NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

OLIVER HERFORD

NEITHER HERE
NOR THERE

BY
OLIVER HERFORD

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. I

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO M. H.

On board S.S. Carmania
Lat. 50° N., Long. 30° W.

“NEITHER HERE—NOR THERE”

CONTENTS

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

THE SECRET

Eve was bored. She confided the fact to the Serpent.

“Tell me something new!” she wailed, and the Serpent—he had never seen a lady cry before—was deeply moved (the Serpent has always been misjudged) and—there being no National Board of Censors—told her everything he knew.

When he had finished, Eve yawned and looked boreder than ever. “Is that all?” she said.

The Dramatic Critic asks the same question on the first night of a new Play—“Will there never be an end to these Dormitory Farces,” he moans, pondering darkly the while how he may transmute its leaden dullness to the precious gold of a scintillating paragraph.

Father Time has nothing to say on the matter. If you ask him to show you a new thing, he shrugs his wings and growls, “You can search me.” Things old and things new are all alike to Father Time.

Peradventure, in the uttermost recess of the Great Pyramid lies a hair of an unknown color, or a blueprint of the fourth dimension, or better still the ms. of a new play, or a joke that has never been cracked.

When a Roman bath is unearthed in Kent or a milliner’s shop in Pompeii we wait breathless to hear of the discovery of a new story, or a new dress pattern, but always it is the same old skull, the same old amphora.

Even the newness of Fashion is a jest of antiquity.

In an Italian book printed in the sixteenth century is a story of a fool “who went about the streets naked, carrying a piece of cloth upon his shoulders. He was asked by some one why he did not dress himself, since he had the materials. ‘Because’ replied he, ‘I wait to see in what manner the fashions will end. I do not like to use my cloth for a dress which in a little time will be of no use to me, on account of some new fashion.’”

There may be a newer version of this story in the ashes of the Alexandrian library or beneath the ruins of Babylon, but this has at least the freshness and luster of its four-hundred years. Also it throws a light, a very searchlight, on the translucent demoiselles of today (see them shyly run to cover at the mere mention of a searchlight.)

Now we know their guilty secret. Each of them has, hoarded away in a secret drawer (as money in panicky times) a roll of fine silk or voile, or panne velvet, or crepe de chine which she is sparing from the scissors till the Wheel of Fashion shall oscillate with less fury. Then she will put away the skimpy, flimsy makeshift garments of transformed window curtains and bath towels, converted robes de nuit and remnants of net or chiffon she has been vainly trying to hide behind—and then—then alas, we shall see her no more!

OUR LEISURE CLASS

Once—and not so terribly long ago at that—we used to be very fond of telling ourselves (and our visitors from Europe) that in America we have no Leisure Class.

That there were people of leisure in our midst, we could not deny, though we preferred to call them idle rich, but as for a special class whose whole business in life was to abstain from all useful activity—oh, no!

Even our idle rich, unblest as they are with the hereditary gift for idling, and untaught save by a brief generation or two of acquired experience, find the profession of Leisure a strenuous not to say noisy task, for while those to the leisure born know by the very feel of it that the habit of idleness is a perfect fit, the newly-idle must look for confirmation in the mirror of public admiration; hence Publicity, the blare of the Sunday Supplement.

But taken as a class our idle rich (though it is being rapidly licked or lick-spittled into shape) is at best an amateur aristocracy of leisure. For the real thing, for the genuine hunting, sporting, leisure-loving American aristocracy, we must go back to the aboriginal Red Man.

And how the busybody Puritan hated the Indian! With his air of well-bred taciturnity, his love of sport, of rest, of nature, and his belief in a happy Hereafter, the noble Red Man was in every respect his hateful opposite, yet if any Pilgrim brother had dared even to hint that the Indian might have points of superiority it would have been the flaming woodpile for him, or something equally disagreeable in the purifying way.

How different it might have been!

If only the Puritan had been less stuck up and self-righteous, the Red Man less reserved! If they could but have understood that Nature intended them for each other, these opposites, these complements of each other.

Why else had Nature brought them together from the ends of the earth?

But alas, Eugenics had not yet been invented and the Puritan and the Indian just naturally hated each other at first sight and so (like many another match-maker) Mother Nature slipped up in her calculations, and a wonderful flower of racial possibility was forever nipped in the bud.

