Read Ebook: Life's Minor Collisions by Warner Frances Lester Warner Gertrude Chandler

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Ebook has 280 lines and 27762 words, and 6 pages

Perhaps a few will do me the magnificent honor of absolving me from boasting, when I say that I am capable of apprehending really nice bits of information in other walks of life;--other than Boston walks. I can pick you out a pneumonia germ from under the microscope, and count your red corpuscles for you. I can receive the Continental Code by wireless, and play on a violoncello. I can get a baby to sleep.

But I cannot tell you where you are in Boston. There are people who would not admit this. They would set themselves, with their faces steadfastly toward the Hub, to learn. Geoffrey is one of these. But I have neither the time nor the proper shoes. I readily admit that Boston is too much for me at my age. So I take my brother with me. Then I placidly relegate Boston Streets to that list of things which I am constitutionally unable to learn:--how to tat, just what is a Stock, and what a Bond, and the difference between a Democrat and a Republican.

TO HORSE

"A duck," we used to read in the primer at school, "a duck is a long low animal covered with feathers." Similarly, a horse is a long high animal, covered with confusion. This applies to the horse as we find him in the patriotic Parade, where a brass-band precedes him, an unaccustomed rider surmounts him, and a drum-corps brings up his rear.

In spite of the veto of the officers, the motion was carried by acclamation. The mediaeval charm of a mounted horse-guard instantly kindled the community imagination. The chaplain, fresh from the navy, was promised a milk-white palfrey for his especial use, if he would wear his ice-cream suit for the occasion.

There was no time to practise before the event, but the boys were told to give themselves no anxiety about mounts. Well-bred and competent horses would appear punctually just before the time for falling in. The officers were instructed to go to a certain corner of a side street, find the fence behind the garage where the animals would be tied, select their favorite form of horse from the collection they would see there, and ride him up to the green.

When Geoffrey came home and said that he was to ride a horse in the procession, our mother, who had been a good horsewoman in her girlhood, took him aside and gave him a few quiet tips. Some horses, she said, had been trained to obey certain signals, and some to obey the exact opposite. For instance, some would go faster if you reined them in, and some would slow down. Some waited for light touches from their master's hand or foot, and others for their master's voice. You had to study your horse as an individual.

Geoffrey said that he was glad to hear any little inside gossip of this sort, and made his way alone to the place appointed, skilfully dodging friends. We gathered that if he had to have an interview with a horse, he preferred to have it with nobody looking on.

The fence behind the garage was fringed with horses securely tied, and the top of the fence was fringed with a row of small boys, waiting. Geoffrey approached the line of horses, and glanced judicially down the row. Books on "Reading Character at Sight" make a great point of the distinctions between blond and brunette, the concave and the convex profile, the glance of the eye, and the manner of shaking hands. Geoffrey could tell at a glance that the handshake of these horses would be firm and full of decision. As one man they turned and looked at him, and their eyes were level and inscrutable.

"Which of these horses," said he to the gang on the fence-top, "would you take?"

"This one!" said an eager spokesman. "He didn't move a muscle since they hitched 'im."

This recommendation decided the matter instantly. Repose of manner is an estimable trait in the horse.

Geoffrey looked his animal over with an artist's eye. It was a slender creature, with that spare type of beauty that we associate with the Airedale dog. The horse was not a blond. The stirrups hung invitingly at the sides. Geoffrey closed the inspection with satisfaction, and prepared to mount.

In mounting, does one first untie one's horse and then get on, or may one, as in a steam-launch, get seated first and then cast off the painter? Geoffrey could not help recalling a page from "Pickwick Papers," where Mr. Winkle is climbing up the side of a tall horse at the Inn, and the 'ostler's boy whispers, "Blowed if the gen'l'man wasn't for getting up the wrong side." Well, what governs the right and wrong side of a horse? Douglas Fairbanks habitually avoids the dilemma by mounting from above--from the roof of a Mexican monastery, for instance, or the fire-escape of an apartment house. From these points he lands, perpendicularly. With this ideal in mind, Geoffrey stepped on from the fence, clamped his legs against the sides of the horse, and walked him out into the street.

