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DAYS OFF

And Other Digressions

by

HENRY VAN <DW18>







[Illustration: Our canoes go with the river, but no longer easily or
lazily.]



I do not count the hours I spend
In wandering by the sea;
The forest is my loyal friend,
Like God it useth me:

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,
Or down the oaken glade,
O what have I to do with Time?
For this the day was made.

                    --RALPH WALDO EMERSON



Illustrated

New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
MDCCCCVII

Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons

Printed in October, 1907
Reprinted in November, 1907
Reprinted in December, 1907




                                  To
                       MY FRIEND AND NEIGHBOUR
                           GROVER CLEVELAND
                      WHOSE YEARS OF GREAT WORK
                            AS A STATESMAN
                HAVE BEEN CHEERED BY DAYS OF GOOD PLAY
                            AS A FISHERMAN
                        THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
                      WITH WARM AND DEEP REGARDS

Avalon,
July 10th, 1907.




CONTENTS


   I. _Days Off_                                                  1

  II. _A Holiday in a Vacation_                                  23

 III. _His Other Engagement_                                     57

  IV. _Books that I Loved as a Boy_                             101

   V. _Among the Quantock Hills_                                117

  VI. _Between the Lupin and the Laurel_                        139

 VII. _Little Red Tom_                                          177

VIII. _Silverhorns_                                             193

  IX. _Notions about Novels_                                    221

   X. _Some Remarks on Gulls_                                   233

  XI. _Leviathan_                                               271

 XII. _The Art of Leaving Off_                                  309




ILLUSTRATIONS


_Our canoes go with the river, but no longer easily
or lazily_                                             Frontispiece

                                                        Facing page

_On such a carry travel is slow_                                 36

_A notion to go down stream struck the salmon_                   88

_There was the gleam of an immense mass of silver in
its meshes_                                                      94

_Tannery Combe, Holford_                                        126

"_Billy began to call, and it was beautiful_"                   206

_There he stood defiant, front feet planted wide apart_         218

_She took the oars and rowed me slowly around the shore_        266




DAYS OFF


"A day off" said my Uncle Peter, settling down in his chair before the
open wood-fire, with that air of complacent obstinacy which spreads
over him when he is about to confess and expound his philosophy of
life,--"a day off is a day that a man takes to himself."

"You mean a day of luxurious solitude," I said, "a stolen sweet of
time, which he carries away into some hidden corner to enjoy alone,--a
little-Jack-Horner kind of a day?"

"Not at all," said my Uncle Peter; "solitude is a thing which a man
hardly ever enjoys by himself. He may practise it from a sense of duty.
Or he may take refuge in it from other things that are less tolerable.
But nine times out of ten he will find that he can't get a really good
day to himself unless he shares it with some one else; if he takes it
alone, it will be a heavy day, a chain-and-ball day,--anything but a
day off."

"Just what do you mean, then?" I asked, knowing that nothing would
please him better than the chance to discover his own meaning against a
little background of apparent misunderstanding and opposition.

"I mean," said my Uncle Peter, in that deliberate manner which lends a
flavour of deep wisdom to the most obvious remarks, "I mean that every
man owes it to himself to have some days in his life when he escapes
from bondage, gets away from routine, and does something which seems to
have no purpose in the world, just because he wants to do it."

"Plays truant," I interjected.

"Yes, if you like to put it in that objectionable way," he answered;
"but I should rather compare it to bringing flowers into the
school-room, or keeping white mice in your desk, or inventing a new
game for the recess. You see we are all scholars, boarding scholars, in
the House of Life, from the moment when birth matriculates us to the
moment when death graduates us. We never really leave the big school,
no matter what we do. But my point is this: the lessons that we learn
when we do not know that we are studying are often the pleasantest, and
not always the least important. There is a benefit as well as a joy in
finding out that you can lay down your task for a proper while without
being disloyal to your duty. Play-time is a part of school-time, not a
break in it. You remember what Aristotle says: '_ascholoumetha gar hina
scholazomen_.'"

