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We were speaking of the man whose career was written in terms of huge corporations and incomparable art collections.
"What a life it was!" said Cooper. "From his office-desk he controlled the destinies of one hundred million people. His leisure hours were spent amidst the garnered beauty of five thousand years. Isn't it almost an intolerable thought that the same man should have been master of the Stock Exchange and owner of that marvellous museum in white marble on Thirty-sixth Street?"
"Cooper," I said, "you sound like the I. W. W."
"I am that," he retorted. "I express the Inexhaustible Wonder of the World in the face of this thing we call America. A nation devoted to the principle that all men are bornequal has produced the perfect type of financial absolutism. A people given up to material aims has cornered the art treasures of the ages. Need I say more?"
"You needn't," I said. "You have already touched the high-water mark in lyricism."
But Harding waved me aside.
"I have also been thinking of that marble palace on Thirty-sixth Street," he said. "I can't help picturing the scene there on that critical night in the fall of 1907 when Wall Street was rocking to its foundations, and a haggard group of millionaires were seeking a way to stave off ruin. I imagine the glorious Old Masters looking down from their frames on that unhappy assembly of New Masters—the masters of our wealth, our credit, our entire industrial civilisation. I imagine Lorenzo the Magnificent leaning out from the canvas and calling the attention of his neighbour, Grolier, to that white-faced company of great American collectors. Theperspiring gentleman at the head of the table had one of the choicest collections of trust companies in existence. The man at his elbow was the owner of an unrivalled collection of copper mines and smelters. Facing him was an amateur who had gone in for insurance companies. Others there had collected railroads, or national banks, or holding companies. No wonder old Lorenzo was moved at the prospect of so many matchless accumulations, representing the devoted labour of years, going under the hammer. Around the walls the wonderful First Editions stood at attention and some one was saying, 'Naturally, on the security of your first mortgage bonds—'"
"Putting poetry aside," I said somewhat impatiently, "what I should like to know is whether this garnered beauty of five thousand years, as Cooper calls it, really has any meaning to its owners. I understand that most of our great collections are bought in wholesale lots, Shakespeare folios by the yard, Chineseporcelains by the roomful. Does a man really take joy in his art treasures in such circumstances?"
"Of course he does," said Cooper. "If we buy masterpieces in the bulk, that again is the American of it. I am certain that this man's extraordinary business success is to be explained by the mental stimulus he derived from his books and his pictures. His business competitors really had no chance. Their idea of recreation was yachts or cards or roof-gardens. But he found rest in the presence of the loveliest dreams of dead painters and poets. Can't you see how a man's imagination in such surroundings would naturally expand and embrace the world? No wonder he thought in billions of dollars. Why, I myself, if I could spend half an hour before a Raphael whose radiant beauty brings the tears to your eyes, could go out and float a $100,000,000 corporation."
"Having first dried your tears, of course," I suggested.
"Well, yes," he said.
Harding had been showing signs of impatience, a common trait with him when other people are speaking.
"When a rich man dies," he said, "the first thing people ask is what will the stock market do. They were putting that question last week. Your Wall Street broker is a sensitive being. Nothing can happen at the other end of the world but he must rush out and sell or buy something. Returning, he says to the junior partner, 'I see there has been a big battle at Scutari. Where's Scutari and what are they fighting about?' 'Search me,' says the junior partner, 'but I think you did right in buying.' 'I sold,' says the broker. 'Who won the battle?' says the junior partner. 'I don't recall,' says the broker. But he is convinced that no big battle should be allowed to pass without being reflected in Wall Street.
"But that is not what I wanted to say. Suppose the market does go up two points or loses two points. What is the effect on the Stock Exchange compared with the crisis that ensues in the art world when a rich Americandies? There's where things begin to look panicky. The quotations on Rembrandts and Van Dycks are cut in two. There is consternation in London auction rooms and Venetian palaces. In some half-ruined little Italian town the parish council has almost made up its mind to ship to New York the thirteenth-century altar piece which is the glory of the cathedral. The news comes that Crœsus is dead and the parish authorities see their dreams of new schools and a new chapel and a modern water supply vanish. That is the crisis worth considering."
"Not to speak," I said, "of that little shop on Fourth Avenue where they paint Botticellis."
"I admit that Harding has made a very interesting suggestion, though probably without any deliberate intention on his part," said Cooper. "This steady drain by Wall Street upon Europe's art treasures is a civilising process which scarcely receives the attention it deserves, except when some Paris editor loses his temper and calls us barbarians anddespoilers. I am not sure who is the barbarian, the American trust magnate who thinks a million francs is not too much for one of Raphael's Madonnas, or the scion of Europe's ancient nobility who thinks that no Madonna is worth keeping if you can get a million francs for it. According to the European idea, the proper place for a masterpiece is a corner of the lounging-room where the weary guest, after a hard day with the hounds, may be tempted to stare at the canvas for a moment and say, 'Nice little daub, what?' Their masterpieces are made to be seldom seen and never heard of.
