Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Abandoned Farmers. His Humorous Account of a Retreat from the City to the Farm
The auctioneer almost invariably is of a compounded and composite type that might be described as part matinée idol, part professional revivalist, part floor walker, part court jester and part jury pleader, with just a trace of a suggestion of the official manner of the well-to-do undertaker stirred into the mixture. By sight at least he knows all of his regular customers and is inclined with a special touch of respectful affection toward such of them as prefer on these occasions to be known by an initial rather than by name.
“And sold to Mr. B.,” he says with a gracious smile. Or – “Now then, Mrs. H., doesn’t this bea-u-tiful varse mean anything to you?” he inquires deferentially when the bidding lags. “Did I hear you offer seven hundred and fifty, Colonel J.?” he asks in a tone of deep solicitude.
By long acquaintance with his regular clientèle, or perhaps by a sort of intuition which is not the least of his gifts, he is able to interpret into sums of currency a nod, a wink, a raised finger, a shrug or the lift of an eyebrow, at a distance of anywhere from ten to sixty feet.
In the face of disappointments manifolded a thousand times a month this man yet remains an unfailing optimist. Watching him in action one gets the impression that he reads none but glad books, goes to none save glad plays and when the weather is inclement shares the viewpoint of that sweet singer of the Sunny South who wrote to the effect that it is not raining rain to-day, it’s raining daffodils, and then two lines further along corrects his botany to state that having been convinced of his error of a moment before he now wishes to take advantage of this opportunity to inform the public that it is not raining rain to-day, but on the contrary is raining roses down, or metrical words to that general tenor. He was a good poet, as poets go, but not the sort of person you would care to loan your best umbrella to.
In another noticeable regard our auctioneer friend betrays somewhat the same abrupt shiftings of temperamental manifestations that are reputed to have been shown by Ben Bolt’s lady friend. I am speaking of the late lamented Sweet Alice, who – as will be recalled – would weep with delight when you gave her a smile, but trembled with fear at your frown. Apparently Alice couldn’t help behaving in this curious way – one gathers that she must have been the village idiot, harmless enough but undoubtedly an annoying sort of person to have hanging round, weeping copiously whenever anybody else was cheerful, and perhaps immediately afterward trembling in a disconcerting sort of way. She must have spoiled many a pleasant party in her day, so probably it was just as well that the community saw fit to file her away in the old churchyard in the obscure corner mentioned more or less rhythmically in the disclosures recorded as having been made to Mr. Bolt upon the occasion of his return to his native shire after what presumably had been a considerable absence.
The poet chronicler, Mr. English, is a trifle vague on this point, but considering everything it is but fair to infer that Alice’s funeral was practically by acclamation. Beyond question it must have been a relief to all concerned, including the family of deceased, to feel that a person so grievously afflicted mentally was at last permanently planted under a certain slab of stone rather loosely described in the conversation just referred to as granite so gray. One wishes Mr. English had been a trifle more exact in furnishing the particular details of this sad case. Still, I suppose it is hard for a poet to be technical and poetical at the same time. And though he failed to go into particulars I am quite sure that when asked if he didn’t remember Alice, Mr. Bolt answered in the decided affirmative. It is a cinch he couldn’t have forgotten her, the official half-wit and lightning-change artist of the county.
But whereas this unfortunate young woman’s conduct may only be accounted for on the grounds of a total irresponsibility, there is method behind the same sharply contrasted shift of mood as displayed by the chief salesman of the auction room. He is thrilled – visibly and physically thrilled – at each rapidly recurring opportunity of presenting an article for disposal to the highest bidder; hardly can he control his emotions of joy at the prospect of offering this particular object to an audience of discriminating tastes and balanced judgment. But mark the change: How instantly, how completely does a devastating and poignant distress overcome him when his hearers perversely decline to enter into spirited competition for a thing so priceless! A sob rises in his throat, choking his utterance to a degree where it becomes impossible for him to speak more than three or four hundred words per minute; grief dims his eye; regret – not on his own account but for others – droops his shoulders. When it comes to showing distress he makes that poor feeble-minded Alice girl look like a beginner. Yet repeated shocks of this character fail to daunt the sunniness of his true nature. The harder his spirits are dashed down to earth the greater the resiliency and the buoyancy with which they bounce up again. The man has a soul of new rubber!