"My dear uncle," said I, "there is nothing out of the common in your
remarks, except of course your extraordinary habit of decorating them
with a Greek quotation, like an ancient coin set as a scarf-pin and
stuck carelessly into a modern neck-tie. But apart from this
eccentricity, everybody admits the propriety of what you have been
saying. Why, all the expensive, up-to-date schools are arranged on your
principle: play-hours, exercise-hours, silent-hours, social-hours, all
marked in the schedule: scholars compelled and carefully guided to
amuse themselves at set times and in approved fashions: athletics,
dramatics, school-politics and social ethics, all organized and
co-ordinated. What you flatter yourself by putting forward as an
amiable heresy has become a commonplace of orthodoxy, and your liberal
theory of education and life is now one of the marks of fashionable
conservatism."

My Uncle Peter's face assumed the beatific expression of a man who
knows that he has been completely and inexcusably misunderstood, and is
therefore justified in taking as much time as he wants to make the
subtlety and superiority of his ideas perfectly clear and to show how
dense you have been in failing to apprehend them.

"My dear boy," said he, "it is very singular that you should miss my
point so entirely. All these things that you have been saying about
your modern schools illustrate precisely the opposite view from mine.
They are signs of that idolatry of organization, of system, of the
time-table and the schedule, which is making our modern life so tedious
and exhausting. Those unfortunate school-boys and school-girls who have
their amusements planned out for them and cultivate their social
instincts according to rule, never know the joy of a real day off,
unless they do as I say, and take it to themselves. The right kind of a
school will leave room and liberty for them to do this. It will be a
miniature of what life is for all of us,--a place where law reigns and
independence is rewarded,--a stream of work and duty diversified by
islands of freedom and repose,--a pilgrimage in which it is permitted
to follow a side-path, a mountain trail, a footway through the meadow,
provided the end of the journey is not forgotten and the day's march
brings one a little nearer to that end."

"But will it do that," I asked, "unless one is careful to follow the
straight line of the highway and march as fast as one can?"

"That depends," said my Uncle Peter, nodding his head gravely, "upon
what you consider the end of the journey. If it is something entirely
outside of yourself, a certain stint of work which you were created to
perform; or if it is something altogether beyond yourself, a certain
place or office at which you are aiming to arrive; then, of course, you
must stick to the highway and hurry along.

"But suppose that the real end of your journey is something of which
you yourself are a part. Suppose it is not merely to get to a certain
place, but to get there in a certain condition, with the light of a
sane joy in your eyes and the peace of a grateful content in your
heart. Suppose it is not merely to do a certain piece of work, but to
do it in a certain spirit, cheerfully and bravely and modestly, without
overrating its importance or overlooking its necessity. Then, I fancy,
you may find that the winding foot-path among the hills often helps you
on your way as much as the high road, the day off among the islands of
repose gives you a steadier hand and a braver heart to make your voyage
along the stream of duty."

"You may skip the moralizing, if you please, Uncle Peter," said I, "and
concentrate your mind upon giving me a reasonable account of the
peculiar happiness of what you call a day off."

"Nothing could be simpler," he answered. "It is the joy of getting out
of the harness that makes a horse fling up his heels, and gallop around
the field, and roll over and over in the grass, when he is turned loose
in the pasture. It is the impulse of pure play that makes a little
bunch of wild ducks chase one another round and round on the water, and
follow their leader in circles and figures of eight; there is no
possible use in it, but it gratifies their instinct of freedom and
makes them feel that they are not mere animal automata, whatever the
natural history men may say to the contrary. It is the sense of release
that a man experiences when he unbuckles the straps of his knapsack,
and lays it down under a tree, and says 'You stay there till I come
back for you! I'm going to rest myself by climbing this hill, just
because it is not on the road-map, and because there is nothing at the
top of it except the view.'