"Now see what we do with the same picture over here. Before it is brought into the country all the papers have cable despatches about it, and they have impressed its value on the public mind by multiplying the real price by five. Then we advertise it by raising the question whether it is genuine or a fake. Then we put it into a museum and countless thousands besiege the doorkeeper and ask which is the way to the million-dollar picture.Then the Sunday papers print a reproduction in colours suitable for framing, but it isn't framed very often because the baby destroys it while papa is busy with the comic supplement. Then the New York correspondents of the Chicago papers write columns about the picture. Then it is taken up by women's clubs, the reading circles, and the Chautauqua. Before the process is completed that picture has entered into the daily thought and speech of the American people."
Harding interrupted.
"The members of the European nobility have seldom been interested in art. They have been too busy wearing military uniforms or pursuing the elusive fox all over the landscape."
"But that is just the point I was making," said Cooper indignantly.
"Yes, but not so clearly as I have formulated it," said Harding. "The fact is that art has always flourished under the patronage of the merchant class. The Athenians werea trading people. Lorenzo the Magnificent came from a family of pawn-brokers. Rembrandt sold his pictures to the sturdy, and quite homely, tea and coffee merchants of Holland. It is preposterous to suppose that because a man is lucky in the stock market he is incapable of appreciating the very best things in art. He is not incapable; only he keeps his interests separate. From ten o'clock to three our patron of the arts is busy downtown attending to the unfortunate financiers whom he has caught on the wrong side of the market. If Cooper here were a Cubist painter, and you gave him the run of a great art collector's front office on settlement day, he could produce any number of pictures entitled Nude Speculator Descending a Wall Street Staircase."
"The European aristocracy doesn't always despise us," I said. "Occasionally an American will be decorated by the Grand Duke of Sonderklasse-Ganzgut with the cross of the Bald Eagle of the Third Class, theperson thus honoured being worth nine hundred million dollars and the area of the Prince's dominions being eighty-nine square miles."
Questionnaire:A favourite indoor amusement in uplift circles.
His eyes were bloodshot and he stared forward into vacancy.
"We were married," he said, "shortly after I was graduated from law school. For just five years we were happy. We were in love. I was making good in my profession. Helen took delight in her household duties and her baby. Then one day—the exact date is still engraved in letters of fire on my memory—I received a letter. It was from the Society for the Propagation of Ethical Statistics. It said that a study was being made of the churchgoing habits of college graduates, and there was a printed list of questions which I was requested to answer. I cannot recall the entire list, but these were some of the items:
"Do you go to church willingly or to please your wife?
"Do you stay all through the sermon?
"What is the average amount you deposit in the contribution plate (a) in summer; (b) in winter?
"Is your choice of a particular church determined by (a) creed; (b) the quality of the preaching; (c) ventilation?
"Are you ever overtaken by sleep during the sermon, and if so, at what point in the sermon do you most readily yield to the influence? (Note: In answering this question a state of recurrent drowsiness is to be considered as sleep.)
"Do you go to sleep most easily under (a) an Episcopalian; (b) Presbyterian; (c) Methodist; (d) Rabbi; (e) Ethical Culturist? (Note: Strike out all but one of the above names.)
"Is your awakening attended by a sensation of remorse or merely one of profound astonishment?
"What do you consider to be the ideallength for a sermon, leaving climatic conditions out of account?
"I tossed the letter across the breakfast table to Helen and intimated that I couldn't spare the time for an answer. But Helen insisted it was my duty as a college graduate. If the science of sociology couldn't look to us men of culture for its data, whom could it go to? So I telephoned down to the office that I would be late and sat down to draft my reply. It was much more difficult than I imagined. I was amazed to find how little I knew of my own habits and processes of thoughts. It took the greater part of the morning, and when I finally did get down to the office I learned that my most important client, an aged gentleman of uncertain temper, had gone off in a rage saying he would never come back. He kept his word.
"That letter was the beginning. I had no leisure to worry over this loss of a very considerable part of my income, because the next morning's mail brought a letter from the Association for the Encouragement of theCity Beautiful. It contained a very long questionnaire which I was requested to fill out and forward by return mail. I was asked to state whether the character of the telegraph poles in our neighbourhood was such as to reflect credit on the civic spirit of the community, in respect to material (a) wood, (b) ornamental iron; and secondly, as to paint, (a) yellow, (b) red, (c) green, (d) no paint at all. I was also to say whether conditions in our neighbours' back yards were conducive to the propagation of the typhoid-bearing or common house-fly and to give my estimate of the number of flies so propagated in the course of a week, in hundreds of thousands. Finally, was the presence of the house-fly in our community due to the negligence of individual citizens, or was it the direct result of inefficient municipal government? And if the latter, was our municipal administration Republican or Democratic, and what were the popular majorities for mayor since the Spanish-American war?
"With Helen's assistance I managed tosend off my reply within two days. But when I came down to my place of business I found that I had missed an important long-distance call from Chicago which the office-boy had promised to transmit to me, but failed to do so because he did not understand it in the first place."
