Of Time

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

Two recent utterances by members of the Club have struck an answering chord in the bosom of at least one fellow contributor. He had, as it chanced, flung off in his brilliant, and painless way (that is, by means of three days’ hard labor and four drafts) a few notes of his own on a kindred theme, in which, he believes, other insubordinate persons will find something not altogether to their disadvantage. With Early Rising pronounced a fetich, the Calendar a tyrant, and the Chronometer a bore, we ought, even in New England, to face the new year with a fairly easy mind.

The contributor finds himself reflecting with a certain satisfaction, innocent he trusts, that he has not carried a chronometer for three years and more. He has in the end lost his civilized conception of time as something that winds up and runs down, and perceives that, unassociated with dials, fobs, and pockets, it is capable of being a decent and even comfortable companion. His emancipation was, he hastens to admit, consequent upon a happy release from an employment full of little punctualities. A boyish impulse led him, on the red-letter day which gave him liberty, to fling his watch (a battered and ancient and merely silver one, he confesses) into an inner corner of his desk. It has never been dislodged. He owns, indeed, to a kind of superstitious feeling of precaution which prevents its dislodgment by housekeeping hands. That drawer is not dusted. There, while this machine is to it, the sleeping dog is to lie, a pleasantly mute and studiously neglected symbol of drudgery outlived.

The contributor has been surprised to discover how easy it is to get on without the ministrations of this conventional bore. The routine of the day seems to arrange itself altogether commodiously without the officious reminder of a disk, a dozen numerals, and two pins. When the chickens and the children make so much noise that one can’t sleep o’mornings, one knows it is time to get up. And when the house and the neighborhood grow so quiet that one can’t stay awake o’ nights one knows it is time to go to bed. For the rest, there are signals of sorts to announce luncheon and dinner; and what more can a peace-loving man of letters ask for ? — There are, of course, occasional contacts to be made with the outer world; the city is to be visited now and then, and consequently trains to be “caught,” as the hurried phrase is. The man without a watch never hurries; his spirit is untroubled by considerations of time and tide. Yet he seldom misses appointments. “Biddy,” he says placidly at breakfast, “I’m going to town on the 10.29 train. If you don’t hear me moving about at quarter past ten or so, you might thump on the door.” Perhaps Biddy thumps; but the chances are the contributor comes to in the nick of time, and Biddy has to call after him not to forget the stockings for Tommy.

The man without a watch has, indeed, a sense of time which does not belong to the time-servers. Day or night he can tell you within ten minutes, by the feeling of things merely, what the hour is of which your precious gold repeater prates so loud. Naturally he comes to look with no little commiseration upon victims of the chronometrical habit; frankly, he considers them not quite normal, not quite responsible. Not long since the contributor had an experience way down East with a man who, honestly desiring to profit by the wilderness, remained hopelessly linked to civilization by way of his watch-pocket. If it was a question of planning to do something, there was continual traffic between his right hand and his fob; if the programme was to stay about camp and do nothing, idleness was given a religious cast by faithful observance of its arithmetical divisions. It was an hour and forty-three minutes since breakfast, and, by a singular chance, an hour and fifty-seven minutes before luncheon. The recitation of these details gave the contributor no joy, but it was clear that the process soothed his companion inexpressibly. It seemed to tickle his brain and ear into a comfortable sense of the reliability of things. It offset solitude, it suggested adventure. Time, to be sure, waits for no man, but to keep an eye upon it — is not that almost like making it wait upon him ? Personally, the contributor would not be much put about if the sun saw fit to vary its somewhat mechanical habit of rising and setting at stated hours, like a boarding-school boy. The variation would not cause him and other animals half the embarrassment it would cause astronomers, school-teachers, wheat-operators, almanac-makers, newspaper editors, cooks, and most other stupid persons. For himself, at least, he has had his illuminating experience. He has dared to taste of freedom, and there is no danger of his ever again becoming a Slave of the Turnip.