Travels in Philadelphia/Our Old Desk
OUR OLD DESK
We see that there has been a fire at a second-hand furniture warehouse on Arch street. We think we can offer an explanation for the blaze. Our old desk was there.
That desk was always a hoodoo. Last autumn, when we gave up commuting and moved into town, we had to get rid of some of our goods in order to squeeze ourselves into an apartment. The very first thing we parted with was our old desk. We did not tell genial Mr. P., the dealer in second-hand furniture, that the piece was a Jonah, for we were afraid it would knock fifty cents or so off his offer, but now we feel rather shamefaced for not having warned him.
We bought the desk before we were married, at a department store in New York. It was almost the last article that store, a famous one in its day, got paid for. Soon after selling it the house failed.
We moved the desk out to a cottage in the country. We sat down in front of it. We didn't know it then, but we are convinced now there was some evil genius in it. It must have been built of slippery elm, full of knots, cut in the dark of the moon while a brindle cat was mewing. The drawers stuck once a week and had to be pared down with a jack-knife. We sat at that desk night after night, with burning visions of literary immortality. We wrote poems that no one would buy. We wrote stories that gradually became soiled and wrinkled around the folds of the manuscript. We wrote pamphlets eulogizing hotels and tried to palm them off on the managers as advertising booklets. The hotels accepted the booklets and went out of business before paying for them. Sitting at that desk we composed sparkling essays for a newspaper in Toledo, and after the paper had printed a bunch of them we wrote to the editor and asked him how about a check. He replied that he did not understand we were writing that stuff for actual money. He was quite grieved to have misunderstood us so. He thought we were merely writing them for the pleasure of uplifting the hearts of Toledo.
There was another odd thing about that desk. There was some drowsy sirup in its veins. Perhaps the wood hadn't been properly seasoned. Anyway, we couldn't keep awake while sitting at it. Night after night, assiduously, while the jolly old Long Island mosquitoes hummed in through the open windows like Liberty motors, we would begin to scribe. After an hour or so we would always fall asleep over the tawny keys of our ancient typewriter. It may be that the trouble lay partly in the typing bus, for we were so inexpert that we couldn't pound rapidly enough to keep ourself awake. We remember memorizing the letters on the first row of keys in a vain hope that if we could say qwertyuiop off by heart it would help us to move along faster, but it did no good. We started a novel, but after six months of wrestling we decided that as long as we worked at that desk we would never get it done. We tried writing on the kitchen table, in front of the stove—it was winter by that time—and we got the novel done in no time.
When we moved to Marathon, the van containing that desk broke down near a novelty factory in Trenton. Probably that novelty factory was its home and the old flat-top had nostalgia. In order to get the desk into the Marathon house its top had to be unscrewed and the screws were lost. After that, whenever we were trying to write a poem in the small hours of the night, when we got aroused in the heat of composition and shifted round on our chair, the whole top of the desk would slide off and the inkwell would cascade on to the floor.
There was one drawer in that desk that we look back on with particular affection. We had been asked by a publisher in Chicago to contribute the section on Etiquette for a Household Encyclopedia that was to be issued. That was about 1914, if we remember rightly. We knew nothing whatever about Etiquette. The article was to deal with the origin and history of social usages, coming down to the very latest thing in table manners, accepting and declining invitations, specimen letters dealing with every social emergency, such as being invited to go to a clambake, a wedding or the dedication of a sanitary dog-pound. We had an uproarious time compiling the essay. It was to contain at least fifteen thousand words and we were to get fifty dollars for it. In the chapter on specimen letters we let ourself go without restraint. In these specimen letters we amused ourself by using the names of all our friends. We chuckled to think of their amazement on finding themselves enshrined in this Household Encyclopedia, writing demure and stilted little regrets or acceptances for imaginary functions.
The manuscript of this article had to be mailed to Chicago on a certain date or the fifty dollars would be forfeit. Late the night before we toiled at our desk putting the final touches on The Etiquette of Courtship and Etiquette for Young Girls at Boarding School. Never having been a young girl at boarding school, our ideas were largely theoretical, but still we thought they were based on sound sense and a winsome instinct as to comely demeanor. We threw our heart into the task and felt that Louisa Alcott herself could not have counseled more becoming decorum. It was long after midnight when we finished the last reply of a young girl to the young man who had called her by her first name three months before we felt he had any right to do so. We put these last two sections of the manuscript into a drawer of the desk, to give them a final reading the next morning.
Late that night there came a damp fog, one of those pearly Long Island fogs. The desk drawer swelled up and retired from active life. Containing its precious freight, it was immovable. We stood the desk upside down, we tugged frantically at it, we hammered and chiseled and strove but in vain. The hour for mailing the copy approached. At last baffled, we had to speed to a mail-box and post the treatise on Etiquette without those two chapters. The publisher, we knew, would not miss them, though to us they contained the cream of our whole philosophy of politeness, containing our prized aphorisms on Consideration for Others The Basis of Good Manners.
We were never able to get that drawer open again. When we sold the desk to Mr. P. it was still tightly stuck. Some months ago we were passing along Arch street, just under the Reading Railway viaduct, and we saw a familiar sight on the pavement. It was our old desk, covered with dust and displayed for sale, but unmistakable to our recognitory eye. Furtively we approached it and gave the well-known bottom drawer a yank. It was still jammed, and presumably the manuscript was still within. We thought for a moment of buying the old thing again, splitting it open with an ax and getting out our literary offspring. But we didn't. And now this fire has come along and undoubtedly the desk perished in the flames. If only that chapter on Young Girls at Boarding School could have been rescued . . . . We have a daughter of our own now, and it might have given us some hints on how to bring her up.