He sighed and stared at the floor. His emaciated fingers beat a rapid tattoo on my desk. He droned on in dull, impersonal tones, as if this story of the wreck of a man's happiness had no special concern for him.
"Well," he said, "you can foresee the end for yourself. Within less than two months my law business disappeared, because I simply could not devote the necessary time to it. I resorted to desperate measures. I wrote to our alumni secretary, asking him to remove my name from the college catalogue; but it was too late. My name was by this time the common property of all the sociological laboratories and research stations in the country. At home, want began to stare us in the face. Worry over my financial condition,added to the long hours of labour involved in filling out questionnaires, undermined my health. I grew morose, ill-tempered, curt in my behaviour to Helen and the child. We still loved each other, but the glow and tenderness of our former relations had disappeared.
"Fortunately Helen did not feel my neglect as she might. For by this time she, too, was getting letters from sociological experiment stations. Helen was graduated from a New England college. Her letters, at first, dealt with problems of domestic economy. She had to write out model dietaries, statements of weekly expenses, the relative merits of white and coloured help. Later she was led into the field of child psychology. Our little Laura was hardly able to go out into the open air, because her mother had to keep her under observation during so many hours of the day. The child grew pale and nervous. Helen grew thin. In her case, poor girl, it was actual lack of food. There was no money in the house. One night as we satdown at table there was just a glass of milk and a slice of bread and butter at Laura's plate; for us there was nothing. At first I failed to understand. Then I looked at Helen and she was trying to smile through her tears."
He sobbed and I turned and stared out of the window.
"That night," he said, "I went out and pawned my watch; my great-grandfather had worn it. People rally quickly under trouble, and the next morning we were fairly cheerful. I set to work on a list of questions from the Bureau of Comparative Eugenics. Helen was busy with a questionnaire on Reaction Time in Children Under Six, from the Psychological Department at Harvard. I was resigned. I looked up and saw Laura playing with her alphabet blocks. I thought: Well, our lives may be spoiled, but there is the child. Life had cast no shadow on the current of her young days. At that moment the hall-boy brought in a letter. It was addressed to Miss Laura Smith—our baby.It was from the Wisconsin Laboratory of Juvenile Æsthetics. It contained a list of questions for the child to answer. How many hours a day did she play? Did she prefer to play in the house or on the street? Did she look into shop windows when she was out walking or at moving-picture posters? Was she afraid of dogs? I was crushed. There was a mist before my eyes. I fell forward on the table and wept."
His lip trembled, but the manhood was not gone from him. He faced me with a show of firmness.
"Mind you," he said, "I am not complaining. The individual must suffer if the world is to move forward. We have suffered, but in a good cause."
I agreed. I recalled the tabulated results of a particularly elaborate questionnaire printed in the morning's news. Questions had been sent to a thousand college graduates. Of that number it appeared that 480 lived in the country, 230 preferred the drama to fiction, 198 were vegetarians, and 576 voted forMr. Wilson at the last Presidential election. Those who voted the Democratic ticket were less proficient in spelling than those who voted for Colonel Roosevelt. Could anything be more useful?
I have a confession to make and I have my desk to clean out. One is as hard to go at as the other. If people would only refrain from putting my books and papers in order whenever I am away, I could always find things where I leave them and the embarrassment I am about to relate would have been spared me. After all, there is efficiency and efficiency. If the book I need at any moment is always buried beneath a pile of foreign newspapers, it is only interfering with my work to haul it out during my absence and put it on the desk right in front of me, where I cannot see it.
It was at Harding's place that I met Dr. Gunther. Harding had insisted that we two ought to know each other. After I had spent half an hour in the Doctor's company I agreed that had been worth my while; therest is for him to say. Gunther is a physician of high standing, but his hobby is astronomy, and it was quite evident that he is as big an expert in that field as in his own profession. We spent a delightful evening. As he rose to say good-night, Gunther turned to me and smiled in a timid fashion that was altogether charming.
"I must confess," he said with a sort of foreign dignity of speech, "that my desire to make your acquaintance was not altogether disinterested. I have here," pulling a large envelope out of his pocket, "a few remarks which I have thrown together at odd moments, and which it occurred to me might be of interest to your readers. It is on a subject which I can honestly profess to know something about. Perhaps you might pass it on to your editor after you have glanced through it and decided that it had a chance. In case it is found unavailable for your purposes, you must be under no compunction about sending it back. You see, I have put the manuscript into a stamped and addressedenvelope. I know how busy you journalists are."
I told him I would be delighted to do what I could. I brought the manuscript to the office next morning, laid it on my desk, and forgot about it. It was a Saturday. After I left the office, the janitor's assistant, being new to the place, came in and cleaned up my room. When I looked for the paper on Monday, I could not find it. At first I was not alarmed, because I reasoned that in the course of two or three weeks it would turn up.
