PAGE 2
On Spending A Holiday
by
Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted before he was done. “Pooh!” he said. “There’s mud in the country, and not much of any plumbing, and in the morning it’s cold until you light a fire.”
“Of course,” said Colum. “But I love it. Perhaps you remember, Flint, the old willow stump out near the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of it, and now there’s a family of wrens inside.”
“Nonsense,” said Flint. “There is too much climate in the country–much more than in town. It’s either too hot or too cold. And it’s lonely. As for you, Colum, you’re sentimental about your birdhouses. And you dislike your job. You like the country merely because it is a symbol of a holiday. It is freedom from an irksome task. It means a closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the country, you would grumble in a month’s time. Even a bullfrog–and he is brought up to it, poor wretch–croaks at night.”
Colum interrupted. “That’s not true, Flint. I know I’d like it–to live on a farm and keep chickens. Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look out of the window and I see a mirage–trees and hills.” Colum sighed. “It’s quite wonderful, that view, but it unsettles me for my ledger.”
“That’s it,” broke in Flint. “Your sentimentality spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. It’s immoral.”
Colum was about to retort, when he was anticipated by a new speaker. It was Quill, the journalist, who has long thin fingers and indigestion. At meals he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats food substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or something of that kind, to a daily paper. He always knows whether Steel is strong and whether Copper is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he glances at you for a moment before he knows you. Yet in his slippers he grows human.
“I like the country, too,” he interposed, “and no one ever said that I am sentimental.” He tapped his head. “I’m as hard as nails up here.” Quill cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, and continued: “I have a shack on the West Shore, and I go there week-ends. My work is so confining that if I didn’t get to the country once in a while, I would play out in a jiffy. I’m a nervous frazzle–a nervous frazzle–by Saturday noon. But I lie on the grass all Sunday, and if nobody snaps at me and I am let alone, by Monday morning I am fit again.”
“You must be like Antaeus.”
This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm is a bookish fellow who wears great rimmed glasses. He spends much of his time in company thinking up apposite quotations and verifying them. He has worn out two Bartlett’s. Wurm is also addicted to maps and dictionaries, and is a great reader of special articles. Consequently his mind is a pound for stray collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, it more closely resembles a building contractor’s back yard–odd salvage–rejected doors–a job of window-frames–a pile of bricks for chipping–discarded plumbing–broken junk gathered here and there. Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who once lived on our street–a man of no broad fame–quite local–surely unknown to you–did not collect so wide a rubbish.
However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather a pleasant and harmless bit of cobweb. For a livelihood, he sits in a bank behind a grill. At noon he eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting season he kills in a day as many as a dozen of these pests’ and ranges them in his pen tray. On Saturday afternoon he rummages in Malkan’s and the second-hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see Wurm in his most characteristic pose, is to see him on a ladder, with one leg outstretched, far off his balance, fumbling for a title with his finger tips. Surely, in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job. Then he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home to dinner. This is served him on a tin tray by his stout landlady who comes puffing up the stairs. It is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever dish is served happens to be the very one of which he was thinking as he came out of the bank. By this innocent device he is popular with his landlady and she skims the milk for him.