An Unmailed Letter
BEING A CHRISTMAS TALE OF SOME SIGNIFICANCE
I called the other night at the home of my friend Jack Chetwood, and found him, as usual, engaged in writing. Chetwood's name is sufficiently well known to all who read books and periodicals these days to spare me the necessity of adverting to his work, or of attempting to describe his personality. It is said that Chetwood writes too much. Indeed, I am one of those who have said so, and I have told him so. His response has always been that I – and others who have ventured to remonstrate – did not understand. He had to keep at it, he said. Couldn't help himself. Didn't write for fun, but because he had to. Always did his best, anyhow, and what more can be asked of any man? Surely a defence of this nature takes the wind out of a critic's sails.
"Busy, Jack?" said I, as I entered his sanctum.
"Yes," said he. "Very."
"Very well," said I. "Don't let me disturb you. I only happened in, anyhow. Nothing in particular to say; but, Jacky, why don't you quit for a little? You're worn and pale and thin. What's the use of breaking down? Don't pose with me. You don't have to write all the time."
He smiled wanly at me.
"I – I'm only writing a letter this time," he said.
"Oh, in that case – " I began.
"You can't guess whom to?" he interrupted.
"Me," said I.
"No," he retorted. "Me."
"I don't understand," said I, somewhat perplexed.
"Myself," laughed Chetwood.
"You are writing a letter to – to – "
"Myself," said he. "Truly so. Odd, isn't it? Wait a few minutes, old man, and I'll read it to you. Light a cigar and sit down just a minute and I'll be through."
I lit one of Chetwood's cigars. They are excellent. I have heard one expert pronounce them "bully." They are, and of course while I smoked I was happy.
At the end of a half-hour's waiting, the silence broken only by the scratching of Chetwood's pen and by my own puffings upon the weed, he wheeled about in his chair.
"Well, that's finished," he said, and he glanced affectionately and, I thought, wistfully about his charming workshop.
"Good," said I. "You promised to read it to me."
"All right," said he. "Here goes."
And he kept his word. I reproduce the letter from memory. Like all copy-mongers, he began it with a title double underscored, and I reproduce it as I heard it:
"LETTER TO MYSELF
"On Christmas Giving: A Hint
"My Dear John, – As the Christmas holidays approach it has seemed to me to be somewhat in the line of my duty to write to you not only to wish you all the good things of the season, but to give you a little fatherly advice which may stand you in good stead when the first of January comes about. I have observed you and your ways with some particularity for some time; in fact, since that very happy day, nearly twenty years ago, when you entered upon the duties of citizenship, with twenty-one years and a birthday gift of $500 from your father to your credit. The twenty-one years had come easily and had gone easily. All you had had to do to acquire and to retain them was to breathe and to keep your feet dry. The $500, which represented so much toil on your father's part, came to you quite as easily. You saw the check, and you realized the possibilities of the sum for which it called, but I do not think you ever realized the effort that produced that $500. I judge from the way you let it filter through your fingers that you thought your generous father picked the money up from a pile of gold lying somewhere in the back yard of his home. I do not know if you recall what it went for, but I do. Some of it went for a half-dozen sporting pictures of some rarity that you had long wished to hang on the walls of your den. More of it went for rare first editions of books whose possession you had envied others for no little time. A portion of it was spent on sundry trinkets which should adorn your person, such as studs, scarf-pins, a snake ring, with ruby eyes – a disgusting-looking thing, by the way – to encircle your little finger. There were also certain small things in the line of bronzes, silver writing implements, a jug or two of some value that you had cast your eyes upon, and which you were quick to acquire. Do you remember, my dear Jack, how delighted you were with all that you were able to buy with that $500, until the bills came in and you found that the consciousness of a $500 backing had led you into an expenditure of a trifle over $900? You were painfully surprised that day, Jacky, my boy, but, as I have watched you since you let it go at that, you never learned anything from those bills. Indeed, what you call your cheerful philosophy, which led you to console yourself then with the thought that the stuff you had bought on credit if sold at auction would bring in enough to pay the deficit, has clung to you ever since, and has served you ill – very ill – unless I am wholly mistaken. You would strike any other man than myself were he to venture to call you a second Mr. Micawber, but Johnnie, dear, that is what you are – and you are even worse than that, John. Let me assure you of the fact. You are something worse. You are a modern Dick Turpin! Don't be angry at my saying so. Merely understand that I am telling you the truth, and for your own good, and I'll explain the analogy. I cannot call a man a modern Dick Turpin without explaining why I do so.
