The Idiot at Home
Page 6
V
ON THE MAINTENANCE OF AN ATTIC
The Idiot had been laid up for a week. That is to say, he was tooindisposed to attend to business at his office, and the family physicianthought it would be a good idea if his patient would be content toremain quietly indoors for a little while. To this the Idiot cheerfullyconsented.
"If there is one thing that I can do to perfection," he said, "it isresting. Some men are born leisurely, some achieve leisure, and some aredischarged by their employers. I belong to the first two classes. I cannever become one of the third class, because, being my own employer, Iam naturally pleased with myself, and am not likely to dispense with myown services."
And so he stayed at home, and for a week pottered about the house, as heput it, and he had a glorious time.
"What are you going to do with yourself this morning, dear?" asked Mrs.Idiot on the morning of the first day. "I've got to go to market, andthere are one or two other little things to be attended to which willkeep me out for some hours. Do you think you can amuse yourself while Iam out?"
"Well, I don't know," said the Idiot. "I can try. Of course, you know,my dear, that I am a good deal of a baby yet. However, if you can trustme to stay all by my lonesome for two or three hours I'll try to behave.I promise not to take the piano apart, and I vow I won't steal any jam,and I sha'n't float hair-brushes in the bath-tub pretending that theyare armored cruisers looking for Spaniards, and I'll try to be good, butI can't make any promises."
Mrs. Idiot smiled, as an indulgent guardian should, and went forth. TheIdiot stayed at home and enjoyed himself. What he did is perhaps bestindicated by his remarks some time later at a Sunday-night tea at whichMr. and Mrs. Pedagog, and Mr. Brief, the lawyer, were present.
"Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, "did you ever have an attic?"
"A what?" demanded the Schoolmaster, naturally somewhat nonplussed.
"An attic," said the Idiot. "A favored spot wherein to potter, to root,to rummage."
"Why, yes," said Mrs. Pedagog, after a moment of deliberation. "I havehad an attic, but it never seemed to me to be a particularly interestingspot. I've used it as a sort of store-room for things I didn't know whatto do with."
"Useless things," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"Entirely so," acquiesced the good lady.
"Then if they are useless, why keep them?" queried the Idiot. "Uselessthings might better be thrown away than stored away even in an attic."
"Oh, as for that," rejoined Mrs. Pedagog, "they were useless in thesense that there was nothing I could do with them, and yet there wasgenerally some quality of association or something about them that soappealed to me that I couldn't quite throw them away, or even bringmyself to give them away."
"That is the idea," said the Idiot. "One's cherished possessions areoften stored away up-stairs and forgotten, and then sometimes yearsafter you'll go rummaging about the house for lack of some otheremployment; an old trunk, a wooden box, will be unearthed in the attic,and then what a flood of memories will come rushing back over you as thelong-forgotten objects come to light, one by one."
"I have had much the same experience," said Mr. Brief, "in what I mightterm my professional attic. We keep a room for the storage of oldpapers, and strange exhibits in litigation turn up there frequently thatbring back old-time lawsuits in a most interesting fashion."
"I suppose, then," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a shrug of tolerantcontempt, "that the attic is, in your estimation, a sort of repositoryfor family archives."
"'I SET OFF A GIANT CRACKER UNDER HIS CHAIR'"]
"That's about it," said the Idiot. "You ought to see mine. There arearchives from the Ark in mine. I've got all the portraits of myunpopular relatives up there, and such a gallery of smug-lookingindividuals you never saw. There's Uncle Jedediah, who hated me becauseI set off a giant cracker under his chair one Fourth of July, and whofrom that day vowed I was born to be hanged; and who sent me a crayonportrait of himself the following Christmas--"
"That seems to me to show a kindly feeling, not one of hatred, towardsyou," suggested Mrs. Pedagog.
