The Week-Ender
IN the times of Henry VII, the story runs, there lived in Swaffham Market, in Norfolk, a pedler named John Chapman. Having dreamed one night that, if he went up to London, on London Bridge he would meet a man who would bring him good news, and being unable to get this dream out of his mind, he presently betook himself to London, and all day long walked to and fro on London Bridge. At length a shopkeeper, noting his strange behavior, asked him the meaning of it, and the honest pedler told him his dream.
‘Ah!’ said the shopkeeper, ‘had I taken account of dreams, I might have seemed as much a fool as you; for only the other night I dreamed that in a place called Swaffham Market, in Norfolk, there lives a pedler named John Chapman, who has a tree in his backside, under which is buried a pot of gold.’
The pedierhumbly acknowledged the folly of such behavior and forthwith returned home. There he lost no time in digging under the tree in his backside, and in very truth found just such a pot of gold as the shopkeeper had dreamed of, whereby he lived in plenty the rest of his days.
It must be evident that, under some subtle influence, — a dream, an invitation, or a prospectus, — John Chapman went off for a week-end, and came back from it with his eyes opened to new possibilities at home. Every weekender knows that many a problem insoluble on a Friday will yield to treatment on a Tuesday.
Just as the provincial pedler turned for his holiday to the metropolis, the metropolite naturally seeks his in remote rural solitude. It is my hard lot to spend a part of my summer breadwinning in the stifling city, and to have only the week-ends with my family in the country. Between the scene of my labors and the bosky isle which they inhabit lie four hundred miles of rail, with which my weekly journeys have now made me reasonably familiar. And what with four days and three nights in town, and four nights and three days out of it, I sometimes hardly know which is the week and which the week-end.
I write this memoir on the way back from one of these tranquil retreats from the bustling world. This morning I did nothing at all that I remember, except rise at six, help anchor and beflag the stake-boat and the finish-boat for a regatta, act as announcer for the opening events, drive a launch in the procession, compete in a boat-race, and paddle violently in three hot canoedashes, besides communing with nature in the intervals. We had just time for lunch before I left for the train; and now, rested and refreshed, I am returning to the busy city, eager to participate again in its fervid life.
It is no great inconvenience for the island household to have me ply between it and the marts of trade, and I sometimes prove very useful indeed as a sort of pony express. Week-enders I believe always carry candy, melons, or green corn; but my supreme exploit in transportation was the night I staggered backwards off the steps of a moving station bus, with a large suitcase, a box of candy, and a seven-foot beach umbrella in my otherwise empty hands. Of course, I added a basket of fruit before venturing on the train. John Chapman himself can hardly have returned from London heavier laden.
I went week-ending once in Egypt, years ago, with a plum-cake, and a basket of vegetables — the leeks and onions of Egypt — so huge that, it and I occupied an entire compartment of the Fayum train. Something like this happened last summer, when I was escorting north a wooden ash-stand perhaps two feet high, in the form of a negro waiter. The person who sold him to me asked me where he was to stand; and when I said on the porch of a summer cottage, she answered brightly, ‘ Then this will be just the thing. You know you want a touch of color.’ But when packed and boxed, my touch of color proved too bulky to go under the berth, nor could his congener, the porter, find room for him in his closet or in the vestibule; and in the end he did in simple fact occupy an upper all by himself, even as I.
Why is it that the week-ender, no matter how high-minded, thus unfailingly degenerates into a beast of burden? Are there not express companies and parcel-posts? Yet who cares for what they bring? A commonplacelooking bundle is pushed at you over the post-office counter: it must be those bathing-shoes come at last, when the interest felt in ordering them has evaporated. But to arrive at the island before breakfast, bringing out of one’s pack things ordered, or, better, unexpected — this has about it something of Santa Claus and the Swaffham pedler combined. The things you bring are the spoils of your hunting; you have somehow wrung them out of the vast impersonal city, and you come bringing them in an elemental sort of triumph. Your arrival becomes an event.
There is also another reason for this pack-horse phase of week-ending: you forgot to get the things till the last minute, and you had to carry them, or arrive ingloriously, bringing nothing more welcome or substantial than explanations. Besides, shopping for the paraphernalia of sport through the week helps to keep one in a holiday frame of mind. And was not John Chapman, that patron of week-enders, himself a pedler by profession?