If the Puritan, with his piety and thrift and domesticity and his doctrine of election and the Noble Red Man, with his love of paint and syncopated music and dancing and belief in a happy Hereafter, had overcome their mutual prejudices and instead of warring with flintlocks and tomahawks, had pursued each other with engagement rings and marriage licenses, what a grand and glorious race we might be today!

What a land of freedom might be ours!

CONCERNING REVOLVING DOORS.

There has been some discussion of late as to the etiquette of the revolving door. When a man accompanied by a woman is about to be revolved in it, which should go first? Some think the man should precede the woman furnishing the motive power, while she follows idly in the next compartment. Others hold that the rule “Ladies first” can have no exception, therefore the man must stand aside and let the female of his species do the rough work of starting the door’s revolution while the man, coming after, keeps it going and stops it at the right moment.

“Starting something” is perhaps of all pastimes in the world the one most popular with the sex we are accustomed to call the gentle sex; one might almost say that “starting something” is Woman’s prerogative; on the other hand there is nothing on earth so abhorrent to that same gentle sex as the thing that is called Consistency; and though she may be perfectly charmed to start a revolution in South America, or in silk pajamas, or suffrage, or the rearing of children it does not follow that she will take kindly to the idea of starting the revolution of a revolving door.

As for the rule “Ladies first,” its application to the etiquette of doors in general (as distinguished from the revolving variety) is purely a matter of geography. In some European countries it is the custom, when entering a room, for the man to precede the woman, and if it be a closed street or office door, the man will open it and following the door inward, hold the door open while she passes in. If the door opens outward the woman naturally enters first, since her companion must remain outside to hold the door open.

The American rule compelling the woman to precede her escort when entering a room or building doubtless originated with our ancestor the cave-man.

On returning to his Apartment with his wife after a hunting expedition Mr. Hairy K. Stoneaxe would say with a persuasive Neolithic smile (and gentle shove) “After you my dear,” being rewarded for his politeness by advance information as to whether there were Megatheriums or Loxolophodons or an ambuscade of jealous rivals lurking in the darkness of his stone-upholstered sitting-room.

By all means let the lady go first; by so doing we pay the homage that is due to her sex and even though there are no Megatheriums of Loxolophodons in these days—there may be burglars! Only in the case of a door that must be opened inwards would I suggest an amendment. What more lamentable sight than that of a gentle lady squeezing precariously through a half-opened door while her escort, determined that though they both perish in the attempt, she shall go first, reaches awkwardly past her shoulder in the frantic endeavor to push back the heavy self-closing door while at the same time contorting the rest of his person into the smallest possible compass that she may have room to pass without disaster to her ninety-dollar hat, not to speak of her elbows and shins.

How much happier—and happiness is the mainspring of etiquette—they would be, this same pair, if (with a possible “allow me” to calm her fears) the escort should push boldly the door to its widest openness and holding it thus with one hand behind his back, with the other press his already removed hat against his heart as the lady grateful and unruffled sweeps majestically by.

BOLSHEVISM FOR BABIES

When W. S. Gilbert wrote these lines, he stated in an amusing way a great truth, for the doctrine of infant depravity and original sin thus lightly touched upon is, when stripped of its Calvinistic mummery, a recognized scientific verity.

I sometimes think that if the “highbrow” mothers who turn to books by long-haired professors with retreating chins for advice in child training, should study instead the nonsensical wisdom of Gilbert’s book, they would derive more benefit therefrom. At least it would do them (and their children) no harm.

I wish as much as that could be said of a book I have lately come across entitled “Practical Child Training,” by Ray C. Beery (Parent’s Association). So far from harmless it is, in my opinion, a more fitting title for it would be “Bolshevism for Babies.”

Obedience, says the author, “is your corner-stone. Therefore lay it carefully.” And this is how it is laid: “While you are teaching the child the first lessons in correct obedience, do not give any commands either in the lesson or outside except those which the child will be sure to obey willingly.”

Obedience is to be taught by wheedling and cajolery, which lessons the clever child will apply in later life as bribery and corruption. The author denies this in Book I, p. 130, but his denial is so curious it deserves quoting: “You would entirely vitiate its principles if in giving this lesson you should state it to the child like this: ‘If you do not do thus and so, I will give you no candy.’” Then on the same page: “While the thought of candy in the child’s mind causes him to obey, yet the lesson is planned in such a way that you are not buying obedience.”