"'WOULD HANG THAT PORTRAIT UPON THE WALL OF MY BEDROOM'"]
"Oh no," said the Idiot, with a laugh. "You never knew my dear old UncleJed. He sent it in a pure spirit of revenge. He had to send something,and he picked out the one thing he had reason to know I didn't want; andhe was likewise aware that my mother had a sense of the proprieties andwould hang that portrait upon the wall of my bedroom, whence it couldstare at me, disapprovingly, forevermore. Still, when I became the headof my own house, I did not take a mean-spirited revenge on UncleJedediah's portrait by selling it to one of the comic papers with a jokeunder it; I gave it the nicest, warmest, most comfortable spot I couldfind for it under a pile of old magazines in the attic, and the otherday when it came to light again I greeted it with an affectionate smile;and the picture of the old gentleman rising hurriedly from over thegiant cracker on that long-forgotten Fourth, brought vividly to mind bythe portrait, brought tears to my eyes, I laughed so heartily. Itreally was very affecting."
Mr. Pedagog gazed at the Idiot fondly.
"You are a great boy," he said. "You'd never suspect it, but I had asimilar case of Uncle Jed, but the years I have lived since havesoftened my feelings so that I remember my old relative with a certaindegree of affection."
"I shall never believe, my dear John," said Mrs. Pedagog, "that in yourday boys ever placed giant crackers under their uncles' chairs."
"We never did, my love," Mr. Pedagog responded, quickly.
"Why, of course not," laughed the Idiot. "They couldn't, you know. Theyhadn't been invented. What was your trouble with Uncle Jed, Mr.Pedagog?"
"Oh, our difference of opinion was rather of an ethical import," repliedMr. Pedagog, genially. "My Uncle Jed was a preacher, and he used tospeak entirely from notes which he would make out the night before andplace in the pocket of his black coat. All I did was to take the notesof his next day's sermon out of his pocket one Saturday evening, and putin their stead a--ah--a recipe for what we called Washington pie--and avery good pie it was."
"John!" ejaculated Mrs. Pedagog.
"'STARTED TO PREACH WITH THE RECIPE FOR A WASHINGTONPIE'"]
"I _did_, my dear," confessed the Schoolmaster, "and really I have neverregretted it, although my particular uncle gave me a distressingly acridand dreary lecture on my certain future when he found out what hadhappened. Yet what did happen, though mischievously intended, resultedin great good, for when the dear old gentleman stood up in the pulpitand started to preach the next morning, with the recipe for a Washingtonpie as the only available note at hand, he pulled himself together andpreached off-hand the finest sermon of his life, and he discovered thenthe secret of his after-success. He became known ultimately as one ofthe most brilliant preachers of his time, and from that moment neverwent into the pulpit with any factitious aids to his memory."
"You mean cribs, don't you?" asked the Idiot.
"That is what college-boys call them, I believe," said Mr. Pedagog. "Iwill say further that a year before he died _my_ Uncle Jed told me thatit was my mischievous act that had given him the hint which becamethe keynote of his eloquence," he added, complacently. "I shall alwaysremember him affectionately."
"Of course," said the Idiot. "No doubt we all remember our Uncle Jedsaffectionately. I certainly do. He was my mother's brother, and he meantwell. I never really blamed him for not knowing how to sympathize with aboyish prank, because there has never been a school of instructions foruncles. Unclehood is about the hardest hood man has to wear, and as Ihave observed uncles and their habits, they either spoil or repel thesmall chaps and chappesses who happen to be made their nephews andnieces by an accident of birth. Uncles are either intensely genial orintensely irritable, and as far as I am concerned it is my belief thatour colleges should include in their curriculum a chair of 'Uncleism.'Unclehood is a relationship that man has to accept. It is thrust uponhim. He can't help himself. To be a father or
a mother is a matter ofvolition. But even in a free country like our own, if a man has abrother or a sister he is liable to find himself an uncle at any timewhether he wishes to be one or not. Then when it happens he's got toreason out a course of procedure without any basis in previousexperience."
"Why don't you write a book on 'Hints to Uncles,' or 'The CompleteAunt,'" suggested Mr. Brief. "I have no doubt it would make goodreading."
