for themselves by inscribing their name and title on their bags in large characters. Lawyers can put “Legal Documents Only.” Travelers can have the name of their firm or commodity emblazoned.
Or, to put another interpretation on the idea, although this is hardly fair to Bodkin, now that he has employed the idea in self-defence, could not those who do line up at the liquor stores camouflage their bag’s contents by all sorts of disarming inscriptions such as “MSS Only.” “Dr. Smith. horse doctor,” “Use Squkm Gramophone Needles,” “Hokem and Pokem, Barristers, Etc.”
The clever concealment of the true function of a handbag that is solely employed for the purpose of carrying two crocks from the liquor store will now be one of those things that will tax the ingenuity of a necessarily ingenious section of the public.
Editor’s Notes:
By Gregory Clark, December 10, 1927.
The leading winter sport in Toronto is dancing.
Not enough snow for skiing, tobogganing or sleigh bells.
The people who golf and tennis and otherwise romp the long summer through are not free to quit, suddenly, all activity. Their nerves won’t permit it.
So they dance. With all due respect to those who denounce the sport of dancing, doctors are ready to agree that modern dancing is nothing but a form of exercise – a sport.
Etiquet forbids doctors to talk for publication but a well known young Toronto specialist answered the question:
“Is dancing good?”
“You take,” replied the diagnostician, “the average young man and woman of to-day, and they are a pretty active pair from, May to November, with golf, tennis, summer resorts, motoring, boating, playing as much of their time as they can spare. It is impossible for them, from purely physical reasons, to suspend all activity from November to May. Their whole being demands action. That explains the popularity of dancing, and it also explains, if I may theorize about something I know nothing about, the extreme simplicity of the modern dance: it is a form of pleasant exercise, reduced to the minimum of artificiality.”
This theory is borne out in the history of dancing. In olden days when duelling was a very formal sport, dancing, too, was formal and ornate. The barn dance, with its vigor and bounding simplicity, was merely a translation into terms of the off season of plowing, reaping and the common activities of the farm.
Modern dancing translates into indoor terms such games as golf and tennis. Waltzes are golf; one-steps and the flat Charleston1 are tennis.
You have to learn golf and you have to learn dancing. The proof that dancing is not a welling up of original sin in a boy or girl is the fact that few people are natural dancers, just as few are natural singers. The easiest way to learn is to start as a youngster, during the unselfconscious years. The great majority of beginners, according to dancing masters in Toronto, are eldest children of a family or only children. If dancing is learned in the home, as part of the everyday fun of the home, the two simple fundamentals of dancing are unconsciously won: unselfconsciousness and natural grace. And they never have to take lessons in an academy.
We visited different dancing classes and public dance floors in Toronto to witness the process by which the sport of dancing is mastered, and to see if it were a pastime to be classed with golf, tennis, skating and so forth as a means of enjoying that period of inarticulate ecstasy called youth.
In all of them, we found a majority of young men. They were attractive as a type, almost without exception. And they were going at the business of learning to dance with a concentration that reminded us more of our early days of squad drill as recruits in the army than anything else.
“If they like this,” said Jim, “we must have liked squad drill.”
First Lesson Just Walking
For the dancing master has only one or two principles to teach and he handles them as dexterously as the drill sergeant handled his “right turn by numbers.”
Picture a large dance floor with forty or fifty boys and a lesser number of girls grouped around the edge.
It is a beginners’ class.
“Take your places out in two ranks on the floor,” says the master.
They stride out, gamely or bashfully as they are constituted, these young students, clerks, juniors in all the callings and professions. The girls are less self-conscious than the boys.
“Watch me move from here to there,” says the master. And he walks, with a slow, graceful, gliding steps, about ten paces.
“The first thing you must understand, if you wish to dance, is that there is grace in your body, whether you have ever suspected it before or not. You can carry yourself handsomely, or you can carry yourself badly. You men will have the greatest trouble in this. I ask you only this: carry yourself in a manly fashion, straightly, easily, and not slinking or heavily. And instead of placing your heels down first, point your foot and place the ball of your foot on the ground first. All right. Now we will walk the length of the floor.”
And the roomful, to the count of the master, paces slowly all together from one end of the dancing floor to the other.
Some of them are extremely comic. The self-conscious ones are suddenly terrifically self-conscious. They shrink into themselves, and stride unsteadily, awkwardly. The bold ones swagger down the floor, with elaborate mincing steps as far from the master’s demonstration as could be conceived.
