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Page 30
AJAX: This is a brave idea, Socrates. And then, when all the
children were bedded for the night, how would the domestic
atmosphere be simulated?
SOCRATES: Nothing simpler. After dinner such husbands as are
accustomed to washing the dishes would be allowed to do so in the
club kitchen. During the day it would be the function of the matron
to think up a number of odd jobs to be performed in the course of
the evening. Pictures would be hung, clocks wound, a number of tin
cans would be waiting to be opened with refractory can openers, and
there would always be several window blinds that had gone wrong. A
really resourceful matron could devise any number of ways of making
the club seem just like home. One night she would discern a smell of
gas, the next there might be a hole in the fly-screens, or a little
carpentering to do, or a caster broken under the piano. Husbands
with a turn for plumbing would find the club basement a perpetual
place of solace, with a fresh leak or a rumbling pipe every few
days.
AJAX: Admirable! And if the matron really wanted to make the members
feel at home she would take a turn through the building every now
and then, to issue a gentle rebuke for cigar ashes dropped on the
rugs or feet elevated on chairs.
SOCRATES: The really crowning touch, I think, would lie in the
ice-box raids. A large ice-box would be kept well stocked with
remainders of apple pie, macaroni, stewed prunes, and chocolate
pudding. Any husband, making a cautious inroad upon these about
midnight, would surely have the authentic emotion of being in his
own home.
AJAX: An occasional request to empty the ice-box pan would also be
an artful echo of domesticity.
SOCRATES: Of course the success of the scheme would depend greatly
on finding the right person for matron. If she were to strew a few
hairpins about and perhaps misplace a latch key now and then----
AJAX: Socrates, you have hit upon a great idea. But you ought to
extend the membership of the club to include young men not yet
married. Think what an admirable training school for husbands it
would make!
SOCRATES: My dear fellow, let us not discuss it any further. It
makes me too homesick. I am going back to my lonely apartment to
write a letter to dear Xanthippe.
[Illustration]
WEST BROADWAY
Did you ever hear of Finn Square? No? Very well, then, we shall have
to inflict upon you some paragraphs from our unpublished work: "A
Scenic Guidebook to the Sixth Avenue L." The itinerary is a frugal
one: you do not have to take the L, but walk along under it.
Streets where an L runs have a fascination of their own. They have a
shadowy gloom, speckled and striped with the sunlight that slips
through the trestles. West Broadway, which along most of its length
is straddled by the L, is a channel of odd humours. Its real name,
you know, is South Fifth Avenue; but the Avenue got so snobbish it
insisted on its humbler brother changing its name. Let us take it
from Spring Street southward.
Ribbons, purple, red, and green, were the first thing to catch our
eye. Not the ribbons of the milliner, however, but the carbon tapes
of the typewriter, big cans of them being loaded on a junk wagon.
"Purple Ribbons" we have often thought, would be a neat title for a
volume of verses written on a typewriter. What happens to the used
ribbons of modern poets? Mr. Hilaire Belloc, or Mr. Chesterton, for
instance. Give me but what these ribbons type and all the rest is
merely tripe, as Edmund Waller might have said. Near the ribbons we
saw a paper-box factory, where a number of high-spirited young women
were busy at their machines. A broad strip of thick green paint was
laid across the lower half of the windows so that these immured
damsels might not waste their employers' time in watching goings on
along the pavement.
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