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Title: The Patient Observer
       And His Friends


Author: Simeon Strunsky



Release Date: September 22, 2006  [eBook #19359]

Language: English

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THE PATIENT OBSERVER

And His Friends

by

SIMEON STRUNSKY







New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1911
Copyright, 1910, by The Evening Post Company
Copyright, 1910, by P. F. Collier & Son
Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers
Copyright, 1910, by The Atlantic Monthly Co.
Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead and Company




To

_M. G. S._




CONTENTS


I       Cowards                         Page 1

II      The Church Universal                10

III     The Doctors                         19

IV      Interrogation                       29

V       The Mind Triumphant                 37

VI      On Calling White Black              45

VII     The Solid Flesh                     57

VIII    Some Newspaper Traits               67

IX      A Fledgling                         80

X       The Complete Collector--I           92

XI      The Everlasting Feminine           100

XII     The Fantastic Toe                  111

XIII    On Living in Brooklyn              119

XIV     Palladino Outdone                  130

XV      The Cadence of the Crowd           138

XVI     What We Forget                     147

XVII    The Children That Lead Us          159

XVIII   The Martians                       179

XIX     The Complete Collector--II         189

XX      When a Friend Marries              198

XXI     The Perfect Union of the Arts      209

XXII    An Eminent American                216

XXIII   Behind the Times                   227

XXIV    Public Liars                       238

XXV     The Complete Collector--III        249

XXVI    The Commuter                       257

XXVII   Headlines                          270

XXVIII  Usage                              278

XXIX    60 H.P.                            285

XXX     The Sample Life                    296

XXXI    The Complete Collector--IV         313

XXXII   Chopin's Successors                320

XXXIII  The Irrepressible Conflict         327

XXXIV   The Germs of Culture               336




NOTE


Of the papers that go to make up the present volume, the greater number
were published as a series in the columns of the New York _Evening Post_
for 1910, under the general title of The Patient Observer. For the
eminently laudable purpose of making a fairly thick book, the Patient
Observer's frequently recurrent "I," "me," and "mine" have now been
supplemented with the experiences and reflections of his friends
Harrington, Cooper, and Harding as recorded on other occasions in the
New York _Evening Post_, as well as in the _Atlantic Monthly_, the
_Bookman_, _Collier's_, and _Harper's Weekly_.




I

COWARDS


It was Harrington who brought forward the topic that men take up in
their most cheerful moments. I mean, of course, the subject of death.
Harrington quoted a great scientist as saying that death is the one
great fear that, consciously or not, always hovers over us. But the five
men who were at table with Harrington that night immediately and sharply
disagreed with him.

Harding was the first to protest. He said the belief that all men are
afraid of death is just as false as the belief that all women are afraid
of mice. It is not the big facts that humanity is afraid of, but the
little things. For himself, he could honestly say that he was not
afraid of death. He defied it every morning when he ran for his train,
although he knew that he thereby weakened his heart. He defied it when
he smoked too much and read too late at night, and refused to take
exercise or to wear rubbers when it rained. All men, he repeated, are
afraid of little things. Personally, what he was most intensely and most
enduringly afraid of was a revolving storm-door.

Harding confessed that he approaches a revolving door in a state of
absolute terror. To see him falter before the rotating wings, rush
forward, halt, and retreat with knees trembling, is to witness a
shattering spectacle of complete physical disorganisation. Harding said
that he enters a revolving door with no serious hope of coming out
alive. By anticipation he feels his face driven through the glass
partition in front of him, and the crash of the panel behind him upon
his skull. Some day, Harding believed, he would be caught fast in one
of those compartments and stick. Axes and crowbars would be
requisitioned to retrieve his lifeless form.

Bowman agreed with Harding. His own life, Bowman was inclined to
believe, is typical of most civilised men, in that it is passed in
constant terror of his inferiors. The people whom he hires to serve him
strike fear into Bowman's soul. He is habitually afraid of janitors,
train-guards, elevator-boys, barbers, bootblacks, telephone-girls, and
saleswomen. But his particular dread is of waiters. There have been
times when Bowman thought that to punish poor service and set an example
to others, he would omit the customary tip. But such a resolution,
embraced with the soup, has never lasted beyond the entree. And, as a
matter of fact, Bowman said, such a resolution always spoils his dinner.
As long as he entertains it, he dares not look his man in the eye. He
stirs his coffee with shaking fingers. He is cravenly, horribly afraid.

Bowman is afraid even of new waiters and of waiters he never expects to
see again. Surely, it must be safe not to tip a waiter one never
expected to see again. "But no," said Bowman, "I should feel his
contemptuous gaze in the marrow of my backbone as I walked out. I could
not keep from shaking, and I should rush from that place in agony, with
the man's derisive laughter ringing in my ears."

The only one of the company who was not afraid of something concrete,
something tangible, was Williams. Now Williams is notoriously,
hopelessly shy; and when he took up the subject where Bowman had left
it, he poured out his soul with all the fervour and abandon of which
only the shy are capable. Williams was afraid of his own past. It was
not a hideously criminal one, for his life had been that of a bookworm
and recluse. But out of that past Williams would conjure up the
slightest incident--a trifling breach of manners, a mere word out of
place, a moment in which he had lost control of his emotions, and the
memory of it would put him into a cold sweat of horror and shame.

Years ago, at a small dinner party, Williams had overturned a glass of
water on the table-cloth; and whenever he thinks of that glass of water,
his heart beats furiously, his palate goes dry, and there is a horribly
empty feeling in his stomach. Once, on some similar occasion, Williams
fell into animated talk with a beautiful young woman. He spoke so
rapidly and so well that the rest of the company dropped their chat and
gathered about him. It was five minutes, perhaps, before he was aware of
what was going on. That night Williams walked the streets in an agony
of remorse. The recollection of the incident comes back to him every now
and then, and, whether he is alone at his desk, or in the theatre, or in
a Broadway crowd, he groans with pain. Take away such memories of the
past, Williams told us, and he knew of nothing in life that he is afraid
of.

Gordon's was quite a different case. The group about the table burst out
laughing when Gordon assured us that above all things else in this world
he is afraid of elephants. He agreed with Bowman that in the latitude of
New York City and under the zooelogic conditions prevailing here, it was
a preposterous fear to entertain. Gordon lives in Harlem, and he
recognises clearly enough that the only elephant-bearing jungle in the
neighbourhood is Central Park, whence an animal would be compelled to
take a Subway train to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and lie in
wait for him as he came home in the twilight. But irrational or no,
there was the fact. To be quashed into pulp under one of those
girder-like front legs, Gordon felt must be abominable. To make matters
worse, Gordon has a young son who insists on being taken every Sunday
morning to see the animals; and of all attractions in the menagerie, the
child prefers the elephant house. He loves to feed the biggest of the
elephants, and to watch him place pennies in a little wooden box and
register the deposits on a bell. What Gordon suffers at such times, he
told us, can be neither imagined nor described.

My own story was received with sympathetic attention. I told them that
the one great terror of my life is a certain man who owes me a fairly
large sum of money, borrowed some years ago. Whenever we meet he insists
on recalling the debt and reminding me of how much the favour meant to
him at the time, and how he never ceases to think of it. Meeting him has
become a torture. I do my best to avoid him, and frequently succeed. But
often he will catch sight of me across the street and run over and grasp
me by the hand and inquire after my health in so hearty, so honest a
fashion that I cannot bear to look him in the face. And as he beams on
me and throws his arm over my shoulder, I can only blush and shift from
one foot to the other and stammer out some excuse for hurrying away.
Passers-by stop and admire the man's affection and concern for one who
is evidently some poor devil of a relation from the country. One Sunday
he waylaid me on Riverside Drive and introduced me to his wife as one of
his dearest friends. I mumbled something about its not having rained the
entire week, and his wife, who was a stately person in silks, looked at
me out of a cold eye. Then and there I knew she decided that I was a
person who had something to conceal and probably took advantage of her
husband.

No; the more I think of it, the more convinced am I that very few men
pass their time in contemplating death, which is the end of all things.
Only those people do it who have nothing else to be afraid of, or who,
like undertakers and bacteriologists, make a living out of it.




II

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL


Harding declares that a solid thought before going to bed sets him
dreaming just like a bit of solid food. One night, Harding and I
discussed modern tendencies in the Church. As a result Harding dreamt
that night that he was reading a review in the _Theological Weekly_ of
November 12, 2009.

"Seldom," wrote the reviewer, "has it been our good fortune to meet with
as perfect a piece of work as James Brown Ducey's 'The American
Clergyman in the Early Twentieth Century.' The book consists of exactly
half a hundred biographies of eminent churchmen; in these fifty brief
sketches is mirrored faithfully the entire religious life, external and
internal, of the American people eighty or ninety years ago. We can do
our readers no better service than to reproduce from Mr. Ducey's pages,
in condensed form, the lives of half a dozen typical clergymen, leaving
the reader to frame his own conception of the magnificent activity which
the Church of that early day brought to the service of religion.

"The Rev. Pelatiah W. Jenks, who was called to the richest pulpit in New
York in 1912, succeeded within less than three years in building up an
unrivalled system of dancing academies and roller-skating rinks for
young people. Under him the attendance at the Sunday afternoon sparring
exhibitions in the vestry rooms of the church increased from an average
of 54 to an average of 650. In spite of the nominal fee charged for the
use of the congregation's bowling alleys, the income from that source
alone was sufficient to defray the cost of missionary work in all
Africa, south of the Zambesi River. Dr. Jenks's highest ambition was
attained in 1923 when the Onyx Church's football team won the
championship of the Ecclesiastical League of Greater New York. It was in
the same year that Dr. Jenks took the novel step of abandoning services
in St. Basil's Chapel, now situated in a slum district, and substituting
a moving-picture show with vaudeville features. Thereafter the empty
chapel was filled to overcrowding on Sundays. To encourage church
attendance at Sunday morning services, Dr. Jenks established a tipless
barber shop. Two years later, in spite of the murmured protests of the
conservative element in his congregation, he erected one of the finest
Turkish baths in New York City.

"The Rev. Coningsby Botts, Ph.D., LL.D., D.D., was regarded as the
greatest pulpit orator of his day. His Sunday evening sermons drew
thousands of auditors. Of Dr. Botts's polished sermons, our author gives
a complete list, together with short extracts. We should have to go far
to discover a specimen of richer eloquence than the sermon delivered on
the afternoon of the third Sunday after Epiphany, in the year 1911, on
'Dr. Cook and the Discovery of the North Pole.' On the second Sunday in
Lent, Dr. Botts moved an immense congregation to tears with his sermon,
'Does Radium Cure Cancer?' Trinity Sunday he spoke on 'Zola and His
Place in Literature.' The second Sunday in Advent he discussed 'The
Position of Woman in the Fiji Islands.' We can only pick a subject here
and there out of his other numerous pastoral speeches: 'Is Aviation an
Established Fact?' 'The Influence of Blake Upon Dante Gabriel Rossetti,'
'Dalmatia as a Health Resort,' and 'Amatory Poetry Among the Primitive
Races.'

"The Rev. Cadwallader Abiel Jones has earned a pre-eminent place in
Church history as the man who did most to endow Pittsburg with a
permanent Opera House. Our author relates how in the winter of 1916,
when the noted impresario Silverman threatened to sell his Opera House
for a horse exchange unless 100 Pittsburg citizens would guarantee
$5,000 each for a season of twenty weeks, Dr. Jones made a
house-to-house canvass in his automobile and went without sleep till the
half-million dollars was pledged. He fell seriously ill of pneumonia,
but recovered in time to be present at the signing of the contract. Dr.
Jones used to assert that there was more moral uplift in a single
performance of the 'Mikado' than in the entire book of Psalms. One of
his notable achievements was a Christmas Eve service consisting of some
magnificent kinetoscope pictures of the Day of Judgment with music by
Richard Strauss. Tradition also ascribes to Dr. Jones a saying that the
two most powerful influences for good in New York City were Miss Mary
Garden and the Eden Musee. But our author thinks the story is
apocryphal. He is rather inclined to believe, from the collocation of
the two names, that we have here a distorted version of the Biblical
creation myth.

"The Fourteenth Avenue Church of Cleveland, Ohio, under its famous
pastor, the Rev. Henry Marcellus Stokes, exercised a preponderant
influence in city politics from 1917 to 1925. Dr. Stokes was remorseless
in flaying the bosses and their henchmen. At least a dozen candidates
for Congress could trace their defeat directly to the efforts of the
Fourteenth Avenue Church. The successful candidates profited by the
lesson, and, during the three years' fight over tariff revision, from
1919 to 1922, they voted strictly in accordance with telegraphic
instructions from Dr. Stokes. In the fall of 1921 Dr. Stokes's
congregation voted almost unanimously to devote the funds hitherto used
for home mission work to the maintenance of a legislative bureau at the
State capital. The influence of the bureau was plainly perceptible in
the Legislature's favourable action on such measures as the Cleveland
Two-Cent Fare bill and the bill abolishing the bicycle and traffic
squads in all cities with a population of more than 50,000.

"Our author lays particular stress on the career of the Rev. Dr. Brooks
Powderly of New York, who, at the age of thirty-five, was recognized as
America's leading authority on slum life. Dr. Powderly's numerous books
and magazine articles on the subject speak for themselves. Our author
mentions among others, 'The Bowery From the Inside,' 'At What Age Do
Stevedores Marry?' 'The Relative Consumption of Meat, Pastry, and
Vegetables Among Our Foreign Population,' 'How Soon Does the Average
Immigrant Cast His First Vote?' 'The Proper Lighting for Recreation
Piers,' and, what was perhaps his most popular book, 'Burglar's Tools
and How to Use Them.'

"In running through the appendix to Mr. Ducey's volume," concludes the
reviewer, "we come across an interesting paragraph headed, 'A Curious
Survival.' It is a reprint of an obituary from the New York _Evening
Post_ of August, 1911, dealing with the minister of a small church far
up in the Bronx, who died at the age of eighty-one, after serving in the
same pulpit for fifty-three years. The _Evening Post_ notice states that
while the Rev. Mr. Smith was quite unknown below the Harlem, he had won
a certain prestige in his own neighbourhood through his old-fashioned
homilies, delivered twice every Sunday in the year, on love, charity,
pure living, clean thinking, early marriage, and the mutual duties of
parents towards their children and of children towards their parents.
'In the Rev. Mr. Smith,' remarks our author, 'we have a striking
vestigial specimen of an almost extinct type.'"




III

THE DOCTORS


The quarrels of the doctors do not concern me. I have worked out a
classification of my own which holds good for the entire profession. All
doctors, I believe, may be divided into those who go clean-shaven and
those who wear beards. The difference is more than one of appearance. It
is a difference of temperament and conduct. The smooth-faced physician
represents the buoyant, the romantic, what one might almost call the
impressionistic strain in the medical profession. The other is the
conservative, the classicist. My personal likings are all for the newer
type, but I do not mind admitting that if I were very ill indeed, I
should be tempted to send for the physician who wears a Vandyke and
smiles only at long intervals.

The reason is that when I am really ill I want some one who believes me.
That is something which the clean-shaven doctor seldom does. He is of
the breezy, modern school which maintains that nine patients out of ten
are only the victims of their own imagination. He greets you in a jolly,
brotherly fashion, takes your pulse, and says: "Oh, well, I guess you're
not going to die this trip," and he roars, as if it were the greatest
joke in the world to call up the picture of such dreadful possibilities.
When he prescribes, it is in a half-apologetic, half-quizzical manner,
and almost with a wink, as if he were to say, "This is a game, old man,
but I suppose it's as honest a way of earning one's living as most
ways." While he writes out his directions, he comments: "There is
nothing the matter with you, and you will take this powder three times a
day with your meals. It is just a case of too much tobacco supplemented
by a fertile fancy. Rub your chest with this before you go to bed and
avoid draughts. And what you need is not medicine but the active
agitation for two hours every day of the two legs which the Lord gave
you, and which you now employ exclusively for making your way to and
from the railway station. This is for your digestion, and you can have
it put up in pills or in liquid form, according to taste. And the next
time you feel inclined to call me in, think it over in the course of a
ten-mile walk."

Now this may be cheering if somewhat mixed treatment, but it has nothing
of that sympathy which the ailing body craves. The case is much worse if
your smooth-faced physician happens to be a personal friend. The
indifference with which such a man will listen to the most pitiful
recital of physical suffering is extraordinary. You may be out on the
golf links together, and he has just made an exceptionally fine iron
shot from a bad lie and in the face of a lively breeze. He is naturally
pleased, and you take courage from the situation. "By the way, Smith,"
you say, "I have been feeling rather queer for a day or two. There is a
gnawing sensation right here, and when I stoop----" "That must have been
180 yards," he says, "but not quite on the green. You don't chew your
food enough. Take a glass of hot water before your breakfast--and you
had better try your mashie!" Of course, no one likes to talk shop,
especially on the golf links. Still you think, if you were a physician
and you had a friend who had a gnawing sensation, you would be more
considerate. After the game he lights his cigar and orders you not to
smoke if the pain in your chest is really what you have described it.
"In me," he says, cheerfully, "you get a physician and a horrible
example for one price."

But there is one thing that this impressionistic school of medicine has
in common with the other kind. Both types are faithful to the funereal
type of waiting-room which is one of the signs of the trade. It is a
room in which all the arts of the undertaker have seemingly been called
upon to bring out the full possibilities of the average New York
brownstone "front-parlour." I have often tried to decide whether, in a
doctor's waiting-room, night or day was more conducive to thoughts of
the grave. At night a lamp flickers dimly in one corner of the long
room, and the shadows only deepen those other shadows which lie on the
ailing spirit. But this same darkness mercifully conceals the long line
of ash-coloured family portraits in gold frames, the ash-coloured carpet
and chandelier, and the hideous aggregation of ash-coloured couches and
chairs which make up the daylight picture. Why doctors' reception rooms
should always so strongly combine the attractiveness of a popular
lunch-room on a rainy day with the quiet domestic atmosphere of a county
jail, I have never been able to find out, unless the object is to reduce
the patient to such a horrible state of depression that the mere summons
to enter the doctor's presence makes one feel very much better already.
There are times when to be told that one has pneumonia or an incipient
case of tuberculosis must be a relief after an hour spent in one of
those dreadful ante-chambers.

The literature in a physician's waiting-room is not exhilarating.
Usually, there is an extensive collection of periodicals four months old
and over. From this I gather that physicians' wives and daughters are
persistent but somewhat deliberate readers of current literature. The
sense of age about the magazines on a doctor's table is heightened by
the absence of the front and back covers. The only way of ascertaining
the date of publication is to hunt for the table of contents. That,
however, is a task which few able-bodied men in the prime of life are
equal to, not to say a roomful of sick people, nervous with
anticipation. Most patients under such circumstances set out
courageously, but only to lose themselves in the first half-dozen pages
of the advertising section. Yet the result is by no means harmful. There
is something about the advertising agent's buoyant, insinuating,
sympathetic tone that is very restful to the invalid nerves. Harrington
tells me that the small suburban house in which he lives, the paint and
roofing with which he protects it against the weather, the lawn-mower
which he has secured in anticipation of a good crop of grass, and the
small stock of poultry he experiments with, were all acquired through
advertisements read in doctors' waiting-rooms. Some physicians take in
the illustrated weeklies as well as the monthly magazines. In one of the
former I found the other day an excellent panoramic view of the second
inauguration of President McKinley.

But I am afraid I have wandered somewhat from what I set out to say. I
meant to show how different from your clean-shaven doctor is the
physician of the conventional beard. There is no trifling with him. He
takes himself seriously, and he takes you seriously. His examination is
as thorough as the stethoscope can make it; in fact, he listens to your
heart-action long enough to make you fear the worst. This is in marked
contrast with the smooth-faced doctor, who, as a rule, asks you to show
your tongue, and when you obey he does not look at it, but begins to go
through his mail, whistling cheerfully. He puts such vital questions as,
how far up is your bedroom window at night, and do you ever have a
sense of eye-strain after reading too long, and when you reply, he pays
no attention. His entire attitude expresses the conviction that either
you are not ill at all, or that if you are, you are not in a position to
give an intelligent account of yourself. That is not the case with the
other physician. He asks precise questions and insists on detailed
replies. Nothing escapes him. While you are describing the sensations in
the vicinity of your left lung, he will ask quietly whether you have
always had the habit of biting your nails.

Under such sympathetic attention the patient's spirits rise. From an
apologetic state of mind he passes to a sense of his own importance.
Instead of being ashamed of his ailments he tries to describe as many as
he can think of. His specific complaint may be a touch of sciatica, but
he takes pleasure in recalling a bad habit of breathing through the
mouth in moments of excitement, and a tricky memory which often leads
him to carry about his wife's letters an entire week before mailing
them. The need for a certain amount of self-castigation is implanted in
all of us, and it is satisfied in the form of confession. Many people do
it as part of their religious beliefs. Others belabour themselves in the
physician's office. Men who in the bosom of the family will deny that
they read too late at night and smoke too many cigars will call such
transgressions to the doctor's attention if he should happen to overlook
them. I know of one man suffering from neuralgia of the arm who insisted
on telling his doctor that it made him ill to read the advertisements in
the subway cars. But the doctor who wears no beard does not invite such
confidences.




IV

INTERROGATION


One day a census enumerator in the employ of the United States
government knocked at my door and left a printed list of questions for
me to answer. The United States government wished me to state how many
sons and daughters I had and whether my sons were males and my daughters
females. I was further required to state that not only was I of white
descent and that my wife (if I had one) was of white descent, but that
our children (if we had any) were also of white descent. I was also
called upon to state whether any of my sons under the age of five (if I
had any) had ever been in the military or naval service of the United
States, and whether my grandfather (if I had one) was attending school
on September 30 last. There were other questions of a like nature, but
these are all I can recall at present.

Halfway through the schedule I was in a high state of irritation. The
census enumerator's visit in itself I do not consider a nuisance. Like
most Americans who sniff at the privileges of citizenship, I secretly
delight in them. I speak cynically of boss-rule and demagogues, but I
cast my vote on Election Day in a state of solemn and somewhat nervous
exaltation that frequently interferes with my folding the ballot in the
prescribed way. I have never been summoned for jury duty, but if I ever
should be, I shall accept with pride and in the hope that I shall not be
peremptorily challenged. It needs some such official document as a
census schedule to bring home the feeling that government and state
exist for me and my own welfare. Filling out the answers in the list
was one of the pleasant manifestations of democracy, of which paying
taxes is the unpleasant side. The printed form before me embodied a
solemn function. I was aware that many important problems depended upon
my answering the questions properly. Only then, for instance, could the
government decide how many Congressmen should go to Washington, and what
my share was of the total wealth of the country, and how I contributed
to the drift from the farm to the city, and what was the average income
of Methodist clergymen in cities of over 100,000 population.

What, then, if so many of the questions put to me by the United States
government seemed superfluous to the point of being absurd? The process
may involve a certain waste of paper and ink and time, but it is the
kind of waste without which the business of life would be impossible.
The questions that really shape human happiness are those to which the
reply is obvious. The answers that count are those the questioner knew
he would get and was prepared to insist upon getting. Harrington tells
me that when he was married he could not help smiling when the minister
asked him whether he would take the woman by his side to be his wedded
wife. "What," said Harrington, "did he think I was there for? Or did he
detect any sign of wavering at the last moment?" What reply does the
clergyman await when he asks the rejoicing parents whether they are
willing to have their child baptized into the community of the redeemed?
What is all ritual, as it has been framed to meet the needs of the human
heart, but a preordained order of question and response? In birth and in
burial, in joy and in sorrow, for those who have escaped shipwreck and
those who have escaped the plague, the practice of the ages has laid
down formulae which the soul does not find the less adequate because they
are ready-made.

Consider the multiplication-table. I don't know who first hit upon the
absurd idea that questions are intended to elicit information. In so
many laboratories are students putting questions to their microscope. In
so many lawyers' offices are clients putting questions to their
attorneys. In so many other offices are haggard men and women putting
questions to their doctors. But the number of all these is quite
insignificant when compared with the number of questions that are framed
every day in the schoolrooms of the world. Wherefore, I say, consider
the multiplication-table. A greater sum of human interest has centred
about the multiplication-table than about all doctors' and lawyers' and
biologists' offices since the beginning of time. Millions of
schoolmasters have asked what is seven times eleven and myriads of
children's brains have toiled for the answer that all the time has been
reposing in the teacher's mind. What is seven times eleven? What is the
capital of Dahomey? When did the Americans beat the British at
Lexington? What is the meaning of the universe? We shall never escape
the feeling that these questions are put only to vex us by those who
know the answer.

I said that I am looking forward to be summoned for jury-duty. But I
know that the solemn business of justice, like most of the world's
business, is made up of the mumbled question that is seldom heard and
the fixed reply that is never listened to. The clerk of the court stares
at the wall and drones out the ancient formula which begins
"Jusolimlyswear," and ends "Swelpyugod," and the witness on the stand
blurts out "I do." The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
asks the President-elect whether he will be faithful to the Constitution
and the laws of the United States, and the President-elect invariably
says that he will. The candidate for American citizenship is asked
whether he hereby renounces allegiance to foreign kings, emperors, and
potentates, and fervently responds that he does. When I took my medical
examination for a life-insurance policy, the physician asked me whether
I suffered from asthma, bronchitis, calculus, dementia, erysipelas, and
several score other afflictions, and, without waiting for an answer, he
wrote "No" opposite every disease.

Whenever I think of the world and the world's opinion, I think of Mrs.
Harrington in whom I see the world typified. Now Mrs. Harrington is
inconceivable in a scheme where the proper reply to every question is
not as thoroughly established as the rule for the proper use of forks
at dinner. In the presence of an unfamiliar reply to a familiar question
Mrs. Harrington is suspicious and uneasy. She scents either a joke or an
insult; and we are all Mrs. Harrington. If you were to ask a stranger
whom did he consider the greatest playwright of all times and, instead
of Shakespeare or Moliere, he were to say Racine, it would be as if one
were to ask him whether he took tea or coffee for breakfast and he said
arsenic. It would be as though you asked your neighbour what he thought
of a beautiful sunset and he said he did not like it. It would be as if
I were to say to Mrs. Harrington, "Well, I suppose I have stayed quite
long enough," and she were to say, "Yes, I think you had better be
going."




V

THE MIND TRIUMPHANT


One night after dinner I quoted for Harding the following sentence from
an address by President Lowell of Harvard: "The most painful defect in
the American College at the present time is the lack of esteem for
excellence in scholarship." Thereupon Harding recalled what some one had
said on a related subject: "Athleticism is rooted in an exaggerated
spirit of intercollegiate rivalry and a publicity run mad."

That night Harding dreamt the following:

_From the Harvard "Crimson" for October 8, 1937:_

    "Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children in the Stadium yesterday
    broke into a delirium of cheers when the Cambridge team in Early
    English Literature won its fourth successive victory over Yale. Both
    sides were trained to the minute, however different the methods of the
    two head coaches. The Harvard team during the last two weeks had been
    put on a course of desultory reading from Bede to the closing of the
    theatres by the Puritans in 1642, while Yale had concentrated on the
    Elizabethan dramatists and signal practice.

    "Harvard won the toss, and Captain Hartley led off with a question on
    the mediaeval prototypes of Thomas More's 'Utopia.' Brooks of Yale made
    a snappy reply, and by a dashing string of three questions on the
    authorship of 'Ralph Roister-Doister,' the sources of Chaucer's
    'Nonne's Preeste's Tale,' and the exact site of the Globe Theatre,
    carried the fight into the enemy's territory. But Harvard held well,
    and the contest was a fairly even one for twenty minutes. There was an
    anxious moment towards the end, when Gosse, for Harvard, muffed on the
    date of the first production of 'The Tempest,' but before Yale could
    frame another question the whistle blew.

    "In the second half, Yale perceptibly weakened. It still showed
    brilliant flashes of attack, but its defence was poor, especially
    against Brooks's smashing questions on the Italian influences in
    Milton's shorter poems. Harvard made its principal gains against
    Burckhardt, who simply could not solve Winship's posers from Ben Jonson
    and Beaumont and Fletcher. The Yale coaches finally took him out and
    sent in Skinner, the best Elizabethan on the scrub team, but it was too
    late to save the day. There were rumours after the game that Burckhardt
    had broken training after the Princeton contest by going on a three
    days' canoe trip up the Merrimac. That, however, does not detract from
    the glory of Harvard's magnificent triumph."

_From the Boston "Herald" of October 9, 1937:_

    "William J. Burns and Douglas Mitchell, sophomores at Harvard, were
    arrested last night for creating a disturbance in the dining-room of
    the Mayflower Hotel by letting loose a South American baboon with a
    pack of firecrackers attached to its tail. When arraigned before
    Magistrate Conroy, they declared that they were celebrating Harvard's
    Early English victory over Yale, and were discharged."

_From the Yale "News" of June 12, 1940:_

    "In the presence of twenty thousand spectators, including the President
    of the United States, the greater part of his Cabinet, and several
    foreign ambassadors, Yale's 'varsity eight simply ran away from
    Harvard in the tenth annual competition in Romance languages and
    philology. Yale took the lead from the start, and at the end of fifteen
    minutes was ahead by 16 points to 7.... This splendid victory is due in
    part to the general superiority of the New Haven eight, but too much
    credit cannot be given to little Howells, who steered a flawless
    contest. The Blue made use of the short, snappy English style of
    text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German
    seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were
    elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid work on Corneille and
    the poets of the Pleiade, while Harvard's choice fell on Butterworth,
    probably the best intercollegiate expert on Cervantes. In the evening
    all the contestants attended a performance of 'The Prince and the
    Peach' at the Gaiety. It is reported that no less than nine out of the
    sixteen men have received flattering offers to coach Romance language
    teams in the leading Western universities."

_From the "Daily Princetonian" of February 13, 1933:_

    "Princeton won the intercollegiate championship yesterday with 63
    points to Harvard's 37, Yale's 18, and 7 each for Brown, Williams, and
    Pennsylvania. Princeton won by her brilliant work in the classics and
    biology. Firsts were made by Bentley, who did the 220 lines of Homer in
    29-3/5 minutes, scanned 100 Alcaics from Horace in 62 seconds flat, and
    hurdled over nine doubtful readings and seven lacunae in the text of
    Aristotle's 'Poetics' in 17-1/2 minutes. Two firsts went to Ramsdell,
    who made only two errors in Protective Colouration and one error in
    explaining the mutations of the Evening Primrose."

_From the editorial columns of the New York "Evening Post" for July 7,
1933, and October 11, 1938:_

    (1) "Scholastic competitions have ceased to be the means to an end and
    have become an end in themselves. The passion to win has swept away
    every other consideration. Professionalism has laid its tainted hand on
    the sports of our college youth. High-priced professors from the
    University of Leipzig and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes are engaged to
    drill our teams to victory. Men who should have long ago taken their
    Ph.D. have been known deliberately to flunk examinations so as to be
    eligible for the 'varsity contests. Promising students in the
    preparatory schools are bribed to enroll with this or that college. The
    whole problem of summer mathematics reeks to heaven. It is not enough
    that a student during eight months of the year will put in all his
    time on invariants and the theory of numbers. Vacation time finds him
    at some fashionable resort, tutoring the sons of millionaires in
    multiplication and quadratic equations."

    (2) "Thus our so-called student 'activities' are neither active in the
    true sense, nor fit for students. There has grown up a small clan of
    intellectual athletes who win victories while thousands of mediocre
    students, six feet and over and having an average weight of 195 pounds,
    stand around and cheer. Our student-managers have become men of
    business, purely. The receipts at the last Harvard-Yale debate on the
    popular election of United States senators amounted to more than
    $50,000. The Greek philology team spends three-quarters of its time in
    touring the country. The _Evening Howl_ prints the pictures of the
    [Greek: Phi Beta Kappa] members every other day. It is time to call a
    halt."




VI

ON CALLING WHITE BLACK


If it were not for the deadly hatred that exists between Bob, who will
be four years old very soon, and Abdul Hamid II, late Sultan of Turkey,
I hardly know what would become of my moral standards. Whenever my sense
of right and wrong grows blunted; whenever the inextricable confusion of
good and bad in everything about us becomes unusually depressing, I have
only to recall how virulent, how inflexible, how certain is Bob's
judgment on the character and career of the deposed Ottoman despot.

Bob is Harrington's youngest son. He and Abdul Hamid II first met in the
pages of a fat new history of the Turkish Revolution having a white
star and crescent on the cover and perhaps half a hundred pictures
inside. The book immediately supplanted the encyclopaedia and General
Kuropatkin's illustrated memoirs of the Russo-Japanese War, in Bob's
affections. Who, he wanted to know, was the swarthy, lean, hook-nosed
gentleman in a tasselled cap, who stood up in a carriage to acknowledge
the cheers of the crowd. That, Harrington told him, was a bad Sultan,
and tried to turn to the next picture, which showed an unhappy-looking
Armenian priest casting his first vote for a member of Parliament.

But the boy has for some years been in the stage where every fact laid
before him must be backed up with an adequate reason. What does a bad
Sultan do, he wished to know. Harrington was puzzled. It seemed a pity
to bring Bob into touch with the cruelties and pains of life. But on the
other hand here was a chance to inoculate Bob at a very early age with
a hatred for tyranny and oppression, and a love for the principles of
representative government; and on the whole I am inclined to think
Harrington did right. In any case Harrington told the boy that the bad
Sultan was in the habit of sending his soldiers to shoot people, and
burn down their homes, and take away everything they had to eat, and put
all the women into jail. He hesitated over the children. It was out of
the question to tell Bob how, by order of the bad Sultan, little
children were ripped open before their mothers' eyes, or had their
brains dashed out against the walls. The little children, Harrington
finally told Bob, were whipped by the bad Sultan's bad soldiers, and had
all their toys confiscated.

But that apparently was not enough. Bob wanted to know what else the bad
Sultan did to the little children. What else? Harrington's criminal
imagination had exhausted itself. He didn't know, and he called upon Bob
for suggestions.

"He gives them medicine," said Bob, "and sprays their throats with
peroxide, and they cry." Was there any after-thought in that remark,
Harrington wondered. Could it be that he had only succeeded in arousing
in that active young mind the recognition of a certain family
resemblance between himself and Abdul the Damned? For that matter, was
it fair to the late Commander of the Faithful to charge his name with a
crime he was probably innocent of? But then again, if that particular
crime was necessary to the lesson borne in on Bob, why hesitate? So
Harrington ponders a moment and decides; yes, even to that level of
iniquity had Abdul Hamid II sunk. The atomiser was one of the
instruments of torture he made use of. And when the bad Sultan is
finally checked in his nefarious career, and dragged off to prison,
where he gets nothing but hard bread to eat and filthy water to drink,
Bob retains the impression that all this came about because the Young
Turks grew tired of having their throats washed with peroxide solutions.

"When I see the bad Sultan," says Bob, "I will punch him, like this,"
and his fist, shooting out and up, knocks the pipe from Harrington's
mouth.

"But aren't you afraid he will hurt you?" his father asks.

"No," says Bob; "I'll run away."

And the boy has been steadfast in his hatred. He meets the Sultan every
night just before supper, when he insists on being taken right through
the fat, red volume with the star and crescent on the cover; and every
time the Sultan's face appears in the pictures, the boy smites it with
his fist. Bob goes to his meals with an excellent appetite engendered by
his violent encounters with that disreputable monarch.

Abdul Hamid II is in very bad shape from the punishment. Bob has caught
him in the act of addressing the English members of the Balkan
Committee, and left him only a pair of shoulders and one leg. Of the
Sultan driving to the Selamlik every Friday there is visible now only
one of the carriage horses and the fragments of a cavalryman. Nor is the
physical presentment of Abdul Hamid the only thing that has gone to
pieces under Bob's unrelenting hostility. The Sultan's character has
been growing worse and worse as night after night the boy insists upon
new examples of what bad Sultans do.

To satisfy that inexhaustible demand, Harrington has shouldered Abdul
Hamid with all the sins of all the epochs in history. He has made him
steep unhappy Christian prisoners in pitch and burn them for torches,
and send innocent Frenchmen to the guillotine, and tomahawk the Puritan
settlers as they worked in the fields. He has made him responsible for
St. Bartholomew's Day, and Andersonville prison. He has robbed the Czar
of his just credit by making Abdul Hamid the hero of Bloody Sunday in
St. Petersburg. I am not sure but that Harrington has not laid the
abnormally high price of meat and eggs at the Sultan's door. There are
times when I really feel that Harrington should ask Abdul Hamid's
pardon.

But no; he should _not_ beg his pardon. For that is just the point I set
out to make. It is a moral tonic to be brought into touch with Bob's
opinion of Abdul Hamid, and to get to feel that things are not all a
hodge-podge, indifferently good or indifferently bad, as you choose to
look at it. In Bob's world there are good things and bad things, and the
good is good and the bad is bad. Bob knows nothing of the cant which
makes the robber monopolist only the sad victim of forces outside his
control. Bob knows nothing of the sentimental twaddle about that
interesting class of people who are more sinned against than sinning.
Bob, like Nature, indulges in no fine distinctions. When he meets a bad
Sultan he punches his head. When he meets a good Sultan, nothing is too
good to believe concerning him.

And he accepts the one as naturally as he does the other. He has no
moral enthusiasms or enthusiasms of any kind. It is merely an obvious
thing to him that right should triumph and wrong should fail. He does
not play with his emotions. I remember how, one night, in relating the
fall of Abdul Hamid, Harrington had worked himself up to an
extraordinary pitch of excitement. Never had that despot been painted in
such horrid colours; and after he had told how the palace guards rose
against the Constitution, and how the Young Turks marched upon
Constantinople, and how the craven tyrant, crying "Don't hurt me, don't
hurt me," was dragged from his bed by the good soldiers and clapped into
prison, Harrington turned, all aglow, to Bob, and waited for the boy to
echo his enthusiasm. But Bob waited till the cell-door clanged behind
the Unspeakable Turk, and said: "Now tell me about the giraffe that fell
into the water."

I spoke of the good Sultan. Of course there had to be one, and
Harrington found him in the same book with the bad Sultan. And when he
had studied the somewhat stolid features of Mohammed V for a little
while, it was inevitable that Bob should ask what a good Sultan did.
Harrington was in difficulties again. It was impossible to explain that
at bottom there really is no such thing as a good Sultan; that they are
as a rule cruel and immoral, and always expensive; and that at best they
are harmless, if somewhat stupid, survivals. But since the very idea of
a bad Sultan demands a good one, Harrington tried to satisfy Bob by
investing Mohammed V with a large number of negative virtues. "A good
Sultan does not shoot people, or burn down houses or throw women into
jail or whip little children." The portrait failed to please. Bob's
faith demanded something robust to cling to; and in the end he compelled
his father to do for the good Sultan the opposite of what he had done
for the bad one. Mohammed V stands to-day invested with all the virtues
that have been manifested on earth from Enoch to Florence Nightingale.

And yet of the two, Bob and his father, I must say again that it is Bob
who has the more truthful and healthy outlook upon life, and it is good
for Harrington to rehearse with him the history of the fall of Abdul
Hamid II three or four times a week. Bob has no flabby standards. He
wastes no time in looking for lighter shades in what is black or dark
spots in the white. Bob holds, for instance, that bad soldiers shoot
down good people, and that good soldiers shoot down bad people. He is
quite as close to the truth as I am, who believe that there is no such
thing as a good soldier and that the business of shooting down people,
whether good or bad, is a wretched one. For all that, I know there come
times when a man must take human life, and in such cases Bob has the
advantage over Hamlet and me. Where we falter and speculate and end by
making a mess of it all, Bob just punches the bad Sultan's head and
passes on to the giraffe that fell into the water.




VII

THE SOLID FLESH


Physical culture as pursued in the home probably benefits a man's body;
but the strain on his moral nature is terrific. I go through my morning
exercise with hatred for all the world and contempt for myself. Why, for
instance, should every system of gymnastics require that a man place
himself in the most ridiculous and unnatural postures? A stout,
middle-aged man who struggles to touch the floor with the palms of his
hands is not a beautiful sight. Equally preposterous is the practice of
standing on one leg and stretching the other toward the nape of one's
neck. In the confines of a city bedroom such evolutions are not only
ungraceful but frequently dangerous. Harrington tells me that every
morning when he lunges forward he scrapes the tips of his fingers
against the edge of the bed and the tears come into his eyes. When he
throws his arms back he hits the gas jet. Harrington's young son, who
insists on being present during the ordeal, believes that the entire
performance is intended for his amusement, and laughs immoderately. I
cannot blame him. Morning exercise is incompatible with the maintenance
of parental dignity. Were I a child again I could neither love nor
respect a father who placed two chairs at a considerable distance from
each other and mounted them horizontally like the human bridge in a
melodrama.

I admit, of course, that home exercises have the merit of being cheap.
No special apparatus is required. The ordinary household furniture and
such heirlooms as are readily available will usually suffice. An onyx
clock will do instead of chest weights. Any two volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica will take the place of dumb-bells or Indian
clubs. Many a time I have stood still and held a bronze lamp in my
outstretched right hand for a minute and then held it in my left hand
for half a minute. I know of one man who skipped the rope one hundred
times every morning. Within four months he had lost three and a half
pounds, and driven the family in the flat below into nervous
prostration. I have even been told that there are systems of exercise
which show how physical perfection may be attained by scientifically
manipulating, for fifteen minutes every day, a couple of fountain pens
and a paper cutter. But I cannot reconcile myself to such methods
because of the confusion they introduce into the world of common things.
A table is no longer something to write upon or to eat upon, but
something to lie down upon while one flings out his arms and legs fifty
times in four contrary directions. A broom-stick is an instrument for
strengthening the shoulder muscles. When I see a transom, I find myself
estimating the number of times I could chin it.

The intimate connection between the hygienic life and the temptation to
tell lies is a delicate subject to touch upon; but the facts may as well
be brought out now as later. People of otherwise irreproachable conduct
will lose all sense of truthfulness when they speak of physical culture
and fresh air. They will exaggerate the number of inches they keep their
bedroom windows raised in midwinter; they will quote ridiculous
estimates of the doctors' bills they have saved; they will represent
themselves as being in the most incredibly perfect health. I know one
sober, intelligent business-man who not only habitually understates, by
ten degrees, the temperature of his morning tub, but gives an
altogether distorted impression of the alacrity with which he leaps into
his bath every morning, and the reluctance with which he leaves it. This
same man asserts that he can now walk from the Chambers Street ferry to
his office in Wall Street in astonishing time. And not only that, but
since he took to walking as much as he could, he has cut down his daily
number of cigars to one-fourth (which is untrue). And not only that, but
since he has gone in for exercise and fresh air and has given up
smoking, his income has increased by at least 50 per cent., owing to his
improved health and clearer mental vision. But that again, as I happen
to know, is untrue.

But there is another, much more subtle form of prevarication. Smith
meets you in the street and remarks upon your flabby appearance. He
argues that you ought to weigh twenty-five pounds less than you do, and
that a long daily walk will do the trick. "Look at me," he says, "I walk
ten miles every day and there isn't an ounce of superfluous flesh on
me." And so saying, he slaps his chest and offers to let you feel how
hard the muscles are about his diaphragm. Of course, there is no
superfluous flesh on Smith. And if he abstained entirely from physical
exertion and guzzled heavy German beer all day and dined on turtle soup
and roast goose every day, and ate unlimited quantities of pastry, he
would still be what he describes as free from superfluous flesh. _I_
call it scraggy. Smith is one of the men set apart by nature to
perpetuate the Don Quixote type of beauty, just as I am doomed with the
lapse of time to approximate the Falstaffian type. Smith's five sisters
and brothers are thin. His father was slight and neurasthenic. His
mother was spare and angular. Little wonder the Smith family is fond of
walking. Friction and air-resistance in their case are practically
nonexistent.

I do not, of course, mean to deny the ancient tradition that a sound
body makes a sound mind. But I would only point out that we are just
beginning to wake to the truth of the converse proposition, that a sane,
equable, easy-going mind keeps the body well. Hence there are really two
kinds of exercise, and two kinds of hygiene, a physical kind and a
spiritual kind. Which one a man will choose should be left entirely to
himself. It is only a question of approaching the same goal from two
different directions. Smith is welcome to make himself a better man by
exercising his legs three hours a day. But I prefer to sit in an
armchair and exercise my soul. Smith comes in refreshed from a
half-day's sojourn in the open air, and I come away refreshed from a
roomful of old friends talking three at a time amidst clouds of tobacco
smoke.

The trouble with so many of the physical-culture devotees is that they
tire out the soul in trying to serve it. I am inclined to believe that
the beneficent effects of the regular quarter-hour's exercise before
breakfast, is more than offset by the mental wear and tear involved in
getting out of bed fifteen minutes earlier than one otherwise would.
Some one has calculated that the amount of moral resolution expended in
New York City every winter day in getting up to take one's cold bath
would be enough to decide a dozen municipal elections in favour of the
decent candidate, or to send fifty grafting legislators to jail for an
average term of three and a half years. The same specialist has worked
out the formula that the average married man's usefulness about the
house varies inversely with his fondness for violent exercise. Smith's
dumb-bell practice, for instance, leaves him no time for hanging up the
pictures. After his long Sunday's walk he is invariably too tired to
answer his wife's questions concerning the influence of the tariff on
high prices.

By this time it will be plain that I am no passionate admirer of the
gospel of salvation by hygiene. So many things that the world holds
precious have been developed under the most unhygienic conditions.
Revolutions for the liberation of mankind have been plotted in
unsanitary cellars and dungeons. Religions have taken root and prospered
in catacombs. Great poems have been written in stuffy garrets. Great
orations have been spoken before sweating crowds in the foul air of
overheated legislative chambers. Lovers are said to be fond of dark
corners and out-of-the-way places. It is not by accident that children,
said to be the most beautiful thing in the world, are so inordinately
fond of dirt. Every great truth on its first appearance has been
declared a menace to morals and society; in other words, unhygienic. And
yet one would imagine that truth, from its habit of going naked, would
appeal strongly to the ardent fresh-air practitioner.




VIII

SOME NEWSPAPER TRAITS


At Cooper's house last winter I met Professor Grundschnitt of Berlin,
who has been making a study of American newspaper methods in behalf of
the German government. For some time after the professor's arrival in
this country, he told me, he found himself completely at sea. American
newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was
the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver
Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to
be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other
was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed
from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent
many painful hours over such sentences as "Jeffries annexes the Brunette
Beauty's Angora," and "Sugar Barons hand Uncle Sam a lemon." This
dialect, he found, was extensively employed by truck-drivers,
playwrights, and college students.

It did not take the professor very long, however, to overcome this
initial difficulty. His education proceeded rapidly. One of the first
things he learned, so he told me, is that some American newspapers are
printed in black ink and some in red. As a rule, the former tell more of
the truth, but the latter sell many more copies. On Sunday, which in
America is observed much more rigorously than in Europe, the red ink
predominates. The professor suggested that this might be a survival of
primitive times when the British ancestors of the present-day Americans
tattooed themselves in honour of their gods. It is universally accepted
that the American business man reads so many papers because he has
neither the time nor the energy to read books. But this would seem to be
contradicted on Sundays, when every American business man reads two or
three times the equivalent of the entire works of William Shakespeare.
Herr Grundschnitt was inclined to believe that carrying home the Sunday
paper is the most popular form of physical exercise among our people.

A very curious circumstance about the press in all the great American
cities, the professor thought, is that every newspaper has a larger
circulation than any other three newspapers combined. According to the
arithmetical system in use among all civilised peoples, that would be
manifestly impossible. But the professor imagines that the methods of
calculation by which such results are obtained are the same as those
employed by politicians in estimating their majorities on the eve of
election day, by millionaires in paying their personal taxes, and by
operatic sopranos in figuring out their age. The influence of a
newspaper depends, of course, upon its circulation. Such influence is
exercised directly in the form of news and editorial comment, and
indirectly in the form of wrapping paper.

Still another curious trait about all American newspapers, this learned
German found, is that they tell a story backward. This arises from the
desire to put the most important thing first; and in this country it is
the rule that the thing which happens last is the most important. As an
illustration Herr Grundschnitt read the following brief account clipped
from one of the principal newspapers in New York city:

"Arthur Wellesley Jones died in the municipal hospital last night as the
result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. The end was
peaceful. Mr. Jones was driving his own machine down Fifth Avenue when
he ran into a laundry-wagon at Twenty-first Street. He had left his home
in New Rochelle an hour before. Mr. Jones was an enthusiastic motorist.
In 1905 he won the Smithson cup for heavy cars. In 1903 he was second in
the Westchester hill-climbing contest. In 1899 he helped to organise the
first road race in New York State. He was in Congress from 1894 to 1898,
and was elected to the Legislature in 1889, the same year that his
eldest son was born. Two years before that event he married a daughter
of Henry K. Smith of Philadelphia. He was graduated from Yale, having
prepared for that institution at Andover, where he played right tackle
on the football team. As a child he showed a decided taste for
mechanics. He was born in 1861."

The daily press in America, the professor went on to say, takes
extraordinary interest in visitors from abroad. He referred, as an
instance in point, to the recent arrival in New York of a nephew of the
Dalai Lama of Tibet. As the ship was being warped into the dock, a young
man with a notebook asked the distinguished visitor if it was true that
his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, had been found guilty of converting the
temple treasures at Lhassa to his own use. Upon receiving a reply in the
negative, the young man asked what progress the suffrage movement had
made in Tibet. He was told that inasmuch as every woman in Tibet must
take care of several husbands instead of one, as among the more
civilised nations, women there were not interested in the question of
votes. Thereupon the young man asked whether Tibet offered a promising
market for automobiles. He was pleased to learn that Tibet, with its
extremely sparse population and its very precipitous cliffs, was an
ideal place for the automobilist.

These, however, were superficial characteristics. What the professor was
anxious to learn was just how the newspapers influence the national life
to the remarkable extent they undoubtedly do. He knew, of course, that
the Americans are a free people, and that they select their own
lawmakers and magistrates. He soon discovered that when the people
desire to choose some one to rule over them, they name two, three, or
more men for the same office. The newspapers then proceed to accuse
these men of the vilest crimes, and the one who comes out least
besmirched is declared to be elected. After he has been put into office
the people no longer pay attention to him, leaving it to the newspapers
to see that he conducts himself properly. When a high official is caught
stealing the people rejoice, because it shows that the newspapers are
doing their duty.

In the sphere of social relations, Herr Grundschnitt learned, the
newspapers are mainly concerned with safeguarding the purity and
integrity of the home. Most of them do this by printing full accounts of
all murder and divorce trials. The professor told me that he could
recall nothing in literature that quite equals the white heat of
indignation with which the editor of the _Star_ once spoke of "the
festering national sore revealed in the proceedings of the Dives divorce
suit, the nauseous details of which the reader will find in all their
hideous completeness on the first three pages of the present issue,
together with all the photographs ruled out of evidence on the grounds
of decency." The press also serves the cause of public morals by holding
up to scorn the vices and extravagances of the vulgar rich, whose
ill-used millions, as they hasten to point out elsewhere, are nothing
more than what any American may look forward to, provided he has courage
and energy.

The same ingenious method of promoting virtue by holding up vice to
obloquy is pursued in every other field, the learned German told me. The
newspapers do not print the names of men who support their wives, but
they print the names of men who do not, or who support more than one.
They do not publish the photographs of honest bank clerks, but of
dishonest ones, and of these only when they have stolen a very large
sum. They pay no attention to a clergyman as long as he advocates the
brotherhood of man, but they have large headlines about the minister who
believes in the moderate use of the Scotch highball. They overlook a
college professor's epoch-making researches in American history, and
take him up when he comes out in favour of an exclusive diet of raw
spinach. From the newspaper point of view, a college professor counts
less than a professional gambler; a gambler counts less than an actress;
a good actress counts less than a bad one; a bad actress counts less
than a prize-fighter; a prize-fighter counts less than a chimpanzee that
has been taught to smoke cigarettes; and an educated chimpanzee counts
less than a millionaire who suffers from paranoia. By continuously
pondering on the horrors of crime and vice as depicted in the
newspapers, the American people are roused to such a hatred of evil that
some editors receive a salary of $100,000 a year.

Oddly enough, the American people freely criticise their newspapers. One
of the commonest charges is that their editors write with great haste
and little accurate information. But, Herr Grundschnitt argued, it is
unfair to insist that newspapers shall be both forceful and accurate.
It is true that the editors who supply the American people with their
opinions think fast and write fast, but it is absurd to maintain that as
a class they are unreasonably set in their own beliefs. Editors, as a
matter of fact, change their opinions every little while. In such cases
they usually have no difficulty in proving that, while their present
views are right, their previous views were also right. This makes for
consistency. Nor is there any reason for maintaining, as is often done,
that editors are restive under criticism. The professor declared that
there are very few newspapers in the United States that will refuse to
print a letter from any one who believes that the paper in question is
the only one in town with courage and honesty enough to tell the truth
and that it is the best newspaper in the country at the price.

As for the old-fashioned critics who maintain that not even the best
newspaper tells more than half the truth, my informant pointed out that
every town and village in the United States has at least two daily
publications. The conscientious reader who buys both is thus saved from
error.

When I rose to say good-night the professor accompanied me to the door,
and would not let me go till he had pronounced a final eulogy on the
press in general, and the American newspaper in particular. He
expatiated on its omnipresence. The printed sheet is with a man when he
wakes in the morning, and when he falls asleep at night, and when he is
at the breakfast table with his wife. The newspaper breaks up families
and reunites other families, though it usually misspells their names. It
chastises the rascal, and worries the honest man. It can make a
reputation in a day, and destroy a reputation in ten minutes, sending
its owner into the grave or upon the vaudeville stage. It teaches
Presidents how to rule, women how to win husbands, the Church how to
save souls, and middle-aged gentlemen how to reduce weight by exercising
ten minutes every day. It knows nearly everything and guesses at the
rest. It will say almost anything and publish the rest at advertising
rates. Without it, democratic government would be difficult and
travelling in the Subway quite impossible. The newspaper is the only
institution since the world began that succeeds in being all things to
all men for the moderate sum of one cent a day. The only universal
things that come cheaper, the professor told me, are birth and death.




IX

A FLEDGLING


A sophomore's soul is not the simple thing that most people imagine. I
am thinking now of my nephew Philip and of our last meeting. This time,
he was more than usually welcome. I was lonely. The family had just left
town for the summer and the house was fearfully empty. I sat there,
smoking a cigarette amid the first traces of domestic uncleanliness,
when I heard him on the stairs. The dear boy had not changed. Dropping
his heavy suitcase anyways, he seized my hand within his own huge paw
and squeezed it till the tears came to my eyes. His voice was a young
roar. He threw his hat upon the table, thereby scattering a large number
of papers about the room, and then sat down upon my own hat, which was
lying on the armchair, on top of several July magazines. I had put my
hat down on the chair instead of hanging it up, as I should have done,
because the family was away and I was alone in the house.

Might he smoke? He was busy with his bull-dog pipe and my tobacco jar
before I could say yes. He explained that he was sorry, but he found he
could neither read, write, nor think nowadays without his pipe. He
admitted that he was the slave of a noxious habit, but it was too late,
and he might as well get all the solace he could out of a pretty bad
situation. But, as I look at Philip, I cannot help feeling that his fine
colour and the sparkle in his blue eyes and his full count of nineteen
years make the situation far less desperate than he portrays it. Philip
is not a handsome lad, but he will be a year from now. At present he is
mostly hands and feet, and his face shows a marked nasal development.
Before Philip has completed his junior year, the rest of his features
will have reasserted themselves, and the harmony of lineament which was
his when he was an infant, as his mother never tires of regretfully
recalling, will be restored. Until that time Philip must be content to
carry the suggestion of an attractive and eager young bird of prey.

Philip lights pipe after pipe as he dilates on his experiences since
last I saw him. The moralising instinct is very weak in me. I cannot
find it in my heart to censure Philip's constant mouthing of the pipe.
I, too, smoke, and I am not foolish enough to risk my standing with
Philip by preaching where I do not practise. Besides, I observe that the
boy does not inhale, that his pipe goes out frequently, and that his
consumption of matches is much greater than his consumption of tobacco.
So I say nothing in reproof of his pipe.

But it is different with his language. Philip, I observe regretfully, is
profane. I am not mealy-mouthed myself. There are moments of high
emotional tension when silence is the worst form of blasphemy. But
Philip is profane without discrimination. His supply of unobjectionable
adjectives would be insufficient to meet the needs of the ordinary
kindergarten conversation. He uses the same swift epithet to describe
certain brands of tobacco, the weather on commencement day, the food at
his eating-house, his professors of French and of mathematics, the
spirit of the incoming freshman class, and the outlook for "snap"
courses during the coming year.

It is not my moral but my aesthetic sense that takes offence, so I ask
Philip whether it is the intensity of his feelings that makes it
impossible for him to discuss his work or his play without continual
reference to the process of perdition and the realm of lost souls; or
whether it is habit. No sooner have I put my question than I am sorry.
There is nothing the young soul is so afraid of as of satire. It can
understand being petted and it can understand being whipped; but the
sting behind the smile, the lash beneath the caress, throws the young
soul into helpless panic. It feels itself baited and knows not whither
it may flee. I have always thought that the worst type of bully is the
teacher in school or in college who indulges a pretty talent for satire
at the expense of his pupils. It is a cowardly and a demoralising
practice. It means not only hitting some one who is powerless to retort,
it means confusing the sense of truth in the adolescent mind. Here is
some one quite grown up who smiles and means to hurt you, who says good
and means bad, who says yes and means no. The young soul stares at you
and sees the standards of the universe in chaos about itself.

And I feel all the more guilty in Philip's case because I know that the
lad speaks only a mechanical lingo which goes with his bull-dog pipe and
the aggressive shade of his neckwear and his socks. The very pain and
alarm my question raises in him shows well enough that his soul has kept
young and clear amid his world of "muckers" and "grinds" and "cads" and
"rotten sneaks," and all the men and things and conditions he is in the
habit of depicting in various stages of damnation. "Now, you're making
fun of me," says Philip. "We fellows don't know how to pick out words
that sound nice, but mean a--I beg your pardon--a good deal more than
they say. Anyhow, I suppose, if I try from now on till doomsday I shall
never be able to speak like you."

Bless his young sophomore's soul! With that last sentence Philip has
seized me hip and thigh and hurled me into an emotional whirlpool, where
chills and thrills rapidly succeed each other. Because I am fifteen
years older than Philip the boy invests me with a halo and bathes me in
adoration. I am fifteen years older than he, I am bald, obscure, and far
from prosperous, and there is unmistakably nothing about me to dazzle
the youthful imagination. Yet the facts are as I have stated them.
Philip likes to be with me, copies me without apparently trying to, and
has chosen my profession--so he has often told me--for his own. I am
pretty sure that he has made up his mind when he is as old as I am to
smoke the same brand of rather mediocre tobacco which I have adopted for
practical reasons. I am sometimes tempted to think that Philip, at my
age, intends to be as bald as I am.

Hence the alternate thrills and chills. I am by nature restless under
worship. The sense of my own inconsequence grows positively painful in
the face of Philip's outspoken veneration. There are people to whom such
tribute is as incense and honey. But I am not one of them. I have tried
to be and have failed. I have argued with myself that, after all, it is
the outsider who is the best judge; that we are most often severest upon
ourselves; that if Philip finds certain high qualities in me, perhaps
there is in me something exceptional. I even go so far as to draw up a
little catalogue of my acts and achievements. I can recall men who have
said much sillier things than I have ever said, and published much worse
stuff than I have ever written. I repeat to myself the rather striking
epigram I made at Smith's house last week, and I go back to the old
gentleman from Andover who two years ago told me that there was
something about me that reminded him of Oliver Wendell Holmes. By dint
of much trying I work myself up into something of a glow; but it is all
artificial, cerebral, incubated. The exaltation is momentary, the cold
chill of fact overtakes me. There is no use in deceiving one's self.
Philip is mistaken. I am not worthy.

But that day Philip rallied nobly to the situation. My little remark on
strong language had hurt him, but he saw also that I was sorry to have
hurt him, and he was sorry for me in turn. "I don't in the least mind
your telling me what you think about the way we fellows talk," he said.
"That's the advantage of having a man for one's friend, he is not afraid
of telling you the truth even if it hurts. And then, if you wish to, you
can fight back. You can't do that with a woman."

"Have you found that out for yourself!" I asked him.

He looked at me to see if again I was resorting to irony. But this time
he found me sincere.

"Women!" Philip sniffed. "I have found it doesn't pay to talk seriously
to a woman. There is really only one way of getting on with them, and
that's jollying them. And the thicker you lay it on, the better." He put
away his pipe and proffered me a cigarette. "I like to change off now
and then. I have these made for me in a little Russian shop I discovered
some time ago. They draw better than any cigarette I have ever smoked.
Of course, there are women who are serious and all that. There are a lot
in the postgraduate department and some in the optional literature
courses. But you ought to see them! And such grinds. None of us fellows
stands a ghost of a chance with them. They take notes all the time and
read all the references and learn them by heart. You can't jolly
_them_. They wouldn't know a joke if you led them up to one and told
them what it meant. I think coeducation is all played out, don't you?
Home is the only place for women, anyhow. Do you like your cigarette?"

The Patient Observer, it may possibly have been gathered before this, is
somewhat of a sentimentalist. He liked his cigarette very well, but
through the blue haze he looked at Philip and could not help thinking of
the time--only two short years ago--when he, the Patient Observer, with
his own eyes saw Philip borrow a dollar from his mother before setting
out for an ice-cream parlour in the company of two girl cousins. The
Patient Observer has changed little in the last two years; his hair may
be a little thinner and his knowledge of doctors' bills a little more
complete. But in Philip of to-day he found it hard to recognise the
Philip of two years ago. And the marvels of the law of growth which he
thus saw exemplified moved the Patient Observer to throw open the gates
of pent-up eloquence. He lit his pipe and began to discourse to Philip
on the world, on life, and on a few things besides.

And when it was time for both of us to go to bed, Philip stood up and
said, "I wish I came every day. You don't know what a bore it is,
listening to that drool the 'profs' hand you out up there." His fervent
young spirit would not be silent until, with one magnificent gesture, he
had swept the tobacco jar to the floor and shattered two electric lamps.
Then he went to his room and left me wondering at the vast mysteries
that underlie the rough surface of the sophomore's soul.




X

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--I


"I have given up books and pictures," said Cooper. "I now devote myself
entirely to collecting samples of the world's wisdom."

"Proverbs, do you mean?" I asked.

"No, but the facts on which proverbs are based. You see, I grew tired of
pictures when it got to be a question of bidding against millionaires
for the possession of spurious old masters. The break came when Downes
proved that my Velasquez was painted in 1896. His own, it turned out,
was done in 1820; but even then, you see, he had the advantage over me.
So I concentrated on books. But I could not resist the temptation of
glancing through my first editions now and then, and the pages began to
give way. Then I tried Chinese porcelains. There, again, I had to
compete against Downes, who ordered his agent to buy two hundred
thousand dollars' worth of Chinese antiquities for the Louis XIV. room
in his new Tudor palace. And, besides, this rather disconcerting thing
happened: I had as my guest a mandarin who was passing through New York
on his way to Europe, and I showed him my collection of jades. 'There
was only one collection like this in China some years ago,' I told him.
'Yes,' he replied, 'it was in my house when the foreign troops entered
Peking in 1900.' So I decided to sell my porcelains.

"But of course I had, as you say, to collect something, and for a long
time I could think of no field in which a cultivated taste and personal
effort could make way against the competition of mere brute millions.
And then, all at once, I hit upon proverbs. The suggestion came in a
rather peculiar fashion. It seems that there was an eccentric old poet
on Long Island who spent many years in collecting all sorts of inanimate
freaks, odds and ends, and rubbish. When he died they found among his
treasures a purse made out of a sow's ear and a whistle made from a
pig's tail. I saw my opportunity at once. The eccentric old man, by
acquiring two such extraordinary _objets d'art_ had indulged himself in
a sneer at the world's proverbial wisdom. I would come to the rescue of
our threatened stock of experience by gathering the facts that upheld
it. I would make it, besides, more than the selfish hobby of the private
collector who gives the world only a very little share of the pleasure
he tastes. I would make my collection a museum and a laboratory. Instead
of reading about the wise ant and the busy bee people should come and
see them in the life. It was the difference between reading about
animals in a book and seeing them in the life."

"And have you succeeded?" I asked.

"Beyond all expectations," he replied. "Come, I will take you through my
galleries," and he showed the way into the queerest garden I have ever
seen. It was as if a menagerie and a museum had been brought together in
the open air. Between enclosures and cages which harboured animals of
all species, ran long tables supporting glass cases like those used for
exhibiting coins or rare manuscripts.

"Now here," he said, stopping before a small chest with a glass top,
"here is my collection of straws."

"Straws?" I said.

"Yes. It is small but select. Here, for instance, is the last straw that
broke the camel's back. Some one suggests that it must have been a Merry
Widow hat, but that's jesting, of course. This again is the straw that
showed which way the wind blew and enabled a politician to change sides
and get a reputation as a reformer. We will see the politician further
on." I noticed then for the first time that the iron-barred cages
contained human beings as well as beasts. "Here is a handful of straws
which an entire conference of theologians spent three months in
splitting. This," pointing to a little mannikin about four inches high,
"is the man of straw whose defeat in debate gave one of our United
States Senators his brilliant reputation. And this, finally, is a
handful of straws out of the pile on which Jack Daw slept when he gave
up his bed to buy his wife a looking-glass, or, as some one has
suggested, an automobile.

"And now observe the advantages of my method. The student, having been
shown the straw that broke the camel's back, will, if he is a cautious
student, well drilled in the methods of modern research, demand to see
the camel. Well, here it is," and Cooper turned toward a large enclosure
where several members of the family _Camelidae_ were peacefully browsing,
with the exception of one that lay in a corner with drooping head and
closed eyes, apparently lifeless. "It's been hard work, of course, and
expensive, keeping a broken-backed camel alive, but, encouraged by such
examples of the remarkable vitality of animals as may be seen for
instance in the Democratic donkey, I have persisted and succeeded. This
rather thin-legged creature near the fence is the camel that tried to
pass through the needle's eye, and the one close beside him is the one
swallowed by the man who strained at a gnat. Harrington asserts that he
has never been able to see how either phenomenon is possible, but the
problem is only half as difficult as it appears. For it is evident that
if a camel were small enough to pass through the eye of a needle, there
would be comparatively little trouble in swallowing him. And, speaking
of needles, it has been a constant regret that my collection is still
without a needle found in a haystack."

I have not the space to enumerate one tithe of what Cooper showed me. As
we hurried past the cages containing numerous specimens of _Homo
Sapiens_, he contented himself with pointing out a physician who had
failed to cure himself by psycho-therapeutics; a shoemaker who by
sticking to his last failed to become a railroad president, though in
the course of time he could tell where every man's shoe pinched; an
importer who, in defiance of the Pure Food law, put new wine into old
bottles, and labelled them Bordeaux; and a harmless-looking man of
middle age, who continued to smile and smile, and had played Iago,
Macbeth, and Hamlet's uncle. Before a sturdy-looking man dressed in
working-clothes Cooper stopped for a moment and said, "Mr. C. W. Post
and Mr. James Farley assure me that this is the rarest item in my
collection."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"It is a union labourer who is worthy of his hire," Cooper said.




XI

THE EVERLASTING FEMININE


I am convinced that the easiest business in the world must be the
writing of epigrams on Woman. I have been reading, of late, in a new
volume of "Maxims and Fables." It came to me with the compliments of the
author, in lieu of a small debt which he has kept outstanding for
several years. Although the writer contradicts himself on every third or
fourth page, I am justified in calling the book a very able bit of work
for the reason that the ordinary book on this subject contradicts itself
on every other page. No one who glances through this volume will fail to
understand why the psychology of Woman should be a favourite subject
with very young and very light thinkers. It is the only form of
literature that calls for absolutely no equipment in the author. Writing
a play, for instance, presupposes some acquaintance with a few plays
already written. No one can succeed as a novelist without a fair
knowledge of the technique of millinery or a tolerable mastery of stock
exchange slang. The writer of scientific articles for the magazines must
have fancy, and the writer of advertisements must have poetry and wit.
But to produce a book of epigrams on Woman requires nothing but an
elementary knowledge of spelling and the courage necessary to put the
product on the market.

The secret of the thing is so simple that it would be a pity to keep it
from the comparatively few persons who have failed to discover it. It
consists entirely in the fact that whatever one says about Woman is
true. And not only that, but every statement that can possibly be made
on the subject is sure to ring true, which is much better even than
being true. On every other subject under the sun there is always one
opinion which sounds a little more convincing than every other opinion.
There are, for example, people who insist that birds of a feather do not
necessarily flock together more frequently than birds of a different
feather do; and they will assert that if you step on a worm with real
firmness the chances of his turning are much less than if you did not
step on him at all. Nevertheless, there is undeniably a truer ring about
the assertion that birds do flock together than about the assertion that
they do not, and we accept more readily the worm that turns than the
worm that remains peaceful under any provocation. But this is not the
case with aphorisms about the gentler sex. There, everything sounds as
plausible as everything else.

Let me be specific. Right at the beginning of the volume to which I have
alluded, I came across the following apothegm: "Long after Woman has
obtained the right to vote she will continue to face the wrong way when
she steps from a street-car." "How true," I said to myself. Well, a few
days later, while glancing through the pages at the end of the volume,
my eye fell on the following lines: "Now that Woman is learning to face
the right way when she steps from a street-car, she has demonstrated her
right to the ballot." "How true." But I had scarcely expressed my
approval when it occurred to me that I had read the same thing elsewhere
in the book. And when I searched out the earlier passage and compared
the two and found that they did not say the same thing, but quite the
opposite thing, it did not seem to make a very great difference after
all. They both sounded plausible. I recited one sentence aloud and then
the other, and they rang equally true; and the more I repeated them the
truer they rang.

Delighted with my chance discovery I proceeded to make a thorough study
of "Maxims and Fables" with the object of bringing together the author's
widely scattered observations on the same topic under their appropriate
heads. The work went slowly at first; but after a little while I found I
could pick out a maxim and turn almost instinctively to one that
directly contradicted it. The occupation is fascinating as well as
instructive. It sheds a new light on the conditions of human knowledge
and the workings of the human mind. Consider, if you will, the following
half-dozen sentences that I succeeded in compiling in less than ten
minutes. They all deal with the question of a woman's age:

"A woman is as old as she looks.

"A woman is as old as she says.

"A woman is as old as she would like to be.

"A woman is as old as the only man that counts would have her be.

"A woman is as old as any particular situation requires.

"A woman is as old as her dearest woman friends say she is."

Let any one read these maxims to himself quietly, and admit that not
only would each of them impress him as true if found standing by itself,
but that they all ring quite as true when taken together. But that is by
no means all. It may be shown that if all these propositions are true,
taken singly or together, the negative of each and all of these
propositions is also true. Thus:

"A woman is seldom as old as she looks.

"A woman is never as old as she says.

"No woman is just the age she would like to be.

"A woman is rarely as old or as young as the one man that counts would
have her be.

"Few women are ever of the age that a particular situation requires.

"No woman is as old as her dearest woman friends say she is."

How all these opposites can be equally true, I will not undertake to
explain. It is probably inherent in the very nature of the subject. The
French, a people wise in experience, knew what they were about when they
laid it down that if you have a mystery to solve, you must look for the
woman. What they meant was, that, having found a woman, you may make any
statements you please about her; the world will accept them
unquestioningly and your puzzle will consequently be solved.

Sometimes, however, it has seemed to me that a possible reason for this
very curious fact may be found in the established fashion of speaking
about men as individuals and about women as a class and a type. And that
class or type we saddle with all the faults and virtues of all its
individual members. When Smith tells me that his automobile cost him
three times as much as I know he has paid for it, I record my
impressions by telling Jones as soon as I meet him that the man Smith is
an incorrigible liar. But when Mrs. Smith tells me that her family is
one of the oldest in Massachusetts, which I have every reason to believe
is not so, I invariably say to myself or to some one else, "A woman's
appreciation of the truth is like her appreciation of music; she likes
it best when she closes her eyes to it."

Or Smith may be a very straightforward man, given to plain-speaking, and
when you ask him how he liked your last dinner he may say that in his
opinion the wine was better than the conversation. In that case you will
probably tell your wife that Smith has shown himself to be an
insufferable ass, and that you have decided to cut his acquaintance. But
when Mrs. Smith tells you that your expensive dinners are rather beyond
what a man of your modest income should go in for, you merely writhe and
smile; only on the train the next day you will say to Harrington, "Has
it ever occurred to you that a woman loves the truth, not because it is
the truth, but because it hurts? Take a cigarette."

For these reasons I would urge every one who can possibly find time, to
write a book of maxims about Woman, provided he has not done so already.
In the first place, as I have shown, it is an easy and delightful
occupation, which, for that very reason, is in danger of becoming
overcrowded. But there is another reason for losing no time in the
matter. Now and then I have the foreboding that some day in the near
future the world may suddenly lose its habit of believing that, where
women are concerned, two and two are four and are not four at the same
time. And then there will be no more writing of epigrams on Woman. For
it is evident that there can be no point to an epigram if its assertions
must be qualified. The situation will become impossible when students of
psychology, instead of writing, "Woman likes the truth for the same
reason that she likes olives--to satisfy a momentary craving," will be
compelled to write, "Some women tell the truth, and some women do not,"
"Some women mean yes when they say no, and some women mean no," "Some
women think with their hearts, and some think with their minds." That
little word "some" will settle the epigram writer's business, and an
interesting form of literature will disappear.

Not that in some respects its disappearance will fail to arouse regret.
These books amused very many people in the writing, and they never did
very much harm. And it is something to have a universal topic that every
one can write on, just as it is stimulating to have a universal appetite
like eating, or a universal accomplishment like walking. How many other
subjects besides Woman have we on which the schoolboy and the sage can
write with equal confidence, fluency, and approach to the truth?
Possibly even women will regret that they are no longer the subject of
universal comment. Who knows? A woman will forgive injury, but never
indifference.




XII

THE FANTASTIC TOE


When we reach the year 1910 [Harding dreamt he was reading in the
_Weekly Review_ for 1952], we find the art of dancing well on its way
toward establishing itself as the predominant mode of expression. The
next few years marked a tremendous advance. The graceful _danseuses_ who
interpreted Mendelssohn's "Spring Song," Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony,
and Shakespeare's "Tempest" were the pioneers of a vast movement. We can
do nothing better than recall a few typical public performances given in
New York during the season of 1912-13.

In a splendid series of matinees extending over two months, Professor
William P. Jones danced the whole of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire." The first two volumes were danced in slow time, to the
accompaniment of two flutes and a lyre. The poses were statuesque rather
than graceful, and the gestures had in them a great deal of the antique.
But, beginning with the story of the barbarian invasions in the third
volume, Professor Jones's interpretation took on a fury that was almost
bacchantic. The sack of Rome by the Vandals in the year 451 was pictured
in a veritable tempest of gyrations, leaps, and somersaults. The subtle
and hidden meanings of the text called for all the resources of the
Professor's eloquent legs, arms, shoulders, lips, and eyes. A certain
obscure passage in the life of Attila the Hun, which had long been a
puzzle to students of Gibbon, was for the first time made clear to the
average man when Professor Jones, standing on one foot, whirled around
rapidly in one direction for five minutes, and then, instantly reversing
himself, spun around for ten minutes in the opposite direction.

In the ballroom of the Hotel Taftoftia, during Christmas week, William
K. Spriggs, Ph.D., held a number of fashionable audiences spellbound
with his marvellously lucid dances in Euclid and Algebra up to
Quadratics. Perhaps the very acme of the Terpsichorean art was attained
in the masterly fluency of body and limbs with which Mr. Spriggs
demonstrated that the sum of the angles in any triangle is equal
to two right angles. In Pittsburg Mr. Spriggs is said to have moved
an audience to tears when, by an original combination of the Virginia
reel, the two-step, and the Navajo snake dance, he showed that if
_x^{2}+y^{2}_ = 25 and _x^{2}-y^{2}_ = 25, _x_ equals 5 and _y_ equals
zero. All the pride and selfishness of _x_, all the despair of _y_, were
mirrored in the dancer's play of features. The spectators could not help
pondering over the seeming law of injustice that rules the world. Why
should _x_ be everything in the equations and _y_ nothing? Why should
_y_'s nonentity be used even to set off the all importance of _x_? But
they found no answer. On the other hand, a large number of college
freshmen who had failed on their entrance mathematics found no
difficulty in passing off their conditions after attending three
performances of Mr. Spriggs's dance.

We can give only the briefest mention to an entire school of experts and
scientists who helped to make the season of 1912-13 memorable in the
annals of the greatest of all arts. For a solitary illustration we may
take Mr. Boom, who, at the annual meeting of the American Zooelogical
Association, danced his monumental two-volume work entitled, "The
Variations of the Alimentary Canal in the Frogs and Toads." This dance
was subsequently repeated before several crowned heads of Europe.

An event of more than ordinary interest was the debate between Senators
Green and Hammond on the question whether the United States should
establish a protectorate over Central America. Senator Green danced for
the affirmative and Senator Hammond danced for the negative. Both
gentlemen had an international reputation. Senator Green's war-dance in
the Senate on the Standard Oil Company is still spoken of in Washington
as the most striking rough-and-tumble exhibition of recent years.
Senator Hammond is an exponent of a style which lays greater stress on
finesse than on vigour. In a single session of the Senate he is said to
have sidestepped nearly a dozen troublesome roll-calls without arousing
any appreciable dissatisfaction among his constituents. Before a popular
jury, however, Senator Green's Cossack methods were likely to carry
greater conviction. And that is what happened in the great debate we
have referred to. Senator Hammond appeared on the platform in a filmy
costume made up of alternate strips of the Constitution of the United
States and the Monroe Doctrine. Wit, sarcasm, irony followed one another
in quick succession over his mobile features and fairly oozed from his
fingers and toes. Yet it was evident that while he could appeal to the
minds of the spectators he had no power to sway their emotions. It was
different with Senator Green. A thunderous volume of applause went up
the moment he appeared on the stage, booted and spurred and heavily
swathed in American flags. His triumph was a foregone conclusion. The
scene that ensued when Senator Green concluded his argument by leaping
right over the table and pouring himself out a glass of ice-water on the
way, simply beggars description.

No one to-day can possibly foresee [wrote the critic of the _Weekly
Review_] to what heights the dance, as the expression of all life, will
be carried. We can only call attention to the plans recently formulated
by one of our leading publishers for a library of the world's best
thought, to be issued at a price that will bring it within the reach of
people of very moderate means. The library will consist of bound volumes
of photographs showing the world's greatest dancers in their
interpretation of famous authors. Twenty young women from the Paris and
St. Petersburg conservatories of dancing have already been engaged.
Among other works they will dance the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, the
second book of the Iliad, "Oedipus the King," the fifth Canto of
Dante's "Inferno," Spinoza's "Ethics," "Hamlet," Rousseau's
"Confessions," "Mother Goose," Tennyson's "Brook" and the "Charge of the
Light Brigade," Burke's "Speech on Conciliation," "Alice in Wonderland,"
the "Pickwick Papers," the Gettysburg Address, Darwin's "Origin of
Species," and Mr. Dooley.




XIII

ON LIVING IN BROOKLYN


Perhaps the principal charm about living in Brooklyn lies in the fact
that strangers can find their way there only with extreme difficulty.
The streets in Brooklyn are to me a perpetual source of joy and
wonderment. Like the city itself, they have kept the slow-paced habits
of a former age. No city is more easy to be lost in, and Brooklyn is at
all times full of people from across the river, who ask the way to
Borough Hall. For that matter, one may easily be lost on Staten Island,
where the inhabitants are reputed to pass the pleasant summer evenings
in guiding strangers to the trolley lines. But a person naturally
expects to lose his bearings on Staten Island. On the other hand, to be
lost in Brooklyn irritates as well as confuses. It is like starving in
the midst of plenty. One always has the choice of half a dozen surface
cars, but one is always sure to be directed to the wrong one.

So I repeat: Brooklyn's tangled streets serve their highest purpose in
safeguarding its inhabitants against the unwelcome visitor. Because of
our American good nature we are always inviting people to call; and when
they accept we immediately feel sorry. It is a law with us that if two
utterly unsympathetic persons meet by chance at the house of a common
friend, they shall insist on having each other to dinner on the
following two Sundays. Or, again, you may be shaking hands with a very
dear friend in the presence of a third person whom you dislike. And you
are extremely anxious to have your friend come up for tea on Sunday,
and you cannot do it without asking the other man.

Under such circumstances, it is well to live in Brooklyn. All you need
say then to the person you have an aversion for is: "I should be
delighted to have you call on us Sunday afternoon. We live in Brooklyn,
you know, at No. 125 Bowdoin Place." You may then go home in peace,
confident that your undesired visitor will never find you. At eight
o'clock on Sunday night he will be wearily asking a policeman on
Flatbush Avenue what the shortest way is to Borough Hall. Long before
that he will have given up hope of finding No. 125 Bowdoin Place. His
only object is to get home before midnight. Now it is plain that such an
excellent defence against unpleasant people is unavailable in Manhattan.
Ask a man to look you up at No. 952 West One Hundred and Twelfth Street,
and though your heart loathes him, you shall not escape. But in
Brooklyn you are safe until the moment your doorbell actually rings. For
even if your visitor should find Bowdoin Place, many streets in Brooklyn
have two, three, or four systems of numbering. Some will maintain that
it is not rigidly honest to give a stranger your Brooklyn address
without giving him detailed directions for finding his way from the
station, illustrating your argument with a sketch map. But there will
always be Puritan consciences.

As a matter of fact, some of the kindest and most enlightened people I
know live in Brooklyn. And I cannot see why that in itself should make
them a subject for general satire. I have been told that a professor at
Harvard has recently made the calculation that the drama and the art of
conversation in America would be poorer by 33-1/3 per cent. if the joke
about living in Brooklyn were to disappear. When a visitor from
Brooklyn drops in unexpectedly at a Harlem flat, the proper thing for
the host to say is, "Well, well, what a task it must have been to find
your way out," and when the visitor starts for home his host remarks,
"Sorry you can't stay; but we all know how it is--in the midst of life
you are in Brooklyn. Goodnight."

Of course I don't mean to deny that the people who live in Brooklyn are
themselves largely responsible for the perpetuation of the silly jest.
They subscribe to it in a spirit of meekness that is characteristically
local. Ask a man from Cherry Springs or Binghamton where is his home and
he will quietly say, Cherry Springs or Binghamton, as the case may be.
But the resident of Brooklyn is apologetic from the start. He
anticipates criticism by saying, "Well, you know, _I_ live in Brooklyn,"
and he looks at you in tremulous expectation of the usual condolences.
If by any chance one should omit the traditional reply, the man from
Brooklyn begins to fear the worst. On both sides of the East River the
principle seems to be accepted that inasmuch as there are places like
Cherry Springs or Binghamton there must be people who live in them, but
that it is by definition impossible to bring forward a valid reason why
one should live in Brooklyn.