The “five principles of discipline” are embodied in the following story: The father of a boy sees him and two other boys throwing apples through a barn window, two of whose panes had been broken. To make a long story short, the parent, instead of reproving his offspring, says: “Good shot, Bob! Do you see that post over there? See if you can hit it two out of three times.” “It would have been unwise for that father (adds the author of “Practical Child Training”) to say, ‘I’d rather you’d not throw at that window opening—can’t you sling at something else?’ The latter remark would suggest that the window was the best target and the boys would have been dissatisfied at having to stop throwing at it.”

The inference that the boys only needed the father’s objection to an act on their part to convince them that it was a desirable act would be ludicrous if it weren’t so immoral.

If you ask me which disgusts me most, the Father or his sons, I should reply without a moment’s hesitation—the Author of the book!

THE TUTTI-FRUTTI TREE

When the author of the most famous Love Song ever written, cried, “There is no new thing under the sun,” cigarettes, chewing-gum, the thermos-bottle and the “snapper” for fastening ladies’ frocks—(an indispensable thing when one has several hundred wives)—were yet to be invented.

Neither so far as we can learn, had Solomon who knew and could address in its own language every flower and tree in existence, ever heard of the Tutti-Frutti Tree.

There is to my certain belief only one tree in existence answering to that name, and I christened it myself. I am its Godfather.

In the heartmost heart of the fruitful Paradise of New Jersey stands a small but ancient stone cottage that has come to regard me as its lord, and on Squire Williams’ estate, whose verdant acres lie just outside my garden fence, grows the Tutti-Frutti Tree.

Once it was a young Apple Tree. It is still young, but as the result of a series of sap transfusions it is also several other kinds of tree, and when it grows up it will bear apples, quinces, two kinds of pears, peaches and, I believe, plums—almost everything in fact except Water Melons.

Some day a future Stevenson will immortalize it in verse something after this fashion,

It’s quite absurd, of course, but just suppose the Tree of Knowledge in that First Garden has been a Tutti-Frutti Tree instead of an Apple Tree! With seven separate kinds of fruit to choose from, all equally forbidden and, for that reason, equally desirable, how could Eve ever have decided which one to pluck?

And with Eve’s hesitation Sin would have been lost to the world!

Let us give thanks that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was not a Tutti-Frutti Tree.

THOSE BILL-BOARDS

Every now and again, generally when the warm weather is upon us, somebody or other starts a heated discussion about something that is of no particular interest to anybody.

This time it is Mr. Joseph Pennell, the artist, who wails and gnashes his pen about the terrible bill-board and advertising pictures that deface the public buildings and thoroughfares of American cities and the public scenery of the American countryside.

If my opinion were asked I should be tempted to quote the gentle answer with which the late William D. Howells was wont to turn away argument, and say to Mr. Pennell, “I think perhaps you are partly right.”

But since I am not on Mr. Pennell’s list of great American artists, a list, by the way that contains only two names, I am free to say what I really think, and that is that if the dear old familiar “Ads” were suddenly to disappear from the streets and cars, I should miss them very much.

Perhaps I have acquired a taste for them as the dweller near a street railroad first endures, then tolerates, and at last becomes so completely habituated to the roaring of wheels and the clang of metal that he is unable to sleep without their soothing lullaby.

Soothing—that’s what they are, these advertising pictures. They soften the underground torment of travel in the Subway, they take the place of the scenery which beguiles the tedium of ordinary travel, and at least they are, as a rule, more interesting to contemplate than the people in the opposite seat. Those people are strangers, the people in the advertisement panels are, many of them, old friends, friends met in other cars in other cities. Mr. Pennell no doubt would like to see them thrown off the train, but I am always glad to meet them again, and to some of them, with whom I have a sort of informal bowing acquaintance, I mentally take off my hat.

One amiable gentleman in particular I always look for and hail with delight when I find myself sitting opposite to him. He is an Italian, I take it, from his appearance, and from Naples, to judge by his accent, which, though I have never heard his voice, is depicted as plainly as the nose on his face.

Neither do I know his name, but I call him Signor Pizzicato, for it is quite evident that nature intended him for an Operatic career. How he ever came to be a barber, I cannot imagine. Perhaps he sang in the Barber of Seville and lost his voice and became a realist, as some painters lose their sense of form and become cubists or futurists. Whatever he should have been or might have been or was, a barber is what he is now, and I gaze upon him in fascination as with a priceless gesture of thumb and forefinger (as if he should pluck an individual mote from a sunbeam) he extols to his customer and to you, the bouquet so ravishing of the hair tonic he holds in his other hand, on the sale of which he presumably receives a large commission.