When I say that he walked him out into the street, I use the English language as I have seen it used in books, but I think that it was an experienced rider who first used the idiom. Geoffrey says that he did not feel, at any time that afternoon, any sensation of walking his horse, or of doing anything else decisive with him. He walked, to be sure, dipping his head and rearing it, like a mechanical swan. But on a horse you miss the sensation of direct control that you have with a machine. With a machine, you press something, and if a positive reaction does not follow, you get out and fix something else. Not so with the horse. When you get upon him you cut yourself off from all accurately calculable connection with the world. He is, in the last analysis, an independent personality. His feet are on the ground, and yours are not.

We bow to literary convention, therefore, when we say that Geoffrey walked his horse.

Far ahead of him, he saw the khaki backs of two of his friends who were also walking their horses. One by one they ambled up to the green and took places in the ranks. Geoffrey discovered that his horse would stand well if allowed to droop his long neck and close his eyes. Judged as a military figure, however, he was a disgrace to the army. If you drew up the reins to brace his head, he thought it a signal to start, and you had to take it all back, hastily. With the relaxed rein he collapsed again, his square head bent in silent prayer.

With the approach of the band, however, all this changed. He reared tentatively. Geoffrey discouraged that. Then he curled his body in an unlovely manner--an indescribable gesture, a sort of sidelong squirm in semi-circular formation. His rider straightened him out with a fatherly slap on the flank.

It was time to start. The band led off. Joy to the world, thought the horse, the band is gone. The rest of the cavalry moved forward in docile files, but not he. If that band was going away, he would be the last person to pursue it. Instead of going forward, he backed. He backed and backed. There is no emergency brake on a horse. He would have backed to the end of the procession, through the Knights of Columbus, the Red Cross, the Elks, the Masons, the D.A.R., the Fire Department, and the Salvation Army, if it had not been for the drum-corps that led the infantry. The drum-corps behind him was as terrifying as the band in front. To avoid the drum-corps, he had to spend part of his time going away from it. Thus his progress was a little on the principle of the pendulum. He backed from the band until he had to flee before the drums.

The ranks of men were demoralized by needless mirth. Army life dulls the sensibilities to the spectacle of suffering. They could do nothing to help, except to make a clear passage for Geoffrey as he alternately backed from the brasses and escaped from the drums. Vibrating in this way, he could only discourse to his horse with words of feigned affection, and pray for the panic to pass off. With a cranky automobile, now, one could have parked down a side street, and later joined the procession, all trouble repaired. But there was nothing organic the matter with this horse. Geoffrey could not have parked him in any case, because it would have been no more possible to turn him toward the cheering crowds on the pavement than to make him follow the band. The crowds on the street, in fact, began to regard these actions as a sort of interesting and decorative manoeuvre, so regular was the advance and retirement--something in the line of a cotillion. And then the band stopped playing for a little. Instantly the horse took his place in the ranks, marched serenely, arched his slim neck, glanced about. All was as it should be.

Geoffrey's place was just behind the marshal, supposedly to act as his aide. During all this absence from his post of duty, the marshal had not noticed his defection or turned around at all. Now he did so, hastily.

"Just slip back, will you," he said, "and tell Monroe not to forget the orders at the reviewing stand."

Geoffrey opened his mouth to explain his disqualifications as courier, but at that moment the band struck up, and his charger backed precipitately. The marshal, seeing this prompt obedience to his request, faced front, and Geoffrey was left steadily receding, no time to explain--and the drum-corps was taking a vacation. There was, therefore, no reason for the horse ever to stop backing, unless he should back around the world until he heard the band behind him again. As he backed through the ranks of infantry, Geoffrey shouted the marshal's message to the officer of the day. He had to talk fast--ships that pass in the night. But the message was delivered, and he could put his whole mind on his horse.

He tried all the signals for forward locomotion that he could devise. Mother had told him that some horses wait for light touches from their master's hand or foot. Geoffrey touched his animal here and there, back of the ear--at the base of the brain. He even kicked a trifle. He jerked the reins in Morse Code and Continental, to the tune of S O S. The horse understood no codes.

They were now in the ranks of the Knights of Columbus, and the marching boys were making room for them with shouts of sympathetic glee. Must they back through the Red Cross, where all the girls in town were marching, and into the Daughters of the Revolution float where our mother sat with a group of ladies around the spinning-wheel? Geoffrey remembered that the Red Cross had a band, if it would only play. It struck up just in time. The horse instantly became a fugitive in the right direction. On they sped, the reviewing stand almost in sight. The drum-corps had not begun to play. Could they reach the cavalry before it was too late? Geoffrey hated to pass the reviewing stand in the guise of a deserter, yet here he was cantering among the Odd Fellows, undoubtedly A.W.O.L.