The question is really a complicated one. Harlem's disapproval of
Brooklyn is not of a piece with Harlem's disapproval of localities
outside itself. Living in Brooklyn is something utterly different from
living in New Jersey or the Bronx. New Jersey and the Bronx are so
entirely out of the ordinary that they call for no explanation. Living
there has at least the merit of originality. A great poet might choose
to live in the Bronx. Minor poets have been known to commute across the
Hudson. But Brooklyn cannot be dismissed so easily. She is too big, too
close, and, for all her timidity, too contented. Her people come under
the head of those who ought to know better and do not try. Thus, while
living in New Jersey is a matter of taste, and living in the Bronx is a
matter of necessity, living in Brooklyn is a matter of habit.

And a fine, rich, ripe old habit it is, and a precious thing in a
modern, shouting world that has no habits but only impulses and vices.
Let me confess: I like Brooklyn, and I like to dream of going to live
there some day. And possibly I would go if it were not for the desire of
keeping the project before me as one of the few ideals I have retained
in life. I like Brooklyn's shapeless rotundity as contrasted with our
abominable rectangular distances in Manhattan. I like it because it
sprawls low against the ground instead of clawing up into the sky.
Manhattan is solid with brick and steel from river to river. Brooklyn
ambles on peacefully till it comes to a region of sand lots or a marsh
or a creek, and stops. Half a mile further on it resumes its gentle
dreams of progress and wanders north, or south, or east, as the fancy
seizes it. It runs into blind corners, it debouches upon ravines and
woodland strips, it hears the echoes of ocean on the beaches. It is
leisure; it is peace; it is Brooklyn.

At the same time it is well to remember that Brooklyn is something more
than a geographical fact. Brooklyn describes a scheme of life and a
condition of the mind. The life there is like a page from yesterday.
People who live in Brooklyn organise reading circles. They attend
lectures on the Wagnerian music drama. They have retained progressive
euchre and the strawberry festival as essential ingredients of religion.
They are extremely fond of going on long excursions into the country in
early spring. They make it a habit to walk across the bridge on their
way home in the evening, and they speak with great feeling of the
beautiful effect when New York's high buildings flash into banked masses
of flame in the falling dusk. People who live in Brooklyn take pride in
keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There
are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York,
because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of
being unsafe.

And yet, as I have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete
fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn.
London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the
line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is
not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at heart
are residents of Brooklyn. Such people, though they live in Harlem,
avoid the express trains in the Subway on account of the crush. They
visit the Museum of Natural History on Sunday and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art on legal holidays and extraordinary occasions. They cross
the Hudson and walk on the Palisades. They bring librettos to the opera
and read them in the dark, thus missing a great deal of what passes on
the stage. On the other hand, you will find people in Brooklyn whose
spirit is totally alien to the place. They want to boost Brooklyn and
boom it and push it and make it the most important borough in Greater
New York, and develop its harbour facilities, and establish a great
university, and double the assessed value of real estate within five
years. Such people are in Brooklyn, but not of it.

And that is why Brooklyn has so strong a hold on me. I like it because
it has so many wonderful, valuable, common things in it. In Brooklyn
there are people, churches, baby-carriages, bay-windows, butchers' boys
carrying baskets and whistling, policemen who misdirect strangers,
vacant lots where boys play baseball, small tradesmen, overhead
trolleys, quiet streets tucked away between parallel lines of clanging
elevated railway, an Institute of Arts, and old gentlemen who write
letters to the newspapers. I like Brooklyn because it hasn't the highest
anything, or the biggest anything, or the richest anything in the
world.




XIV

PALLADINO OUTDONE


Harding spent one long winter night in reading the report of a select
committee of the Society for Psychical Recreation which placed on record
no less than half a dozen absolutely authenticated cases of material
objects being moved through space by some mysterious agency other than
physical. The report, as it took shape in Harding's dreams that night,
was as follows:

In the first experiment the medium was an ordinary American citizen. The
precautions against the slightest bodily movement on his part were
perfect. Mr. Joseph G. Cannon planted both of his feet on the medium's
left foot and seized his left hand in both his own. Senator Aldrich did
the same on the other side. The Honourable Sereno E. Payne grasped the
medium by the throat, the Honourable John Dalzell straddled on his
chest, Senator Burrows of Michigan strapped his ankles to the chair, and
Senator Scott of West Virginia thrust a gag into his mouth. As a further
precaution, before the seance began, a representative of the Sugar Trust
went through the medium's pockets. The medium struggled and groaned and
made other signs of distress, but at all times remained under absolute
control. Yet it is a fact that, in spite of all restraints imposed upon
him, this ordinary American citizen did succeed in raising a family of
two sons and a daughter and even in sending the eldest child to college.
At various times one even caught sight of a loaf of bread or a pair of
shoes sailing through the air, and once, for a moment, the Committee
distinctly smelt roast turkey with cranberry sauce. At the end of the
seance the medium was in a pitiful state of exhaustion, but declared
that he was quite ready to go on.

In the second experiment the Committee made use of the Mayor of one of
our large cities and of the boss of the party to which the Mayor
belonged. The boss acted as medium, being securely strapped into a chair
about three feet away from another chair, on which the Mayor was
sitting, blindfolded. Again the standard precautions against fraud were
gone through, but this time the medium's efforts met with almost
immediate response. At the merest droop of the boss's right eyelid, the
Mayor leaped up from his chair and turned completely around. The boss
smiled faintly, whereupon the Mayor balanced himself for 3 minutes and
42 seconds on his right foot and for 2 minutes and 35 seconds on his
left foot, and then began to run about the room on all-fours in an
amusing imitation of a spaniel fetching and carrying for his master. The
boss inserted the point of his tongue into his cheek and withdrew it
again, repeating the process several times in rapid succession. In
response, the Mayor's face went into a series of spasmodic smiles and
frowns that aroused general laughter. At the conclusion of the
performance, the boss gently clicked his tongue against his palate, and
the Mayor promptly stood on his head in the middle of the floor.

A somewhat similar experiment was concerned with a magazine editor and a
life-size mannikin made up to resemble a muckraker. The editor and the
lay figure sat facing in opposite directions at a distance of about ten
feet. The editor, who acted as medium, was holding the telephone
receiver with one hand and signing checks with the other, so that there
could be no question of manual manipulation on his part. Neither could
his feet come into play, because they were in full view on his desk. The
telepathy hypothesis was eliminated because, in the first place, the
mannikin had no mind, of course, and in the second place, the editor
changed his own mind so fast that no external mind could possibly keep
up with it. The results were gratifying. The editor took a slip of paper
and wrote a few words upon it. Immediately the stuffed figure began to
shout, "Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help!
Murder!" at intervals of two seconds. The editor wrote something on
another slip of paper, and the mechanical figure went through a most
complex series of movements. First it seized a pair of paint brushes and
began to paint all the white objects in the room black and all the black
objects white. Then it went through the motions of playing, for a few
minutes, upon a typewriter. Then it seized a pair of shears and set to
work clipping solid pages from books and magazines. Then it copied a
long column of figures from an almanac and added them up wrong. Then it
drew a memory sketch of an English statesman, and put the wrong name
under it. The editor assured the Committee that he could continue the
process for hours at will.

An excellent seance was one in which the medium was a man very near the
top in American finance. The rest of the group forming the circle around
the table were plain American citizens of the type described in the
first experiment. The medium was securely roped in his chair with
anti-Trust laws, anti-rebating laws, insurance laws, banking laws,
franchise laws, etc. Yet no sooner were the lights turned down than the
phenomena began. John Smith, on the right of the medium, suddenly felt a
sharp blow on the neck. As he turned around instinctively a ghostly
hand snatched away his pocket-book and the sound of mocking laughter
could be plainly heard from the dark cabinet. Another weird hand pulled
Thomas Jones's insurance policy out of his breastpocket, dangled it in
the air just out of his reach, and then flung it back at him. Later when
Jones looked at his policy he found that its face value had been cut
down one-half. James Robinson all at once began to feel his shoe pinch,
and could not discover the reason until he, too, caught sight of a
ghostly hand hovering in the vicinity of his pocket. Soon the room was
filled with a veritable chaos of flying objects. Railroads, steamship
lines, national banks, trust companies, insurance companies, went
hurtling through the air, but all the time our financier sat motionless
in his chair. It was suggested that the force which set such ponderous
objects into motion was the mysterious element known as "executive
ability."

In the final experiment the subject was a popular novelist, who gave a
most interesting exhibition of how a nation-wide reputation can be
raised and supported without the slightest apparent reason. A
painstaking examination by the Committee showed that he had concealed
about him neither talent, nor imagination, nor knowledge of human
nature, nor insight into life, nor an intimate acquaintance with the
elements of English grammar. Nevertheless, before the eyes of the amazed
observers, novel after novel went humming through the air in a direction
away from the writer, while a steady stream of bank-books, automobiles,
and country houses flowed in the opposite direction.




XV

THE CADENCE OF THE CROWD


I have always been peculiarly susceptible to the music of marching feet.
I know of no sound in nature or in Wagner that stirs the heart like the
footsteps of the crowd on the board platform of the Third Avenue "L" at
City Hall every late afternoon. The human tread is always eloquent in
chorus, but it is at its best upon a wooden flooring. Stone and asphalt
will often degrade the march of a crowd to a shuffle. It needs the
living wood to give full dignity to the spirit of human resolution that
speaks in a thousand pair of feet simultaneously moving in the same
direction; and particularly when the moving mass is not an army, but a
crowd advancing without rank or order. I am exceedingly fond of military
parades; so fond that I repeatedly find myself standing in front of
ladies of medium height who pathetically inquire at frequent intervals
what regiment is passing at that moment. But it is not the blare of the
brass bands I care for, or the clatter of cavalry, which I find
exceedingly stupid, or even the rattle of the heavy guns, but the men on
foot. Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the
desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country.
Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but
it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on
shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes.

This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it. Any
procession, no matter how humble, puts me into a state of mingled
exaltation and tearfulness. It is in part the sound of human footsteps
and in part the solemn idea behind them. I am not thinking of stately
processions moving up the aisles of churches to the sound of music. I
have in mind, rather, a band of, say, a thousand working girls on Labour
Day, or of an Italian fraternal organisation heavy with plumes and
banners, or even a Tammany political club on its annual outing; wherever
the idea of human dependence and human brotherhood is testified to in
the mere act of moving along the pavement shoulder to shoulder. Above
all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of
myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I
sat in state on the principal's platform. When the bell rang for
dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one
huge assembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of
the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not
know which I wanted to be then, the principal in his magnificent chair
of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their
march towards freedom.

Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire
drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible
reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is
consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which
I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order
and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition
of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by
getting close together and moving forward in close formation. In any
case, the pathos is there. Consider a children's May party, on its way
to Central Park. A fife-and-drum corps of three little boys in uniform
leads the way. The Queen of the May, all in white, walks with her
consort under a canopy of ribbons and flowers, a little stiffly,
perhaps, and self-consciously, but not more so than older queens and
kings on parade. A long line of boys and girls in many-coloured caps
moves between flying detachments of mothers carrying baskets. The
confectioner's wagon, laden with its precious commissariat of ice cream
and cake, moves leisurely behind; for the confectioner's horse this is
evidently a holiday. Is pathos conceivable in so delightful, so smiling,
an event? Alas, I have watched May parties go by, and the serious little
faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of
_Weltschmerz_ than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan
und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in
unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along,
pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in
procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always heavy
with pathos.

But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the
"L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that
the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human
history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison.
You see only a heaving mass of men and women who are not very well clad.
The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on
with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained
in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very
little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way
through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of
the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men
carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch
of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper
wrappers. But it is not an assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers,
or whatever class it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is
that most solemn of all things--a city crowd on its way home from the
day's work.

The footsteps keep up the tramp, tramp, on the board flooring, while
train after train pulls out jammed within and without. The influx from
the street allows no vacuum to be formed upon the platform. The patience
of the modern man shows wonderfully. The tired workers face the hour's
ride that lies between them and home with beautiful self-restraint and
courage. And in their weariness and their patience lies the full
solemnity of the scene. The morning crowd, even on the same wooden
platform at City Hall, is different. The morning crowd is not so firmly
knit together. You catch individual and local peculiarities. You feel
that there are men and women here from Harlem, and others from Long
Island, and others from Westchester and the Bronx. They are still fresh
from their separate homes, with their separate atmospheres about them.
Some are brisk from the morning's exercise and the cold bath; some are
still a bit sleepy from last night's pleasures; some go to the day's
task with eager anticipation; some move forward indifferent and
resigned. But when these same men and women surge homeward in the
evening, they are one in spirit; they are all equally tired. The city
and the day's task have seized upon them and passed them through the
same set of rollers and pressed out their differences and transformed
them into a single mass of weary human material. The city has had its
day's work out of them and now sends them home to recruit the new
supply of energy that it will demand to-morrow. The unshaven men with
their newspapers and the listless women with their paper-covered novels
show ascetically tight-drawn faces, as if the day had been passed in
prayer and supplication. I need not see those faces; I know they are
there from the steady footfalls on the board platform. I overhear a
young girl recounting what a perfectly lovely time she had last night,
and how she simply couldn't stop dancing; but her foot drags a bit
heavily and there sounds in her chatter and her vehemence the
ground-tone of weariness.

It is not often that I hear the tramp of the late afternoon crowd upon
the wooden platforms at City Hall. I find the sound of the crowd too
solemn to be endured every day, and there is no comfort in the crush. I
usually take pains to travel at an early hour when there are few people,
and one is sure of a seat.




XVI

WHAT WE FORGET


The importance of knowing who my Congressman is had never occurred to me
until Professor Wilson Stubbs brought up the subject at a luncheon in
the Reform Club. Professor Stubbs spoke on Civic Obligations. He argued
that at the bottom of all political corruption lay the average citizen's
personal indifference. "For instance," he said, "how many of those
present know the name of the man who represents their district at
Washington?" And as it happened, while he waited for a reply, his eye
rested thoughtfully on me.

I grew red under his scrutiny. I tried my best to remember and failed. I
did vaguely recall the lithographed presentment of a large,
clean-shaven man, with a heavy jaw. It hung in a barber-shop window
between a blue-and-red poster announcing a grand masquerade and civic
ball, and a papier-mache trout under a glass case. I could not bring
back the man's name, although I was sure that his picture was inscribed
on the top "Our Choice," and at the bottom he was characterised as
somebody's friend--I could not recall whether he was the People's
friend, or the Workingman's, or the Bronx's. I could not even make out
his features, although, oddly enough, I could see the trout very
distinctly. The fish, I recollected, had a peculiarly ferocious scowl,
as if it resented the absurd blotches of green and gold with which the
artist had attempted to imitate Nature's colour scheme. Gradually I
found myself thinking of the trout as a member of Congress. Had I
continued much longer, I should have visualised that fish in the act of
addressing the Speaker of the House on the tariff bill.

Yet I could not help taking the professor's implied criticism to heart.
It would have been something even, to be able to tell whether I lived in
the Eleventh Congressional District or the Fifteenth; but I didn't know.
For how long a term was the man elected? I didn't know. Was it required
that he should be able to read and write? I didn't know.

That was the beginning. When luncheon was over, I sat before the fire
and tried to find out how much I did know of the things I should. I
found myself staring into bottomless depths of ignorance. I tried to
draw up a list of State Governors. I knew there must be between forty
and fifty, but I could remember only three Governors, including our own;
and later I recalled that one of the three was dead.

From death my mind leaped, oddly enough, to drownings. How should one
go about resuscitating a man who has been pulled out of the river? He
must be rolled on a barrel, of course; that much I remembered. But was
it face down or face upward? And should his arms be pumped vertically up
and down, or horizontally away from the body and back? Yes, and how if
some intelligent foreigner were to ask me what our five principal cities
were, in the order of population? It would be easy enough to begin, New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia--and then? Was it Boston, or Baltimore, or
San Francisco? I did not know.

There was no stopping now. I was fast in my own clutches. I bit at my
cigar, and tried to call the roll of the seven wise men of Greece. I
stopped at the first, Solon. He, I remembered, rescued the Athenians
from misgovernment and slavery, and left the city before they could
experience a change of heart and hang him.

Who were the nine muses? Well, there was Terpsichore--her disciples are
spoken of every day in the newspapers. And then there was the muse of
History, whose name possibly was Thalia, and the muse of Poetry, whose
name I could not recall. I fared much better with the apostles: Peter
and Paul, of course, and John and James, and Judas and Matthew, and Mark
and Luke; eight out of twelve.

But of the seven wonders of the world I could cite with certainty only
one, the Colossus of Rhodes. I was doubtful about Mount Vesuvius. I
remembered not a single one of the seven deadly sins, and, at first,
could place only two of the ten commandments--the ones on filial
obedience and on the Sabbath. Later I thought of the newest realistic
hit at the Park Theatre; that brought back one more commandment. On the
other hand, it was a relief to call the three Graces straight
off--Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I grew humble. I began to doubt if, after all, it is true that a modern
schoolboy knows more than Aristotle did. In any case, whether
Harrington's boy who is still in the grammar grades knows more than
Aristotle, he certainly knows more than his father. They have a
new-fashioned branch of study in the modern schools, which they call
training the powers of observation. And that boy comes home with
mischief in his soul, and asks Harrington which way do the seeds in an
apple point. Harrington stares at the boy, and the boy smiles
quizzically at Harrington, and the father grows suspicious. Are there
seeds in an apple? There are seedless oranges, of course, which
presupposes oranges not destitute of seeds; but an apple? Harrington
tries to call up the image of the last apple he has eaten and he thinks
of sweet and sour apples, apples of a waxen yellow and apples of a
purple red, but he cannot visualise the seeds.

As Harrington sits there dumb, Jack asks him which shoe does he put on
first when he dresses in the morning. Jack knows, the rascal. He can
trace every process through which the cotton fibre passes from the plant
to the finished cloth. He knows why factory chimneys are built high. He
knows how a boat tacks against the wind. And he knows that his father
knows nothing of these things.

But I would rather have Harrington's boy quiz me on things that I can
pretend are not worth knowing, like the seeds in an apple, than on
things that cannot be waved aside. I tried to explain one day how the
revolution of the earth about the sun produces the seasons, and I
succeeded only in proving that when it is winter in New York it is
daylight in Buenos Ayres. Thereupon, Jack asked me what an unearned
increment was. When I finished he said his teacher had told them that
views like those I had just expressed were common among ill-informed
people. The following day he came in and said to Harrington, "Papa, name
six female characters in Dickens, in three minutes." Well, Harrington
did, but it was a strain, and in order to make up the total he had to
count in the anonymous, elderly, single woman whom Mr. Pickwick
surprised in her bedroom. Jack insisted that, as she was nameless, it
was not fair to call her a character, but Harrington put his foot down
and refused to argue the matter.

And as I sit there before the fire, smiling over Harrington and Jack and
myself, my cigar goes out, and I signal Thomas to bring me another.
Thomas has the ascetic countenance of a tragedian, and the repose of an
archbishop. Now, Thomas--and it comes to me with a shock--what do I
know about Thomas, the man, as distinguished from the hired servant whom
I have been aware of this year and more? Is he married or single? And if
he is married, do his children resent their father's wearing livery?
Does Thomas himself like to be a servant? Are there ideals and
speculations behind that close-shaven mask? Has he any views on the
future life? Has he ever thought on the subject of vivisection? Does he
vote the Republican ticket? Does he earn a decent wage?

I could only answer, with an aching sense of isolation, with the wistful
longing of one who looks into unfathomable depths, that I didn't know.
Oh, Thomas, fellow man, brother! We have rubbed elbows for months and I
do not know whether you are a man or only a lackey; whether you drink
all night, or pray; whether you love me or hate me. How can you hold the
cigar box so impassively, so single-mindedly?

I said to myself that I would make amends to Thomas, that it was never
too late. And, quietly, genially, I asked him, "How do you like your
place here, Thomas?" Thomas grew uneasy, and smiled in a sickish
fashion, and entreated me with his eyes to pick my cigar and let him go.
But I was in the full swing of new-found righteousness. "There's nothing
wrong, is there, Thomas?" And he replied, "I beg pardon, sir; but
Henry's my name. Thomas was my predecessor. He left, you will remember,
sir, a year ago last May." "But everybody calls you Thomas." "The
gentlemen were used to the other name, sir."

Might Professor Wilson Stubbs be wrong, after all, I thought. Perhaps no
one is really expected to know what everybody ought to know. I don't
know the name of my Congressman. But neither do I know the name of my
butcher and my grocer; and my butcher and my grocer can slay me with
typhoid or ptomaines, whereas the utmost my Congressman can do is to
misrepresent me. I don't know the man who makes my cigars; he may be
consumptive. I don't know the critic who supplies me with literary
opinions, and the scholar who gives me my outlook upon life. I don't
know the man who lives next door. From the decent silence that reigns in
his apartment, I gather that he does not beat his wife; but that is all.
Yet he and I are supposed to be bound up in a community of interests. We
both belong to the class whose income ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a
year, of which we spend 38 per cent. on food; and we raise an average of
2-2/3 children to the family, and are both responsible for the wide
prevalence of musical comedy on the American stage. But I have seen my
neighbour twice in the last three years.

So that was the end of it. And because it was late in the afternoon, I
thought I would telephone to the office that I was not coming back. But
for the life of me, I could not think of my telephone number; and Henry
looked me up in the directory.




XVII

THE CHILDREN THAT LEAD US


The mayor sat before his library fire and shivered, and kept wondering
why there was no clause in the city charter prescribing a minimum of
common sense for presidents of the Board of Education. A man thus
qualified would know more than to suggest an increase of three million
dollars for school sittings. The city's comptroller was crying
bankruptcy; the newspapers were asserting that the mayor's nephew was
head of a favoured contracting firm not entirely for his health; and the
Board of Education wanted three million dollars. The mayor had a touch
of fever. The steep rows of figures in the Education Board's memorandum
curled up into little arabesques under his eyes, which were closing
with fatigue. Only he did not wish to sleep. In the perfect stillness he
could hear his own rapid heartbeat. The clatter of sleety rain against
the windows made him restless.

If only O'Brien were here, O'Brien, who was a good chief of police, and
a matchless personal aide-de-camp. They would then put on boots and
oilskins and go out into the night on one of their frequent
Harun-Al-Rashid expeditions. The mayor's wife? Yes, it is true that
before leaving for the theatre she had cautioned him not to stir from
the house. But she could not possibly have known how great was his need
of a breath of air. But O'Brien was not here. Was it because he had just
been appointed president of the Board of Education and comptroller in
one and was a busy man? Perhaps. And yet a person might step to the
telephone and ring up O'Brien if it were not that one's legs were
weighted down with the weight of centuries and of dozens of new school
buildings all in reinforced concrete. Was it concrete? The mayor was not
quite sure, and he turned to ask O'Brien, who stood there at one side of
the fireplace, erect and attentive.

"Do we go out to-night?" said the mayor.

"I should not advise it, your Honour," answered O'Brien. "You are not
well enough. If it is adventure you would go in search of, I have here
quite an extraordinary delegation of citizens who desire an interview
with your Honour."

"Let us hear them, by all means," replied the mayor.

O'Brien drew aside the curtain which divided the library from the
general reception room and there marched in, two abreast and maintaining
precise step, a solemn line of children, who saluted the mayor gravely
and ranged themselves in a semicircle across the room. As the mayor
veered in his chair to face his visitors, a girl of some fifteen years
stepped out of the line. She was still in her schoolgirl's dresses, but
tall, with features of a fine, pensive cut and earnest eyes that were
already peering from out the child's life into the opening doors of
womanhood.

"May it please your Honour," she began, "we are a committee from the
Central Bureau of Federated Children's Organisations and we have come
here to protest against certain intolerable conditions of which our
members are the victims."

Had they come in behalf of those additional three million dollars, the
mayor wondered uneasily. "State the nature of your grievance," he said.

The leader of the delegation came a step nearer. "Your Honour, I can
only attempt the merest outline of our general position. Several of my
associates will take turns in acquainting you with the details of our
case. Our complaint is that we, the children of this country, are being
overworked. Formerly it was supposed to be the inalienable right of
children to remain free from the cares of life. That theory has long
been abandoned. The task of solving the gravest problems of existence
has been thrust upon us, and every day that passes leaves us saddled
with new responsibilities. But the limit of endurance has been reached
at last. We feel that unless we protest now the whole structure of
society--its economics, politics, art, and religion--will be shifted
from the shoulders of the world's men and women to the shoulders of us
children. I hope your Honour is willing to hear us."

"Of course, my dear," the mayor answered softly. He said, "My dear," and
he said it tenderly because he had recognised in the speaker his own
daughter Helen, whom he had supposed with her mother at the theatre.

"Step forward, Flora Binns," said Helen, and Flora Binns, who was only
eight, blue-eyed, and with ringlets of gold, approached and curtsied
prettily. "May it please your Honour," she said, "I am the delegate from
Local No. 16 Children of Weak and Tempted Stage Mothers' Union. We wish
to place on record our opposition to the modern society drama, which so
frequently throws the duty of supporting the climax of a play upon
children under the age of ten. Although the playwrights are fond of
showing that our papa is a brute and that our mamma is an angel, they
invariably shrink from the logical conclusion that our mamma is right in
planning to run away with the man who has offered her years of silent
devotion. So the playwrights make one or two of us appear on the stage
just in time to arouse in our mamma a sense of duty to her children and
to prevent the elopement. Now we submit that the office of justifying
our entire modern marriage fabric is too burdensome for us. Don't you
think so, Mr. Mayor?"

"Why, yes," replied the mayor, thoughtfully.

"And they make use of us in other ways, sir. In fact, whenever the grown
up persons in a play are in difficulties and the audience is beginning
to yawn, the author sends us to the rescue. Why, only the other day we
children saved a Wild West melodrama from utter failure. It took three
of us to do it, but we succeeded." Flora curtsied, started back and
returned. "And when I utter these sentiments, sir, I speak also for the
Union of Precocious Magazine Children, which is represented here by Mary
Sparks." Mary Sparks, a dark-haired miss with dancing eyes, bowed
saucily.

"Step out, Fritz Hackenschneider," said Helen, and flaxen-haired Fritz,
radiantly holiday-like in his lustrously washed face and large, blue
polka-dot tie, approached the mayor's chair.

"I don't have much to say, sir," he recited in a nervous, jerky voice.
"I have been sent by the Fraternal Association of Comic Supplement
Children. We wish to raise our voice against the almost universal
conception that people can be made to laugh only when one of us hides a
pin on the seat of grandpa's chair. The burden of an entire nation's
humour is more than we can sustain. Thank you, sir," and he retired into
the background, giving, as he passed, just one tug at Mary Sparks's hair
and eliciting a suppressed scream.

"Mamie O'Farrell," called out Helen. The mayor found it impossible to
decide whether Mamie was thirteen or twenty-five. She was very short
and flat-chested, and the colour of her face in the firelight was like a
dull cardboard. She wore a long, faded automobile cloak and an enormous
black hat with a trailing green feather. On a gilt chain about her neck
hung a locket in the form of a heart half as large as the one that beat
uneasily within her. Mamie came forward reluctantly and saluted. Then
she began to squirm from side to side and to shift from foot to foot,
giggling in unfathomable embarrassment.

"Well," said Helen, in a voice that was not at all unkind.