“Now, then! This is the way some of you went,” and the master imitates the bashful ones. “And this is the way others of you went.” He mocks the swaying, swaggering ones. There is a burst of hearty laughter and the class is suddenly on the way to learning how to walk. For the master again shows the way: body held still and straight, easily and lightly, advancing by an almost cat-like tread on the forward part of the foot. He seems to glide. There is not the slightest up-and-down motion to him. He is a big, manly man, and there is not the faintest trace of sissiness about his actions.
“Now, let’s be graceful. Take it easily. You are all so self-conscious that none of you is looking at his neighbor, so don’t be afraid of grace. It is in you all. Merely let it out.”
For half an hour the master makes these novices walk, walk, walk. They walk around in a circle or across the floor in ranks. A piano quietly cuts in, and they find themselves, each by himself, pacing slowly to soft music. The dance has begun.
“Ladies and gentleman,” says the master, “you are now dancing.”
And these clumsy-footed boys, awkward and painfully self-conscious, these girls rather shy and most of them mincing, under the impression that they must bounce in fairy-like swerves and shoulder-swayings, have delighted expressions on all their faces as they pace thus slowly, their bodies suddenly graceful and consciously graceful because they are light, easy, and under the first control of grace.
The master then lectures them: simply and without pretense or bluff; tells them to practise walking in the privacy of their homes, turning, rounding corners, to the music of the victrola, until they can handle themselves without losing balance, until they teach long neglected muscles to function with ease and sureness.
“Practise as you walk in the streets and in your offices,” he says. “Start right now to walk gracefully. Practise grace consciously until it becomes unconscious. Here endeth the first lesson.”
A dance class consists usually of six lessons. It starts in this simple fashion. The next meeting, the class is taught the first rudiments of steps. Instead of merely walking in a straight line, they walk two steps and turn. One turn is the two-step, another turn is the waltz. Again, the class is suddenly awkward, because new rhythm is demanded from unaccustomed muscles – muscles just left, for years past, to work as they felt like working. Now they must work with grace.
And Doctors Prescribe It
In six lessons, the average dance master can teach his pupils enough to put them at their ease on the ballroom floor.
Cecil Da Costa, one of the leading masters in Toronto, has no belief in much of the pretension and bunkum about dancing.
“The majority of people, wish to dance because it is one of the ways of being happy,” he says. “They are deterred from dancing because they feel they are awkward. Therefore, we simply have to prove to them that they are not awkward. And with the usual exceptions, it does not take more than three or four lessons to make them understand the simple principle of grace – which is nothing but control.
“All sports are graceful in the hands of proficient players – awkward in the hands of beginners. A great golfer is one of the finest exhibitions of grace there is. A great tennis player is not far removed – in his or her perfect control and rhythm – from a perfect ballet dancer. It is nothing more or less than that.
“The fashionable steps which come and go are simply decorations upon an institution fundamentally simple. Not ten per cent. of the people. who are dancing in Toronto to-night know what step they are dancing, or care! They are simply dancing to the music. What the music demands, they give. As in all other pastimes, there are the refinements. In dancing, these are the flat Charleston which the Prince of Wales2 dances, or the Varsity drag3. We give those who want them these refinements. And they must be learned, as Bobby Jones4‘ style of grasping the club must be learned. But we are busiest teaching the two principles and the few basic facts – grace, unconscious grace, and control of the body.”
Always there are the impossible ones. There are certain people who seem to be mentally incapable of conceiving rhythm or the beat of time. Not tone-deaf but time-deaf. And they try so hard. The careful, exaggerated beat of the master’s specially trained pianist is unheard. They stamp and stagger and hesitate all over the floor, trying to put their foot down when the others do, not when the music asks for it. These are hopeless, and are about as luckless as color-blind people in matching silks.
A certain number of elderly people are in every class. They move with an awkwardness born of years. The little finenesses of control in muscles is far behind them. In nearly every case, when investigated, these elderly people are studying dancing on physicians’ orders.
“More and more,” says the instructor, “we are getting what you might call patients – people who must have some gentle exercise or some new interest in life. A doctor called me and told me he was sending a man whose trouble was solely nervous, a man past his youth, who must be got interested in something stimulating to his mind as well as easy exercise.
“Then we have the reducing work: no end of women are taking private lessons for the sole purpose of reducing. They tell me the same story: that after settling down to the routine of married life, they missed the gay activity of their earlier years, and began to put on flesh. And of course, it is nothing new that dancing is the finest kind of reducing exercise. Now the doctors are beginning to prescribe it, most particularly to young married women who have suddenly surrendered their youth and settled down to matronly, habits – which, after years of activity, are bad habits.”
Which all goes to show that dancing may be many things, but really is one thing: a form of sport or pastime which, like many other pastimes, calls for mastery of the body, grace, and a stimulating activity.
Editor’s Notes:
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