"Turpin was a highwayman, as you know. He mounted his horse and went out upon the highway, and whatever he wanted he took. He had no greater powers of resistance in the face of temptation than others had in the face of him. You, John, are much the same, even if you do not realize the fact. You mount the steed called Credit, and you go out upon the highways, and whatever you see that you happen to want you take – don't you, Jack? It is true that, sooner or later, you pay, but so did Turpin. Turpin paid with his life. You will pay with yours, and that is why I write you, for the constant anxiety to meet the obligations of your thefts – for that is what they are, John; we cannot blink the fact – this constant anxiety, I say, is sapping your strength, undermining your constitution, destroying slowly but surely your nerves, and sooner or later you will succumb to the strain. Is it worth the price, my boy?
"I can imagine you asking what all this has to do with Christmas and the season of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Man. You think I am merely cavilling, but I am not. It has this to do with it: It involves my Christmas present to you, which is important to me and I trust will be so to you. I am not going to give you a gold watch, or a complete edition of Thackeray, or a set of golf clubs this year, and, being a man, I cannot knit you a worsted vest as your sister might – or as some other fellow's sister might. All I can afford to give you this year is a hint, and I shall not wait until Christmas morn to hand it over to you, because it would then lack value. I send it to you now, when you need it most, and, if you accept it, when the Christmas chimes begin to sound their music on the frosty air you will thank me for it perhaps more than you do now.
"Don't be a highwayman this year, John. Never mind what Solomon said; think of what I say. Solomon was a wise man, but he lived in a bygone age. Take thought of the morrow, my boy. Don't consider the lilies of the field, but come down to real business. Don't mount your prancing horse Credit and hold up some poor jeweller for a silver water-pitcher for your brother George when you know that on January 1st the jeweller will probably ask you for a quid pro quo, and for which quid you will be compelled to compel him to wait until April or May. And remember that, if your dear wife could have her choice, she would infinitely prefer your peace of mind to the sables which you propose to give her at Christmas, bought on a credit which, however pleasing to-day, is sure to become a very pressing annoyance to-morrow.
"Then, my dear man, there are your children. What a joy they are! What a source of affectionate pride; what a source of satisfaction, and how they trust you, Jack. You remember the trust you placed in your father. You have never slept since you had to do for yourself as you slept when he did for you. You didn't know a care then; you had no worries in those old days; you knew your home was yours and that every reasonable thing you could wish for he would give you to the full extent of his means. That confidence was not misplaced, and all that you have to-day you'd willingly give up for that sweet peace of mind that was yours while he was with you. God bless him and his memory. Do you realize, Jack, that you occupy that same relation to your children? They believe in you as you believed in him. And are you meeting your responsibilities as he met his? Think it over. Of course, for instance, Tommie wants a complete railway system, with tracks and signals and switches and nickel-plated rolling stock, and all that – but can you afford to give it to him? And Pollie – dear little Pollie – what right-minded little Pollie does not want a doll; a great yellow-haired, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked doll, with automatic insides and an expensive trousseau? But can you really afford to give it to her? Do you remember when you were a baby how you wanted the moon, and yelled for it lustily? And do you remember how you didn't get it, and how you sobbed yourself to sleep, and how, in spite of it all, you waked up the next morning all smiles and sunshine, with no recollection of ever having wanted the moon? And do you realize that if your daddy could have given it to you he would have done so? Do you recollect how, ever since that happy time, you have wanted the earth, and how you haven't got it, and how fortunate you are, and how happy you are without it? So it is, and so it will be with your children. These things do not change. My beloved boy, a serene, unworried father, next to a serene and happy mother, is God's most gracious gift to childhood, at Christmas or at any other time. If January finds you petulant and nervous over a bill you cannot pay for Tommie's Christmas railway and for Pollie's Yuletide doll, then has the 25th of December brought woe instead of joy into your home; strife instead of peace, and good will to man is not to be found there. In January the pure, sweet, simple little minds will wonder at you, Jack. The little hearts will love you just the same, but the little minds will wonder at your irritability, and they will still hold to that beautiful trust. And you? Well, you'll toss about at night, sleepless and worried, and if you are of the right sort, as I hope and believe you are, you will ask yourself if you are worthy of the confidence the little ones place in you. Your mistaken notions of generosity may have imperilled your household. Given health and strength and ideas, you may be able to keep on and make all right, but who knows at what moment you will have to give up the fight? Why should you invite care and worry? Why not come down to the serious facts and insure the happiness of all who depend upon you by following out a sane and sensible plan of living and of giving? My dear boy, don't you know you are doing wrong in being unjustifiably ostentatious in your giving? I have likened you to Turpin. You will laugh this off. You aren't a thief – at least you cannot believe that you are one; but there is something worse even than being a thief, and I fear you are verging upon it.