Mamie's giggle grew worse. She seemed bent on snapping the massive gilt
chain with twisting it back and forth, and finally gave up the whole
case. "You tell it, Helen," she begged. "I forgot wot I was goin' t'
say. I'm scared poifectly stiff."

Helen complied. "May it please your Honour, Mamie O'Farrell wants me to
say that she represents the Amalgamated Union of Cash Girls and Juvenile
Cotton Mill and Glass Factory Operatives. Mamie is fifteen. She works
eleven hours a day and receives three and a half dollars a week. She
passes two hours every day clinging to a strap in a crowded surface car.
She carries her lunch in a paper bundle together with a copy of Laura M.
Clay's novel entitled 'Irma's Ducal Lover.' Saturday nights, if her
father has been strong enough to pass Murphy's saloon without opening
his pay envelope, she goes to the theatre where the play is 'The Queen
of the Opium Fiends.' Sometimes she attends a dance of the Friendship
Circle, but as a rule she spends her nights at home reading the _Evening
Yell_, which tells her that beauty is often a fatal gift and that there
is danger in the first glass of champagne a young girl drinks. Am I
telling your story in the right way, Mamie?" asked Helen.

"Goodness, yes. You're awful kind, Helen," said Mamie.

"Thus far, Mamie has nothing to complain of," continued Helen. "But she
has read somewhere that the slaughter of the poor negroes in the Congo
and of the Chinese in Manchuria, and of the Zulus in Natal, and of the
Moros in the Philippines, arises from the necessity under which the
civilised nations labour to find foreign markets for their increasing
output of cotton goods, brass jewelry, and coloured beads. Now the
members of Mamie's union are engaged in producing precisely those
commodities, and they have come to feel in consequence, that they are
directly responsible for the innocent blood that is being shed in
various parts of the world. It cannot be their employers who are at
fault, because the press and the clergy are unanimous in declaring that
the heads of our great industries are the benefactors of humankind. That
is why the girls protest. They are quite content with their own fate,
but they cannot bear the entire responsibility for the march of
civilisation. Mamie tells me that she cannot sleep of nights for
thinking of the poor little Moorish babies whose mothers were killed by
the French guns. That is the position taken by your union, isn't it,
Mamie?"

Mamie giggled, went through a final contortion of ill-ease and returned
to her place, in the half-circle. She was succeeded by a brown-haired
little maiden, who for some minutes had been showing a strained anxiety
to break into speech.

"Please, Helen," she entreated, "may I say something?"

"Of course, dear," said Helen.

The little maid bowed to the mayor. "Please, sir," she said, "my papa
was thirty-eight years of age when he married mamma. He was an old
bachelor. He was not anxious to be married, but they put a tax on him
because they were afraid of depopulation. And he loves me very dearly.
But sometimes when he thinks of his old freedom he looks so sadly at me.
I feel very sorry for him then. I don't want him to be unhappy on my
account----"

She withdrew and Helen stepped forward to sum up the case. "You must not
think, your Honour, that it is our desire to embarrass your
administration. Bad as conditions are, we would have continued to suffer
in silence, because, you see, there are still little flashes of freedom
left to us children. But we have learned that there is now on foot in
England a movement which threatens to reduce us to unmitigated slavery.
We understand that Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl
Pearson, and Mr. Bernard Shaw are advocating a scheme of state endowment
for motherhood. Now you can see for yourself what that would mean. In
politics it would mean the establishment of a motherhood suffrage with
plural voting based on the size of the family. In the economic sphere it
would mean that we shall be supporting our papas and mammas. In art,
which must reflect the actualities of life, it would mean almost the
elimination of the element of love, since the world is to be a
children's world. In other words, as I have already said, the entire
social fabric will come to press on our shoulders alone. It is against
the mere possibility of such an unnatural state of affairs that we are
here to protest."

"But what is it you want?" asked the mayor, somewhat nettled because
O'Brien, instead of backing him up, was busy piling three million
golden dollars on the floor in stacks two and a half feet high.

"We want to be left alone!" The reply came in a chorus of trebles,
pipings, quavers, and adolescent falsettos that caused the mayor to lift
his hands to his forehead entreating silence. "We want our old
privileges again. We want to be allowed just to grow up."

"Yassir," shrilled one voice above the others, "jist to grow up."

The mayor raised himself in his chair and his eyes lit up with surprise
at the sight of a well-known black little face at the very end of the
second row.

"What, Topsy, you here?" he called out. "Haven't you done growing all
these sixty years, nearly?"

"Yassir," answered Topsy, inserting an index finger into her mouth. "Ah
was shure growin' fas'; but Massa Booker Washin'ton he says that ah and
the likes of me was charged with th' future of the negro race. An' that
skyeered me so ah made up mah mind ah wouldn' grow no further."

The mayor turned to Helen. "You understand of course, my dear, that I
cannot lay a proposition of so vague a nature before the Board of
Aldermen. They are a rather unimaginative set of men."

"We have drawn up a list of demands, your Honour, in terms precise
enough to make it a sufficient basis for practical legislation. May I
read the list to you, papa?"

"Yes, my dear," he replied, and rising from his chair he put his arms
about her and kissed her. Her forehead was cool to his burning lips.
"Pray proceed, Miss Chairman."

And Helen read in her high-pitched, petulantly graceful soprano:
"Resolutions adopted at a special meeting of the Central Bureau of the
Federated Children's Organisations of the United States:

"1. Henceforth the proportion of child fiction in any magazine shall be
restricted to ten per cent. of the total contents of such publication;
and no magazine fiction child under the age of twelve shall be
represented as possessing an amount of intelligence greater than the
combined wisdom of its parents.

"2. The married heroine of a society drama who has consistently
preferred yachting trips, bridge, and the opera to the company of her
children shall be precluded from calling upon them for aid to save
herself from the dangers of a mad infatuation.

"3. Children under the age of eighteen shall be employed in no form of
industry whatsoever. If there are not enough hands to produce piece
goods for the Congo and the Philippines, let them draft all adult
motor-car chauffeurs, diamond polishers, wine agents, amateur coach
drivers, settlement workers, preachers of the simple life, and writers
of musical comedy.

"4. In the public schools there shall be no talks or lessons dealing
with the duties of citizenship. The time now given to that subject shall
be devoted to the reading of dime novels and fairy tales, so that on
graduating, children shall not be confronted with so startling a
contrast between the realities of life and what they have learned at
school.

"5. Cooking and other branches of domestic science shall no longer be
taught in the schools. One-half of us expect to live in family hotels
and the other half will probably be in no position to afford the
expensive ingredients employed in scientific cookery.

"6. Mr. Francis Galton, who invented Eugenics, and Messrs. Karl Pearson
and Sidney Webb, who helped to popularise it, shall be executed. Mr.
Bernard Shaw shall be banished to a desert island."

And the mayor all the while kept thinking how like her mother Helen was:
her voice, her hair, her eyes, but especially her voice. It filled the
room with many-coloured vibrations of the consistency of building
concrete and hid completely from the mayor's sight the crowd of young
faces, O'Brien, the Board of Aldermen, and the three million presidents
of the Board of Education. Only Helen remained and she came close to him
and laid her cool fingers on his aching head.

The mayor started up to find his wife bending over him.

"Edward," she was saying, "you promised me you would go to bed early."

"My dear," he replied, "I would have if I had not fallen asleep in my
chair. Have you had a pleasant evening at the theatre?"

"It is dreadful weather," she said, "and I have a bit of cold. I suppose
I shouldn't have gone out to-night, but it was the last chance, and you
know the children _would_ see 'Peter Pan.'"




XVIII

THE MARTIANS


The saddest thing about the recent announcement that there are no canals
on Mars is that Robert and I will now have so little to talk about.
Robert is my favourite waiter, and when he found out that I am what the
newspapers call a literary worker, he made up his mind that the ordinary
topics of light conversation would not do at all for me. After prolonged
resistance on my part he has succeeded in reducing our common interests
to two: the canals on Mars and French depopulation. Now and then I
venture to bring up the weather or the higher cost of living. Once I
asked him what he thought about the need of football reform. Once I
tried to drag in Mme. Steinheil. But Robert listens patiently, and when
I have concluded he calls my attention to the fact that in 1908 the
number of deaths in France exceeded the number of births by 12,000. When
the French population fails to stir me, he wonders whether the
inhabitants of Mars are really as intelligent as they are supposed to
be.

And yet it must have been I that first suggested Mars to him. Let me
confess. I do not love the Martian canals with the devouring passion
they have aroused in susceptible souls like Robert. But in a quieter way
the canals have been very dear to me. Their threatened loss comes like
the loss of an old friend; a distant friend whose face one has almost
forgotten and never hopes to see again, from whom one never hopes to
borrow, and to whom one never expects to lend, but who all the more
lives in the mind a remote, impersonal, and gentle influence. I am not
ashamed to admit that I have learned to care more for the Martian
canals than for any canals much closer to us. The Panama Canal will
probably cut in two the distance to China, and give us a monopoly of the
cotton goods trade in the Pacific; but I think cotton goods are
unhealthful, and I don't want to go to China. The Suez Canal may be the
mainstay of the British Empire, but I have no doubt that it would make
just as satisfactory a mainstay for some other empire. My interest in
the Erie Canal is connected entirely with the fact that when it was
opened somebody said, "What hath God wrought!" or "There is no more
North and no more South"--I have forgotten which.

I have always had a softer spot in my heart for the inhabitants of Mars
than for any other alien people. They have always impressed me as more
unassuming than the English, fonder of outdoor exercise than the
Germans, and less addicted to garrulity than the French. They lead
simple, laborious lives, digging away at their canals every morning, and
filling them up every night, for reasons best known to themselves and
certain professors at Harvard. I am attracted by their quaint
appearance. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, has depicted them with
cylindrical bodies of sheet iron, long legs like a tripod, heads like an
enormous diver's helmet, and arms like the tentacles of an octopus--as
odd a sight in their way as the latest woman's fashions from Paris.
Others have described the Martians as pot-bellied and hairless, with
goggle eyes, powerful arms, and curly, gelatinous legs, the result of
millions of years of universal culture and Subway congestion. A race so
unattractive could not but be virtuous. One feels instinctively that
there is no graft bound up with the digging of the Martian canals.

No, anything but graft. One of the principal reasons why I am so fond of
the canals on Mars is that they are the most cheaply built system of
public works on record. A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona
finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars
is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways. Am I wrong
in thinking of the Martian canals as one of the greatest triumphs of the
human mind? An African savage might find an elephant's skeleton and from
that reconstruct the animal in life. Only science can reconstruct an
elephant from a half-inch fragment of the bone of his hind leg. Only a
scientist could have reconstructed the Martian canals from a few
photographic scratches. Of such reconstructions our civilisation is
largely made up. We build up a statesman out of a bit of buncombe and a
frock coat; a genius out of two sonnets and half a dozen cocktails; a
dramatic "star" out of a lisp and a giggle; a two-column news story out
of the fragment of a fact; a multitude out of three men and a band; a
crusade out of one man and a press agent; a novel out of the trimmings
of earlier novels; a reputation out of an accident; a captain of
industry out of an itching palm; a philanthropist out of a beneficent
smile and a platitude; a critic out of a wise look and a fountain pen;
and a social prophet out of pretty small potatoes. I need not allude
here to the process of making mountains out of molehills, beams out of
motes, and entire summers out of single swallows.

But mind, I do not mean that I was ever sceptical about the canals.
Indeed, I have always admired the way in which their existence was
demonstrated. There have always been two ways of proving that something
is true. One way is to bring forward sixteen reasons why, let us say,
the moon is made of green cheese. The other way is to assume that the
moon is made of green cheese and to answer sixteen objections brought
forward against the theory. I have always preferred the second method,
because it throws the burden of proof on your opponent. There is no
argument under the sun that cannot be refuted. Obviously, then, it is an
advantage to let your opponents supply the argument while you supply the
refutation.

Neglect this precaution, and you are in difficulties from the start. You
contend, for instance, that the moon must be made of cheese because the
moon and cheese are both round, as a rule. True, says your opponent, but
so are doughnuts, women's arguments, and, occasionally, the wheels on a
trolley car. The moon and cheese, you go on, both come after dinner.
Yes, says your opponent, but so do unwelcome visitors, musical
comedies, and indigestion. Then, you say, there is the cow who jumped
over the moon. Would she have resorted to such extraordinary procedure
if she had not perceived that the moon was made of cheese from her own
milk? Well (says your opponent), the cow might merely have been trying
to gain a broader outlook upon life. And here you are thirteen reasons
from the end, and your hands hopelessly full.

Now compare the advantages of the other method. You adopt a resolute
bearing and declare: "The moon is made of green cheese." It is now for
your opponent to speak. He argues: "But that would make the moon's
ingredients different from those of the earth and other celestial
bodies." "Not at all," you say; "the earth is made up largely of chalk,
and what is the difference between chalk and cheese, except in the
price?" "But, if it's green cheese the moon is made of," asks your
opponent, "why does it look yellow?" "Only the natural effect of
atmospheric refraction," you reply calmly; "remember how a politician's
badly soiled reputation will shine out a brilliant white, through the
favourable atmosphere that surrounds a Congressional investigating
committee. Recall how a lady who is green with envy at her neighbour's
new hat will turn pink with delight when the two meet in the street and
kiss. Recall how the same lady's complexion of roses and milk will
assume its natural yellow under the candid dissection of her dearest
friends." Your opponent might go on marshalling his objections forever,
and you would have no difficulty in knocking them on the head.

So I used to believe. But if the method breaks down in the case of Mars
and its canals, it breaks down everywhere else. If there are no canals
on Mars, what about the blessings of the tariff, which are based on
exactly the same kind of reasoning? What about the efficacy of mental
healing? What about the advantages of giving up coffee? What about the
impending invasion of California by the Japanese? What about the
Kaiser's qualifications as an art critic? What about the restraining
influence of publicity on corporations? What about the connection
between easy divorce and the higher life? What about the divine right of
railroad presidents? What about the theatrical manager's passion for a
purified stage? What about the value of all anti-fat medicines? All of
these things have been shown to be true by assuming that they are true.
If the canals on Mars go, all these have to go. And that makes me almost
as sad as the fact that I shall have nothing to talk about with my
favourite waiter.




XIX

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--II


"The idea of this exquisite little collection of frauds and forgeries,"
said Cooper, "--and I don't believe I am boasting when I speak of my few
treasures as exquisite--came to me in a natural enough way. One of the
bitterest trials the connoisseur has to contend with, is the
consciousness that no amount of care and expense can guarantee him an
absolutely flawless collection. The suspicion of the experts has fallen
upon not a single picture, brass, marble or iron in his galleries; and
yet as he walks those galleries the unhappy owner groans under the moral
conviction that there are spurious pictures on his walls, spurious
marbles in his halls, spurious carvings and coins under his glass
cases, and that there they must stay until discovered and exposed.

"A perfect collection, therefore, in the sense of a collection in which
every object can be traced back with absolute certainty to its author
and its place of origin, is impossible. Unless, and that is how the
inspiration came," said Cooper, "unless one set to collecting objects of
art which have been proved to be fraudulent. Then and only then, could
one be sure that one's treasures were just what one believed them to be.
And that is just what I set out to do. I began buying objects of art,
which, after masquerading under a great name, had been exposed and given
up to scorn. I have kept at it for twenty years, and I can now point to
what no American multi-millionaire can ever boast of, a collection made
up _entirely_ of 'fakes.' When I stroll through _my_ little museum I am
obsessed by no doubts. I am as certain as I am of being alive that no
genuine Leonardo or Holbein or Manet or Cellini has found its way under
my roof.

"I must admit," Cooper went on, "that the question of economy has been
an important factor in the case. When we first set up housekeeping, a
year after our marriage, our means were not unlimited and our tastes
were of the very highest. Buying the best work or even the second-best
work of the best painters was out of the question. But buying cheap
copies of the masters, replicas, casts, photogravures, was equally
impossible. The idea of owning anything that some one else may own at
the same time is abhorrent to the true collector. On the other hand, if
we went in for spurious masterpieces, we were sure of securing unique
specimens at very small expense. And I will not deny that the bargain
element appealed very strongly to Mrs. Cooper. Most of our things we
got at really fabulous reductions. There was the crown of an Assyrian
princess of the twenty-fourth century B.C., for which one of the leading
European museums paid $75,000, and which, after it was shown that it had
been made by a Copenhagen jeweller in 1907, I purchased from the museum
for something like fifty-five dollars, plus the freight. This charming
little landscape with sheep and a shepherd boy brought $23,000 in a
Fifth Avenue auction room two years ago. Three months after it was sold,
a certain Mrs. Smith on Staten Island sued her husband for desertion and
non-support, and in the course of the proceedings it was brought out
that Smith made $10,000 a year painting Corots and Daubignys, and that
the $23,000 picture was one of his latest achievements. I got it for a
little over one hundred dollars. I am really proud of the picture,
because Smith has put into it enough of the Corot quality to deceive
many an expert observer. If I were not in possession of the documentary
proof that Smith painted the picture in 1908, I should myself be tempted
at times to believe that Smith and his wife lied in court and that the
picture is really a Corot.

"But these are the chances," said Cooper, "that every art-lover must
take. I have said that at present I feel perfectly sure that not a
single genuine work has crept in to vitiate my collection. And that is
true. But only a few weeks ago I had a very bad quarter of an hour
indeed over this spurious Tanagra figurine. It had been bought for a
museum not one hundred miles from here by a patron who was a good friend
of mine, and who had paid several thousand dollars for the statuette. I
was in the room with Hawley when Stimson, our very greatest Greek
archaeologist and art-expert, entered, and, catching sight of the little
figure, picked it up, studied it for a few moments, smelt it, licked it
with his tongue, pressed it to his cheek, and handed it back to my
friend with a single, blasting comment--'fake.' We two were incredulous,
but within fifteen minutes Stimson had convinced us that the thing was a
palpable fraud. Quite beside himself with vexation, Hawley lifted up the
statuette and was about to dash it into fragments on the ground, when I
caught his arm. 'Let me have it,' I said; and I carried it home in great
glee.

"Well, a few weeks later I was showing my collection to Dr. Friedheimer
of Berlin, who is a much greater man even than Stimson. The German
savant stopped in fascination before the Tanagra figurine. 'A pretty
good imitation,' I said. He seized the statuette with trembling fingers.
'Imidation!' he shouted. 'Chenuine, chenuine as de hairs on your het.
Himmel, wat a find!' And he proceeded to do what Stimson had done, and
he smelt it and licked it, and rubbed it against his beard, and I am not
sure but that he knocked it against his forehead to test its texture.
And then in his agitation he let the figure fall, and it broke in two on
the floor, and inside we found a bit of newspaper dated Naples, January
27, 1903. Dr. Friedheimer could only say, 'Unerhoert!' but I was nearly
frantic with delight. I repaired the statuette, and it now holds, as you
see, the place of honour in my collection."

As we sat over our coffee and cigars, Cooper grew reflective. "After
all," he said, "is not the fabricator of frauds fully as great an artist
as the man whose work he imitates? Take the famous marble Aphrodite of a
few years ago, which was attributed by some critics to Praxiteles, and
by some critics to Scopas, until proof came that it had been made in
Hoboken. Consider the labour that went into the fraud. For years,
probably, the dishonest sculptor was engaged in preliminary studies for
the work. He spent months in libraries, museums, and the lecture-rooms
of learned professors. He impregnated himself with the spirit of Greek
art. He devoted months to searching for a suitable piece of antique
marble. How long he was in carving it, I can only guess. When it was
completed, he boiled it in oil; then he boiled it in milk; then he
boiled it in soap; then he boiled it in a concoction of molasses and
wine; then he buried it in moist soil, and let it age for three years.

"Now, suppose the statue had been really carved by Praxiteles. That
joyous master and genius might have put two weeks' work, three weeks'
work, a month's work, upon it, and there you were. What was the labour
of a lifetime to the other man was to Praxiteles just an easy bit of
routine. If art is a man's soul and hopes and brain and sweat and blood
put into concrete form, who produced the truer work of art, Praxiteles
or the unknown sculptor of Hoboken? I speak only of the comparative
expenditure of effort. So far as the artistic result is concerned, it is
evident, from the ease with which we were taken in, that there is no
great difference between the school of Hoboken and the school of
Praxiteles."




XX

WHEN A FRIEND MARRIES


Taking dinner with an old friend who has just been married is an
experience I regard with apprehension. In the first place, it is always
awkward to be introduced to a woman who begins by being jealous of you
because you knew her husband long before she did. She may be a nice
woman; in fact, from the air of almost imbecile happiness that invests
young Hobson, you are sure she is. But since it is natural to hate those
whom we have injured, it is natural for young wives to dislike their
husband's friends.

People say that a woman begins to prepare for marriage at the age of
five. Judging from the absolutely spontaneous way in which the Hobsons
have taken to it, marriage is a career that calls for no preparation
whatever. I am not referring, of course, to the outward aspects of early
housekeeping. The little difficulties that beset the newly married are
there. I can see that my hostess is more anxious about the creamed
potatoes than she will be five years hence. Her attitude to the maid who
waits on us is by turns excessively severe and excessively timid. I
learn that the dining-room table has been sent back twice to the store,
and is still not the one originally ordered. But these are trifles. It
is with the Hobsons' souls I am concerned; and their souls are perfectly
at ease in their new estate.

The first few minutes, like all introductions, go stiffly. The bride
smiles and says that Jack has often spoken to her about you. Whereupon
you remember that there are not many secrets a young husband keeps from
his wife. Jack is no sieve, but he would be more than human if he has
failed to dissect your little weaknesses and humours for his new wife.
He has probably emphasized the two or three particular little failings
of character which have prevented you from realising the brilliant
promise you showed at college. At bottom, Jack thinks, you have the
capacity for being almost as happy as he, Jack, is. But then, again, if
Mrs. Hobson does know you thoroughly well, it strikes you that there is
that much trouble saved, and you sit down to chat with a fair sense of
intimacy.

Toward such conversation you and the man of the house are the principal
contributors. You speak of college days and contemporary politics, and
other things that the wife is not interested in, but she smiles
graciously, and now and then takes sides with you against her husband.
At one point in the conversation you look up and find her quietly
scrutinising you. And you recall what you have heard concerning the
match-making propensities of young wives, and you wonder uneasily if to
herself she is running over a list of girl friends and trying to decide
which one will suit you best. You even suspect that she inclined toward
a Marjorie or an Edith, who is plain, but clever, a good manager, and of
an affectionate disposition. Happily, at that moment the bride thanks
you for your handsome wedding gift.

At table the visitor begins to be more at ease. For one thing, there is
the traditional hazing process to which the bride must be subjected.
Jack takes the lead. Admitting that to-night's repast is an unqualified
success, he hints that there have been occasions when, if he only would,
there might be a different tale to tell. The visitor protests; yet in
the extravagant praise he resorts to there is a suggestion of mild
banter which is considered the proper thing. The wife professes to
enter into the joke; but in her heart she laughs to see the two men go
solemnly through the stupid and outworn ceremonial. Young wives nowadays
are excellent cooks. This one has secretly pursued a three months'
course in domestic science and has a diploma hidden away somewhere. But
she pretends to be properly outraged by our foolish satire, and insists
on both being helped a second time to the custard. Jack, in fact, eats
all that remains. It makes dish-washing easier, he says.

And as the visitor steers his way pleasantly through the meal, he makes
the acquaintance of an extraordinary number of relatives. The spoons, he
finds, are from Aunt Amy. Aunt Amy lives in Syracuse and at first
objected to the match. The salt cellar is from a male cousin who (you
learn this from Jack), it was thought at one time, would be the
fortunate man himself--that is, until Jack appeared on the scene. Poor
fellow, he sought consolation by marrying, only two months later, a nice
girl from Alexandria, Va. The cut-glass salad dish is from the bride's
dearest friend at boarding-school, a charming girl, who paints and sings
and is now studying music in Berlin.

When the coffee is brought in, Jack asks if you will smoke. This is, in
a way, the most dangerous situation of the entire evening. If you say
yes, Jack is apt to pass the cigars and and say, "Go right ahead. _I_
have given it up, you know, and I feel all the better for it." But if
you are expert in reading faces, and decide that the bride probably has
conscientious scruples against the habit, and you reply "No," Jack is
likely to say, "Sorry, but Alice allows _me_ one cigar a day after
dinner," and you are left to suffer the torments of the lost, and have
lied into the bargain. Nor is it possible to lay down any rule for
arriving at the correct reply under such circumstances. A hurried glance
about the house will not help one. A handsome bronze ash-tray may be
only a paperweight. Young wives are in the habit of buying their
husbands the most ornate smoking apparatus, with the understanding that
it shall never be used.

It is after dinner that reflection comes; and with it comes a touch of
sorrowful wonder. Jack bears himself with great equanimity in his new
condition; but it is apparent, nevertheless, that he has changed from
what you knew him. In the first place, he has built up a comprehensive
system of domestic serfdom to which he cheerfully submits. He glories in
his enslavement; he rattles his chains. He actually boasts of the habit
he has acquired of dropping in at the grocer's every morning on his way
to the office. When it is the maid's day out, Jack insists on helping
with the dishes and he tells you with pride that, given plenty of hot
water, there is nothing in that line which he would hesitate to
undertake. He makes it a point to visit Washington Market at least twice
a week, and he comes home with cuts, joints, steaks, rounds, poultry,
fish, game, and fruits in dazzling variety. He carries these things
conspicuously in the Subway. And Jack's wife is appreciative of his kind
intentions, and lets him bring, from long distances, meats which she can
purchase at several cents a pound less from her butcher two blocks away.

The passion for acquiring food commodities is only one phase of Jack's
new character. You begin to see now that all these years you have never
suspected what capacities for home-building he had in him. In the
presence of any kind of article offered for sale his overmastering
passion is to buy the thing and take it home. Instinct apparently
impels him to store up quite useless supplies against a future
emergency. He haunts hardware stores, he rummages in antique furniture
shops, and you may see him any day during the lunch hour flattening his
nose against windowfuls of copper and brass ware. He buys patent hammers
by the quarter dozen, as well as nails, tacks, screws, bolts, casters,
brackets, and curtain poles. He brings home Japanese vases from the
auction rooms. One day he acquired a step-ladder; it came by wagon
because they refused to let him take it into the Subway.

And Jack's wife acquiesces in his self-imposed servitude. She does not
demand it; she is even a good deal incommoded by it. But her woman's
instinct tells her that the thing is a disease, which a man must catch,
like the measles. Until the husband's passion for home-building quiets
down, she is content to accept the unnatural situation; she is even
proud to have inspired it.

But as Jack prattles on, and Jack's wife smiles over her embroidery
frame, it comes over you that, despite all the kindly communion of the
evening, you are an outsider there. You ask yourself bitterly whether
there is such a thing as constancy in man, whether there is such a thing
as true comradeship or affection. For fifteen years, from your freshman
year at high school, you and Jack have been what the world calls
friends. What are you now? Jack still calls you friend; apparently that
is the reason why you have just dined with him and his wife. But in
reality you are not there as his friend. You are there as the guest of
this newly-constituted social unit, this new family. You are there not
as a person, but as part of an institution.

And just when you are ready to accept the new situation you are swept
away by the unreality of the entire arrangement. It is inconceivable
that Jack should have thrown you over for this alien person whom he
calls wife. Your habits and Jack's are so much alike; your tastes, your
outlook upon life. You used to play the same games at college, sing the
same songs, smoke the same tobacco, wear each other's clothes, and now
Jack has thrown you over for one with whom in the nature of things he
can have none of those habits in common. It is not merely puzzling; it
grows almost absurd. You shake your head over it some time after you
have said good-night, and the bride has told you that as a dear friend
of Jack's, they always will be pleased to have you call.