Let us draw near and scrutinize the scene that unfolds itself at each presentation: The attendants fetch out an offering described in the printed catalogue, let us say, as Number 77 A: Oriental Lamp with Silk Shade. Reverently they place it upon a velvet-covered stand in a space at the back end of the salesroom, where a platform is inclosed in draperies with lights so disposed overhead and in the wings as to shed a soft radiance upon the inclosed area. The helpers fade out of the picture respectfully. A tiny pause ensues; this stage wait has been skillfully timed; a suitable atmosphere subtly has been created. Oh, believe me, in New York we do these things with a proper regard for the dramatic values – culture governs all!
The withdrawal of the attendants is the cue for our sunny friend, perched up as he is behind his little pulpit with his little gavel in his hand, to fall gracefully into a posture bespeaking in every curve of it a worshipful, almost an idolatrous admiration.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen” – hear him say it – “I have the pleasure and the privilege of submitting for your approval one of the absolute gems of this splendid collection. A magnificent example of the Ming period – mind you, a genuine Ming. I am confidentially informed by the executors of the estate of the late Mr. Gezinks, the former owner of these wonderful belongings, that it was the prize piece of his entire collection. Look at the color – just look at the shape! Worth a thousand dollars if it is worth a cent. Try to buy it in one of the antique shops round the corner for that – just try, that’s all I ask you to do. Now then” – this with a cheery, inviting, confident smile – “now then, what am I offered? Who’ll start it off at five hundred?”
There is no answer. A look of surprise not unmixed with chagrin crosses his mobile countenance. From his play of expression you feel that what he feels, underlying his other feelings, is a sympathy for people so blinded to their own good luck as not to leap headlong and en masse at this unparalleled chance.
“Tut tut!” he exclaims and again, “tut tut! Very well, then,” – his tone is resigned – “do I hear four hundred and seventy-five – four hundred and fifty? Who’ll start it at four twenty-five?”
His gaze sweeps the faces of the assemblage. It is a compelling gaze, indeed you might say mes-meristic. There is a touch of pathos in it, though, an unuttered appeal to the gathering to consider its own several interests.
“Do I hear four hundred?” He speaks of four hundred as an ostrich might speak of a tomtit’s egg – as something comparatively insignificant and puny.
“Twenty dollars!” pipes a voice.
He clasps his hand to his brow. This is too much; it is much too much. But business is business. He rallies; he smiles bitterly, wanly. His soul within him is crushed and bruised, but he rallies. Rallying is one of the best things he does and one of the most frequent. The bidding livens, slackens, lags, then finally ceases. With a gesture betokening utter despair, with lineaments bathed in the very waters of woe, he heart-brokenly knocks the vase down to somebody for $88.50.
But by the time the hired men have fetched forth Lot 78 he miraculously has recovered his former confidence and for the forty-oddth time since two o’clock – it is now nearly three forty-five – is his old cheerful beaming self. Thirty seconds later his heart has been broken in a fresh place; yet we may be sure that to-morrow morning when he rises he will be whistling a merry roundelay, his faith in the innate goodness of human nature all made new and fully restored to him. He would make a perfectly bully selection if you were sending a messenger to a home to break to an unsuspecting household some such tragic tidings, say; as that the head of the family, while rounding a turn on high, had skidded and was now being removed from the front elevation of an adjacent brick wall with a putty knife. If example counted for anything at all, he would have the mourners all cheered up again and the females among them discussing the most becoming modes in black crepe in less than no time at all.
My, my, but how my sense of understanding did broaden under the influence of the auction sales we attended through the spring and on into the Summer. When the morning paper came we would turn to the advertising section and look for auction announcements. If there was to be one, and generally there was – one or more – we canceled all other plans and attended. Going to auctions became our regular employment, our pastime, our entertainment. It became our obsession. It almost became our joint calling in life. To our besetting mania we sacrificed all else.