Then there is that delightful little Miss clad in airy next-to-nothings—but no, on second thought I shall not introduce you to her. I fear she is not to be trusted. The last time I sat opposite to her in a street-car in Cleveland—(or was it in Buffalo)—she caused me to go five blocks past my destination which happened to be a railway station, so that I was two blocks late for my train.

All I will tell you about her, gentle reader, is that she has fringed gentian eyes with a look in them that says quite plainly nothing would gratify her more than to play the same trick upon you.

All this chatter, I am aware, has nothing to do with Art, that is to say the “Art of Painting”; that large, severe-looking female you sometimes see crouched in an uncomfortable position on a still more uncomfortable cornice of a public building, wearing a laurel wreath and a granite peplum, and holding in her hand a huge stone palette.

But sometimes this severe female climbs down from her stone perch and takes a day off, Coney Island-wise, on the billboards and street cars, and then if she is not always at her best, she is often very amusing.

And just because a goddess isn’t stuck up it doesn’t prove that she isn’t a goddess—does it?

THE LURE OF THE “AD”

Kipling once, when sojourning in a far country, complained bitterly of the thoughtlessness of his friends at home in sending him a batch of magazines shorn (to save postage) of all the advertisements. Which shows that the most grown-up of artists may still have the heart of a child.

For my part, if I were forced to make choice between the advertising pages and the reading matter (so-called), I should in nine periodicals out of ten choose the former.

To the grown-up child the advertising section of the magazine takes the place of the Shop-Window of infancy through which, with bulging eyes and mouth agape, like some mazed minnow staring at the submerged Rhine-Gold, he once gazed at the tinsel treasure so bitterly beyond his penny’s reach.

And now, just as far out of reach as ever, in the display-window of the advertising page, the grown-up child gazes at the miraculous Motor-Car gliding, velvet shod, through palmy solitudes reflecting the rays of the setting sun with a splendor out-Solomoning Solomon.

Or the “Home Beautiful,” constructed throughout of selected materials of distinctive quality, and roofed with spark-proof shingles of the most refined pastel tints, “just the home you have dreamed about at a price that will dumfound you! Enclose this coupon with your order.”

Again it is the magical cabinet that brings into your very lap as it were the Galli-Curci, the Tetrazzini or any other “ini,” “owski” or “elli” it may please your fancy to pick from its golden perch in the operatic aviary.

And what a relief to turn from the magazine pictures of the slick-haired hero and the slinky heroine of fiction (perpetually vis-à-vis yet always looking past each other)—to turn from these to the very attractive, intelligent-looking girls of the advertising pages, girls exquisitely coiffed, gowned and silk-hosed and ever happily employed in some useful task: this one (in the Paquin “trottoir” of mouse-colored voile) joyously propelling a vacuum-cleaner, this (in the afternoon toilette of tricolette) mixing the ingredients for a custard pie in a forget-me-not-blue Wedgwood bowl, and this, not less lovely than either of her sisters, polishing a bathtub with some magic powder till it glistens like a Childs’ restaurant.

Now, any one of these dear girls, on her face alone—not to mention her graceful carriage and delicately moulded stockings—might without the least effort in the world have obtained a position as a Star in a Musical Comedy—with her picture in the Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair at least once a fortnight—but she prefers the simple household task, the vacuum cleaner, the spotless oil-stove, the shining bathtub to the plaudits of the masses.

And this is only one of the many lessons that are to be learned from the advertising pages. Who can look at the busy little Dutch lady in the blue frock and white cap and apron, stick in hand, chasing the Demon Dirt in street cars, subway and elevated stations, billboards and electric signs, all over town, all over the continent for that matter—who can look at the determined back of that fierce little lady (no one has ever seen her face, save the Demon) without inwardly swearing that wherever Demon Dirt may show his face, whether it be on the stage, the picture screen or the printed page of fiction he will do unto him even as doth the Little Dutch Lady with the big stick—

Or is it a rolling pin?

LOOK BEFORE SHE LEAPS

The Fourteenth of February in Leap Year is a dread-letter day for the shrinking bachelor and the shy (wife-shy) grass widower.