"Frankly, Jack, I am afraid you are a snob. Yes, sir, a plain snob; and if snobbery is not worse than thievery, I know nothing of life. I'd rather be a straight-out, sincere, honest, unpretending thief than a snob, my dear boy. Wouldn't you? Let us look into this. The thief is the creature of circumstances. He is what he is because his environment and his moral sense, plus his necessities, require that he shall do what he does. But the snob – what compelling circumstances make a snob of a man? Why should he make a pretence of being what he is not? Why should he give things he cannot afford to give unless it be that he desires to make an impression that he has no right to? The thief banks on nothing. The snob takes advantage of his supposed respectability. Bless us, Jacky, aren't we worse than they are?
"Read your Thackeray, old chap. See what he said about snobs. He never inveighed against the submerged soul that never had a chance. He never, with all his imputed cynicism, made a slimy thing of those who fell, as Dickens did. He struck high. He exploited the vices of those who might do him real harm. He took the high man, not the low man, for his target, and he struck home when he struck at snobbery. And he struck a blow for purer, sweeter living, and men may call him cynic for all time, but I shall never cease to call him brave and true for what he did for you and for me, as well as for all other men.
"Put yourself in the crucible, Jack. Find out what you are and what you may be, and don't try to make yourself appear to be generous when you are simply financially reckless. Don't rob your creditors in the vain hope that you are living up to the spirit of the hour, and don't rob yourself. You are not living up to that spirit. You are degrading it. God knows I love you more than I love any living thing except my wife and children, but let me tell you this: the man who gives more than he has a right to give is a thief in the eyes of conscience, and, worse than that, he is a snob, and a mean one at that. Adapt your giving to your circumstances. Do what you can to make others happy, but at this season do not, I beg of you, try to do what you can't in an effort to appear for what you are not.
"The happiness of your children, of your wife, of yourself, is involved, and when that happiness is attacked or weakened, then is the whole spirit of Christmas season set aside, and the selfishness of the posing impostor put in its place. Always your affectionate self,
"John Henry Chetwood."
When Chetwood had finished I puffed away fiercely upon my cigar.
"Good letter, Jack," said I.
"Yes," said he, tearing it up.
"Don't do that," I cried, trying to restrain him.
He smiled again and sighed. "It's – gone," said he. "Gone. Forever. I shall never write it again."
"You should have sent it to – to yourself," said I. "I have thought sometimes that such a letter should be written to you."
"Possibly," said he. "But – it's gone." And he tossed it into the waste-basket.
"It's a pity," said I. "You – you might have sold that."
"I know I might," said he. "But if it had ever appeared in print I should have been immortally mad. It's a libel on myself. Truth – is libellous, you know."
"It might have been rejected," I said, sarcastically.
"That would have made me madder yet," said Chetwood.
"Still – you realize the – ah – situation, Jack," I put in.
"Well," said he, with a laugh, "Christmas is coming, and when the fever is on – I – well, I catch it. I want to give, give, give, and give I shall."
"But you are imperilling – " I cried.
