Robert Cortes Holliday

“ The genius of the greatest of authors always unfolds with particular warmth in the presence of their landladies. A moment's reflection will recall a procession of immortal landladies. Whether it is that the colorful calling of landlady cultivates in one a peculiar richness of human nature, or whether landladies are born and not made—those with characters of especial tang and savor instinctively adopting this occupation,—I cannot say, but the fact is indisputable that landladies are not as other persons are. No one ever saw a humdrum landlady. A commonplace person as a landlady is unthinkable. ”

“ But the time to come up to a great city is when one is young. The time to walk up Broadway at night, and feel a gusto about it, and Fifth Avenue by day, is when one is young. That is an enchanted time, when it is a fine dashing thing to be doing, to live at a second-rate boarding house; when discouragement is adventure; when it is worth while even to be poor; when one makes life-long friends at sight; when young love is sipped; when courage is ever stout in one's breast ”

“ Winder over such a nature as his own; Mr. Winder he did not suppose had read a book within the last ten years.
As, at that hour which sets the weary toiler free, in the gathering dusk Keyes stood on the curb amid the hurrying throng homeward bound,—oh! how he longed for that establishment in the eyes of men which the success of his story would bring him. Oh, when would he hear! As he bowled along in the crowded trolley the thought stole through him, until it amounted almost to a conviction, that the great letter awaited him at home now. ”

“ Every here and there an areaway held, in a holiday effect, a cluster of bare-headed maid-servants—the "gallery" of the shovellers, whose presence tended to make of the task of clearing the sidewalk a night-hour lark.
Voices in the street, as you know, and laughter there, is never so musical as above snow-stilled pavements. Then, too, cheery echoes are abroad among the recesses between the houses, in the courts and down the ways where packages are delivered. The shovellers good-naturedly banter one another and pass a cordial jest with those who travel by. ”

“ Along Broadway what a whirl! The street like an arena, hordes of gladiators in doughty combat with the onslaught of the storm, snow-carts banging and backing about (horses seem to stomp and snort and rear more in a snowstorm than at any other time) , new ridiculously miniature "caterpillar tractors" performing like toy tanks at war, traffic in a hilarious tangle, street cars crawling along looking more than ever before like prodigious cat-eyed bugs. Here with a terrific buzz comes one all dark furiously thrashing the snow from side to side by means of revolving brooms beneath. ”

“ Dedications run the whole gamut of the emotions. A type of author very tonic to the spirit is that one whose soul embraces not merely an individual but which enfolds in its heroic sweep a nation, a people, or some mighty idea. What, for instance, could be more vast in the grandeur of its sweep than this—which I came upon the other day in a modest little volume? "To the Children of Destiny." The Great War, which has wrought so much evil and inspired so much literature, is responsible for a flood of noble, lofty dedications. ”

“ Everyone knows that to revel in the possession of a book one must covet it before one feels one should buy it. Everyone knows that to love a book jealously one must have made some sacrifice to obtain it. That a library which supplies unending strength to the spirit means in all its parts, a little here, a little there, some self-denial of other things.
But editors, poor fish, are impotent in this high and lasting pleasure; they have lost the power to spend their money for books. They expect books to be given to them free by the publishers. ”

“ Keyes got thinner in flesh, more distressed in spirit, and poorer in this world's goods as time went on. Sometimes he felt like an imposter and was ashamed to face his wife; then he reread his press notices and a fever to do something shook him. But a man cannot support himself and his wife on a fever to do something. Benjamin Cecil Keyes could not understand the thing: if he had literary genius why couldn't he write? ”

“ Suddenly, within a few hours, the whole nature of the great city is changed—your city and mine, New York or Chicago, or Boston or Buffalo or Philadelphia.
Though nobody seems to say much about it afterward. Just sort of take the thing for granted.
It is just like Armistice Night, every once in awhile. Total strangers suddenly begin to call each other "Neighbor." Voices everywhere become jollier. Numerous passersby begin to whistle and sing. People go with a skip and a jump. Catcalls are heard. Groups may be seen all around going arm in arm, and here and there with arms about necks. ”

“ It is not much to mount three pairs of stairs in the brave days when one is twenty-one, and Day was in the little room, where, rich only in the glory of his rising sun, in his youth, he weathered it so long.
This apartment was the width of the dark hall, which was face to face with it, about fourteen feet long, and furnished in tune, so to speak. An uncommonly small, old-fashioned, wooden bedstead, a bantam-size "dresser," a washstand its shorter brother, a small table or "stand," and two half-grown chairs, mature before their season, were the principal articles of furniture. ”