But this was evidently Dr. Gunther's first experience as a contributor to the press. He was impatient. Within a week I had a letter from him, dated Boston, where, as he explained, he had been called on a matter of private business which would keep him for some time. Without at all wishing to seem importunate, he asked whether my editor had arrived at any decision with regard to his manuscript. It was a vexing situation. I shrank from writing and confessing how clumsy I had been; and besides the paperwas likely to be found at any moment. I saw that I must fight for time.
What I am about to say will confirm many good people in their opinion of the unscrupulous nature of the newspaper profession; but the truth must be told. I determined to write to Dr. Gunther as if I had read his article. The terrible difficulty was that I did not know what it was about. I was fairly sure it had to do with one of two things, medicine or astronomy. He had said, when he gave me the manuscript, that it was a subject on which he could claim special knowledge. But which of the two was it? For some time I hesitated, and then I wrote the following letter:
"Dear Dr. Gunther: Before giving your valuable paper a second and more thorough reading, I must bring up a question which suggests itself even after the most cursory examination. It is this: Will your article go well with illustrations, and if so where are they to be had? You know that ours is a picture supplement, appealing to a generalaudience, and there is every chance for inserting illustrations into an article of scientific nature abounding in such close-knit argument as you present. Of course there is not the least reason for haste in the matter. A reply from you within the next four weeks will be in time."
Next morning I found a telegram from Boston on my desk. It said: "Naturally no objection to pictures. Suggest you reproduce some of the illustrations from Langley's masterly work on the subject. Gunther."
My ruse had succeeded. I was prepared now to keep up a fairly active correspondence until the missing paper was found. I knew of Samuel Pierpont Langley, one of the greatest of American astronomers and a pioneer of aviation. I turned to the encyclopædia to see which one of Langley's books was likely to be the one Gunther had in mind. There, before me, was a biographical sketch of John Newport Langley, an English physiologist, who had published, among otherthings, a treatise "On the Liver," and another "On the Salivary Glands." I recalled that at Harding's house Gunther, after an elaborate discussion of the present state of meteorology, had drifted into a spirited tirade against the evils of ill-cooked and undigested food. It might very well be this paper "On the Salivary Glands" that Gunther had in mind.
I delayed writing as long as I could while the office was being ransacked for the missing article. It was a hopeless search. The manuscript had evidently been swept away into the all-devouring waste basket, another victim to mistaken ideals of efficiency. A few days later came a long and friendly letter from Gunther. Without wishing to flatter me, he said that he was quite as much interested in my opinion of his article as in getting it published. He hoped to hear from me at my very earliest convenience.
I waited nearly a week, and yielding to fate wrote as follows:
"Dear Dr. Gunther: The article is altogetheradmirable. It seems to me that there are just two subjects which never lose their appeal to the average man. One is the food by which he lives. The other is the universe in which he lives. They represent the opposite poles in his nature, one being no less important than the other. Let the primitive man but satisfy the cravings of his stomach, and his awed gaze will turn to the illimitable glory of the stars. I think of Pasteur's epoch-making researches into the processes of food-fermentation and then I think of Galileo. If you ask me which is the greater man, I will say frankly I do not know. Your article will duly appear in our magazine, though not for some time. In the meanwhile, it may be that additions or changes will suggest themselves to you. Very likely you have a carbon copy of your manuscript at home. Make such alterations as you see fit and send the new manuscript to us as soon as you are satisfied with it."
The foregoing letter was addressed to Dr. Gunther in Boston. Two days later he wrotefrom his home address in New York. He said: "I cannot speak adequately of the consideration you have given to my poor literary effort. Your letter offering me an opportunity to revise the manuscript reached me just before I left for New York. At home I found the original article awaiting me, in my own envelope. Evidently it had occurred to you that I might not have a copy of the article at hand—which is indeed the case—and so you hastened to send me the original."
Of course the envelope containing the good Doctor's manuscript had not fallen into the hands of the janitor at all. It had caught the quick eye of our conscientious mail-boy, who saw his duty and promptly did it. It only remains for me to persuade the managing editor to print the article when it comes back. After what I have gone through, this should not be difficult. Our readers, therefore, may look forward to a masterly article on a subject of great interest. Whether it is an astronomical article or a pure food article the reader will learn for himself.
Cooper was in a confidential mood.
"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"
"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor except, possibly, his wife and the children."
"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently published an article on Social Decadence in theNorth American Review. He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be increasing most rapidly from thatgroup least fitted by heredity or by income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of "reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to recall what they are."
"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."
"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't write the way Madame de Sévigné did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.
"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that unhappy predilectionfor getting into tight places which is one of the characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when an explosion of gas—unavoidable, as in all mine disasters—killed nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the following letter:
"'Good-bye, my children, God bless you.'
"He had two children, which for a man of low social worth was doing quite well. But on the other hand he was improvident enough to leave his children without a mother. When I was at college, my instructor in rhetoric was always saying that my failure to write well was due to the fact that I had nothing to say; and he used to quote passages from Isaiah to show how the thing should be done. I think my rhetoric teacher wouldhave approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary style. I think Isaiah would have."
"But we can't all of us work in the mines," I said.