The beach umbrella was for the Fourth of July; but lesser occasions, like regattas, have their uses for the week-end express. All I brought up last Friday night, that I now recall, besides my personal luggage, was two paddles, three boxes of candy, a boathook, a navy anchor, and six ropefenders for the launch. The boat-hook, I remember (someone else won it and now rejoices in it), was of a peculiar elegance, being tipped with brass. As I was buying it in a sporting-goods store, a boy and a man looked on. ‘ We ought to have one of those,’ said the boy, and added with fine inconsequence, ’What’s it for ? ’ ’It’s to open and close windows with,’ said the man; thus betraying his narrow urban horizon.
The picturesqueness of our island remoteness is accentuated by the railway which connects us with the great world. For more than twenty years it has stood like a rock against the encroachments of fashion and our too mechanical age. On it one finds none of the freakish contrivances of modern travel. Its fine old sleepers go back to the Victorian period. I have made some study of archæology, but I must confess that in the dim pillared aisles of some of these ancient coaches I stand in awe, not to say dread. What wassail of thirsty fishing-clubs have these venerable vehicles not witnessed! They are as redolent of antiquity as Dickens’s ghostly stage-coaches, only these hoary conveyances are still awheel. The porters are of an appropriate maturity. They are like old family servants. The same old darky year after year greets you at the steps of your Pullman, and the dining-car conductors are old family friends, to whom fathers introduce their children.
The locomotives, too, have their distinctive traits. Most engines start slowly and reluctantly, but in this ozone-laden air, the very engines jump forward eagerly to their task, and the whole train starts with a thrilling jerk. Strangers misunderstand this, but the sympathetic and reflective week-ender sees deeper into it, and comes to find the lazy ways of city locomotives tedious and annoying by contrast. It is an experience to see one of these quaint engines, with its spark-arrester, so suggestive of afternoon tea, jauntily perched upon its smokestack, ricocheting along the rails, or, in more pensive mood, stealthily pushing its way through the thick shrubbery that overhangs the track. Our railroad has a system of powerful locomotives, each eighty cubits long and capable of six thousand horse-power. But it has never profaned our forest solitudes by the admission of these monsters. They would wreck the mossy old bridges, frighten the timid creatures of the wood, and put the wayside golfer off his game.
But what a thing it is, in the dewy freshness of early morning, having again survived the perils of travel, to descend from the train upon the very shores of a certain friendly lake! The launches from the scattered cottages that dot the points and islands are picturesquely clustered at the landing just beyond the trees. In a moment they are filled and scatter, and proud is he who gets away first with his load. In a minute or two they are strung out in a gallant line, making each for his particular breakfast-table, about which will soon gather the gayest breakfastparty of the week. News of the city and the lake will be exchanged, and plans discussed for the three days that make up a proper week-end. It is now that the week-ender opens his capacious pack and draws out a new rug for the living-room and a six-foot flag to fly in the regatta. He has also a new fire-screen, a can of paint for the boathouse, and a pair of wading boots for the general good. Of a truth, there is no morning like Saturday morning, and the week-ender is its prophet.
If it be true that habitual week-ending imparts to existence a hectic hue (and hectic, if I remember, began by meaning habitual), it has its sanative properties as well. There is nothing like a change of air, and to change it twice a week all summer should restore any appetite. How much the stable native population which ministers to our summer migrations would be profited by a little judicious weekending! How it would disorganize their factions and rearrange their prejudices! It would recharge their spiritual batteries and air out the cupboards of their souls. It would set local rivalries in a more tolerant perspective, and ease the cruel friction of rural life, which is so real to them and to us migrants so like a stage play. An occasional holiday on London Bridge, or its American equivalent, might send them home again with eyes to find the pot of gold under the tree in their backside.
Yet much week-ending might blur the piquant outlines of personality, dull imagination, and conventionalize speech. The other day, as we were gathering minnows from a creek, the forester’s boys came down the road. With bucolic courtesy we asked where they were going. They answered without emotion that they were after their colt: ‘The blame shrimp swum the lake.’ Mark the passionless restraint of the reproach, and the fine propriety of the figure. From the hotel-keeper who is our local eponym we later learned the climax of the colt’s exploits. The spirited creature had effected a landing at the hotel, and seizing the bell-rope in his teeth, had roused the slumbering establishment with wild alarum. Even a colt will have his holiday on London Bridge, and if there is no bridge where one should be, will swim for it perforce. So deep is the week-ending instinct.