XXI

THE PERFECT UNION OF THE ARTS


I have never had the slightest reason to doubt Harding's truthfulness.
The following episode, I remember, was told with more than Harding's
usual gravity. I can do nothing better than to give it here in Harding's
own words so far as I can recall them:

On the third day after his arrival, my guest, Muhammad Abu Nozeyr, said
to me, "O Harding Effendi, I desire greatly to witness a presentation of
what you and the wife of your bosom, on whom both be peace, have often
referred to as Grand Opera."

I replied, with involuntary astonishment. "Son of a hundred sheiks,
forgive my seemingly derelict hospitality. But I should have asked you
before this to go to the opera with us, if I had not thought that the
principles of your faith were opposed thereto. For you must know, O
Father of the Defenceless, that our women go there unveiled even as the
women of the people that you see on our streets, and that on the stage,
singers of both sexes indulge in open exaltation of that thing called
love, which your prophet has confined within the walls of the
_haremlik_."

Abu Nozeyr laughed. "Your knowledge of our customs, Harding Effendi, is
fifty years behind the times. True, I come from the desert, and have
never heard your singing women of the stage. But did not one of the
learned muftis at yesterday's evening repast declare that 'Aida' was
written for the Khedewi Ismail Pasha, may his soul rest in peace?"

"Yes," I said; "but you will understand, Dispenser of a Thousand
Mercies, why at first blush Islam and the lyric stage should strike me
as somewhat incompatible."

"Not modern Islam," he replied. "Take us not too literally. I am told
that your people, like others of the Feringhi, have succeeded in
building battleships which are really instruments of peace; that you
have trust companies in which you place no confidence, and Open Doors
which you close against people from my part of the world; you have
legislators who speak but do not legislate, and a Speaker who legislates
but does not speak; you have had men in your White House who always saw
red, and you have red-emblazoned newspapers which are yellow; you call
your politicians public servants who are your masters, and you call your
women the masters, but will not let them vote. Why, then, should you be
so surprised at any seeming incongruity in others?"

"I am convinced, Abu Nozeyr," I said, "and to-morrow we will go to see
'Tristan und Isolde.' But shall I attempt to describe for you, in a few
words, just what Grand Opera is?"

"My ear is open to your words, Harding Effendi."

"Know, then, Protector of the Fatherless, that the music-drama is a
perfect blending of all the arts. It calls to its aid the resources of
sculpture, painting, dancing, together with numerous mechanical
agencies, and to a minor extent, music and the drama. For observe, O Abu
Nozeyr, that each art aims to awake its own specific emotion. Sculpture
appeals to our sense of form, painting to our delight in colour, dancing
to the pleasure of rhythmic motion, the mechanic arts to our liking for
sudden action, while music and the uttered word represent the union of
the clearest and vaguest modes of expressing thought. It follows
therefore that the highest phase of human emotion can only be expressed
by that art which gives us simultaneously the living form of a Venus de
Milo with the colouring of a Titian, the grace of a Nautch girl, the
miracle-working powers of a Hindu fakir, the elocution of a Demosthenes,
and the voice of a Malibran."

"By the beard of the Prophet," exclaimed Abu Nozeyr, "I thought such
bliss was to be had only in the Paradise of the Faithful; and that is
Grand Opera, Harding Effendi?"

"With certain modifications," I replied. "Nothing human is perfect, Abu
Nozeyr. It is a regrettable circumstance that the human voice attains
its perfect development many years after the human form. Hence our
heroes on the lyric stage are all middle-aged and our heroines somewhat
heavy in movement. I have seen a pair of starving lovers in an operatic
garret, who would surely not have passed the scrutiny of a United
Charities investigator. It is also to be regretted that adequate
voice-production leaves no breath for dancing or other forms of active
effort. Hence the dance with which Carmen fascinates poor Don Jose,
argues an intense readiness to be pleased on the part of the latter, and
Telramund's defeat at the hands of Lohengrin is never quite free from a
certain degree of contributory negligence."

"But tell me this, Harding Effendi, are there composers who have carried
the union of the arts to a higher point than others?"

"There are, O Grandson of the Wild Ass. There are operas in which at
certain moments the libretto speaks of a leaping fire, the music plays
leaping fire, and the fire actually leaps and blazes on the stage. But
unfortunately it always happens that the words cannot be heard because
of the orchestra, and the fire sinks when the orchestral swell rises,
and rises when the orchestral surge subsides. I have caught the
orchestral sound of hammer on anvil long before the two have come into
contact, and have heard Spring described as entering through a door
which persists in staying closed. I have seen boats being pushed by
human hands, Rhine maidens suspended on a wire, and harvest moons moving
in orbits unknown to Herschel and Pickering."

"And are there people who still persist in taking their sculpture,
painting, drama, and music separately, Harding Effendi?"

"There are; but that is because they fail to recognise that opera is a
perfect union of all the arts. To-morrow, Abu Nozeyr, we go to hear
'Tristan und Isolde.' It appeals to every one of our senses. To enjoy it
completely, however, it is often wise to close one's eyes and just hear
the singer sing."




XXII

AN EMINENT AMERICAN


After dinner I asked Herr Grundschnitt what headway he was making in his
studies of American life. The professor was in more than his usually
mellow mood. He had enjoyed his dinner. He liked his cigar. He confided
to me that he was hard at work on a volume of sketches dealing with the
career of representative successful Americans, and he offered to read me
one of his early chapters. If the following summary of Herr
Grundschnitt's account of the life of Wallabout Smith can even suggest
the extraordinary impression which the original produced upon me, I am
content.

Wallabout Smith did not attain recognition until late in life. I gather
that he must have been well over fifty when a former President of the
United States declared that Wallabout Smith, by raising a family of four
sons and two daughters, had done more for his country than all the laws
enacted by the Legislatures of all the New England and Middle Atlantic
States since the Spanish-American War. Fame came rapidly after this. The
college professors repeated what the former President said. The
newspapers repeated what the college professors said. The playwrights
repeated what the newspapers said. The pulpit repeated what the
playwrights said. Interviewers descended upon Wallabout Smith. They wore
out his front lawn, the hall carpet, and the maid-servant's temper; but
they always found Smith himself patient, affable, ready to say whatever
they wished him to say.

The reporters would usually begin by asking Wallabout Smith what were
his lighter interests in life. "I find my greatest pleasure," Smith
would reply, "in common things. For instance, I have never ceased to be
intensely interested in the cost of shoes and stockings. The subject is
fascinating and inexhaustible. One gets tired of most things, but there
has never been a time in which the cost of shoes and stockings has
failed to appeal with peculiar force to me. My odd moments on the train
have as a rule been taken up with that question. If you have ever
thought upon this subject, you must have been struck with the fact that,
putting food aside, shoes and stockings constitute the most permanent
and persistent human need. They begin with the first few weeks of our
life, and they continue to the end; the size alone changes. It is a
subject, too, that opens up such wide horizons. For while a man of
comparatively little leisure can confine himself to the simple topic of
shoes and stockings, he may, if he so desires, widen the field of his
interests so as to include the allied subjects of frocks, jackets,
blouses, caps, and collars, until he has covered the entire range of
children's apparel. Nor is that all. I have spent many an absorbing hour
figuring out the annual rate of increase in servants' wages and rent. Of
late years I have been in the habit of putting in part of my lunch hour
in a study of college fees and tailors' bills. In moments of extreme
physical lassitude, when nothing else appeals to me, I think about the
next quarterly premium on my insurance policy."

How well-known men do their work has always interested the public. Few
newspaper men omitted to question Wallabout Smith on this subject. From
the large number of interviews cited by Herr Grundschnitt we may build
up a very fair picture of Wallabout Smith's daily routine. It was his
habit to spend a good part of his day in New York City. He would rise
about six o'clock every week-day in the year, and, snatching a hasty
breakfast, would make his way to the railroad station, pausing now and
then in perplexity as he tried to recall what it was his wife had asked
him to bring home from town. Sometimes he would catch his train and
sometimes he would not. Arrived at his office, he would remove his coat,
and, putting on a black alpaca jacket to which he was greatly attached,
he would proceed to glance over, check, and transcribe the contents of a
large number of bills and vouchers representing the daily transactions
of a very prosperous commercial enterprise in which he had no
proprietary interest. The day's work would be pleasantly broken up by
frequent inquiries from the general manager's office. Every now and then
a fellow-worker would take a moment from his duties to ask Wallabout
Smith how his lawn was getting on. Sometimes he would be summoned to
the telephone, only to learn that Central had called the wrong number.
Lunch was a matter of a few minutes. At 5.30 every afternoon Wallabout
Smith exchanged his alpaca jacket for his street coat with a fine sense
of weariness, and the secure conviction that the next morning would find
the same task waiting for him on his table. "I have no hesitation in
stating," Smith would frequently say, "that some of the busiest hours of
my life have been spent at my office desk."

Walking was his favourite form of exercise. When he lived in the city
during the first few years after his marriage, he used to walk the floor
with the baby. Later when the children began to grow up and he moved out
into the country, he walked to and from the station. His gait was a
free, manly stride, bordering close upon a run, in the morning, and a
more deliberate, sliding pace, somewhat suggestive of a shuffle, in the
evening. He was at his best when tramping the country roads with a
congenial companion or two on a Sunday afternoon. On such occasions he
would pour forth a continuous stream of light-hearted talk on everything
under the sun--the new board of village trustees, the shameful condition
of the village streets, the prospects of a new roof for the railway
station. Good-nature was the keynote of his character, but he would
frequently sum up a situation or a person with a sly touch of irony or a
trenchant word or two. He once described the village streets as being
paved chiefly with good intentions. Another time he characterised the
minister of a rival church as having the courage of his wife's
convictions. But such flashes of satire went and left no rancour behind
them. His high spirits were proof against everything but automobiles.
These he detested, not because they made walking unpleasant and even
dangerous, but because they were run by men who mortgaged their homes to
buy motor cars, and thus threatened the stability of business
conditions.

Wallabout Smith would often be asked to lay down a few rules for those
who wished to emulate his success. He would invariably reply that the
secret of bringing up children was the same double secret that underlay
success in every other field--enthusiasm and patience. "It has always
been my belief," he would say, "that the head of a family should spend
at least as much time with his children as he does at his barber's or
his lodge, and, if possible, a little more. Children undoubtedly stand
in need of supervision. In the beginning, it is a question largely of
keeping them away from the matches and the laudanum. Fortunately, we
live at some distance from a trolley-line and there is no well in our
back-yard. As my children grew up, I made it a point to know what books
they were reading out of school and whether the boys were addicted to
the filthy cigarette habit. On the subjects of breakfast foods and
corporal punishment, I have always kept an open mind."

The experiment of living upon a basis of comradeship with one's children
which we see so frequently recommended was not a success in the case of
Wallabout Smith. "Although my boys are fond of me," he once told a
reporter, "they usually regard my presence as a bore. When I find time
to go out walking with them, they do their best to lose me, and whenever
we divide off into teams for a game of ball, each side insists on my
going with the other side. I have made up my mind that there is a time
for being with one's children and a time for letting them alone, and
that the proper time for being with them is when they are in trouble
and want you, and the proper time for letting them alone is when they
are happy and wish to be let alone. This I admit is the reverse of the
common practice, and probably there is something to be said for parents
who grow fond of their children's society when they, the parents, have
nothing else to do. As a rule, I have never obtruded myself on my boys,
being confident that natural affection and the recurrent need of
pocket-money would constitute a sufficient bond between us."

There was, in conclusion, one factor in his success upon which Wallabout
Smith would never fail to lay the most emphatic stress, and to which
Herr Grundschnitt attached equal importance. "Such fame," he would say,
"as has fallen to my share must be attributed in the very largest
measure to my wife. Many is the time she gave up her meetings at the
Browning Club to watch with me beside the sick-bed of one of our little
ones. And she would do this so uncomplainingly, so cheerfully, that it
almost made one oblivious to the extent of her sacrifice. There must
have been occasions, I feel sure, when it cost her a pang to find her
photograph omitted from the local paper's account of a club meeting or a
church bazaar; but if she ever suffered on that score, she never let it
be known. I can truly say that, without her, my life work would have
spelt failure."




XXIII

BEHIND THE TIMES


I had scarcely exchanged a half-dozen sentences with Howard King before
we knew ourselves for kindred spirits. I was in a roomful of people who
were talking about new books I had not read, new plays I had not seen,
and new singers I had not heard, and I was exceedingly lonesome. There
was one youngish middle-aged lady in pink, who asked me what was the
best novel I had read of late, and when I said "Robert Elsmere," she
looked at me rather grimly and asked whether I lived in New York. When I
said yes, she turned away and began chatting with a young man on her
right, who looked like the advertisement for a new linen collar. It was
this reply of mine that attracted Howard King's attention. He had been
sitting in one corner of the room quite as disconsolate as I was. But
now he walked over and shook hands and told me that in his opinion
"Robert Elsmere" was not so good a book as "Trilby," which he was just
reading.

Howard King and I belong to the comparatively small class of men whom
nature, or fate, or whatever you please, has decreed to be always a
certain interval behind the times; it might be years or months or days,
according to the rate of speed at which a particular fashion happened to
be moving forward. King told me, for instance, that of late he has been
possessed with a passionate desire to learn the game of ping-pong. When
all the world was playing table-tennis eight or ten years ago, King
viewed the game with disgust. He thought it utterly childish,
uninteresting, and admirably illustrative of all the idiotic qualities
that go to make up a fad. But for the last six months, King said, he
frequently wakes at night and sits up in bed and yearns with all his
soul for a ping-pong set. He was, of course, ashamed to speak to others
about it. But if he could find some one who shared his feelings on the
subject, he had a large library with a square table in it. Would I come
to-morrow night? I said I should be very glad, indeed.

I told Howard King what my attitude is toward clothes. It is my fate
always to grow fond of a fashion just as it is passing out. I recalled
the exaggerated military styles for men that came in with the
Spanish-American and the South African wars. Those enormously padded
shoulders and tight-shaped waists and swelling trouser legs, and the
strut and the stoop that went with the whole ugly _ensemble_, roused my
anger. My feelings remained unchanged until some time after the
Russo-Japanese War, and then one day it came to me that I must have a
suit of military cut. It was like the sudden awakening of the
unregenerate to grace, it was as irresistible as first love. And when
the tailor said that only sloping shoulders were now being worn, that
what I wanted was hopelessly out of date, the sense of loss was
overpowering. I confessed to King that in my opinion nothing uglier in
men's apparel was conceivable than the green plush hats that are just
beginning to go out of style. And I told him that I was as certain as I
am certain of anything in this world that some day in the very near
future I shall be seized with an uncontrollable longing to wear a green
plush hat, and I shall enter a shop and ask for one, and the man behind
the counter will look at me quizzically, and, after a long search, bring
me the only plush hat in his shop, and I shall carry it home in shame,
and put it away in my closet, and mourn over the resolution that came
too late.

You must not imagine that Howard King and I are conservatives. We do not
hold fast to one thing, or even hold fast to the old. We move forward,
but at a pace so curiously regulated as to bring us to the front door
just when most people are leaving by the back. I have worn every shape
of linen collar that the best-dressed men have worn during the last
fifteen years; but I have worn them from three to six months late. I
became passionately fond of bicycling shortly after all the bicycle
factories began the exclusive production of automobiles. I am not very
fond of automobiles, but I shall be, I know, when aeroplanes come into
extensive use. It is only in the last few months that I have discovered
how amusing a toy the Teddy bear makes. And this is true of fashions in
games and of fashions in language. I have no fundamental objections to
slang, but I always pick up the bit of slang that most people are just
discarding.

I recall, for instance, how, up in the hills last summer, the woods and
glens were echoing to the sound, half a howl and half a screech, of "Oh,
you!" addressed at quarter-minute intervals to every object, animate or
inanimate, that came within the howler's vision or thought. This
particular bit of gutter-slang induced a peculiar irritation. It seemed
to me utter desecration that this quickening beauty of hill and sky and
river and green woods, which should have stirred young hearts to
madrigals and chorals, should resound to the blatant, shrieking
vulgarity of Lobster Square. I do not mind confessing that at times my
feelings towards the innocent young barbarians bordered close on murder.
Until--until, alas! one September morning, after all the guests were
gone and I alone remained; that morning I woke with the poison in my
soul, and I walked down to the river for my bath, and, coming across the
farmer's herd of cows halfway down the hillside, saluted them, before I
knew what I was doing, with that horrid, that unspeakable--I blush now
to think of it. When I told Howard King, he admitted humbly that after
holding out for years he has just begun to say, "It's me," and that he
feels morally convinced that within the next year or two he will be
saying "Between you and I."

But you must not think that this peculiarity in Howard King and myself
is an acquired habit or a pose in which we take any measure of pride.
Our attitude towards those happy people who are always in fashion is one
of sincere and profound envy. I think there is nothing more wonderful
under the sun than the unknown force that impels the great majority to
begin doing the same new thing at the same time. It must be a precious
gift to feel instinctively what the right new thing is to do. A
mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on
black straw hats surmounted by a cock in his pride. Another mysterious
order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the
latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this
instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only
where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such
people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of
fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and
direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age
who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation.
Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.

In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in
a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of
his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically
up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only
yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a
three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told
him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and
asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken
aback, told him that I was just finishing Frank Norris's "McTeague" and
was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality
characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a
review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy. I told him that I
might very well do so if it were a question of writing something he
would find personally instructive, and rose to go, with the intention of
slamming the door behind me.

But he called me back and insisted that he meant no offence, that he
simply must have live, up-to-date copy or nothing at all. He proposed a
popular article on art, and wondered if I could write something about
the Dutch masters, with special reference to the recent notable
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. I was obliged to confess that I
had missed the exhibition by two weeks. "Well," he said, patiently,
"there is opera. You might do something about the singers. You have
heard Mary Garden, of course?" I told him no. Only the other day I had
irrevocably decided to hear Mary Garden in "Thais" next season; and the
next morning I learned that Mr. Hammerstein had gone out of business.

He continued to be patient with me. "There's 'Chantecler,' to be sure,
although that is ancient history by this time. Have you read the play?"
I had not, but just here an inspiration came. "You sneered at Homer just
now," I said. "Well, there was another Greek who wrote a bird play 2,300
years before Rostand. I mean Aristophanes----" The editor leaped from
his chair. "Great, great!" he cried. "We'll call it 'Chantecler 400
B.C.'" I caught the infection of his enthusiasm. "And Aristophanes had
another play on woman's rights," I told him. "You might call it 'An
Athenian Suffragette.'" "Splendid!" he cried; "splendid; we can make a
whole series, and Goulden will do the pictures in colours. It's the most
novel thing I have heard of for a long time. It will beat the others by
a mile." And he sent me away happy.




XXIV

PUBLIC LIARS


There are three things that puzzle me; yes, four things that I cannot
explain: Why street clocks never show the right time; why thermometers
hanging outside of drug stores never indicate the right temperature; why
slot machines on a railway platform never give the right weight; and why
weather-vanes always point in the wrong direction. At bottom, I imagine,
these are really not four things, but one. For it must be the same
mysterious and malicious principle that takes each of these
contrivances, set up to be a public guide to truth, and turns it into an
instrument for the dissemination of error.

What makes me think that there is some animate principle behind such
clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are
persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on
the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I
have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of
Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my
own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently
Jones will break in upon me in the middle of a column of figures and
tell me that the largest ranch in the world is situated in the State of
Sonora, Mexico. "Yes?" I say, hoping that he will go away. "Yes," he
assures me. "It is so large that the proprietor can ride 200 days on
horseback without leaving his own grounds. He has 2,000,000 men working
for him and he lives in a marble palace of 700 rooms. No one can be
elected President of Mexico against his will."

Now obviously it would have been better for me to remain altogether
unacquainted with Mexican conditions than to share Jones's distorted
view of affairs in that interesting republic. But Jones insists on
taking the innocent blank spaces in my knowledge of the world and
filling them up with the most incorrect data. He tells me, for instance,
that Mme. Finisterra once sang the mad scene from "Lucia" before the
late Sultan of Morocco, who wept so bitterly that the performance was
interrupted lest the monarch should go into convulsions. At the age of
eight Mme. Finisterra knew twelve operatic soprano roles by heart, and
when she was ten she played Juliet to Tamagno's Romeo. She now gets
$10,000 a night, in addition to the service of a maid, a chef, and two
private secretaries. In private life she is very stout. All this,
needless to say, is not true.

But I must not forget the clocks. The worst of the class, oddly enough,
are those found in front of watchmakers' and opticians' shops. I
sometimes think that such clocks are purposely put out of order by the
shop-keeper. The object is apparently to induce irascible old gentlemen
to enter the store, watch in hand, in order to protest against the
maintenance of a public nuisance. It is then a comparatively easy task
to sell them a pair of solid gold spectacles with double lenses at a
handsome profit. I, for one, would not blame the old gentleman who
should pick up a stone and hurl it at one of these Tartuffes and
Chadbands of the street-corner with their chubby, gilded hands reposing
on their prosperous stomachs, sleek and smug and ultra-respectable, but
unconscionable liars for all that. They are not content with their own
success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a
faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and
actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old
sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent assurance on the
ordinary man.

The difference between the typical public clock and a watch out of order
is obvious. Every prudent man knows the peculiarities of his own watch,
just as he knows the peculiarities of his own wife and children; and he
is consequently prepared to make allowances. But the clock on the street
corner persists in thrusting false information upon you. The man who
consults his watch does so with a purpose, and is naturally on the
alert. But the cheating clock confronts him in moments of unsuspecting
security, and throws him into a condition of the wildest alarm. It is
peculiarly active on bright spring days, when people rise early and look
forward to being at their desks half an hour before their usual time. On
such occasions they invariably come upon a clock which points to a
quarter of ten, and sends them scurrying breathless up four flights of
stairs, to find the janitor engaged in cleaning out the baskets.

Church clocks are not so bad as jewellers' clocks; but they are bad
enough, and, in the nature of things, we have a right to expect more
from a church clock than from any other kind. For the same reason the
weathercock on a church steeple is to be judged by a higher standard
than the one over a carpenter's shop or the ordinary dwelling. I cannot,
for instance, imagine a more dangerous moral _ensemble_ than a church
with a clergyman preaching bad doctrine in the pulpit, a clock
indicating the wrong time on the tower, and, over all, a clogged weather
vane pointing to the south when the wind blows from the east.

With reference to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks
are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest
clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in
Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is
just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this
clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or
consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the
window at 9:30 and find this clock pointing to eleven, and to look out
ten minutes later and find it pointing to 9:35, is extremely
disconcerting. One is inclined to expect something more restrained in a
clock connected with the most prosperous parish of one of our most
conservative denominations.

What I have said of clocks is largely true of the weighing-machine. Like
the public clock, it thrusts itself upon us, and like the clock it
betrays the confidence which it invites. I feel convinced that no one
would ever think of using a weighing-machine if it did not constitute
the most characteristically national piece of furniture in our railway
stations. All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me
the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has
swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on
which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes
and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should
immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil. Yet even
this mockery of a weighing-machine is preferable to the emotional type
of scales which simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your
fortune in utter disregard of age and sex, and plays a tune that cannot
be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's
weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be
President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a
tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval
after walking across the room on his hind legs.

As for the ordinary street thermometer, there is this to be said for it:
It may deceive, but it gives pleasure in deceiving. When a person is
sagging beneath the heat of an August midday, it is a distinct source of
comfort and pride to have the thermometer register 98 degrees. Even when
we are fully aware that the mercury is too high by three or four
degrees, it is easy enough to make one's self believe for the moment in
the higher figure. If it were not for this spiritual stimulus, I should
be inclined to regard all thermometers as a nuisance. Translating
Fahrenheit into Centigrade and _vice versa_, is one of the most painful
mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the
operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European
monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that
his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put
38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the
constitution of that European monarch that he should have survived the
violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand
Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142
degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from
the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should
multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.

I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I
have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and
weighing-machines--they are but the remnants of the fine old communal
life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too
little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares
as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill
our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or
regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile.
Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind
closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because
it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above
reproach and above suspicion.




XXV

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--III


Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of
delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by
fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he
succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws--the
straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a
drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of
bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper
stand the blow, his friends wondered. He took it very well. Within a
week he had set to work on a new fad, the collection of Statistical
Realities, and in a half-year he had filled three good-sized lofts and
a large back-yard with his treasures. Yesterday he took me through his
galleries.

"What do you make of this?" he said, stopping before a glass jar some
four feet high, in which, to the peril of one's nerves, you could
distinctly see the upper two-thirds of a child's body. Head, trunk, and
arms were beautifully fashioned, but there was no vestige of growth
below the knee-caps. I could only show my astonishment. "Well," he went
on, "you must have seen the statement by the president of Bryn Mawr that
the average number of children among college-bred mothers is 3-6/10.
This is the six-tenths of a child. Here," he said, pointing to another
and somewhat larger jar, "you see three-fifths of a woman; 1-3/5 women
to one man is the ratio in some parts of Ireland. Here, in adjoining
bottles, are three-tenths of a physician, seven-eighths of a lawyer,
and four-fifths of a clergyman, the latest census having shown that we
have 23-3/10 physicians, 29-7/8 lawyers, and 17-4/5 physicians for every
1,000 of our population."

Stopping before a glass case containing little heaps of ordinary copper
coins, Harrington pointed out that these were the odd cents which the
scrupulous science of statistics insists on leaving attached to vast
sums of money. He showed me the 27 cents which, added to $3,469,746,854
represented the value of the foreign commerce of the United States in
1910; he showed me the twopence ha'penny which, increased by
L788,990,187, constitutes the total funded debt of Great Britain; and he
laid special emphasis on the eleven pennies which Tammany's most
vigorous efforts at economy could not pare off from New York City's
budget of $166,246,729.11 for the year 1909.

Another row of glass cases contained what appeared at first sight a
collection of comic dolls. Cooper pointed to a sturdy little mannikin in
boots and a Russian blouse, who, with mouth fearfully distended, was
endeavouring to swallow an iron bar four or five times his own size.
"You may have read," said Cooper, "that the annual consumption of
pig-iron in Russia is 3.7 tons per capita. This figure shows the fact
concretely. Here," indicating the figure of an infant apparently a week
or two old, "is a French baby. You may observe that she is engaged in
counting her share of the national wealth, which is estimated in France
at 1,254 francs 63 centimes for every man, woman, and child. She is
wondering whether she ought to invest her capital in Russian treasury
bonds or in Steel Common. This," pointing to a group of seven or eight
dolls riding on a perfectly modelled brindled cow, "represents the
proportions of domesticated cattle to the total population of the
United States."

The fire which flashes up in the eye of every amateur when he
contemplates the gem of his collection, was visible as Cooper led the
way to a good-sized platform of polished mahogany and brass on which was
set up what I took to be a beautiful reproduction of the planetary
system in miniature. I was right. "But observe," said Cooper, "the
details of construction. The sun is made up of infinitely small eggs,
since we know that the weight of all the hen's eggs consumed by the
human race since the beginning of the Christian era is equal to
one-billionth the weight of the sun. The planets are fashioned in the
same way. Jupiter you see is made up of little, squirming animal-like
units; that is because Jupiter occupies the same amount of space that
would be filled by the descendants of a single pair of Australian
rabbits in five hundred years, if left unchecked. Observe the orbit of
the earth. It is marked out in twopenny postage stamps, for
statisticians assure us that the path of the earth around the sun is
equivalent in length to all the postage stamps consumed since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, if laid end to end. In the same way
the seven rings of Saturn are made up of copper pennies, obtained by
reducing the world's annual output of gold to coins of that
denomination."