“ And England, particularly London, is, as all the world knows, to the devotee of landladies what Africa is to the big game sportsman—his paradise. There the species comes to luxuriant flower, so that to possess with the mind one or two well-developed London landladies is never to be without food for entertainment. My present landlady, to return, is of course a widow. While it may be, for aught I know, that all widows are not landladies, with very few exceptions all landladies worthy of the name are widows. Those who are not widows outright are, as you might say, widows in a sense. ”

“ Too near for a clean-cut young man, in his second and twentieth year, redolent of health, with moderately cropped chestnut hair inclined to curl, intelligent forehead, good nose, rather big mouth, full lips, and round chin with a cleft in the centre—too near for him even to remain in the hands of the master dramatist. A warm glow suffused him. His intellectual perception of the illuminated, noble spectacle before him in a frame of night numbed in his brain and he was conscious only of the rich sensation that circulated through him. ”

“ Strolling about New York, from river to river, uptown and down, one might readily fancy that here only the poor pass out of the world. Or that if the rich and fashionable ever die their bodies are mysteriously spirited away to destinations unknown; or are secretly preserved (presumably by some taxidermal process) in their homes.
Why? Well, where on Fifth Avenue is an undertaker's? True, a man I know declares there is a single one there. I am unable to find it. Where on any fine street of the metropolis? ”

“ When the camera reproduces the chorus girl herself, suddenly strangely plain and painted, there is to the observing and reflective instead of sauciness the hollowness of sauciness. There can be few things more awful than those silent photographs of some gay chorus, reproducing, as they do, the spectacle with solemn critical aloofness from the spirit. ”

“ For he believed that the multitude was born, and ate and slept, and squabbled among itself, and acquired property, and begot offspring, but to await the arrival of genius. And the only genius he knew was genius in eccentric painting. The only genius worth while that is, for there is a genius that invents labor-saving machines, telephones, X-rays, and so forth; but nobody loves that genius. ”

“ Here recruited somehow among this gang of husky laborers is a slim eccentric figure in a—yes, a frock coat, a derby hat, kid gloves, and very tight trousers ... a quaint picture of the shabby genteel. Walking very briskly back and forth, very upright in carriage, the small of his back curved inward, he pushes his scraper before him holding it by the very tip of the long handle—and as well as can be observed doesn't scrape anything at all. His fellow workers regard him with surly disgust and roughly bump into him at every opportunity. ”

“ I do not know that the city's parks are not a finer spectacle under snow than in the summer—their dark glistening branches laden à la Christmas card, and, after dark, their festoons of lamps more twinkling and more yellow than at any other time. ”

“ One who makes a culture of landladies comes in time to have a flair for these racy beings, and is drawn by a happy intuition to the habitats of those most resplendent in the qualities of their kind. Of course, one never can tell what life will bring forth, but it seems to me that my present landlady marks the top of my career as a connoisseur, an amateur, of landladies. ”

“ It had been an exceedingly hot day for early spring. Traffic policemen had stood on their little platforms at the centre of the street crossings under those mammoth parasols they have to shield them from the rigors of the Washington sun. As we proceeded toward our exit from the grounds, approaching to the White House came a diminutive and decrepit figure muffled in an overcoat extending to his heels, bowed under a tall top hat, a pair of mighty ear-muffs clamped over his ears. ”

“ That is why, he declares, scientists and artists frequently live happy and alert to such a great age: Thomas A. Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Jap chap (what's his name? Hokusai) who at a hundred and ten or thereabout was called "the old man mad about painting."
Maybe it was thinking of that idea, maybe it was the fearsome thought of that dusty derby hat of my friend's which haunted my mind, or maybe my competitive instincts had been aroused from spring slumber by the spectacle of my Caruso-like friend careering along, anyhow a decidedly bugged-up feeling began to flow through me ”

“ Imagine a man like Keyes sitting his days away on an office stool. His mother, however, could not "see" his resigning his position. His "father had always" ... and so forth. Keyes foamed within. What a thing—woman's maddening narrowness! At the office Keyes's situation grew, in subtle ways, more and more oppressive. His position appeared to become equivocal. Mr. Winder seemed to make a point of increasing exactness. Keyes felt a disposition in authority to put down any subordinate uppishness of feeling possibly occasioned by doings outside the line of business. ”

“ I like, too, the way the undertakers' shops of the humble and obscure carry on cheek by jowl with the familiar, homely, friendly things of life. This gives Death a neighborly sort of air. On my walks in that quarter I always give a friendly glance to the windows of a "Cremation Ass'n" on Eighth Avenue, on one side of it a delicatessen shop, on the other a "loan office," in the basement below a plumber.
Attractive, too, is it to consider how founders of tidy undertaking houses have become personages and are held in revered esteem. ”

“ And out in Los Angeles they boastfully tell you that one way in which Los Angeles "is like New York" is this: That whereas a man may or may not happen to go to Richmond or to Detroit, sooner or later you are bound to see him on the streets of Los Angeles. That, as I say, is what they tell you out there.
But what are those aspects of Washington which are peculiar to that city, and make it so unlike any other city in the United States? And which in some cases make it an influence for the bad to many of its visitors? ”

“ Then you come to that prison as gruesome in its name as the Tower of London is romantic in its connotation—the Tombs. The structure itself, a cluster of rather slender wings, rises from behind its dark walls with an element of grace, in contrast to that chill, squat, mouldering pile which begot and bequeathed the historic name. Ugh! though, those barred windows, row upon row, give a fellow such qualms as do the ugly symbols of our mortality. Even though you ain't done nothin', make you feel sorta faint like inside! ”

“ The blocks of sugar (two for Richard) for this stimulating beverage (made out of chicory) were taken by the customer with his fingers from a heaping-full sort of great punch-bowl mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room. It was drawn from a nickel-plated engine with glass tubes by a young man in a white coat like a barber's, who served it, with crullers, piece of pie, or sandwich, across a kind of little bar at the rear end of the long room.
Day scorned the packed, parading trolley cars, and swung vigorously up the street. ”

“ Honestly, between you and me, think hard and tell me what really there is funny about going to see a burial establishment?
Paradoxical indeed is the attitude of mind of practically everyone toward this subject of being ushered out of life. Sundry totally contradictory emotions are aroused in the very same person by slightly different aspects of the same subject. If you remark that you are going to spend the afternoon at the undertaker's that is awfully amusing. At the same time, is not nearly everyone down in his heart a bit scared of undertakers' shops? ”

“ This newspaper feature is called "Situations Wanted." It might just as accurately be called "The Human Scene," or "The Heart of the World," or "The Cry of the Soul." Its tale is of what all men are seeking (and have ever sought) , each in his own degree, and after his fashion—bread, a place in the sun, a level higher than that of today.
Let us, briefly, survey this Page of Life.
The most conspicuous figure in the vast and motley throng is the Bold and Confident Man. He that knows his superior worth and does not propose to hide his light, he that has the spirit to attack the conqueror. ”

“ My friend had been much more interested in the guide-conducted touring parties than in the atrocious painting of the Battle of Lake Erie, and so on, expatiated on to them. Parties which, he said, made him feel that he was back again at the Indiana State Fair. We had sat, in the visitors' gallery of the Senate, in the midst of a delegation of some sort of religious sect, whose beards had most decidedly the effect of false whiskers very insecurely attached. Had been much struck by the extreme politeness of a new Senator who bowed deeply to each one in turn of a row of pages he passed before. ”

“ It was the institution of the common, corner saloon, I fancy, at which the bulk of American temperance sentiment was directed.
The perverse operation of prohibition then was this: It ceased to be possible (openly) to obtain any alcoholic beverage in anything like wholesome surroundings, in a first-class restaurant or hotel or in a gentleman's club. But in New York City, as is known to everybody who knows anything at all about the matter, the saloons, and particularly the lower class of saloons, have flourished as never before. ”

“ A good many women of culture and means, I understand, choose to live in Washington; probably in large measure because the city is beautifully laid out, because it is a pleasant size, because there are no factories and subways there, and so on. We know that numerous retired statesmen prefer to remain there. There is society of the embassies. In consideration of all this, and in consideration further of the comparatively large leisure there for an American city, you would suppose that, behind the transient population, in Washington, a highly civilized life went on. ”

“ Conspicuous among the postures assumed for its iconoclastic purpose by the genius of photography is that of "art." That fetish of the great body of the unenlightened, the dim feeling that to the enlightened bodily nakedness in pictorial representation is something very fine, is played upon. The "art photograph" is an ironic tour de force. If specimens of this have ever fallen in the way of your observation, then you have reflected upon the strange discrepancy between the female nude as presented in painting and sculpture and in photographs. ”