I remember there was one afternoon when John McCormack was billed to sing. I am very fond of hearing John McCormack. For one thing, he generally sings in a language which I can understand, and for another, I like his way of singing. He sings very much as I would sing if I had decided to take up singing for a living instead of writing. This is only one of the sacrifices I have made for the sake of English literature.
McCormack that day had to struggle through without me. Because there was a sale of Italian antiques billed for three p. m., and we were going to have an Italian hall and an Italian living room in the new house, and we felt it to be our bounden duty to attend.
It took some time and considerable work on the part of those fitted to guide me in the matter of decorations before I fell entirely into the idea of an Italian room, this possibly being due to the fact that I was born so far away from Italy and passed through childhood with so few Italian influences coming into my life. Even now I balk at the idea of hanging any faded red-silk stoles or copes, or whatever those ecclesiastical garments are, on my walls. I reserve the right to admire such a vestment when it is worn by the officiating cleric at church, but for the life of me and despite all that has repeatedly been said to me on the subject I fail to see where it belongs in a simple household as a part of the scheme of ornamentation.
I do not think it proper to display a strange clergyman’s cast-off costume in my little home any more than I would expect the canon of a cathedral to let me hang up a pair of my old overalls in his cathedral. Nor – if I must confess it – have I felt myself greatly drawn to the suggestion that we should have a lot of tall hand-painted candles sitting or standing round in odd spots. I mean those candlesticks which are painted in faded colors, with touches of dull gilt here and there on them and which are called after a lady named Polly Crome – their original inventor, I suppose she was, though her name does sound more as if Arnold Bennett had written her than as if she were a native Italian. I imagine she thought up this idea of a hand-painted candlestick nine feet tall and eighteen inches through at the base, and then in her honor the design was called after her, which in my humble opinion was compounding one mistake on top of another. Likewise I fear that I shall never become entirely reconciled to these old-model Italian chairs. My notion of a chair is something on which a body can sit for as long as half an hour without anesthetics. In most other details concerning antique furniture they have made a true believer out of me, but as regards chairs I am still some distance from being thoroughly converted. In chairs I favor a chair that is willing to meet you halfway, as it were, in an effort to be mutually comfortable. The other kind – the kind with a hard flat wooden seat and short legs and a stiff high back, a chair which looks as though originally it had been designed to be used by a clown dog in a trained animal act – may be artistic and beautiful in the chasteness of its lines and all this and that; but as for me, I say give me the kind of chair that has fewer admirers and more friends in the fireside circle. I take it that the early Italians were not a sedentary race. They could not have figured on staying long in one place.
I suppose the trouble with me is that I was born and brought up on the American plan and have never entirely got over it. In fact I was told as much, though not perhaps in exactly those words, when antiques first became a vital issue in our domestic life. In no uncertain terms I was informed that everybody who is anybody goes in for the Italian these times. I believe the only conspicuous exceptions to the rule are the Italians who have emigrated to these shores. They, it would appear, are amply satisfied with American fixtures and fittings. I have a suspicion that possibly some of them in coming hither may have been actuated by a desire to get as far away as possible from those medieval effects in plumbing which seem to be inseparable from Old World architecture.
My education progressed another step forward on the occasion of my first visit to an auction room where presumably desirable pieces of Italian workmanship were displayed as a preliminary to their being disposed of by public outcry. I was accompanied by a friend – the wormholeist already mentioned – and when he lapsed into rhapsodies over a pair of gilt mirrors, or rather mirrors which once upon a time, say about the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire, had been gilded, I was astonished.
“Surely,” I said, “nobody would want those things. See where the glass is flawed – the quicksilver must be pretty nearly all gone from the backs of them. And the molding is falling off in chunks and what molding is left is so dingy and stained that it doesn’t look like anything at all. If you’re asking me, I’d call those mirrors a couple of total losses.”
“Exactly!” he said. “That is precisely what makes them so desirable. You can’t counterfeit such age as these things show, my boy.”