We passed into a cosy little alcove lined to the ceiling with books.
There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about them at first sight, but
my host soon undeceived me. "These," he said, "are the books that might
have been written in the last hundred years, if the time and energy that
are spent on smoking, drinking, whist, bridge, and out-door games were
devoted to the cultivation of literature. Here, for instance, are three
plays quite as good as 'Hamlet,' written by two million men named Smith,
who gave up the use of tobacco. Here is a philosophical poem which shows
on every page an inspiration higher than Goethe ever attained; it
embodies the concentrated ideas produced by twenty-five thousand former
golf players, thinking half an hour a day for three days in the week.
Here is a poetic version of the future life which completely outclasses
the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of
forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers,
seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete euchre clubs.

"Perhaps," concluded Cooper, "you should see this before you go," and he
pointed to a single shelf of books with a curious mechanical arrangement
at one side. "This shelf," he said, "is exactly five feet long. This
little electric motor at the side is so constructed that it gets into
motion every day for twenty minutes, and stops. By a system of cogs and
levers the motor propels a fine steel needle straight through the five
feet of books. A glance at this brass dial shows at once how far the
needle point has reached. At the present moment, for instance, it is
halfway through the front cover of the 'Journal of John Woolman.' And
while the dial is recording the distance covered on the five-foot shelf,
the blue liquid in this glass tube measures the rising level of culture.
It is a very ingenious application of President Eliot's idea, don't you
think?"




XXVI

THE COMMUTER


Whenever Harrington urges me to go to live in the country, his place is
only forty-three minutes from City Hall. But when he asked me last week
to spend Saturday afternoon with him, he told me that some trains are
slower than others and that I had better allow ten minutes for the
ferry. I have never known a commuter who told the truth about the time
it takes him to cover the distance from his office-door to his front
lawn. If he is exceptionally conscientious he will take into account the
preliminary ride on the Subway and possibly even the walk from his
office to the Subway station. But no commuter ever alludes to the
fifteen minutes' walk at the other end. I did know one man who never
under-estimated the length of his daily trips, but he was a cynic who
hated the country and lived there because his wife's mother owned the
house, and he multiplied by two the time it really took him to get into
town. The exact truth I have never had.

As a matter of fact, sitting there in a rather stuffy car which made its
way through much unlovely landscape, I reflected that there are really
three different schedules on which suburban traffic is conducted. One is
the time it takes a commuter's friends to come out to see him. Another
is the time he claims it takes him to come into town every day. The
third, and incomparably the shortest of the three, is the time your
friend says it will take him to come into town after the completion of
some very extensive railway improvements which, in practice, I have
found are never completed. I am quite aware that great bridges have
been built, and that railway tunnels have been opened into Long Island
and other railway tunnels into New Jersey, and that steam is being
rapidly replaced by electricity. But it is my firm belief that such of
my suburban friends as live within the zone affected by these
improvements will move away before the change for the better actually
comes. I am no pessimist. I base this expectation on the simple fact
that every commuter I know, for as long a period as I have known him,
has been looking forward to the completion of railway improvements
involving the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars. The march of
progress apparently finds the suburban resident always a little in
advance.

Harrington met me at the station and asked me if that was not a very
good train I had come down on. The suburban virus was in me. I lied and
said yes. As we sat at our luncheon I felt how peculiarly a vital factor
in out-of-town existence the railroad constitutes. Both Harrington and
his wife spoke of trains as of living, breathing people. Some trains,
with all their faults, the Harringtons evidently loved. Others they
detested, and made no attempt to conceal the fact. I had just finished
telling Mrs. Harrington about the latest woman's suffrage parade when
Harrington said: "Do you know, my dear, the 8.13 is getting worse all
the time." I was still thinking of my own story, and I failed to catch
just who or what it was that was getting worse all the time to an extent
so inimical to Harrington's peace of mind. But Mrs. Harrington looked
up, frowning slightly, and said: "Can't anything be done?" Harrington
shook his head. "It's hopeless." By this time I was convinced that it
must be some family skeleton that Harrington had rather oddly chosen to
bring out before a stranger; some scapegrace cousin, I suspected, who
probably got drunk and came to Harrington's office and demanded money. I
looked discreetly into my plate as Mrs. Harrington suggested: "You might
write to the superintendent." "We have," replied Harrington, "and he
threatened to take it off altogether. Not that it would mean any loss. I
can make just as good time now by the 8:35."

After luncheon we walked. I have never found the walking in the suburbs
very good. There is a regrettable lack of elbow-room. A short stroll
brings one either to a railway-siding, which is bad enough, or to a
promising growth of trees, which is worse. From the road these trees
look like the beginning of a primeval jungle sweeping on to far
horizons. Plunge into that timber growth and in five minutes you emerge
on a sewered road with concrete sidewalks and ornamental lamp posts and
a crew of Italian labourers drinking beer in the shadow of a
steam-roller. It is a gash of civilisation across the face of the
wilderness, and, like most deformities, it is displeasing to the eye.
Walking under such conditions is not stimulative. I miss the sense of
space and freedom I get in the streets of New York, where I know that I
can walk twenty miles north or twenty miles east without interference or
inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban
vistas are pitifully cramped.

That day it had rained, and I should have been additionally glad to stay
indoors. But Mrs. Harrington is a fervent naturalist, and she insisted
on taking me out to look at the wild flowers and listen to the
bird-calls. Both of these branches of nature-study, I am convinced, call
for an intensity of sympathetic imagination that I am incapable of
developing; and especially the bird-calls. Concerning the latter, I
feel sure that a great deal of humbug is being said and written. I mean
to cast no reflections upon Harrington or his wife. The only occasions
on which I have known Harrington to deviate from the truth have been, as
I have already pointed out, in connection with his train-schedules. And
as Mrs. Harrington does not travel to the city, even this charge will
not hold against her. And yet I cannot help feeling that neither of the
two really hears the catbird say "miaow" or the robin "cheer up," as
they pretend to. At the first twitter or chirp from some invisible
source Mrs. Harrington stops and with radiant face asks me whether I do
not distinctly catch the "pit-pit-pity-me" of the meadow-lark. I say
yes; but I really don't, and I don't believe she does. My explanation is
that Mrs. Harrington is a woman and consequently ready to hear what she
has been led to expect she would hear. As for Harrington, he is a
devoted husband.

For let us look at the matter with an open mind. Our alphabetical
representations of animal sounds are at best only rough approximations.
Most often they are not even that. They are mere arbitrary symbols. We
use consonants where the bird uses none, as when we give the name cuckoo
to a bird whose cry is really "ooh, ooh." Or else we put in the wrong
consonants, which is shown by the fact that different nations assign
different consonantal sounds to the same bird. We do not even agree on
the vowel sounds. What is there in common between our English
"Cock-a-doodle-doo" and M. Rostand's "cocorico"? And we need not go as
far as the animal world. See how the nations differ in spelling out that
elementary human sound which is the expression of pain or surprise, and
which in this country we hear as "Oh," and the Germans hear as "Ach,"
and the Greeks heard as "Ai, Ai." If the human vocal chords can be so
imperfectly imitated, what shall we say of birds speaking after a manner
all their own? For myself I confess that in congenial company I can hear
birds say anything, but that left to myself I am sometimes puzzled by a
parrot. And that is the reason why I am sceptical concerning Mrs.
Harrington's accomplishments in this field.

But while the birds about the Harringtons' home simply offend my regard
for the truth, the Harringtons' dog causes me acute bodily and mental
discomfort. He is of a spotted white, with a disreputable black patch
over one eye, and weighs, I should imagine, between eighty and ninety
pounds. During luncheon he takes his place under the table, and from
there emits blood-curdling howls with sufficient frequency to make
conversation extremely difficult. This he varies by nosing about the
visitor's legs and growling. I am not fond of dogs under the best of
circumstances. I always labour under the presumption that they will
bite. Their habit of suddenly dashing across the floor, in furious
pursuit of nothing in particular, upsets me. But an invisible dog under
a dining-room table is a dreadful experience. It is true that I managed
to give Mrs. Harrington a fairly rational account of the woman's
suffrage parade. But was she aware, as I sat there smiling
spasmodically, what agonies of fear were mine as I waited for those
white fangs under the table to sink into my flesh? If, under the
circumstances, I confused Harriet Beecher Stowe with Julia Ward Howe,
and made a bad blunder about woman's rights in Finland, am I so very
much to blame?

Not that the Harringtons are the worst offenders in this respect. There
is an old classmate, and a very dear friend, indeed, who lives on
Flushing Bay, and has a pair of hopelessly ferocious dogs that hold the
neighbourhood in terror. The only occasion on which they have been known
to show indifference to strangers was one night when burglars broke in
and stole some silver and a revolver. When I go out to Flushing, I
stipulate that the dogs shall be locked up in the cellar from ten
minutes before my train is due until ten minutes after I have left the
house. But it would be foolhardy to omit additional precautions. Hence I
always carry an umbrella with the ferrule sharpened to a point, and when
I am within a block of the house I stoop and pick up a large stone, and
go on my way, with all my senses acute, whistling cheerfully. It is odd
how people will put themselves out to keep a harmless, poor relation out
of the way of visitors, and never think of the much greater discomfort
attendant upon the constant presence of an active bull-terrier.

I may have produced the impression that life in the country makes no
appeal to me. Nothing could be further from my intentions. Whatever
doubts I may have entertained on this point vanish completely as the
Harringtons escort me to the station in the cool of the evening, the dog
having been left at home at my request. We pass by low, white-pillared
houses behind hedges, and the scent of hay comes up from the lawns, and
laughter comes from the dark of the verandas. The city at such a time
seems a very undesirable place to return to; a place to lose one's self
in--yes, and that is all. The Harringtons never were in the city what
they are here. They have taken root, they have developed local pride
which is only the sense of home. As we walk they point out the
residences of the leading citizens. Here lives the owner of one of the
largest factories of mechanical pianos in the country. This Japanese
temple belongs to a man who writes for some of the best-known magazines.
That colonial dwelling is occupied by the lawyer who defended Mrs. Dower
when she was tried for poisoning her husband. I reflect, in genuine
humility, that in the city I never think of taking strangers to see Mr.
William Dean Howells's house or Mr. Joseph H. Choate's. And with real
regret and admiration, I say good-night to the Harringtons.




XXVII

HEADLINES


After Stephane Dubost, editor of the Paris _Reveil_, had been ten days
in this country, and had collected all his material for a series of
volumes on the American Woman, Yankee and Yellow Peril, Democracy
Decollete, and Football _versus_ the Fine Arts--to name only a few--he
was asked what single feature of our life had impressed him as most
characteristically American. He replied, "The headlines in your daily
press." Just what M. Dubost did think of our achievements in that
department of journalism may be gathered from a letter he addressed the
very same day to his friend, Marcel Complans, director of the Bureau of
Cipher Codes in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

"In nothing, my dear Marcel, is the American genius for saving time so
strikingly exemplified as in their newspaper headlines. Think of our
_Figaro_ or _Temps_ with its dreary columns of solid type introduced by
a minute solitary heading, and then pick up one of Uncle Sam's great
dailies. It may be only an item of four or five inches, what they call
here a stickful or two, but are you left to make your way unassisted
through the brief account? No. Your eye immediately catches a
time-saving headline like this:

DESERTED GIRL WIFE
    TO HOLD UP MAN.

Having that concise legend before you, all you need to do, my dear
Marcel, is simply to decide for yourself whether our story deals with an
unscrupulous wretch who abandons his young wife to engage on a career of
highway robbery; or whether it is the history of a deserted girl who
becomes the wife of a professional outlaw; or whether it is a betrayed
young wife who gives herself up to the cause of elevating the human
race. A French reader, under the circumstances, would be compelled to go
through as much as thirty or forty lines of small print before he
secured the desired information. Thus it requires but a brief experience
with American headlines to recognise that when the Chicago _Evening
Post_ says

FINDS ENGLISH FOOD
FOR LAND TAX FAITH

it means that an American single-taxer, who has just returned from Great
Britain, believes that the English people is ready to listen to the
principles of the single-tax theory. And when the New York _Sun_ says

LA FOLLETTE TALKING BOLT

it does not mean that the Senator from Wisconsin is a manifestation of
crashing, celestial eloquence, but that he is advocating a secession
from the Republican party. Can you not see, my friend, what magnificent
economies of time are effected by headlines like

WATCH SPRINGS TRAP
    FOR JAPANESE SPY

over a story dealing with the capture of an Oriental suspect by a
sentinel at one of the Pacific Coast forts, or

SCREAMING FRIARS TORTURED
CHILD MOTHER FAINTS

which does not mean that a society of howling friars have been guilty of
an atrocious crime upon an infant in the presence of its mother; or that
a band of religionists are driven by torture to cries of pain, while a
young mother faints at the sight. It only means that a poor mother, who
has suddenly gone insane, breaks into a house of refuge, where her
little boy is being cared for by a religious fraternity, accuses,
without warrant, the brothers of torturing her child, and faints. Or
take

FRENCH RACE WORN OUT
    ENGLISH TO TRIUMPH.

These lines are not the summary of a study in national growth and decay,
but expressive of the fact that a French bicycle team wins a signal
victory over a group of exhausted English competitors. Do you see now
how far towards the art of simplified story-telling these Americans have
gone?

"I can only express my profound admiration, as I pass, for the genius of
those men who almost automatically will dig the heart out of a 'story,'
and blazon it before the reader not only with marvellous brevity and
meaning, but with extraordinary appropriateness of characterisation.
Can you seize, for instance, the full relevancy of a headline like

PRESBYTERIAN FALLS
    TWENTY FEET

or,

PROFESSOR THRICE MARRIED
    DENIES AUTHENTICITY OF BIBLE

or see how the essential point is caught when a 'head' writer places

FLORODORA GIRL EXPELLED
FROM CZAR'S CAPITAL

over an account of the latest ukase which banishes from St. Petersburg
two hundred members of the Duma, twelve professors, fifty-five Jewish
bankers and artists, all the labour delegates, as well as the agent of
the American Plough Corporation, whose wife was one of the original
sextette?

"I will conclude with what to me is an example of the art of headline
writing carried almost to perfection. Suppose that at Paris a
long-distance foot-race between one of our countrymen and a foreign
athlete had been won by our compatriot. The _Reveil_ would probably say,
'Armand Wins at Auteuil,' and go on to give the details. But observe
what they do here. I cite the article complete, headline and text:

HAYES WINS

VICTOR IN DUAL MATCH OVER DORANDO

AMERICAN LEADS ITALIAN TO THE TAPE,
    AND CARRIES OFF PRIZE

DORANDO CAN DO NOTHING BETTER THAN
    SECOND

ONE MORE VICTORY ADDED TO GREAT
    RUNNER'S STRING

TEN THOUSAND CHEERING SPECTATORS
SEE THE AMERICAN RUNNER REPEAT
HIS VICTORY AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES

"New York, November 26.--The race between Hayes and Dorando this
afternoon was won by the former."




XXVIII

USAGE


    ... _a certain class of verbal critics who can never free themselves
    from the impression that man was made for language and not language for
    man._--Professor Lounsbury.

From a large number of readers we have received requests for a ruling on
disputed cases of English usage. We now proceed to answer these
inquiries in accordance with the liberal standard for which Professor
Lounsbury pleads. One man writes:

_Question:_ Which is right, "To-morrow is Sunday and we are going out,"
or "To-morrow will be Sunday and we shall go out?" _Answer:_ Both forms
are right, but as a matter of fact, if to-morrow is like other Sundays,
it will probably rain all day, and your chances of going out are not
bright.

_Q._ Must a sentence always have coherence? What is the practice of our
great writers on this point? _A._ Coherence is not essential. Thus:
"Conquests! Thousands! Don Bolaro Fizzgig--Grandee--only daughter--Donna
Christina--Splendid creature--loved me to distraction--jealous
father--high-souled daughter--handsome Englishman--Donna Christina in
despair--prussic acid--stomach pump in my portmanteau--operation
performed--old Bolaro in ecstasies--consent to our union--join hands and
floods of tears--romantic story--very." (Charles Dickens.)

_Q._ Must a sentence always have a predicate? _A._ No. For example: (1)
"The Universe smiles to me. The World smiles to me. Everything. Man.
Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything
smiles to me." (_The Complete Whitmanite_) (2) "From the frowning tower
of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with
the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the
beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed
skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the
gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools that stud the
sides of Pentelicus, down to our own Washington, throned like an empress
on the banks of the beautiful Potomac, waiting for the end which we
trust may never come." (From the _Congressional Record_.)

_Q._ Is "ivrybody" a permissible variant for "everybody"? _A._ It is.
For instance, "His dinners [our ambassador's at St. Petersburg] were th'
most sumchuse ever known in that ancient capital; th' carredge of state
that bore him fr'm his stately palace to th' comparatively squalid
quarters of th' Czar was such that _ivrybody_ expicted to hear th'
sthrains iv a calliope burst fr'm it at anny moment." (Mr. Dooley.)

_Q._ Is there good authority for saying, "He was given a hat," "He was
shown the door," etc.? _A._ The form is common, and therefore correct.
As, "The Senator _was paid_ twenty thousand dollars for voting against
the Governor"; "He _was offered_ a third term, but declined"; "The
coloured delegates _were handed_ a lemon." (From the contemporary
press.)

_Q._ The use of "who" and "whom" puzzles me. Must "who" always be used
in the nominative case and "whom" in the objective? _A._ Not
necessarily. Thus, "I told him who I wanted to see and that it wasn't
none of his business" (W. S. Devery); "That's the first guy whom he said
put him into the cooler." (Battery Dan Finn.)

_Q._ I am told that it is wrong to place a preposition at the end of a
sentence. Why can't I say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy
talking _with_"? _A._ Your example is unfortunate. You should say, "Mr.
Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talking _after_."

_Q._ Is it wrong to split infinitives? Is a phrase like "to seriously
complain" really objectionable? _A._ We hasten to most emphatically say
"Yes!"

_Q._ Is there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite
tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? _A._ Two
examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the
flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a
gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did that, and _begun_ at two
yards; but he never tried it on ag'in; for he _blowed_ the bird right
clean away at the first fire, and nobody ever _seed_ a feather on him
arterwards.'" (2) "So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my
dear--as the gen'lem'n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a
Sunday--to tell you that the first and only time I _see_ you your
likeness was _took_ on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours
than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheens (wich p'r'aps you
may have _heerd_ on Mary my dear) altho it does finish a portrait and
put the frame and glass on complete with a hook at the end to hang it up
by and all in two minutes and a quarter." (Charles Dickens.)

_Q._ What is "elegance" in style? I know it does not mean long words and
many of them; but just what does it mean? _A._ Elegance is
appropriateness. Long and circumlocutory terms are just as elegant in
the mouth of a fashionable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the
mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angels and ministers of grace defend
us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are
equally elegant.

_Q._ What is force in style? _A._ We may illustrate with a quotation
from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her
as men and women have kissed through the aeons, since the first star
hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only
about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the
native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South
America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is
nevertheless a very forcible one.




XXIX

60 H.P.


For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition
of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never
given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a
balloon at 2.30 A.M.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a
prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a
Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediaeval Florentine altar-piece made
in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with
affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that
when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family
prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but
as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A
candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium
den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in
polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has
been seen in a garage.

To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to
stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place
occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail
in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important
functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys
who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for
Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not
want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are
developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a
bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.

Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be
in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a
baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five
feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an
auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible
speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if
two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot
avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by
another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own
carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give
her personal attention to the car going south.

It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders,
without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents
should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of
New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in
the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their
pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized
with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin,"
and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You
frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires
against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street
two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to
one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the
car straight about, but when you get there they are there. "Ladies,"
you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of
fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from
the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second
Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he
says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you
will kindly step into the car, I will."

Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the
contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being.
It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in
the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing
more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the
spirit of _dolce far niente_, than the American farmer on his wagon in a
narrow road with an auto behind him. The grunt of the horn invariably
stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years,
and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he
might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he
moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws
his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged
examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three
vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural
resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the
natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.

The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of
the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one
of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is
a kindred soul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the
question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the
owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear
for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams,
and 'crap' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the
majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and
an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right,"
says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the
middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without
cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having
been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social
affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a
sleeping man. One hundred dollars."

Such incidents make it clear that the automobile as an annihilator of
space has established its reputation. In the days before the auto a
drive of fifteen or twenty miles constituted a good Sunday's outing.
To-day a man can leave New Rochelle at eight o'clock in the morning and
pay a fine at Poughkeepsie at one in the afternoon, or he can leave
Poughkeepsie at eight in the morning and at one in the afternoon be in
the lock-up at New Rochelle.

What hurts the motorist's feelings most of all, however, is to be
regarded by the public as a sort of licensed assassin. Yet almost any
one can think of people who drive a car and take no pleasure in spilling
blood. The common belief that automobile killing is a favourite sport
among our best families seems to be based on the fact that in nine cases
out of ten the occupants of a man-slaying automobile bear such
well-known Knickerbocker names as Mr. William Moriarty, chauffeur; his
friend, Mr. James Dugan, who is prominent in coal-heaving circles; and
their friends, the Misses Mayme Schultz and Bessie Goldstein. At bottom,
it would seem, most of the criticism directed against the automobile is
based on its failure to take a hog and turn him into a gentleman. But in
this respect automobiles are like many of our colleges. The comforting
thing is that the life of the automobile hog is an uncertain one. Sooner
or later he runs down a steep place into the sea, like certain of his
species mentioned in the Bible, and the question adjusts itself.

Meanwhile, however, the decent motorist must suffer for the other's
sins. A friend says: "The only time I dare be seen in my machine is
between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. Before that time people point me out as a
'joy-rider' returning from a night's debauch. After that time I am a
'joy-rider' bound for a night of it." The complaint rings true. The
exhilaration aroused by a punctured tire in the open country gathers
strength from the remarks of the spectators who wonder if you made your
money honestly. In town a defective sparkplug brings the close attention
of a crowd which exchanges opinions as to whether the lady in the
tonneau is your wife. All agree that you must have mortgaged your home
to buy the machine.

And yet it is evident that much misunderstanding could be avoided if we
had a simple code of rules for people who cross the street just as there
are regulations for the autoist. A few such rules suggest themselves: 1.
If one is about to cross the street in front of an auto, one should do
so either before the man in the car succumbs to heart failure or after,
but not while the driver is wrestling with death; it is in such cases
that one is apt to get hurt. 2. If one is in the middle of the road and
sees a car approaching, one should move either (_a_) away from the car,
(_b_) towards the car, (_c_) to the right, (_d_) to the left, or (_e_)
stand still; under no circumstances should one attempt to combine (_a_),
(_b_), (_c_), (_d_), and (_e_). 3. The safest place from which to
ascertain the make of an automobile or to estimate its cost is the
sidewalk.




XXX

THE SAMPLE LIFE


The hour, the occasion, and the scene were conducive to melancholy. We
had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again
under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of
weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare
room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of
rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away
in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from me,
wretchedly fluttered the pages of a popular magazine and looked
ill-natured and horribly unkempt. The new table-cloths had not yet been
laid for dinner. The sawdust on the floor was mostly mire. Angelina,
the cook, was screaming at Paolo and Francesca, who were trying to boil
the cat. It was very dreary.

"Harding," I said, "you were insisting only a little while ago that life
is always beautiful."

"So it is," he replied, too listless to be defiant. "To some people."

"To whom?"

"Well, to the two here, for instance," and he pointed to a pair of
handsome lovers playing golf all over a double page in the advertising
section of his magazine. "Do you mean to say these two ever know what
ugliness is, or pain, or want? Or ever grow old? Or cease to love? Here
is the perfect life for you."

"Are you so sure of that?" said some one over my shoulder, and I turned
about sharply to look into the most entrancing face I have ever beheld
in man or woman. It was Apollo standing there above me, or if not he, at
least one of the divine youths that the Greeks have left for us in
undying marble. He made Scipione's grimy cellar luminous with beauty.

"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, seating himself at our table
as joyously confident and as simple as an immortal should be. "But I
feel myself competent to speak on the point you have raised because the
Advertising Supplement you refer to is my own home. This very young man
playing golf is, as you will observe, no other than myself."

There was no denying the amazing resemblance.

"You say the Advertising Supplement is your home," I collected myself
sufficiently to ask, "but just how do you mean that?"

"Literally," he replied. "My whole life, and for that matter my parents'
life before me, has been spent in the pages you are now fingering. My
name is Pinckney, Walter Pinckney, and if you are sufficiently
interested in my career I should be glad to describe it."

"Go ahead," cried Harding, with almost ferocious earnestness.

"If I begin a bit back before my birth," said Pinckney, "you will be
patient with me. I will not detain you very long."

"Begin where you please," said Harding in the same grim manner; "only
begin."

"My father," commenced young Pinckney, "at eighteen, was a sickly
country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other
prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him
an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to
master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising
Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him
tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by investing the
small sum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling
himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence
schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and
scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the
work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a
collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his
daily training--an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame
through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble
clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of
the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls
of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at
his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules
and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an
important Eastern railroad. It was shortly after he had won this place
that he met my mother."

The caressing fondness with which he uttered the last word imparted to
his seemingly supreme beauty an added warmth of appeal.

"Her, too, you have met in the Advertising Columns. She had begun to
teach school when a mere girl; but when her father's death threw upon
her young shoulders the burden of three little children and a helpless
mother, she had risen to her greater needs. She succeeded in quadrupling
her income by learning to write short stories, criticism, and verse,
from a literary bureau which charged her a nominal fee for instruction
and purchased her output at extremely generous rates for disposal among
the leading magazines. When my father first saw her--it was in the
course of a Fourth of July excursion to Niagara Falls which, including a
three days' stay at the best hotels, was offered to the public at half
the usual cost--she had sent the eldest boy through college, her younger
sister was teaching school, and she was free to follow the inclinations
of her heart."

"You were fortunate in the selection of your immediate ancestry," said
Harding.

"Was I not?" Pinckney responded in a flush of grateful recognition. "But
that is not all. The house in which I was born, though generally
recognized as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in
reinforced concrete, was put up by my father, unassisted, from plans
which he purchased for a ridiculously small sum. Its every nook was the
abiding-place of love, of quiet content, and of nurturing comfort. The
furnace was equipped with the latest automatic devices so that it had to
be started only once a year. It was then left to the care of my mother,
who used to give it only a few minutes' attention every day without
going to the trouble of divesting herself of the gown of fine white lawn
which she always wore."

"My dear fellow," I could not keep from exclaiming, "you have almost
explained yourself. In such surroundings how could you help growing up
into what you are?"

"That is what I say, sir," he came back at me eagerly. "But you must
call to mind, also, the fostering personal care that was bestowed upon
us children. Take the matter of diet. Coffee, cocoa, excessive sweets,
every food-element tending to narcotise or over-stimulate the system was
rigorously excluded. Instead we had the numerous grain preparations that
assist nature by contributing directly to the development of our
particular faculties. In my case, for instance, it had been decided some
time before I was born that in the course of time I should enter West
Point. With that end in view Farinette, because of its muscle-building
powers, was made the principal constituent of my bill of fare. Later,
when my parents thought that the pulpit offered better chances of a
successful career, Farinette was replaced by Panema, which is notably
efficacious in the production of cerebral tissue. Just as I was taking
my examinations for college it was finally determined that the sphere of
corporation finance held out unrivalled facilities for advancement, and
Panema gave way to Hydronuxia, which acts particularly on the
imaginative faculties. As for my sisters, they fared no worse than I.
You surely have seen them in the Advertising Pages in all their splendid
bloom. Saved from overwork by soaps that make heavy washing a pleasure,
eternally youthful through the use of electric massage, they smile at
you through the reticulations of the tennis racket which the champion
played with at Newport, or recline under parasols in the bow of canoes
that will neither sink nor upset. They are very fond of playing Chopin
on a mechanical piano while the moonlight streams over the floor of the
open veranda."

