Mince Pie

On Filling An Ink-Well

Those who buy their ink in little stone jugs may prefer to do so because

the pottle reminds them of cruiskeen lawn or ginger beer (with its

wire-bound cork), but they miss a noble delight. Ink should be bought in

the tall, blue glass, quart bottle (with the ingenious non-drip spout),

and once every three weeks or so, when you fill your ink-well, it is

your privilege to elevate the flask against the brightness of a window,

and meditate (with a breath of sadness) on the joys and problems that

sacred fluid holds in solution.

How blue it shines toward the light! Blue as lupin or larkspur, or

cornflower--aye, and even so blue art thou, my scriven, to think how far

the written page falls short of the bright ecstasy of thy dream! In the

bottle, what magnificence of unpenned stuff lies cool and liquid: what

fluency of essay, what fonts of song. As the bottle glints, blue as a

squill or a hyacinth, blue as the meadows of Elysium or the eyes of

girls loved by young poets, meseems the racing pen might almost gain

upon the thoughts that are turning the bend in the road. A jolly throng,

those thoughts: I can see them talking and laughing together. But when

pen reaches the road's turning, the thoughts are gone far ahead: their

delicate figures are silhouettes against the sky.

It is a sacramental matter, this filling the ink-well. Is there a

writer, however humble, who has not poured into his writing pot, with

the ink, some wistful hopes or prayers for what may emerge from that

dark source? Is there not some particular reverence due the ink-well,

some form of propitiation to humbug the powers of evil and constraint

that devil the journalist? Satan hovers near the ink-pot. Luther solved

the matter by throwing the well itself at the apparition. That savors to

me too much of homeopathy. If Satan ever puts his face over my desk, I

shall hurl a volume of Harold Bell Wright at him.

But what becomes of the ink-pots of glory? The conduit from which

Boswell drew, for Charles Dilly in The Poultry, the great river of his

Johnson? The well (was it of blue china?) whence flowed _Dream Children:

a Revery_? (It was written on folio ledger sheets from the East India

House--I saw the manuscript only yesterday in a room at Daylesford,

Pennsylvania, where much of the richest ink of the last two centuries is

lovingly laid away.) The pot of chuckling fluid where Harry Fielding

dipped his pen to tell the history of a certain foundling; the ink-wells

of the Caf de la Source on the Boul' Mich'--do they by any chance

remember which it was that R.L.S. used? One of the happiest tremors of

my life was when I went to that caf and called for a bock and writing

material, just because R.L.S. had once written letters there. And the

ink-well Poe used at that boarding-house in Greenwich Street, New York

(April, 1844), when he wrote to his dear Muddy (his mother-in-law) to

describe how he and Virginia had reached a haven of square meals. That

hopeful letter, so perfect now in pathos--

Yes, let us clear the typewriter off the table: an ink-well is a sacred

thing.

Do you ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a

public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried,

in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune?

What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and

sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. And the ink-wells on hotel

counters--does not the public dipping place of the Bellevue Hotel,

Boston, win a new dignity in my memory when I know (as I learned lately)

that Rupert Brooke registered there in the spring of 1914? I remember,

too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the

Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above

on the same page.

Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has

done honor to the ink-well. His _Apology for the Bottle Volcanic_ is in

his best flow of secret smiling (save an unfortunate dilution of Riley):

I like to think, as I look along book shelves, that every one of these

favorites was born out of an ink-well. I imagine the hopes and visions

that thronged the author's mind as he filled his pot and sliced the

quill. What various fruits have flowed from those ink-wells of the past:

for some, comfort and honor, quiet homes and plenteousness; for others,

bitterness and disappointment. I have seen a copy of Poe's poems,

published in 1845 by Putnam, inscribed by the author. The volume had

been bought for $2,500. Think what that would have meant to Poe himself.

Some such thoughts as these twinkled in my head as I held up the Pierian

bottle against the light, admired the deep blue of it, and filled my

ink-well. And then I took up my pen, which wrote: