The Quiet Corner
"/ counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library."—C. LAMB. A sheepskin book of poems, golden-brown with age, dropf>ed on Dr. Angelicus's portly knees as he read the lines: " 'The children...
...Notions of rascality are generally accompanied, even if at a certain distance, with sentimental considerations, Christian hopefulness, a persistence in the belief of a virtuous triumph in the long run," saidj the Doctor...
...t "Keeping the angel-side of Jenny Lind to the public" seems to have been the task of the great showman, P. T. Barnum, according to his own story, published by Waldo B. Browne...
...And in spite of the fact that I myself fill up their pocket-flasks with my best Scotch every time they go to a party...
...Ponder it, ye soulless corporations of the stage, the news-stand and the library, ye artless literary agents, syndicates and press bureaus...
...mothers in their face masks, daughters in Chinese pyjamas restringing their fresh-water pearl necklaces...
...Would you believe it, Hereticus, that Sybilla Smith, old Dean Peregrine's daughter, wept on my shoulder the other evening over the trials she is having with those two debutante daughters...
...Doctor,' she confided to me, 'I have done everything to make these girls a social success...
...Jenny Lind was the mystical daughter of the North, the associate of Fredericka Brehmer, who visited her in America...
...In Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, by Maurice Magnus, we come across a paragraph that sums up scoundrelism as blackly as anything we have ever encountered...
...I can recall my extreme youth today...
...The lovely old grandma whose life is finished in the broken thread of her knitting...
...There was never a more perfect Swede presented to the American public...
...To get there means the killing of everything good that was ever in him, beyond all hope, and with it appears a carelessness of self, and a gradual awakening of a sense of enjoyment of the cruelties and depravities of their life, until he, like the others, can no longer live without their brutal pleasures and vices, and becomes like them in thought, in apathy, in degeneration, with the same fixed idea that nothing matters except the coarsest, most brutal and physical satisfactions...
...Angelicus's portly knees as he read the lines: " 'The children came in to say good-night With tears in their bright young eyes...
...The question arises, is the black spot in the mind of the writer or in the actual life he is describing...
...Where are such grandmothers today: they live alone in the colored chromolithographs that hang in dark hallway entrances...
...they are unmistakably wall-flowers...
...The ethics of the decent world serve to play with, not to be acted on, or believed in.'" *e »s »i "It is hard for us," remarked the Doctor, after a pause, "to understand the complete evil of Satan as the fulness of virtue of the angels before God...
...George de Latour Tucker, one of the heads of the English Salvation Army, who suggested that, as Tuckers, they might be somehow related...
...Perhaps we had better conclude that we are cousins.' " —^THE LIBRARIAN...
...The black walnuts dropping on the shingled roof, the girls sorting out the cuttings for the rag carpets and rugs...
...Dances, theatres, country-houses and motor-cars all have failed...
...there was a Quakerish touch in her nature, as well as a highly feminine reserve, and the caution bred of years of experience with theatrical and musical agents...
...Do you think what I witness tonight, at home, can recompense me for such a past...
...History will persist in the idealization of her very lovely character, in spite of the allusions so cautiously advanced regarding her stubborn will and whimsical turns...
...Peace, my friends," rejoined Angelicas, "break not my sweet old reveries...
...ranging the slips of calico and silk into the quilts and comforters...
...List, o list, ye children of the lyre, tympanum, buskin and fountain-pen...
...The radio and victrola belching forth dance music gathered from the four quarters of heaven or the other place by sea or prairie where the jazz isi scattered...
...Your nickname among the men is "Salvation" Tucker, as you know: while I am commonly referred to as "Damnation" Tucker...
...As for that,' said the testy British General, 'I can hardly see...
...On earth there is likeness and imlikeness in virtue and vices...
...When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman...
...boys restocking their cigarette cases and pocket-flasks...
...But in grandma's lap with broken thread The finished stocking lies.' "What a picture of old-fashioned happiness...
...What shall I do, advise me!' This, from Dean Peregrine's daughter...
...I recall an amusing story told of General Sir Charles Tucker of the British forces in South Africa...
...A man cannot swim against the stream, and once in the vortex of human depravity, where there is no religion, and where ethical values have never existed, a man, if he has any stamina in him and doesn't fall at once, is slowly attacked by the innumerable subtle, invisible tentacles of wickedness and vice, daily, hourly, in speech, suggestion and action, and life is made a mental and physical torture for him in hundreds of ways, every hour of the day and night, consciously and unconsciously, until he yields to the surrounding influences, and once brought down to their level there is no hope of his resurrection...
...Barnum's trouble with her, real enough although he smoothes over many of his difficulties with her friends and jealous advisers, resulted in, the very compact gains to the singer from her ninety-five American concerts of $176,675, while her great impresario pocketed some $535,485...
...The human brain is not made of steel: it is malleable and impressionable: and the strength of numbers and its force is overpowering...
...Everything must be sacrificed for that...
...His depths of profanity, it is alleged, had brought him before the Army Board for reprimand, just before he received the visiting card of F. St...
...Hereticus broke in with: "And where are the children who came to say good-night, except on their way out to the cabaret ?" Primus Criticus, not to be outdone, exclaimed in the same tone: "And where are the stockings that can stand grandmother's darnings...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 5