The butterfly-winged statue of Femininity that, for three happy leapless years, he worshiped from a safe distance (at the foot of its pedestal), has come to life, has climbed down from its vestal perch, changed fearfully from cool quiet marble to something of the consistency of warm india rubber—from an adorable image to—the female of the species.

And with all the term implies. The butterfly wings of Psyche, iridescent, like rainbows reflected on mother-of-pearl, have shrivelled and blackened into the umbrella-ribbed wings of the vampire and the petalled lips from which could only be thought to issue the maidenly negative “yes” or the melting affirmative “no”—are twisted into little scarlet snakes that hiss, “Kisssss me my fool!”

“Look before she leaps!” is the Leap-Year slogan of the shrinking Bachelor, and it is a perfectly splendid motto, as mottoes go.

But a motto is like a cure for a cold which is only good to cure a cold that has not yet been caught, and the shrinking one is already as good as caught and his perfectly splendid slogan is of no more use than an icebox to an Esquimaux or a fur coat in Hell.

The Leap-Year Bachelor’s only hope is to feign death. Like the Bear in Æsop, the Female of the Species Human has no use for any but a “live one.”

If he flees he is lost—(or found, according to whether the speech be given to the male or the female actor of the scene,)—and if he be a grass widower, he is made hay while the sun shines.

Now whether Providence intended the instinct of flight for the preservation of the hunted one or as a stimulus to the hunter, will never be known. With wolves and tigers it works both ways, but with the leap-year “Vamp” it works pretty much only one way.

And so the gentle bachelor flees and is caught and is lived upon happily ever after—

To see a statue come to life must be a terrifying spectacle. Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea is only for those who get their ideas about artists from magazines to the vacuity of whose contents the face of the girl on the cover may well serve as an index.

I am quite certain that when Pygmalion saw his perfect marble (perfect to him anyway) turn to imperfect flesh and blood, the completed result of months of hard work obliterated—undone—as if it had never been—and in its place “just a girl,” very sweet and lovely and all that—but compared to his statue—oh no!

And that is looking at it from its brightest “angle” (as the motion-picture intellectuals say). As a matter of fact, judging from the agonizing sensation of the human leg (or arm) when rudely awakened from dreamless slumber, the process of transmutation from senseless stone to pulsating flesh must be a very painful one indeed. However pleasing the countenance of the living Galatea might be under normal conditions its expression of mingled bewilderment, rage and physical anguish must have been disconcerting, not to say terrifying, to the sensitive soul of the sculptor, and anything but consoling for the loss of his hard-won and cherished handiwork.

I can picture Pygmalion fleeing madly from his studio, not even waiting for the elevator and vowing by all the gods, then administrating human affairs, never again to make a wish without touching wood or at least crossing his fingers.

THE LOW COST OF CABBING

In the last ten years or so all the necessaries and most of the luxuries of life have more than doubled in cost—all but one—the Cab—or to be more accurate, the Taxi-cab.

Perhaps it is because a cab is quite as often a necessity as it is a luxury and so falls between two schools, the Stoic and Epicurean, that it is an exception to the rule of rising cost.

Did I say rising cost? If I am not very much mistaken the cost of cabbing, so far from not rising has actually fallen in the last ten years, and that brings me to my great invention.

It is a scheme for saving money, a Thrift scheme. It is like this—Every time you take a street-car (what with the dislocated service and the abolition of transfers) you are paying nearly twice what you used to pay, and soon you will be paying even more.

On the other hand, a trip that in a hackney cab, fifteen years ago, cost you a dollar-fifty, today in a taxicab costs you only seventy-five cents.

Now make a swift calculation—

If you take six cars a day you lose thirty cents. A loss of thirty cents a day doesn’t seem very much, but in a year, it amounts to a loss of $109.50 which is not to be treated lightly.

Now if you take six Taxis at an average cost of, say two dollars per trip, you are saving (let me see, six times two) twelve dollars a day and twelve dollars a day is four thousand three hundred and eighty dollars a year, which added to the $109.50 you have saved by not riding in street-cars makes a grand total of $4489.50! And this is only what you save by taking six cabs a day. If you took twice as many cabs you would save twice that amount, and if you increased your cabbage to one hundred per diem (a day) your savings for the first year would amount to $448,950.50—nearly half a million dollars!

Go over my figures carefully with your wife when she returns from business this evening—It is a live proposition—Think it over!