"I know, I know," he interrupted, gently. "God knows I know, but it is the fever of the hour. You can't stave off an epidemic. It's not my fault; it's the fault of the times."
"Nonsense," I retorted. "Can't you stand up against the times?"
"I can," said he, complacently lighting a cigar. "But I sha'n't. We'll all go to ruin together. The man who tries to stand up against the spirit of the times is an ass. I lack the requisite number of legs for that."
"Well," I put in, "I wish you a merry Christmas – "
"I shall have it," said he, cheerily. "The children – "
"And the New Year?" I interrupted.
"It isn't here yet," said Chetwood. "And I never cross a bridge until I come to it. Take another cigar."
Nevertheless, I went from Chetwood that night rather happier than I ought to have been, perhaps. His letter, even though he did not choose to mail it to himself, showed that he was thinking – thinking about it; and I was glad.
What if all men were to consider the questions that Chetwood raised?
Might not the meaning of Christmas, with all its joy and all its beauty, and all its inspiration-giving qualities, once more be made clear to man? I for one believe it would, and I venture to hope that the old-time simplicity of the observance of the day may again be restored unto us.
"God bless us all!" said Tiny Tim.
When the simpler, happier Christmas time, which is a joy, and not a burden, comes back to us, then will Tiny Tim's prayer have been answered.
The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks
A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
It is with very deep regret that I find myself unable to keep the promise made to you last spring to provide you with a suitable ghost story for your Christmas number. I have made several efforts to prepare such a tale as it seemed to me you would require, but, one and all, these have proved unavailing. By a singular and annoying combination of circumstances in which only my unfortunate habit of meeting trouble in a spirit of badinage has involved me, I cannot secure the models which I invariably need for the realistic presentation of my stories, and I decline at this present, as I have hitherto consistently declined, to draw upon my imagination for the ingredients necessary, even though tempted by the exigencies of a contract sealed, signed, and delivered. It is far from my wish to be known to you as one who makes promises only to break them, but there are times in a man's life when he must consider seriously which is the lesser evil, to deceive the individual or to deceive the world, the latter being a mass of individuals, and, consequently, as much more worthy of respect as the whole is greater than a part. Could I bring myself to be false to my principles as a scribe, and draw upon my fancy for my facts, and, through a prostitution of my art, so sickly o'er my plot with the pale cast of realism as to hoodwink my readers into believing what I know to be false, the task were easy. Given a more or less active and unrestrained imagination, pen, ink, paper, and the will to do so, to construct out of these a ghost story which might have been, but as a matter of fact was not, presents no difficulties whatsoever; but I unfortunately have a conscience which, awkward as it is to me at times, I intend to keep clear and unspotted. The consciousness of having lied would forever rest as a blot upon my escutcheon. I cannot manufacture out of whole cloth a narrative such as you desire and be true to myself, and this I intend to be, even if by so doing I must seem false to you. I think, however, that, as one of my friends and most important consumer, you are entitled to a complete explanation of my failure to do as I have told you I would. To most others I should send merely a curt note evidencing, not pleading, a pressure of other work as the cause of my not coming to time. To you it is owed that I should enter somewhat into the details of the unfortunate business.
You doubtless remember that last summer, with our mutual friend Peters, I travelled abroad seeking health and, incidentally, ideas. I had discovered that imported ideas were on the whole rather more popular in America than those which might be said to be indigenous to the soil. The reading public had, for the time being at least, given itself over to moats and châteaux and bloodshed and the curious dialects of the lower orders of British society. Sherlock Holmes had superseded Old Sleuth in the affections of my countrymen who read books. Even those honest little critics the boys and girls were finding more to delight them in the doings of Richard Cœur de Lion and Alice in Wonderland than in the more remarkable and intensely American adventures of Ragged Dick or Mickie the Motorboy. John Storm was at that moment hanging over the world like the sword of Damocles, and Rudolf Rassendyll had completely overshadowed such essentially American heroes as Uncle Tom and Rollo. I found, to my chagrin, that the poetry of Tennyson was more widely read even than my own, even though Tennyson was dead and I was not. And in the universities whole terms were devoted to the compulsory study of dramatists like Shakespeare and Molière, while home talent, as represented by Mr. Hoyt or the facile productions of Messrs. Weber & Fields, was relegated to the limbo of electives which the students might take up or not, as they chose, and then only in the hours which they were expected to devote to recreation. All of which seemed to indicate that while there was of course no royal road to literary fame, there was with equal certainty no republican path thereto, and that real inspiration was to be derived rather under the effete monarchies of Europe than at home. To Peters the same idea had occurred, but in his case in relation to art rather than to literature. The patrons of art in America had a marked preference for the works of Meissonier, Corot, Gérôme, Millet – anybody, so long as he was a foreigner, Peters said. The wealthy would pay ten, twenty, a hundred thousand dollars for a Rousseau or a Rosa Bonheur rather than exchange a paltry one hundred dollars for a canvas by Peters, though, as far as Peters was concerned, his canvas was just as well woven, his pigments as carefully mixed, and his application of the one to the other as technically correct as was anything from the foreign brushes.