On a peaceful evening, summer before last, the semi-weekly freight brought a certain long-expected launch; and as the next day was the Fourth of July, it seemed very necessary to get the boat into the water that night. Half the men of our village had been retained to help in this, and a boat-wagon, especially designed for such ceremonies, was in attendance. The locomotive obligingly left the car with its end to the road, so that the boat might be shoved from its fastenings upon the wagon, and the waiting cohort immediately swarmed over car and launch, tearing off crating, wrenching away supports, and heaving the hull laboriously out of its cradle.
The other half of the villagers looked on and helped with interested advice. Among them appeared one of our neighbors, a veritable Captain of Industry, who had come down to the train to meet a cow. Instinctively he took command, and instinctively we all obeyed. It almost restored one’s faith in the industrial order. ‘Here, Bill! get your back into this,’ he cried to the mightiest of the onlookers. Bill only wanted to be called on. He sprang upon the car, his brothers close behind him. The scene became Homeric. The car was thick with straining men. There was a clamor of voices. The horses became frightened and had to be taken from the wagon. A judge of the state Supreme Court sprang in to take their place, and held the tongue. What an allegory! Justice Holding the Tongue of Transportation! The Captain of Industry moved about, adjusting the packing and giving crisp directions. The twilight faded and night was falling. At length, a final heave, and the hull slid down upon the wagon. The supreme justice was relieved, the horses were put in, the preferred half of the villagers scrambled upon the hull, and as the wagon creaked away toward the lake and the moon mounted above the pines, we dispersed with a friendlier understanding for a half hour’s common toil.
Sometimes, of a Saturday night, the transient and the permanent elements of our sparse population meet for a dance at the so-called rink. The big bare room is dimly lighted with a few oil-lamps, and in the corner the burly forest-ranger, with his fiddle, leads the orchestral trio. The station agent, the inexorable custodian of our telegrams and express parcels, attends thinly disguised as a German peasant, and all make a diligent show of enjoyment. For this is a truly decorous affair, and you may find more real gayety at many a prayer-meeting. The music belongs to the epoch of the waltz, and the Virginia Reel and the old reliable Lancers are seen again. Then, before the hour of midnight checks the patriot’s use of pleasure gas, we scatter to our Fords and launches, and speed homeward under a glorious autumn aurora, just like the picture in the dictionary.
My week-ending will run into some six thousand miles this summer, and as Stevenson says of voyaging in the South Seas, it seems strange to travel so far and see so little. But what people one meets and what narratives one hears! Once in a while you may encounter that rare old species of raconteur, the Lion of the Smoking-Room. As soon as he begins to talk, that luxurious retreat quickly fills up with an attentive group.
It was from a superb specimen of this vanishing race that I heard the legend of the Camels of Arizona. It would seem that long ago, before the Civil War, when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War, it was observed that the Government Mule was not adapted to use on the American Desert. The resourceful strategists of that epoch bethought them of the oriental camel, the Ship of the Desert, and the War Department accordingly imported a number of these animals to carry supplies and ammunition to the waterless parts of the West. This picturesque experiment was not, however, successful. The loads were too heavy; the camels were less amenable to military discipline than their pictures had led Mr. Davis to suppose; and a rapprochement between them and the muledrivers proved difficult to effect. At all events, the stately creatures soon died or deserted, and the military phase of the experiment was over. But on clear nights, more especially after pay-day, the belated rancher has often seen the weird forms of them or their posterity, swinging off across the moonlit sands among the mesas.
I have not been able to substantiate this legend in any particular, and I shudder to think what a wreck historical criticism might make of it. It is not as fact that it interests me, but as imagination; as the finest example I know of the Smoking-Room Legend; or, shall we say, the Pipe Dream?
In my adventurous youth, I stood one evening on the Wielandshöhe, overlooking the River Neckar and the little city of Tubingen. It was a peaceful scene. Far below me a cavalcade of students, booted and spurred, rode two and two across the bridge to some distant rendezvous among the hills. Suddenly, around a bend in the river there swept into view a long raft of logs, steered down the swift stream by a little crew of lumbermen, on its way from the Black Forest to the Rhine. Instantly in all the Verein-houses that crowned the heights, windows were thrown up, heads were thrust out, and a chorus of hoots and cries filled the evening air. One corps vied with another in shouting derision at the little band of raftsmen, and the storm of sound pursued them until the raft disappeared from sight behind a hill below the town, when the uproar ceased as suddenly as it had begun.
So does the cloistered student, like the London shopman, cry out in mingled envy and derision upon the free adventurer in his quest for the pot of gold which is the week-ender’s exceeding great reward.