"Therefore it is not to you that America is looking for the development of an epistolary art," said Cooper; "an art in which we are bound to take first place long before our coal deposits are exhausted. Charles Crawl had his predecessors. In November, 1909, Samuel Howard was thoughtless enough to let himself be killed, with several hundred others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illinois. He, too, left a letter behind him. He wrote:
"If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone. I tried my best to get out and could not.
"If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone. I tried my best to get out and could not.
"You see, being a low-income man, of small social worth and pitifully inefficient, even whenhe did his best to get out, he could not. But perhaps the subject tires you?"
"You might as well go on," said Harding. "If you finish with this subject you will have some other grievance."
"I have only two more examples of the vulgar epistolary style to cite," said Cooper. "Strictly speaking one of them is not a letter. But it is to the point. On the night of April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon of low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to be swimming in the North Atlantic. TheTitanichad just sunk from beneath his feet. But perhaps I had better quote the testimony before the Mersey Commission, which, being an official communication, is necessarily unanswerable, as the late Sir W. S. Gilbert pointed out:
"Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny Bannon on a grating—
"Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny Bannon on a grating—
"From the fact that Johnny Bannon had managed to possess himself of a grating we are justified in concluding that he was a man ofsomewhat higher social worth than the witness, Dillon. However,
"—came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. He said, "Cheero, Johnny," and Bannon answered, "I am all right, Paddy." There was not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, saying, "Well, so long, Johnny," swam off—
"—came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. He said, "Cheero, Johnny," and Bannon answered, "I am all right, Paddy." There was not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, saying, "Well, so long, Johnny," swam off—
In thus leaving Johnny Bannon in undisputed possession of the grating you see that Dillon once more wrote himself down as a low-grade man unfit for competitive survival. However,
—"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.
—"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.
And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flashlight, and Dillon was pulled out of the water to go on stoking and accelerating the process of national decadence.
"My last letter," continued Cooper, "was written in October, 1912, in the Tombs. The author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the patrons of educational moving-picture showsall over the country as Dago Frank. It was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a distinguished ornament of our Great White Way, cut down before his time by a bullet from behind. Cirofici wrote:
"I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like a little baby.—Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of course, you don't know what I know."
"I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like a little baby.—Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of course, you don't know what I know."
"Please," said Harding, "please don't knock a hole into your own argument by asking us to shed tears over the undefiled wells of purity that lie deep in the soul of the Bowery gunman. You won't contend that Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss to the nation."
"It would be an act of delusion on my part," said Cooper, "to expect you to see what I am driving at without going to thetrouble of spelling it out for you, Harding, even if you do belong to the classes of superior social worth. What I want to express is the justifiable wrath which possesses me at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures and adding them up and dividing by three and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafalgar, and all that rot. What if empires, and republics, and incomes, and the size of families do rise and fall? Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay? As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,' is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. And Cirofici, pouring his soul out to his 'pal,' crying like a child over those poor lambs, Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood—"
"If that's what you mean," said Harding with suspicious humility, "I quite agree with you. You know, I have often—"
"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary for you to continue."
At 5:15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally sultry day in August, John P. Wesley, forty-seven years old, in business at No. 634 East Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and hardware, was descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway at Twenty-eighth Street, when it occurred to him suddenly how odd it was that he should be going home. His grip tightened on the hand rail and he stopped short in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the ground in pained perplexity. The crowd behind him, thrown back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful office-boys looked back at him and asked what was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him aside without apology. But Wesley did not mind. He was asking himself why it was that the end of the day's work should invariablyfind him descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway. Was there any reason for doing that, other than habit? He wondered why it would not be just as reasonable to cross the avenue and take an uptown train instead.
Wesley had been taking the downtown train at Twenty-eighth Street at 5:15 in the afternoon ever since there was a Subway. At Brooklyn Bridge he changed to an express and went to the end of the line. At the end of the line there was a boat which took him across the harbour. At the end of the boat ride there was a trolley car which wound its way up the hill and through streets lined with yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family houses, out into the open country, where it dropped him at a cross road. At the end of a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of stucco and timber, standing away from the road, its angular lines revealing mingled aspirations toward the Californian bungalow and the English Tudor. In the house lived a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who wasWesley's wife, and two young girls who were his daughters. They always came to the door when his footsteps grated on the garden path, and kissed him welcome. After dinner he went out and watered the lawn, which, after his wife and the girls, he loved most. He plied the hose deliberately, his eye alert for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not been coming on well, because of a scorching sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with his wife on matters of domestic economy ushered in the end of a busy day. At the end of the day there was another day just like it.
And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley was asking whether right to the end of life this succession of days would continue. Why always the south-bound train? He was aware that there were good reasons why. One was the tall grey-haired woman and the two young girls at home who were in the habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the garden path. They were his life. But apparently, too, there must be life alongthe uptown route of the Interborough. He wanted to run amuck, to board a north-bound train without any destination in mind, and to keep on as far as his heart desired, to the very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park, where they played polo, or the Bronx, where there was a botanical museum and a zoo. Even if he went only as far as Grand Central Station, it would be an act of magnificent daring.