"You can't take in the full import of a Turner unless you stand a way away from it," said he, "and if you'll only stand far enough away from mine you couldn't tell it from a Meissonier."
And when I jocularly responded to this that I thought a mile was the proper distance, he was offended. We quarrelled, but made up after a while, and in the making up decided upon a little venture into foreign fields together, not only to recuperate, but to see if so be we could discover just where the workers on the other side got that quality which placed them in popular esteem so far ahead of ourselves.
What we discovered along this especial line must form the burden of another story. The main cause of our foreign trip, these discoveries, are but incidental to the theme I have in hand. Our conclusions were important, but they have no place here, and what they were you will have to wait until my work on Abroad versus Home is completed to learn. But what is important to this explanation is the fact that while going through the long passage leading from the Pitti Palace to the Uffizi Gallery at Florence we – or rather I – encountered one of those phantoms which have been among the chief joys and troubles of my life. Peters was too much taken up with his Baedeker to see either ghosts or pictures. Indeed, it used to irritate me that Peters saw so little, but he would do as most American tourists do, and spend all of his time looking for some especial thing he thought he ought to see, and generally missing not only it, but thousands of minor things quite as well worthy of his attention. I don't believe he would have seen the ghost, however, under any circumstances. It requires a specially cultivated eye or digestion, one or the other, to enable one to see ghosts, and Peters's eye is blind to the invisible and his digestion is good.
Why, under the canopy, the vulgar little spectre was haunting a picture-gallery I never knew, unless it was to embarrass the Americans who passed to and fro, for he claimed to be an American spook. I knew he was not a living thing the minute I laid eyes through him. He loomed up before me while I was engaged in chuckling over a particularly bad canvas by somebody whose name I have forgotten, but which was something like Beppo di Contarini. It represented the scene of a grand fête at Venice back in the fifteenth century, and while preserved by the art-lovers of Florence as something worthy, would, I firmly believe, have failed of acceptance even by the catholic taste of the editor of an American Sunday newspaper comic supplement. The thing was crude in its drawing, impossible in its coloring, and absolutely devoid of action. Every gondola on the canal looked as if it were stuck in the mud, and as for the water of the Grand Canal itself, it had all the liquid glory under this artist's touch of calf's-foot jelly, and it amused me intensely to think that these patrons of art, in the most artistic city in the world, should have deemed it worth keeping. However, whatever the merit of the painting, I was annoyed in the midst of my contemplation of it to have thrust into the line of vision a shape – I cannot call it a body because there was no body to it. There were the lineaments of a living person, and a very vulgar living person at that, but the thing was translucent, and as it stepped in between me and the wonderful specimen of Beppo di Somethingorother's art I felt as if a sudden haze had swept over my eyes, blurring the picture until it reminded me of a cheap kind of decalcomania that in my boyhood days had satisfied my yearnings after the truly beautiful.
I made several ineffectual passes with my hands to brush the thing away. I had discovered that with certain classes of ghosts one could be rid of them, just as one may dissipate a cloud of smoke, by swirling one's outstretched paw around in it, and I hoped that I might in this way rid myself of the nuisance now before me. But I was mistaken. He swirled, but failed to dissipate.