But Heaven was kind. The drums waited. Through their ranks dashed Geoffrey at full speed, and into the midst of his companions. The reviewing stand was very near. At a signal, all bands and all drums struck up together. The horse, in stable equilibrium at last, daring not to run forward or to run backward, or to bolt to either side, fell into step and marched. Deafening cheers, flying handkerchiefs; Geoffrey and his horse stole past, held in the ranks by a delicate balance of four-cornered fear. If you fear something behind you and something in front of you, and things on both sides of you, and if your fear of all points of the compass is precisely equal, you move with the movements of the globe. Geoffrey's horse moved that way past the stand.

People took their pictures. Our father, beaming down from the galaxy on the stand, was pleased. Later he told Geoffrey how well he sat his horse.

But that evening Geoffrey had a talk with his mother, as man to man. He told her that, if these Victory Parades were going to be held often, he should vote for compulsory military training for the horse. He told her the various things his horse had done, how he went to and fro, going to when urged fro, and going fro when urged not to.

"Probably he had been trained to obey the opposite signals," said our mother. "You must study your horse as an individual."

That horse was an individual. Geoffrey studied him as such. He is quite willing to believe that he had been trained to obey the opposite signals. But Geoffrey says that he still cannot stifle one last question in his mind:--signals opposite to what?

WHEELS AND HOW THEY GO ROUND

It is a simple matter, I have been told, to keep a locomotive running smoothly on its track, once it is well coaled-up and started. In an artistic moment in a summer vacation, Margaret and I likened our house and all its simple well-oiled machinery to a locomotive--Mother and Carrie being the engineer.

Therefore, we accepted rather blandly the charge of the house and grounds while the engineer took a vacation. I rather think we had it in mind to look in occasionally upon the house as it ran along, and to save the bulk of the day for other things. We were already accustomed to the complexities of a house; we had officiated at each separate complexity. But I am not sure that we did not plan to run the house a trifle more nonchalantly than the average anxious housewife, and welcome both our daily duties and any unexpected guests with a minimum of morbid foreboding.

The first thing we noticed after we were left alone was a little steady drip in the back room. This was the refrigerator leaking. When this fact had once been agreed upon, Margaret and I began to see with eyes of the mind fragments of motion pictures in which the refrigerator was being fixed. It is queer what vague remnants of a scene will stay with you, when at the time of the scene you were not responsible for the outcome. Margaret, from her ever-active and interesting memory, called up Mother's dream-shape at the silcock, all ready to turn on the garden-hose. I dimly remembered Carrie with her arm under the refrigerator holding the hose and calling respectfully from the back room--"All ready, mum." So we hatched a plot and proceeded to act it.

We had to assume the pipe at the rear of the ice-box, for we could not see it. We assumed also that it was plugged up. I had chanced once upon Carrie, lying prone on a rug in the back room, directing the nozzle of the hose into this inaccessible pipe-hole near the farther wall. I elected to plumb for the hole, with Margaret to run about alternately holding matches for me and working the spray. My arms are the longer; her fear of fire is somewhat less. After I had found the hole, Margaret attached the hose to the silcock outside the house, threaded it through the screen door, passed the nozzle to me, and went back to turn on the water. Hose in hand, face averted,--prone,--I waited. Prone means on your face. If you turn your head to look under the refrigerator, your arm is not long enough. I directed the water almost wholly by the Braille system. Why it should have entered into the heart of man to construct a refrigerator so deep that the arm of man is not long enough to reach its drain, will have to be explained to us when we reach the city four-square. But a good workman never finds fault with his tools, Margaret said, so we set to work with what Nature offered us.

I soon found that no cue was needed for some of my lines. My manner of shouting, "Turn it off!" was extremely unstudied;--art disguising art. Twice the back room was inundated. I became a saturated solution. I felt like the brave boy of Haarlem. Margaret came in and advanced the theory that, when you have reached a certain stage of wetness, it does not matter at all how much more water you lie in. Acting on this supposition, and with my consent, she turned on all the city's water-power with great suddenness. I shall always think that this did make a difference in my wetness, but it dislodged the obstruction. We could hear the glad water leaping and gurgling through the pipe out of doors.