Wesley climbed to the street, crossed Fourth Avenue, descended to the uptown platform, and entered a train without stopping to see whether it was Broadway or Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of the three women at home in a remote, objective mood. They would be waiting for him, no doubt, and he was sorry, but what else could he do? He was not his own master. Under the circumstances it was a comfort to know that all three of them were women of poise, not given to making the worst of things, and with enough work ontheir hands to keep them from worrying overmuch.
Having broken the great habit of his life by taking an uptown train at 5:15, Wesley found it quite natural that his minor habits should fall from him automatically. He did not relax into his seat and lose himself in the evening paper after his usual fashion. He did not look at his paper at all, but at the people about him. He had never seen such men and women before, so fresh-tinted, so outstanding, so electric. He seemed to have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid colours and sharp contours. It was the same sensation he experienced when he used to break his gold-rimmed spectacles, and after he had groped for a day in the mists of myopia, a new, bright world would leap out at him through the new lenses.
Wesley did not make friends easily. In a crowd he was peculiarly shy. Now he grew garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose up and choked him, but he fought itdown. He turned to his neighbour on the right, a thick-set, clean-shaven youth who was painfully studying the comic pictures in his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a style utterly strange to him:
"Looks very much like the Giants had the rag cinched?"
The thick-set young man, whom Wesley imagined to be a butcher's assistant or something of the sort, looked up from his paper and said, "It certainly does seem as if the New York team had established its title to the championship."
Wesley cleared his throat again.
"When it comes to slugging the ball you've got to hand it to them," he said.
"Assuredly," said the young man, folding up his paper with the evident design of continuing the conversation.
Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation. He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who makefriends in Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be. But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon him. He did not know how to go on.
The stranger went out, but Wesley did not care. He was lost in a delicious reverie, conscious only of being carried forward on free-beating wings into a wonderful, unknown land. The grinding of wheels and brakes as the train halted at a station and pulled out again made a languorous, soothing music. The train clattered out of the tunnel into the open air, and Wesley was but dimly aware of the change from dark to twilight. The way now ran through a region of vague apartment houses. There were trees, stretches of green field waiting for the builder, and here or there a colonial manorhouse with sheltered windows, resigned to its fate. Then came cottages with gardens. And in one of these Wesley, shocked into acute consciousness, saw a man with a rubber hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his feet.
The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know that he was being laughed at. He merely knew that he must go home. He got out at the next station, and when he was seated in a corner of the south-bound train, he sighed with unutterable relief. He wasonce more in a normal world where trains ran to South Ferry instead of away from it. He dropped off at his road crossing, just two hours late, and found his wife waiting.
They walked on side by side without speaking, but once or twice she turned and caught him staring at her with a peculiar mixture of wonder and unaccustomed tenderness.
Finally he broke out.
"It's good to see you again!"
She laughed and was happy. His voice stirred in her memories of long ago.
"It's good to have you back, dear," she said.
"But you really look remarkably well," he insisted.
"I rested this afternoon."
"That's what you should do every day," he said. "Look at that old maple tree! It hasn't changed a bit!"
"No," she said, and began to wonder.
"And the girls are well?"
"Oh, yes."
"I can hardly wait till I see them," hesaid; and then, to save himself, "I guess I am getting old, Alice."
"You are younger to-night than you have been for a long time," she said.
Jennie and her sister were waiting for them on the porch. They wondered why father's kiss fell so warmly on their cheeks. He kissed them twice, which was very unusual; but being discreet young women they asked no questions. After dinner Wesley went out to look at the lawn.
April sunlight on the river and the liners putting out to sea. Paris! Florence! the Alps! the Mediterranean! I turned away and let my thoughts run back to the time when Emmeline and I were in the habit of making, once a year, the trip to Prospect Park South.
The Subway has brought this delightful region within the radius of ordinary tourist travel, though I am told that the element of adventure has not been completely eliminated, owing to the necessity of transferring at Atlantic Avenue, where it is still the custom of the traffic policemen to direct passengers to the wrong car. At the time of which I am speaking, Prospect Park South lay off the beaten track, but the difficulties of the venture were atoned for by the delight of finding one's self, at the journey's end, in a world of new impressions, a world untouchedby the rush and clamour of our own days, and steeped in the colour and poetry which Cook's, cotton goods, and the cinematograph have been wiping out in Europe and the Near East.
There were no Baedekers then for travellers to Prospect Park South. To-day I presume guide-books and maps may be purchased at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge if people still go by that route. We did without guide-books or guides, because the inhabitants of Prospect Park South were a kindly folk and as a rule would wait for visitors at the trolley stops, with an umbrella. When this did not happen, we asked our way from passers-by. These were always strangers who had lost their way. The inhabitants were either peacefully at home or waiting at the trolley stops. For that matter an inhabitant, when encountered by rare chance, was not really of assistance. A resident always referred to streets and avenues by the names they bore when he first moved in; and inasmuch as thestreets in Prospect Park South are renamed every year and the street numbers altered at the same time, the settlers, who would find their own homes by intuition, were worse than useless as guides. On the other hand, to meet a stranger who was lost was always a help. It was a peculiarity of strangers who were lost in Prospect Park South that they would always be passing the street you were looking for, while you in turn had just turned in from the street they were looking for, so that an exchange of information was always mutually profitable.