Here Harding broke in sharply. "You began by differing with me on the
possibility of finding complete happiness in life, and you have done
nothing but refute your own position from the very first. I admit there
are certain essentials toward the perfect life that you have not
mentioned, but I haven't the least doubt that you already possess them
or that they will come to you in time. I mean such things as riches or
love."

"Ah, love," Pinckney murmured, and the shadow of a cloud passed over his
divine brow.

"Surely," I said, "_you_ have not sought for what love has to give and
sought in vain?"

"No," he replied thoughtfully, "I have not failed to win love. But does
love bring with it untouched felicity; that is what I ask." He
hesitated. "I will not attempt to describe her. I really could not, you
know, except in a feeble way, by saying that even to other eyes than
mine she is a woman more wonderful than any of my sisters, if that is at
all possible. We loved at first sight. I had run down for a Sunday
afternoon to Garden Towers-by-the-Sea, a beautiful suburb which a number
of enterprising citizens had built up out of a sand waste to meet the
needs of the tired urban worker who, in his expensive and uncomfortable
city flat, finds himself longing for the life-giving breeze of the ocean
and the sight of a bit of God's open country. I was walking down the
main street of the village, wearing the loosely shaped and well-padded
garments that were then popular with young men, and carrying a set of
golf-sticks in my right hand and a bull terrier under my arm. Then I saw
her. She was sitting on the porch of the house which her father had
purchased for one-third of what its value became when the completion of
extensive rapid-transit improvements brought it within thirty-five
minutes of the New York City Hall. We loved and told each other. My
father, at first, insisted that before assuming the responsibilities of
marriage a man should be in receipt of a larger independent income than
I could boast of. But when Alice pleaded that she could be of help by
raising high-grade poultry for the urban market and organising
subscribers' clubs for the magazines, my father yielded. We are to be
married in two months, sir."

Harding spoke up impatiently. "Still I fail to see where your
unhappiness lies."

"Did I say unhappiness? That is not at all the word, sir. It is rather
a sense of awe that seizes us both at times, when we are together, as
though we were in the presence of unseen influences; as though, rather,
a world not our own were projecting itself into our well-defined lives.
I have shown you that Alice and I belong to a very real, very
matter-of-fact world. But there are times when we seem to be walking in
a land of strange sounds and sights and of shadows that fan our cheeks
as they flit by."

"Oh, well," I said, "when two fond young people are together the limits
of the visible world are apt to undergo undue extension."

"Let me be specific," said Pinckney. "We first became aware of this
state of things some weeks ago. We were walking one afternoon at
twilight through a stretch of woods not far from the shore when all at
once we were conscious that the familiar aspect of things had vanished.
The park had become a virgin forest. Two savage figures girded with
skins were panting in deadly combat. One had sunk his thumbs into the
eye-sockets of his opponent, who, in turn, had buried his teeth in the
flesh of the other's arm. A wild creature, almost hidden in the long
tangle of her hair, crouched there, the only spectator of the battle,
chanting in weird tones: 'Ai! Ai! the call of the wild summons you to
the death-grapple, oh Men, and me to sing who am Woman! Fight on, oh
Men; for it is Good! The Race, the Sons of your strong loins through the
dizzy whirl-dance of all time, are watching you. Match man-strength
against man-strength, breath-rhythm against breath-rhythm, and
knee-thrust against knee-thrust!' And then one of the combatants fell,
and the victor with a yell of triumph seized the woman by the hair and,
flinging her over his shoulder, staggered off, and we heard them call
to each other, 'Oh, my Male!' 'Oh, my Female!' Then we were in our own
grove by the beach and Alice whispered dreamily, 'Dearest, how tame are
our lives.'"

"I think I begin to understand," said I. "What happened was simply that
you had walked right out of the Advertising Supplement into the Fiction
pages; and that was Jack London. Had you other experiences of the kind?"

"On another occasion," he resumed, "we were walking on the beach and
again in a flash we had lost our footing in the world we knew. We were
in a magnificent ballroom. The chandeliers were Venetian, the orchestra
was Hungarian, the decorations were priceless orchids. Every woman wore
a tiara with chains of pearls. There were stout dowagers, callow youths,
gamblers, and blacklegs, and, among the many handsome men, one of about
five-and-thirty, with a wonderfully cut chin, bending sedulously over a
glorious, slender girl whose eyes attested the purity of her soul and
fidelity unto death. 'Dearest,' she was saying, 'what does it matter
that my father was the greatest Greek scholar in America and my mother
the most beautiful woman south of Mason and Dixon's line? What that I
have ten million dollars and can ride, shoot, swim, golf, tennis, dance,
sing, compose, cook, and interpret the Irish sagas? I love you though
you have only twelve thousand a year.' And all over the hall we caught
such phrases as, 'Yes, he dropped 25,000 on Non Sequitur at Bennings.'
'Oh, just down for three weeks at Palm Beach, you know.' 'Two millions
in three weeks, they say, mostly out of Copper and Q.C.B.' 'Yes, just
back from South Dakota on the best of terms.' Then the room vanished, we
were by the sea, and Alice said wistfully, 'How limited our lives are,
dear.'"

I said: "My theory holds good. That was Robert Chambers, I am sure. Go
on."

"I have told you enough," said Pinckney, "to show what I mean by the
shadow over our happiness. It will pass away, of course. In the meantime
I try to explain to Alice that these are phantoms we vision, of no
relation to the practical life that we must lead on our side of the
boundary line; I tell her that these things we see are not, and never
have been and never will be. Am I right, do you think, sir?"

"Quite right," I told him.




XXXI

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--IV


"My latest fad," said Cooper, "is this little library of the greatest
names in literature. It is by no means complete, but the nucleus is
there."

When Cooper speaks of his fads he does himself injustice. The world
might think them fads, or worse. But I, who know the man, know that his
fondness for the insignificant or the extraordinary is something more
than eccentricity, something more than a collector's appetite run amuck.
In reality, Cooper's soul goes out to the worthless objects he
frequently brings together into odd little museums. He loves them
precisely because they are insignificant. His whole life has been a
silent protest against the arrogance of success, of high merit, of rare
value. His heart is always on the side of the _Untermensch_, a name
given by the Germans, a learned people, to what we call the under-dog.

"My collection," said Cooper, "is as yet confined almost entirely to
authors in the English language. Here is my Shakespeare, a first
edition, I believe, though undated. The year, I presume, was about 1875.
The title, you see, is comprehensive: 'The Nature of Evaporating
Inflammations in Arteries After Ligature, Accupressure, and Torsion.'
Edward O. Shakespeare, who wrote the book, is not a debated personality.
His authorship of the book is unquestioned, and I assure you it is a
comfort to handle a text which you know left its author's mind exactly
as it now confronts you in the page.

"Next to the Shakespeare you find my Dickens volumes, two in number.
Albert Dickens published, in 1904, his 'Tests of Forest Trees.' It has
been praised in authoritative quarters as an excellent work of its kind.
An older book is 'Dickens's Continental A B C,' a railway guide which I
am fond of thinking of as the probable instrument of a vast amount of
human happiness. Imagine the happy meetings and reunions which this
chubby little book has made possible--husbands and wives, fathers and
children, lovers, who from the most distant corners of the earth have
sought and found each other by means of the Dickens railway time-tables.
To how many beds of illness has it brought a comforter, to how many
habitations of despair--but I must not preach. I call your attention to
the next volume, Byron. From the title, 'A Handbook of Lake Minnetonka,'
you will perceive that it is in the same class as my Dickens."

Cooper drew his handkerchief to flip the dust from a thin octavo in
sheepskin. "This Emerson," he said, "is the earliest in date of my
Americana. William Emerson's 'A Sermon on the Decease of the Rev. Peter
Thacher' appeared in 1802, at a time when people still thought it worth
while to utilise the death of a good man by putting him into a book for
the edification of the living. The adjoining two volumes are by Spencer.
Charles E. Spencer's 'Rue, Thyme, and Myrtle' is a sheaf of dainty
poetry which was very popular in Philadelphia during the second decade
after the Civil War. Do we still write poetry as single-heartedly as
people did? It may be. Perhaps we might find out by comparing this other
volume by Edwin Spencer, 'Cakes and Ale,' published in 1897, with the
Philadelphia Spencer of forty years ago.

"I must hurry you through the rest of my books," said Cooper. "Thomas
James Thackeray's 'The Soldier's Manual of Rifle-Firing' appeared in
1858, and undoubtedly had its day of usefulness. Thomas Kipling was
professor of divinity at Cambridge University toward the end of the
eighteenth century. In 1793 he edited the volume I now hold in my hand,
'Codex Bezae,' one of the most precious of our extant MSS. of the New
Testament. I like to think of that fine old Cambridge professor's name
as bound up with patient, self-effacing scholarship and a highly
developed spirituality. But I digress. Cast your eye over this little
group of foreign writers. Here is Dumas,--Jean Baptiste Dumas,--whose
'Lecons sur la philosophic chimique,' delivered in 1835, were considered
worthy of being published thirty years later. The quaint volume that
comes next is by Du Maurier, who was French ambassador to the Hague
about 1620. The title, in the Dutch, is 'Propositie gedan door den
Heere van Maurier,' etc.--'Propositions Advanced by the Sieur du
Maurier,' one of the Regent's able and merry-hearted diplomats, I take
it. And here is Goethe; he would repay your reading. Rudolf Goethe's
'Mitteilungen ueber Obst- und Gartenbau' is one of the standard works on
horticulture.

"And finally," said Cooper with a flash of pride quite unusual in him,
"the treasure of my little library--Homer; again a first edition."

"Homer!" I cried. "An _editio princeps_!"

"Nearly one hundred and fifty years old," he said. "The Rev. Henry Homer
deserved well of his British countrymen when he gave to the world--it
was in 1767--his 'Inquiry Into the Measures of Preserving and Improving
the Publick Roads of this Kingdom.'"

Cooper sat down and eyed me doubtfully, as if awaiting an unfavourable
opinion. His face quite lit up when I hastened to assure him that his
library was one of the most impressive collections it had ever been my
good fortune to know.

"Very few collections," I told him, "bear the impress of a personality.
As a rule they are shopfuls of costly masterpieces such as any
multi-millionaire may have if he doesn't prefer horses or monkey
dinners. But how often does one find a treasure-house like yours,
Cooper, revealing an exquisitely discriminating taste in co-operation
with the bold originality of the true amateur?"




XXXII

CHOPIN'S SUCCESSORS


"It is his own composition, the final word in modern music," I had been
told. "He does not merely play the concerto; he lives it. Be sure to
watch his face." It was not a very impressive face as artists go. It was
rather heavy, rather sullen, and seemingly incapable of mirroring more
than the elementary passions. The great pianist entered the hall almost
unwillingly, and wound his way among the musicians with consummate
indifference to the roar of applause that greeted him. You might have
said that he was once more a little boy being scourged to his piano day
after day by parents who had been told that they had brought forth a
genius. He half-dropped into his seat, glanced wearily about him, then
let his eyes sink expressionless on the keyboard and his hands fall flat
on his knees, nerveless, heavy, apathetic.

The orchestra leader poised his baton and the two-score strings under
his command swung into a noble andante. The artist at the piano slowly
raised his eyes to a level with the top of his instrument, his lips just
parted as if in halting wonder at something he alone in the great hall
could see, the hands made as if to lift themselves from his knees. "Look
at his face," my neighbour said. I looked and saw that the dull mask was
slightly changing, that some emotion at last was rising to the surface
of that stolid countenance, striking its cloudy aspect with the first
anticipations of breaking light. Would that cloud dissolve? Would the
light completely break and irradiate player, piano, and audience, all
equally keyed up to the delayed climax? Would those massive hands rise
slowly, slowly, and hanging aloft an instant crash down in a rage of
harmony upon keyboard and auditors' hearts? No. The clouds once more
swept over that massive face. The player moistened his lips with his
tongue, half-turned on his chair, and slowly swept the hall with an
indifferent, almost a disdainful eye. Then he sank into his former
lassitude. His hands dropped to his side without striking the keys.
Evidently the time had not come. The violins in the orchestra sang on.

My neighbour was not the only one to fall under the spell of such
masterly musicianship. Twenty-four ladies in the parquette shrank back
into their seats with a half-sob of brimming emotion, and implored their
escorts to look at the artist's face. Eleven ladies in the lower boxes
interrupted their conversation to remark that it was wonderful what soul
those Slavs managed to put into their playing. In the upper balconies
listeners strained forward in their seats so that from below it seemed
as if they were about to precipitate themselves over the railings. What
expert opinion had described as the sublimest ten minutes in the great
pianist's greatest concerto had just begun. The conductor slightly
raised himself on his toes. Instantly through the weaving of the violins
the voices of the wood instruments began to break out. The contest
between the two came quickly to its climax. The strings were forced back
and back, wailing an ineffective protest against the shrilling advance
of the woods. A solitary 'cello made dogged resistance, knowing its
cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But
the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes
sang a paean of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, swept
down a hurricane of brasses and shook the hall with its resonant
thunders.

That was the moment our artist at the piano had been waiting for. His
heavy figure straightened up; it seemed to swell to monstrous
proportions, forcing orchestra and leader out of the vision and
consciousness of his listeners. His face now was all eloquence. A divine
wrath almost made his eyes blaze as he prepared to hurl himself at the
silent, yet quivering instrument. His huge hands hovered over the
keyboard ready to fall and destroy. His eyes ran over the keys as if
searching for the vulnerable, for the vital spot. Back and forth his
eyes ran, and his outstretched fingers kept pace with them in the air.
But those fingers could find no resting-place. Still the piano remained
silent. And then came the inevitable reaction. Such passion could not
last without crushing player and audience alike. Seven ladies in the
parquette were grasping the arms of their chairs, and three women in the
upper balcony had seized the arms of their escorts, as the brasses
crashed once and died out. The flutes for an instant reappeared, to make
way in turn for the violins, which now began timidly to peep out from
their hiding-places. They grew bolder; they joined hands, and once more
their insistent story quivered and sang throughout the house. And as
they sang, the player at the piano, exhausted by his supreme effort,
sank more and more into his indifferent former self. His form collapsed,
the fire in his eyes died out, and the powerful hands wearily drooped
and drooped till they rested once more on the player's knees. A sigh of
relief swept over the hall. Human emotion could stand no more. The
audience could hardly wait for the last throb of the violins, to break
out in rapturous applause. The master rose, bowed sorrowfully towards
nobody in particular, and walked off.

"Did you watch his face?" asked my neighbour. "Have you ever come across
such utterly overpowering individuality? I have played for fifteen
years, but if I played for fifty years I could never even approach art
like this."




XXXIII

THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT


"The arguments for and against woman suffrage," said Harding, "seem to
me very evenly balanced. I agree with Dr. Biddle of the Society for the
Promotion of Beautiful Manners, that it is unseemly for a woman to climb
a truck and demand the ballot. Dr. Biddle maintains that if woman wants
the ballot she should wait until every one is asleep and then go through
somebody's pockets for it. Woman, Dr. Biddle thinks, has her own
peculiar sphere, which, as the latest Census figures show, includes the
nursery, the kitchen, the vaudeville stage, college teaching,
stenography, the law, medicine, the ministry, as well as the manufacture
of agricultural implements, ammunition, artificial feathers and limbs,
automobiles, axle-grease, boots and shoes, bread-knives, brooms,
brushes, buttons, carriages and wagons, charcoal, cheese, cigars,
clocks, clothing and so on to x, y, and z.

"Can anything be more fatal to our ideals of true womanliness, Dr.
Biddle asks, than a suffragette who throws stones? In reply to this,
Miss Annabelle Bloodthurst asserts that if we count the number of
successful suffragette hits woman is never so true to her sex as when
she is heaving bricks at a British prime minister.

"Professor Tumbler lays particular stress on the outrageous conduct of
the English suffragettes. He recalls how the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, while eating a charlotte russe, felt his teeth strike against a
hard object, which turned out to be a cardboard cylinder inscribed
'Votes for Women.' The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was about to
light his after-dinner cigar the other day when the cigar suddenly
expanded into a paper fan bearing the legend, 'Tyrants, beware!' The
newest Dreadnought with the First Lord of the Admiralty on board was
preparing to set out on her trial trip when it was discovered that the
boilers were not making steam. When the furnace doors were opened two
dozen suffragettes, concealed within, began to shout, 'We want votes!'
The leader of the Opposition is known to have walked all the way down
Piccadilly with a tag tied to his coattails inscribed: 'I see no reason
for bestowing the suffrage on women.'

"But perhaps the most dastardly outrage occurred at the baptism of the
youngest child of a prominent treasury official. It seems that the
nurse, who was a suffragette in disguise, had removed the child, a girl,
and substituted a mechanical doll, with a phonographic attachment. The
clergyman was in the middle of his discourse when the doll began to
scream, 'Votes for women.' The father gasped, 'What! So early?' and
fainted.

"The more you weigh the reasons pro and con," continued Harding, as he
lit one of my cigars, "the harder it is to decide. Mrs. Cadgers has
pointed out that under our present system the wife of a college
professor is not allowed to vote, whereas an illiterate Greek fruit
peddler may. But Mr. Rattler replies that the college professor, too,
seldom votes, and if he does he spoils his ballot by trying to split his
ticket. Why, demands Mrs. Cadgers, should women who pay taxes be refused
a voice in the management of public affairs? Because, replies Mr.
Rattler, the suffrage and taxes do not necessarily go together. In our
country at the present day many millionaires who regularly cast their
votes never pay their taxes.

"Mr. Rattler is particularly afraid that woman suffrage will break up
the family. 'Imagine,' he says, 'a family in which the husband is a
Democrat and the wife a Cannon Republican. Imagine them constantly
fighting out the subject of tariff revision over the supper-table, and
conceive the dreadful effect on the children, who at present are
accustomed to see father light his cigar after supper and fall asleep.
Or suppose the wife develops a passion for political meetings. That
means that the husband will have to stay at home with the baby.' 'Well,'
replies Mrs. Cadgers, 'such an arrangement has its advantages. It would
not only give the wife a chance to learn the meaning of citizenship, but
it would give the husband a chance to get acquainted with the baby.' And
besides, Mrs. Cadgers goes on to argue, a woman's political duties need
not take up more than a small fraction of her time. That, retorts Mr.
Rattler, with a sneer, is because woman derives her ideas on the subject
from seeing her husband fulfil his duties as a citizen once every two
years when he forgets to register.

"An excellent debate on the subject was the one between Mrs. Excelsior,
who spoke in favour of the ballot for women, and Professor Van Doodle,
who upheld the negative. Professor Van Doodle maintained that women are
incapable of taking a genuine interest in public affairs. What is it
that appeals to a woman when she reads a newspaper? A Presidential
election may be impending, a great war is raging in the Far East, an
explorer has just returned from the South Pole, and, woman, picking up
the Sunday paper, plunges straight into the fashion columns! She hardly
finds time to answer her husband's petulant inquiry as to what she has
done with the comic supplement. Can woman take an impersonal view of
things? No, says Professor Van Doodle. In a critical Presidential
election, one in which the fate of the country is at stake, she will
vote for the candidate from whom she thinks she can get most for her
husband and her children, whereas, her husband under the same
circumstances will cast aside all personal interests and vote the same
ticket his father voted for. Woman, concluded the professor, is
constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong,
between truth and falsehood.

"Mrs. Excelsior made a spirited defence. She showed that woman's
undeveloped sense of what truth and honesty are, would not handicap her
in the pursuit of practical politics. She argued that the complicated
problems of municipal finance are no easier for the man who sets out to
raise a family on fifteen dollars a week than for the woman who succeeds
in doing so. She declared that a person who can travel thirty miles by
subway and surface car, price $500 worth of dressgoods, and buy her
lunch, all on fifteen cents in cash and a transfer ticket, would make a
good comptroller for New York City.

"Professor Van Doodle claimed that under woman suffrage only a
good-looking candidate would stand a chance of being elected. Mrs.
Excelsior replied that there was no reason for believing that women
would be more particular in choosing a State Senator than in selecting a
husband. The professor was foolish when he asserted that if women went
to the polls they would vote for the aldermen and the sheriffs, and
would forget to vote for the President of the United States, and would
insist on doing so in a postscript. This was of a piece with the other
ancient jest that women are sure to vote for a Democrat when at heart
they prefer a Republican, and _vice versa_.

"The whole case," concluded Harding, "was summed up by the Rev. Dr.
Hollow when he said that in theory there is no objection to the present
arrangement by which man rules the earth through his reason, and woman
rules man through his stomach; but unfortunately, the human reason and
the average man's stomach are apt to get out of order."




XXXIV

THE GERMS OF CULTURE


In my afternoon paper there was a letter by Veritas who tried to prove
something about the Trusts by quoting from the third volume of
Macaulay's history. After dinner I took the book from the shelf and as I
struck it against the table to let the dust fly up, I thought of what
Mrs. Harrington said. The Harringtons had spent an evening with me. As
they rose to go Mrs. Harrington ran the tip of her gloved finger across
half a dozen dingy volumes and sniffed. "Why don't you put glass doors
on your bookshelves?" she asked. It was a raw point with me and she knew
it. "The pretty kind, perhaps," I sneered, "with leaded panes and an
antique iron lock?" "Exactly," she replied. "The dust here is
abominable. You must be just steeped in all sorts of infection; and
perhaps if you kept your books under lock and key people wouldn't run
away with them." I was a fool to have tried irony upon Mrs. Harrington.
Her outlook upon life is literal and domestic. Books are to her
primarily part of a scheme of interior decoration. Harrington's views
come closer to my own, but Harrington is an indulgent husband.

The incident was now a week old, but something of the original fury came
back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of
dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who
will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden
dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of
the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that
is swept up by trailing skirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs?
And the dust of old beliefs in which we live, my friend? And the dust
that statesmen and prophets are always throwing into our eyes? None of
these interfere with Mrs. Harrington's peace of mind. But when it comes
to the dust on the gilt tops of my red-buckrammed Moliere she fears
infection.

And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree
with me that infection from book-dust is not an ignoble form of death. I
sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says the
_Evening Star_, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after
a very brief illness. Friday night he was with a merry group of diners
in one of our best-known and most brilliantly lighted Broadway
restaurants. He partook heartily of lobster salad, of which, his closest
friends declare, he was inordinately fond. Almost immediately he
complained of being ill and was taken home in a taxicab." If I were H.
Wellington Jones and it were my fate to die of poison I could frame a
nobler end for myself. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," I would have it read,
"died yesterday of some mysterious form of bacterial poisoning
contracted while turning over the pages of an old family Bible which he
was accustomed to consult at frequent intervals. Mr. Smith had a cut
finger which was not quite healed and it is supposed that a dust-speck
from the pages of the old book must have entered the wound and induced
sepsis. He was found unconscious in his chair with the book open at the
thirtieth chapter of Proverbs." Yes, I sometimes find it hard to
understand what Harrington, a man of really fine sensibilities, sees in
Mrs. Harrington. The very suggestion of locking up books to prevent
their being carried away hurts like the screech of a pencil upon a
slate. I think of Mrs. Harrington and then I think of Cooper. Cooper's
shelves are continuously being denuded by his friends. But if you think
of Cooper as a helpless victim you are sadly mistaken. There is an
elaborate scheme behind it all, a scheme of such transcendent ingenuity
as only simple-hearted, sweet-natured, unpractised, purblind visionaries
like Cooper are capable of.

He let me into the secret one day when he saw that I was about to find
it out for myself. "I know very many dear people," he said, "who are too
busy to read books or too little in the habit of it. You know them, too;
they are men and women in whom the pulse of life beats too rapidly for
the calm pleasures of reading. They are not insensible to fine ideas,
but they must see these ideas in concrete form. If I, for instance, wish
to know something about Spain, I get one of Martin Hume's books, but
these people take a steamer and go to Spain. I have read everything of
Meredith's and they have read almost nothing, but they saw Meredith in
London and spent a week-end with him at a country-house in Sussex. I
avoid celebrities in the flesh. I don't want to minister to them and I
want still less to patronise them. I am afraid I should be disappointed
in them and I am sure they would be disappointed in me.

"However, that's not the point," says Cooper. "The problem is to make a
man read who won't read of his own accord. I do it by asking such a man
to dinner. I pull out a volume of Marriott's and remark, without
emphasis, that after infinite exertion I have just got it back from
Woolsey, who is wild over the book. The fires of envy and acquisition
flash in my visitor's eye. Might he have the book for a day or two? Yes,
I say after some hesitation, but he must promise to bring it back. He
grows fervent. Of course he will bring it back, by Saturday at the very
latest and in person. And he is my man from that moment. I have lost the
book, of course, but I have smuggled my troops within the fort, I have
laid the train, I have transmitted the infection. The serpent is in the
garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate,
a red serpent about a golden staff.

"Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have
handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at
least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon
outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book. But if Hobson
expects me to drop in at any moment, he is afraid I may find the book on
his library table and ask him whether he has read it. So he hides the
book in his bedroom. Then he is indeed mine. Some night he will be out
of sorts and find it hard to go to sleep. His eye will fall on the book
lying there on his table, and he will pick it up, at the same time
lighting a cigar. I shall never see that book again. But, I leave it to
you, who needs that book more, I or Hobson?"

But Cooper did not tell all. I know he has made use of shrewder tactics.
Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a
half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French
criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is
just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased
trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite
ineptitude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day
politics and science, and everything else in the present that
well-informed people are supposed to know. It goes with his total
inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in
the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.

How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar
significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's
houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a
Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say,
has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna
Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have
heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him. Or Hobson
may not be going home that night, or he may object to carrying a parcel
in the subway, or for any other reason he will omit to take the book
with him. "The next day," says Cooper, "I pay Hobson a return visit, and
forget the book on his hall-table. Frequently Hobson may be too busy to
take notice of the accident. In that case I call him up on the telephone
as soon as I leave his house and ask in great agitation whether by any
chance I have left a volume of Maeterlinck on his hall-table. Sometimes
I add that Woolsey has been after that volume for weeks. That night, I
feel sure, Hobson will carry the book up to his bedroom."

And as Cooper spoke I thought of the Smith family, whom, by methods like
those I have described, Cooper succeeded in saving from themselves.
Nerves in the Smith family were badly rasped. The mother was not making
great headway in her social campaigns. Her husband chafed at his
children's idleness and extravagance. The children went in sullen
fashion about their own business. They had no resources of their own.
There was gloom in that household and stifled rancour, and the danger
of worse things to come, until the day when Cooper called and forgot at
one blow a copy of "Richard Feverel," the "Bab Ballads," and the third
volume of Ferrero's "Rome."

As I have said, Cooper was not blind to the good he was doing. False
modesty was not one of his failings. He would continually have me admire
his bookshelves. The books he was proudest of were those he had lent or
given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would
boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my
Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner
some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and,
like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I
don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I
think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next
morning. He devoured Gibbon. From him he went to Tacitus. He has since
read hundreds of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of
volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending
me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my
Montaigne--gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a
nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from
Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is
gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled at me
beatifically.

That was Cooper. But Mrs. Harrington that night saw things in quite a
different light. She grumbled and sniffed, and finally grew vehement. I
am not a saint like Cooper, but here and there my shelves, too, show the
visitations of friends. "Not a single complete set," wailed Mrs.
Harrington, "everything lugged away by people who should be taught to
know better. Browning, volumes I, II, V, and VII--four volumes gone.
Middlemarch, volume II, first volume gone. Morley's Gladstone, volumes I
and III, one volume gone. I wager you don't even know who has the second
volume of your Gladstone. Do you, now?"

To tell the truth, I did not for the moment know. And as I hesitated she
thrust one of the volumes in triumph at me and mechanically I opened the
book and saw a red serpent about a golden staff. "I remember now," I
told Mrs. Harrington. "I'll get the second volume the next time I call
on Cooper."



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