"It is this feeling of escape," he continued, in the tone of a man who
has shaken off the harness of polite conversation and let himself go
for a gallop around the field of monologue, "it is just this
exhilarating sense of liberation that is lacking in most of our social
amusements and recreations. They are dictated by fashion and directed
by routine. Men get into the so-called 'round of pleasure,' and they
are driven into a trot to keep up with it, just as if it were a
treadmill. The only difference is that the pleasure-mill grinds no
corn. Harry Bellairs was complaining to me, the other day, that after
an exhausting season of cotillons in New York, he had been running his
motor-car through immense fatigues in France and Italy, and had
returned barely in time to do his duty by his salmon-river in Canada,
work his new boat through the annual cruise of the yacht club, finish
up a round of house-parties at Bar Harbor and Lenox, and get ready for
the partridge-shooting in England with his friend the Duke of
Bangham,--it was a dog's life, he said, and he had no time to himself
at all. I rather pitied him; he looked so frayed. It seems to me that
the best way for a man or a woman of pleasure to get a day off would be
to do a little honest work.

"You see it is the change that makes the charm of a day off. The real
joy of leisure is known only to the people who have contracted the
habit of work without becoming enslaved to the vice of overwork.

"A hobby is the best thing in the world for a man with a serious
vocation. It keeps him from getting muscle-bound in his own task. It
helps to save him from the mistake of supposing that it is his little
tick-tack that keeps the universe a-going. It leads him out, on off
days, away from his own garden corner into curious and interesting
regions of this wide and various earth, of which, after all, he is a
citizen.

"Do you happen to know the Reverend Doctor McHook? He is a learned
preacher, a devoted churchman, a faithful minister; and in addition to
this he has an extra-parochial affection for ants and spiders. He can
spend a happy day in watching the busy affairs of a formicary, and to
observe the progress of a bit of spider-web architecture gives him a
peculiar joy. There are some severe and sour-complexioned theologians
who would call this devotion to objects so far outside of his parish an
illicit passion. But to me it seems a blessing conferred by heavenly
wisdom upon a good man, and I doubt not he escapes from many an
insoluble theological puzzle, and perhaps from many an unprofitable
religious wrangle, to find refreshment and invigoration in the society
of his many-legged friends."

"You are moralizing again, Uncle Peter," I objected; "or at least you
are getting ready to do so. Stop it; and give me a working definition
of the difference between a hobby and a fad."

"Let me give you an anecdote," said he, "instead of a definition. There
was a friend of mine who went to visit a famous asylum for the insane.
Among the patients who were amusing themselves in the great hall, he
saw an old gentleman with a long white beard, who was sitting astride
of a chair, spurring its legs with his heels, holding both ends of his
handkerchief which he had knotted around the back, and crying 'Get up,
get up! G'long boy, steady!' with the utmost animation. 'You seem to be
having a fine ride, sir,' said my friend. 'Capital,' said the old
gentleman, 'this is a first-rate mount that I am riding.' 'Permit me to
inquire,' asked my friend, 'whether it is a fad or a hobby?' 'Why,
certainly!' replied the old gentleman, with a quizzical look. 'It is a
hobby, you see, for I can get off whenever I have a mind to.' And with
that he dismounted and walked into the garden.

"It is just this liberty of getting off that marks the superiority of a
hobby to a fad. The game that you feel obliged to play every day at the
same hour ceases to amuse you as soon as you realize that it is a
diurnal duty. Regular exercise is good for the muscles, but there must
be a bit of pure fun mixed with the sport that is to refresh your
heart.

"A tour in Europe, carefully mapped out with an elaborate itinerary and
a carefully connected timetable, may be full of instruction, but it
often becomes a tax upon the spirit and a weariness to the flesh.
Compulsory castles and mandatory museums and required ruins pall upon
you, as you hurry from one to another, vaguely agitated by the fear
that you may miss something that is marked with a star in the
guide-book, and so be compelled to confess to your neighbour at the
_table-d'hote_ that you have failed to see what he promptly and
joyfully assures you is 'the best thing in the whole trip,' Delicate
and sensitive people have been killed by taking a vacation in that way.

"I remember meeting, several years ago, a party of personally conducted
tourists in Venice, at the hour which their itinerary consecrated to
the enjoyment of the fine arts in the gallery of the Academy. Their
personal conductor led them into one of the great rooms, and they
gathered close around him, with an air of determination on their tired
faces, listening to his brief, dry patter about the famous pictures
that the room contained. He stood in the centre of the room holding his
watch in his hand while they dispersed themselves around the walls,
looking for the paintings which they ought to see, like chickens
searching for scattered grains of corn. At the expiration of five
minutes he clapped his hands sharply; his flock scurried back to him;
and they moved on to 'do' the next room.