The following hints for travellers to Prospect Park South are based upon our experiences of some years ago. Those who go by the Interborough tube will probably find that changed conditions have rendered many of these rules obsolete. But for those who go by way of Brooklyn Bridge they may still be of some value. First then as to dress. As a rule one should dress for Prospect Park South very much as for a short run to Europe. That is to say, woollensare always preferable, especially in the rainy season (which in Prospect Park South is coextensive with the visiting season), owing to the long waits between cars. It is true, as I have said, that the inhabitants of Prospect Park South are accustomed to wait at the trolley stations with an umbrella, and no household is without a full assortment of old mackintoshes and rubbers to lend to improvident visitors who believed the weather reports in the paper. But house parties in Prospect Park South are frequently large and there may not be enough old raincoats to go around. A light overcoat, an umbrella, rubbers or a pair of stout shoes, and a pocket electric light for reading names on the street lamps at night, will be found sufficient for the ordinary traveller.
The choice of route is important. Those who, like us, live in upper Manhattan may lay their plans (excluding the Subway) either for the Ninth Avenue L or the Sixth Avenue L. As far south as Fifty-third Street the two lines coincide. Below Fifty-thirdStreet the question of route should be determined by one's personal preferences in the matter of scenery; though not entirely. Veteran travellers assure me that there is also a difference in comfort. The curves are sharper on Sixth Avenue, but there are more flat wheels on the Ninth Avenue line. According as the tourist is susceptible to lateral or vertical disturbances he will make his choice. The front and rear cars are to be recommended above all others because a seat may always be obtained. I recognise, however, that if the traveller has long been a resident of New York he will force his way into the middle cars. Then, hanging from a strap, he may curse the company and be in turn cursed by the quick-tempered gentleman upon whose feet he is standing.
A phrase-book is not necessary. The English language is used on both the Sixth and Ninth Avenue lines, and being equally incomprehensible, cannot be looked up in a dictionary. Only legal currency of the United States is accepted at the ticket-offices,but change is frequently given in Canadian dimes. It is convenient, but not essential, to supply one's self with reading matter at the beginning of the trip. Newspapers are always to be had for the picking on the floor of the cars. The question of fresh air, a topic of constant unpleasant controversy between American travellers and Europeans on the Continent, need not concern the traveller here. The matter is regulated by the company management which keeps the windows closed in summer and open in winter. Passengers of an independent turn of mind will be wary of opening windows on their own account. The sudden entrance of air following upon the heavy perspiration induced by the effort has been known to lead to pneumonia.
With these few general considerations in mind, we may proceed to give a rapid sketch of the route the tourist traverses. As we have said, down to Fifty-third Street the passenger on the Sixth Avenue and on the Ninth Avenue will pass through the samelandscape. As the train makes the magnificent curve through One Hundred and Tenth Street he will have before him on the right the towering mass of the Cathedral of St. John, which a kindly neighbour will tell him is Columbia University, and on the left the lovely, wooded heights of Central Park, their base skirted by a low line of garages and French dyeing establishments. At Ninety-eighth Street, on the right, is a water tower of red brick, which probably has the distinction of being the tallest water tower on Ninety-eighth Street. At Seventy-seventh Street to the left is the Museum of Natural History, which the same kindly informant to whom we have referred will describe as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On every cross street to the right one may catch a glimpse of the beautiful Riverside Drive with the smoke from the New York Central's freight engines rising above the trees.
At Fifty-third Street the Sixth Avenue trains diverge to the left for a short distanceand then, turning south once more, carry the traveller through a region heavily overgrown with skeleton advertising signs of woman's apparel and table waters. If the Ninth Avenue route is selected the vista is one of tenement houses and factories. At Thirty-third Street is the new Pennsylvania Station, the cost of which the same kindly neighbour will exaggerate by several hundred millions of dollars.
Ten blocks further down are the buildings of the General Theological Seminary, so beautiful in line and colour that no resident of New York ever alludes to them. A few minutes further down the train rounds a curve and the traveller, if he goes in the early morning, as every visitor to Prospect Park South must, catches a glimpse of the fairy land of steeples and battlements of lower New York, a Camelot wreathed with wisps of steam. For the lover of scenery the Ninth Avenue is to be unhesitatingly recommended, whereas the Sixth Avenue route will give pleasure to the citizen who takespride in the development of our garment industries.