“I shouldn’t care to try,” I said. “Where I came from, when a mirror got in such shape that you couldn’t see yourself in it it was just the same to us as a chorus girl that had both legs cut off in a railroad accident – it was regarded as having lost most of its practical use in life. Still, it is not for me, a raw green novice, a sub-novice as you might say, to set myself up against an expert like you. Anyhow, as the fellow said, live and learn. Let us move along to the next display of moldy remains.”
We did so. We came to a refectory table. Ordinarily a refectory table mainly differs in outline from the ordinary dining table by being constructed on the model of a dachshund. But this table, I should guess offhand, had seen about four centuries of good hard steady refecting at the hands of succeeding generations of careless but earnest feeders. Its top was chipped and marred by a million scars, more or less. Its legs were scored and worn down. Its seams gaped. From sheer weakness it canted far down to one side. The pressure of a hand upon it set the poor, slanted, crippled wreck to shaking as though along with all its other infirmities it had a touch of buck ague.
“What about this incurable invalid?” I asked. “Unless the fellow who buys it sends it up in a padded ambulance it’ll be hard to get it home all in one piece. I suppose that makes it all the more valuable, eh?”
“Absolutely!” he said. “It’s a perfectly marvelous thing! I figure it should bring at least six hundred dollars.”
“And cheap enough,” I said. “Why, it must have at least six hundred dollars’ worth of things the matter with it. A good cabinet-maker could put in a nice busy month just patching – ”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You surely wouldn’t touch it?”
“I shouldn’t dare to,” I said. “I was speaking of a regular cabinet-maker. No green hand should touch it – he’d have it all in chunks in no time.”
“But the main value of it lies in leaving it in its present shape,” he told me. “Don’t you realize that this is a condition which could never be duplicated by a workman?”
“Well, I’ve seen some house wreckers in my time who could produce a pretty fair imitation,” I retorted playfully. I continued in a musing vein, for the sight of that hopelessly damaged wreck all worn down and dented in and slivered off had sent my mind backward to a memory of early childhood. I said:
“I can see now how my parents made a mistake in stopping me from doing something I tackled when I was not more than six years old. I was an antiquer, but I didn’t know it and they didn’t know it. They thought that I was damaging the furniture, when as a matter of fact in my happy, innocent, childish way I was adding touches to it which would have been worth considerable money by now.”
What I was thinking of was this: On my sixth birthday, I think it was, an uncle of mine for whom I was named gave me a toy tool chest containing a complete outfit of tools. There was a miniature hammer and a plane and a set of wooden vises and a gimlet and the rest of the things which belong in a carpenter’s kit, but the prize of the entire collection to my way of thinking was a cross-cut saw measuring about eight inches from tip to tip.
Armed with this saw, I went round sawing things, or rather trying to. I could not exactly saw with it, but I could haggle the edges and corners of wood, producing a gnawed, frazzled effect. My quest for stuff suitable to exercise my handicraft on led me into the spare, or company room, where I found material to my liking. I was raking away at the legs of a rosewood center table – had one leg pretty well damaged to my liking and was preparing to start on another – when some officious grown person happened in on me and stopped me with violent words. If I had but been left undisturbed for half an hour or so I doubtless would have achieved a result which now after a lapse of thirty-odd years would have thrilled a lover of antiques to the core of his being. But this was not to be.
My present recollection of the incident is that I was chided in a painful physical way. The latter-day system of inculcating lessons in the mind of the child according to a printed form chart of soothing words was not known in our community at that time. The old-fashioned method of using the back of a hairbrush and imparting the lesson at the other end of the child from where the mind is and letting it travel all the way through him was employed. I was then ordered to go outdoors where there would be fewer opportunities for engaging in what adults mistakenly called mischief.
Regretting that the nurse that morning had seen fit to encase me in snug-fitting linen breeches instead of woolen ones, I wandered about carrying my saw in one hand and with the other hand from time to time rubbing a certain well-defined area of my small person to allay the afterglow. In the barnyard I came upon an egg lying on the edge of a mud puddle under the protecting lee of the chicken-yard fence. I can shut my eyes and see that egg right now. It was rather an abandoned-looking egg, stained and blotched with brownish-yellow spots. It had the look about it of an egg with a past – a fallen egg, as you might say.