"Thanks for the idea," said the Idiot. "I think I'll do it. Not in thehope of profit, but for the benefit of the race."
"What has all this to do with attics?" asked Mrs. Idiot.
"The natural resting-place of the bad uncle," explained the Idiot."Still, I maintain that it is every man's duty to keep an attic for theuseless things, as Mrs. Pedagog calls them, which some day, when heleast expects it, will carry his mind back to other days. The worditself, attic, carries the mind back to the splendors of Athens andother things that are out of date. When I was ill I found sincerestpleasure in rummaging. You can't rummage in a library if your library isproperly looked after. You can't rummage in a bedroom in a well-kepthouse. You all know what parlors are--designed largely for thereception of people who come out to call upon you in their best Sundayclothes, and who would never think of calling upon you intimately, as afriend might, in his knickerbockers. You can't rummage there. The onlyplace where one may rummage with any degree of success is in the attic,and my experience has been such that I believe my recent illness hascontributed to my health. My mind has been carried back to conditionsthat used to be. Conditions which existed then and which were inferiorto conditions which now prevail make me satisfied with the present.Where old-time conditions were better than the existing one I havenaturally discovered how to improve. Rummaging, therefore, is improvingto the mind and contributes to one's contentment."
"'A LITTLE BUNDLE OF MY OWN LETTERS'"]
"Then there are good economical reasons for the maintenance of anattic," the Idiot continued. "I found enough old boyhood collections ofvarious things there to keep Tommy and Mollie happy for years without myhaving to pay out a penny for birthday presents--old stamps, old coins,old picture papers, and, I assure you, a lot of old newspapers, too,with better and more readable news in them than is now to be found inany of our modern bilious journals. Then the bundles of letters thatcame out of that place--my mother's letters to me, written while I wasaway at school; my father's letters in the old days at your house, Mrs.Pedagog, which did much to keep me straight then and re-reading of whichdoesn't hurt now; and, best of all," he added, with an affectionateglance at Mrs. Idiot, "a little bundle of my own letters to a certainperson tied up with a blue ribbon, and full of pressed roses and autumnleaves and promises--"
"In the attic?" asked Mr. Brief, with a dry smile. "Is that where Mrs.Idiot keeps your promises?"
Mrs. Idiot blushed. "I have a cedar chest full of treasures up there,"she said. "I thought it was locked."
"Well, anyhow, I found them," said the Idiot, cheerfully; "and whilethey were not especially good reading, they were good reminders of otherdays. It wouldn't be a bad idea if every married man were to read overthe letters of his days of courtship once a year. I think it would bringback more forcibly than anything else the conditions of the contractwhich he was inviting the young partner of his joys to sign. If an atticnever held anything but bundles of one's old love-letters it woulddemonstrate its right to become an institution."
"Very true," said the lawyer; "but," he added, prompted by that cautiousspirit which goes always with the professional giver of advice, "supposethat side by side with that little bundle of pressed flowers and autumnleaves and promises one should chance to find another little bundle ofpressed flowers and autumn leaves and promises--the promises written bysome other hand than the hand that is rummaging in the cedar chest? Whatthen? Would that prove a pleasing find?"
"Oh, as for that," the Idiot remarked, "when I advocate the maintenanceof an attic as one of the first duties of mankind, I mean itsintelligent maintenance. The thing which makes of the British Museum,the National Attic of Great Britain, a positive educational force is itsintelligent direction. It is the storehouse of the useless possessionsof the British Empire which have an inspiring quality. There is nothingin it which makes a Briton think less of himself or which in any wayunpleasantly disturbs his equanimity. So with the attic of the humblecitizen. It must be intelligently directed if it is to become aninstitution, and should not be made the repository of useless thingswhich ought to be destroyed, among which I class that other possiblebundle to which you refer."
And inasmuch as the whole party agreed to the validity of thisproposition, the subject was dropped, and the Idiot and his guestswandered on to other things.