Why this pipe should have had any connection with the boiler and attendant pipes behind the stove remains forever shrouded in mystery. These pipes began to leak on the morning of the second day, and we sent for a plumber. He pronounced us unpatchable, unsolderable. Margaret and I convened. We decided, in committee of the whole, to be re-piped and re-boilered. We did not know then that the plumbers were going to find still more serious trouble with the pipes that led to the main. Were we justified in ordering complete repairs? Our eternal query of Life became, "What would Mother do?" We went the whole figure--well up into three figures.

It was not until the third day that we succeeded in making our nonchalance at all prominent. We invited a guest to supper, nonchalantly. She was not the type of guest that you take into the kitchen and tie an apron around. In her honor, we decided to have, among other things, popovers and cherry pie. We decided that we could conventionally have popovers because the hour was really a supper hour; that we might have cherry pie because the meal was really a dinner. To make this strange plan at all intelligible, I shall have to state that, as far as our names are known, we are famous for our popovers and our cherry pie. We were at our nonchalant best.

Our cherry tree is a unique specimen among the vegetables. It has a curious short, gnarled trunk just as a cherry tree should; but, aside from that, it runs along the general lines of a spirea. Each main branch, nearly six inches in diameter at the point of departure, sprangles instantly into showers of fragile twigs. These in turn branch gracefully higher and higher, occasional cherries on the outskirts. To pick our cherries, one really ought to be a robin. Each cherry has an exquisite red cheek and a black ant running to and fro across it.

We chose Margaret to pick the cherries. We chose her because she is lighter than I by half a stone; and we thought the fewer stone on the twigs, the better. Then it was going to be her pie.

The cherries which could be reached from the ground were satisfactory in the extreme. They rattled into the pail, just as other people's cherries rattle. It would have been my instinct to leave these till the last. But I was not picking the cherries. I found it impossible, however, to stay away from the cherry-picking. Margaret is rather quick in some of her mannerisms. And her mannerism of mounting our cherry tree was little short of lightning. She was wearing white silk hose and white canvas slippers. Personally I did not consider these correct climbing shoes, but Margaret is accustomed, when far from home, to choose her own boots for all occasions, and to pay for new ones when her choice proves disastrous. So I watched her rise above me without remark.

I freely admit that it always seems less dangerous to one whose feet can feel the crotches on the tree, and on whose arm the tin pail is, than to the anxious relative on the ground below. As Margaret's manoeuvres transmitted unpleasant little cracks along the tree, I recalled bits of sage advice that I had on a time given to my mother concerning her attitude when Geoffrey was climbing trees. I had told Mother that Geoffrey was just as safe in a tree as in his bed. But Margaret did not give this reassuring appearance. Perhaps I like Margaret better than I do Geoffrey. Certainly I was more afraid she would fall out of the cherry tree.

She finally passed out of my sight. After a prolonged interval of silence, I suggested to Margaret that she come down.

"My foot is caught," returned my sister, her tone of voice wholly explanatory. "It won't come out."

"The shoe tapers to a point," I called encouragingly. "Try to turn it sideways and pull backwards at the same time."

"Barbara," said my sister tonelessly, "I just said it wouldn't come out."

"Then you'll have to take your foot out, and leave the slipper up there," I responded with finality.

"What would Mother do?" called Margaret from her lady's bower.

It was so obvious, even to me, that Mother would not have been up a tree at this hour that I could only repeat my original project of abandoning the slipper. I learned afterwards that it is not an entirely uncomplicated process to buckle in the centre when swinging in a tree-top with one foot stationary and a tin pail on one's arm, and untie a slipper-strap without tipping the pail or falling out of the tree. Margaret soon appeared within my line of vision, listing dangerously, chastened, dignified, and stocking-footed. She reminded me simultaneously, as she descended, of a mystic Russian premi?re danseuse, a barefooted native swinging down his cocoanut grove, and High Diddle Dumpling my son John.

I was rash enough later to inquire into the mechanics of retrieving the slipper, but Margaret, as she finished her tart, replied so appropriately in the words of the Scriptures as to be too sacrilegious to repeat.

As they neared the crisis, the city gas was shut off. I acted instantly, treating the phenomenon as a rare exception in housekeeping. I aroused a dying fire in the coal range with great speed and an abundance of kindling, and conveyed my gems across kitchen. It is a sweet-tempered popover, indeed, which will bear shifting from a hot oven to a moderately comfortable one. I began steadily to lose my unconcern. Once on my knees before an oven door, I usually ask no quarter and receive no advice. Advice is sometimes given me, but my advisers realize that it is not being received. This time I called Margaret in consultation.

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