"I suppose that was one way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather
sit at a little table on the _Riva degli Schiavoni_, with a plate of
bread and cheese and a _mezzo_ of Chianti before me, watching the
motley crowd in the street and the many- sails in the harbour;
or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery
alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful
palaces whose names I did not even care to know. Of course I should
like to see a fine picture or a noble church, now and then; but only
one at a time, if you please; and that one I should wish to look at as
long as it said anything to me, and to revisit as often as it called
me."

"That is because you have no idea of the educational uses of a
vacation, Uncle Peter," said I. "You are an unsystematic person, an
incorrigible idler."

"I am," he answered, without a sign of penitence, "that is precisely
what I am,--in my days off. Otherwise I should not get the good of
them. Even a hobby, on such days, is to be used chiefly for its lateral
advantages,--the open doors of the sideshows to which it brings you,
the unexpected opportunities of dismounting and tying your hobby to a
tree, while you follow the trail of something strange and attractive,
as Moses did when he turned aside from his shepherding on Mount Horeb
and climbed up among the rocks to see the burning bush.

"The value of a favourite pursuit lies not only in its calculated
results but also in its by-products. You may become a collector of
almost anything in the world,--orchids, postage-stamps, flint
arrowheads, cook-books, varieties of the game of cat's cradle,--and if
you chase your trifle in the right spirit it will lead you into pleasant
surprises and bring you acquainted with delightful or amusing people.
You remember when you went with Professor Rinascimento on a Della Robbia
hunt among the hill towns of Italy, and how you came by accident into
that deep green valley where there are more nightingales with sweeter
voices than anywhere else on earth? Your best _trouvaille_ on that
expedition was hidden in those undreamed-of nights of moonlight and
music. And it was when you were chasing first editions of Tennyson, was
it not, that you discovered your little head of a marble faun, which you
vow is by Donatello, or one of his pupils? And what was it that you told
me about the rare friend you found when you took a couple of days off in
an ancient French town, on a flying journey from Rome to London? Believe
me, dear boy, all that we win by effort and intention is sometimes
overtopped by a gift that is conferred upon us out of a secret and
mysterious generosity. Wordsworth was right:

    "'Think you,'mid all this mighty sum
      Of things forever speaking,
    That nothing of itself will come,
      But we must still be seeking?'"

"You talk," said I, "as if you thought it was a man's duty to be
happy."

"I do," he answered firmly, "that is precisely and definitely what I
think. It is not his chief duty, nor his only duty, nor his duty all
the time. But the normal man is not intended to go through this world
without learning what happiness means. If he does so he misses
something that he needs to complete his nature and perfect his
experience. 'Tis a poor, frail plant that can not endure the wind and
the rain and the winter's cold. But is it a good plant that will not
respond to the quickening touch of spring and send out its sweet odours
in the embracing warmth of the summer night? Suppose that you had made
a house for a child, and given him a corner of the garden to keep, and
set him lessons and tasks, and provided him with teachers and masters.
Would you be satisfied with that child, however diligent and obedient,
if you found that he was never happy, never enjoyed a holiday, never
said to himself and to you, 'What a good place this is, and how glad I
am to live here'?"

"Probably not," I answered, "but that is because I should be selfish
enough to find a pleasure of my own in his happiness. I should like to
take a day off with him, now and then, and his gladness would increase
my enjoyment. There is no morality in that. It is simply natural. We
are all made that way."

"Well," said my Uncle Peter, "if we are made that way we must take it
into account in our philosophy of life. The fact that it is natural is
not a sufficient reason for concluding that it is bad. There is an old
and wonderful book which describes the creation of the world in poetic
language; and when I read that description it makes me feel sure that
something like this was purposely woven into the very web of life.
After the six mystical days of making things and putting things in
order, says this beautiful old book, the Person who had been doing it
all took a day to Himself, in which He'rested from all the things that
He had created and made,' and looked at them, and saw how good they
were. His work was not ended, of course, for it has been going on ever
since, and will go on for ages of ages. But in the midst of it all it
seemed right to Him to take a divine day off. And His example is
commended to us for imitation because we are made in His likeness and
have the same desire to enjoy as well as to create.