"Hum!" said I, straightening up, and addressing the thing with some degree of irritation. "You may know a great deal about art, my friend, but you seem not to have studied manners. Get out of my way."
"Pah!" he ejaculated, turning a particularly nasty pair of green eyes on me. "Who the deuce are you, that you should give me orders?"
"Well," said I, "if I were impulsive of speech and seldom grammatical, I might reply by saying Me, but as a purist, let me tell you, sir, that I'm I, and if you seek to know further and more intimately, I will add that who I am is none of your infernal business."
"Humph!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Grammatical or otherwise, you're a coward! You don't dare say who you are, because you are afraid of me. You know I am a spectre, and, like all commonplace people, you are afraid of ghosts."
A hot retort was on my lips, and I was about to tell him my name and address, when it occurred to me that by doing so I might lay myself open to a kind of persecution from which I have suffered from time to time, ghosts are sometimes so hard to lay, so I accomplished what I at the moment thought was my purpose by a bluff.
"Oh, as for that," said I, "my name is So and So, and I live at Number This, That Street, Chicago, Illinois."
Both the name and the address were of course fictitious.
"Very well," said he, calmly, making a note of the address. "My name is Jones. I am the president of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, enjoying a well-earned rest from his labors on his savings from his salary as a walking delegate. You shall hear from me on your return to Chicago through the local chapter, the United Apparitions of Illinois."
"All right," said I, with equal calmness. "If the Illinois spooks are as Illinoisome as you are, I will summon the board of health and have them laid without more ado."
Upon this we parted. That is to say, I walked on to the Uffizi, and he vanished, in something of a rage, it seemed to me.
I thought no more of the matter until a week ago, when, in accordance with an agreement with the principal thereof, I left New York to go to Chicago, to give a talk before a certain young ladies' boarding-school, on the subject of "Muscular Romanticism." This was a lecture I had prepared on a literary topic concerning which I had thought much. I had observed that a great deal of the popularity of certain authors had come from the admiration of young girls – mostly those at boarding-school, and therefore deprived of real manly company – for a kind of literature which, seeming to be manly, did not yet appeal very strongly to men. In certain aspects it seemed strong. It presented heroes who were truly heroic, and who always did the right thing in the right manner. Writers who had more ink than blood to shed, and a greater knowledge of etiquette than of human nature, were making their way into temporary fame by compelling chaps to do things they could not do. I rather like to read of these fellows myself. I am no exception to the rule which makes human beings admire, and very strongly, too, the fellow who poses successfully. Indeed, I admire a poseur who can carry his pose through without disaster to himself, because he has nothing to back him up, and, wanting this, if by his assurance he can make himself a considerable personage he falls short of genius only by lacking it. But this is apart from the story. Whatever the general line of thought in the lecture, I was, as I have said, on my way to Chicago to deliver it before a young ladies' boarding-school. I should have been happy over the prospect, for I have many warm friends in Chicago, there was a moderately large fee ahead, and there is always a charm, as well, in the mere act of standing on a dais before some two or three hundred young girls and having their undivided attention for a brief hour. Yet, despite all this, I was dreadfully depressed. Why, I could not at first surmise. It seemed to me, however, as though some horrid disaster were impending. I experienced all the sensations which make four o'clock in the morning so dreaded an hour to those who suffer from insomnia. My heart would race ahead, thumping like the screw of an ocean greyhound, and then slow down until it seemingly ceased to beat altogether; my hands were alternately dry and hot, and clammy and cold; and then like a flash I knew why, and what it was I feared. It suddenly dawned upon my mind that, by some frightfully unhappy coincidence, the address of Miss Brockton's Academy for Young Ladies, whither I was bound, was precisely the same as that I had given the vulgar little spook at Florence as my own. I had entirely forgotten the incident; and then, as I drew near to the spot whereon I was to have been made to suffer through the machinations of the local chapter of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, my soul was filled with dread. Had Grand-Master-Spook Jones's threat been merely idle? Had he, even as I had done, dismissed the whole affair as unworthy of any further care, or would he keep his word? – indeed, had he kept his word, and, through his followers in the Amalgamated Brotherhood, made himself obnoxious to the residents of Number This, That Street?