Some impulse moved me to squat down and draw the toothed blade of my saw thwartwise across the bulge of that egg. For the first time in my little life I was about to have dealings with a genuine antique, but naturally at my age and with my limited experience I did not realize that. Probably I was actuated only by a desire to find out whether I could saw right through the shell of an egg amidships. That phase of the proceedings is somewhat blurred in my mind, though the dénouement remains a vivid memory spot to this very day.
I imparted a brisk raking movement to the saw. It is my distinct recollection that a fairly loud explosion immediately occurred. I was greatly shocked. One too young to know aught of the chemical effect on the reactions following the admission of fresh air to gaseous matter, which has been forming to the fulminating point within a tightly sealed casing, would naturally be shocked to have an egg go off suddenly in that violent manner. Modern military science, I suppose, would classify it as having been a contact egg.
Not only was I badly shocked, but also I had a profound conviction that in some way I had been taken advantage of – that my confidence had in some strange fashion been betrayed. I left my saw where I had dropped it. At the moment I felt that never again would I care to have anything to do with a tool so dangerous. I also left the immediate vicinity of where the accident had occurred and for some minutes wandered about in rather a distracted fashion. There did not seem to be any place in particular for me to go, and yet I could not bear to stay wherever I was. I wished, as it were, to get entirely away from myself – a morbid fancy perhaps for a mere six-year-old to be having, and yet, I think, a natural one under the circumstances.
I had a conviction that I would not be welcomed indoors and at the same time realized that even out in the great open where I could get air – and air was what I especially craved – I was likely to be shunned by such persons as I might accidentally encounter. Indeed I rather shunned myself, if you get what I mean. I was filled with a general shunning sensation. I felt mortified, too. And this emotion, I found a few minutes later, was shared by the black cook, who, issuing from the kitchen door, happened upon me in the act of endeavoring to freshen up myself somewhat from a barrel of rain water which stood under the eaves. She evidently decided offhand that not only had mortification set in but that it had reached an advanced stage. Her language so indicated.
And now, after more than three and a half decades, here on Fifth Avenue more than a thousand miles remote from those infantile scenes, I was gleaning another memorable lesson about antiques. I was learning that junk ceases to be junk if only it costs enough money, and thereafter becomes treasure.
Having had this great principal fact firmly implanted in my consciousness, I shortly thereafter embarked in congenial company upon the auction-room life upon which already I have touched. We went to sales when we had anything to buy and when we had nothing to buy – somehow we did not seem to be able to stay away. The joy of bidding a thing up and maybe of having it knocked down to us undermined our pooled will power; it weakened our joint resistance.
“And sold to – ” became our slogan, our shibboleth and our most familiar sentence. By day we heard it, by night it dinned in our ears as we slept, dreaming dreams of going bankrupt in this mad, delirious pursuit which had mastered us and spending our last days in a poorhouse entirely furnished in Italian antiques.
But taking everything into consideration, I must say the game was worth the candle. By degrees we acquired the furnishings for our two Italian rooms and our other rooms – which, thank heaven, are not Italian but what you might call fancy-mixed! And by degrees likewise I perfected my artistic education. Of course we made mistakes in selection, as who does not? We have a few auction-room skeletons tucked away in our closet, or to speak more exactly, in the attic of the new house. But in the main we are satisfied with what we have done and no doubt will continue to be until Italian-style furniture goes out and Aztec Indian or Peruvian Inca or Thibetan Grand Llama or some other style comes in.
And when our friends drop in for an evening we talk decorations and furnishings – it is a subject which never wears out. Mostly the women callers favor discussions of tapestries and brocades with intervals spent in fits of mutual wonder over the terrible taste shown by some other woman – not present – in buying the stuff for her house; and the men are likely to be interested in carvings or paintings; but my strong suit is wormholing in all its branches – that and patina. I am very strong on the latter subject, also. In fact among friends I am now getting to be known as the Patina Kid.