"Do you remember what the Wisest of all Masters said to his disciples
when they were outworn by the weight of their work and the pressure of
the crowd upon them? 'Come ye yourselves apart into a lonely place, and
rest awhile.' He would never have bidden them do that, unless it had
been a part of their duty to get away from their task for a little. He
knew what was in man, more deeply than any one else had ever known; and
so he invited his friends out among the green hills and beside the
quiet waters of Galilee to the strengthening repose and the restoring
joy which are only to be found in real days off."

My Uncle Peter's voice had grown very deep and gentle while he was
saying these things. He sat looking far away into the rosy heart of the
fire, where the bright blaze had burned itself out, and the delicate
flamelets of blue and violet were playing over the glowing, crumbling
logs. It seemed as if he had forgotten where we were, and gone
a-wandering into some distant region of memories and dreams. I almost
doubted whether to call him back; the silence was so full of
comfortable and friendly intercourse.

"Well," said I, after a while, "you are an incorrigible moralist, but
certainly a most unconventional one. The orthodox would never accept
your philosophy. They would call you a hedonist, or something equally
dreadful."

"Let them," he said, placidly.

"But tell me": I asked, "you and I have many pleasant and grateful
memories, little pictures and stories, which seem like chapters in the
history of this doubtful idea of yours: suppose that I should write
some of them down, purely in a descriptive and narrative way, without
committing myself to any opinion as to their morality; and suppose that
a few of your opinions and prejudices, briefly expressed, were
interspersed in the form of chapters to be skipped: would a book like
that symbolize and illustrate the true inwardness of the day off? How
would it do to make such a book?"

"It would do," he answered, "provided you wanted to do it, and provided
you did not try to prove anything, or convince anybody, or convey any
profitable instruction."

"But would any one read it?" I asked. "What do you think?"

"I think," said he, stretching his arms over his head as he rose and
turned towards his den to plunge into a long evening's work, "I reckon,
and calculate, and fancy, and guess that a few people, a very few,
might browse through such a book in their days off."




A HOLIDAY IN A VACATION


It was really a good little summer resort where the boy and I were
pegging away at our vacation. There were the mountains conveniently
arranged, with pleasant trails running up all of them, carefully marked
with rustic but legible guide-posts; and there was the sea comfortably
besprinkled with islands, among which one might sail around and about,
day after day, not to go anywhere, but just to enjoy the motion and the
views; and there were cod and haddock swimming over the outer ledges in
deep water, waiting to be fed with clams at any time, and on fortunate
days ridiculously accommodating in letting themselves be pulled up at
the end of a long, thick string with a pound of lead and two hooks tied
to it. There were plenty of places considered proper for picnics, like
Jordan's Pond, and Great Cranberry Island, and the Russian Tea-house,
and the Log Cabin Tea-house, where you would be sure to meet other
people who also were bent on picnicking; and there were hotels and
summer cottages, of various degrees of elaboration, filled with
agreeable and talkable folk, most of whom were connected by occupation
or marriage with the rival colleges and universities, so that their
ambitions for the simple life had an academic thoroughness and
regularity. There were dinner parties, and tea parties, and garden
parties, and sea parties, and luncheon parties, masculine and feminine,
and a horse-show at Bar Harbor, and a gymkhana at North East, and
dances at all the Harbors, where Minerva met Terpischore on a friendly
footing while Socrates sat out on the veranda with Midas discussing the
great automobile question over their cigars.

It was all vastly entertaining and well-ordered, and you would think
that any person with a properly constituted mind ought to be able to
peg through a vacation in such a place without wavering. But when the
boy confessed to me that he felt the need of a few "days off" in the
big woods to keep him up to his duty, I saw at once that the money
spent upon his education had not been wasted; for here, without effort,
he announced a great psychological fact--_that no vacation is perfect
without a