I have no space to describe the interesting views to be had while crossing Brooklyn Bridge. I can only mention the harbour with the sunlight upon it, a spectacle of loveliness for which New York will be forgiven much. Straight under the span of the bridge is the pier from which Colonel Roosevelt set sail for South America. On the left, close to the edge of the river, is the beetling mass of sugar refineries famous the world over as the scene of an epoch-making experiment in modifying the law of gravitation, when the sugar company succeeded in weighing in three thousand pounds of sugar to the ton and paying duty on the smaller amount to the United States Government.
Of the trip through Brooklyn to Prospect Park South I will not attempt to give any description. For that matter I will not pretend that on any of our journeys I have carried away a definite idea of Brooklyn. For that a lifetime is necessary.
Life's ironies beset us whichever way we turn. The very day that Woodrow Wilson signed the tariff bill, I discovered that Emmeline is a Protectionist.
Thrice in the course of the evening I alluded, with pretended calm, to the signing of the bill, without awakening the least response in Emmeline. The tariff apparently had no meaning to her. Thereupon I reproached her openly.
"It is characteristic of your sex," I said, "not to betray the slightest interest in a matter that comes so intimately home to you. Here is a bill which is bound to affect the problem of high prices. Every woman who carries a market basket, every woman who shops, every woman who has the management of a household on her hands, is directly concerned in the question of lower tariff duties.Yet I dare say you haven't read two lines on the subject in your newspaper."
"What have we been paying duties on?" she said.
"On everything," I replied with spirit. "Anchors, for instance. We have been paying one cent a pound on them. That means twenty dollars a ton. You know what the average anchor weighs, so you can figure out for yourself what we have been paying out all these years for this commodity alone. We have been paying 85 per cent. on bunion plasters, 10 per cent. on animals' claws, and 85 per cent. on teazels."
"But we hardly ever use any of these things," she said.
"I was simply illustrating the iniquitous extremes to which our tariff advocates were prepared to go," I said. "It may seem natural to put a duty on beef, and shoes, and cotton goods. But the tariff barons were not content. Insatiable greed demanded that a tax be put on teazels."
"What is a teazel?" she said.
"I am not sure that I know," I replied. "But that just illustrates one of the favourite methods of the tariff plunderers. It consisted in slapping a stiff duty on articles people did not know the meaning of and so would pay without protest. I say teazels, but, of course, I mean meat, and sugar, and cotton, and woollen goods, all of which things will soon be within the reach of all. I should imagine that women would be grateful for what has been done to make the living problem so much easier."
"Under the new tariff bill," she said, "will there still be only twenty-four hours to the day?"
"The new tariff doesn't repeal the laws of astronomy," I replied.
"That is what I was thinking when you spoke of the living problem being made easier for us," she said. "Putting twelve more hours into the day would be a help. Did the old tariff have a big duty on hanging up pictures?"
"I don't know what you are driving at," I said, but in my heart I thought I knew.
"I mean," she said, "around moving time. I have always thought there must be a very heavy tax on every picture that a man hangs up; or rugs—"
I decided that frivolity was the best way out of a situation that had suddenly become menacing. "Usually we don't hang up rugs," I said.
"That may be an oversight on our part," she replied. "Perhaps, if we hung up rugs and put pictures on the floor it might appeal to your passion for romance. You might even find it exhilarating."
The idea seemed to fascinate her.
"There are a great many things," she went on, "that I should like to see on the free list. Seats in the Subway, for instance. I stood up all the way from Twenty-third Street this afternoon, but I suppose the duty on a man's giving up his seat to a woman is prohibitive. Then there's Mrs. Flanaganwho comes in by the day. She has a baby who is teething and cries all night. I wish there was a lower duty on babies' teeth, so that they came easier; and on sleep for mothers who have to go out by the day. I also wish there was a lower duty on the whisky that her husband consumes. She could possibly afford to stay at home more than she does."
"He'd only drink himself to death," I said.
But she was not paying attention. "There might be a lower duty on efficient domestic help. It would be a relief."
"Foreign household help are not under the tariff law at all," I said. "They come in free."
"That's what the girl said yesterday when she decided to quit, an hour before dinner. And from the way she spoke to me I imagine that her language also came in free. The more I think of it the fewer advantages I can see for us women under your new tariff bill." And then the bitter truth came out. "Ithink that on the whole I am in favour of a high tariff on most things."
"You are in favour of Protection," I stammered, hardly believing my senses.
"I am in favour of protecting domestic industry," said Emmeline, and I saw that she had been reading the newspapers more carefully than I imagined.
The protective system which Emmeline outlined to me that evening would have made Senator Penrose sob for joy. One of the first things she demanded was a heavy duty on tobacco. She said she would be satisfied with a flat rate of 100 per cent. on the nasty article, with a super tax of 100 per cent. on all half-smoked cigars left lying around the house, and another 100 per cent. on cigar ashes and half-burnt matches. Alcoholic spirits should be totally excluded. She wanted a pretty heavy duty on raincoats left lying on chairs when they should be hung up on the proper hook. She was also in favour of a prohibitive tax on all arguments tending to prove that woman'snatural sphere is the home. Lodge dues, club dues, and the practice of reading newspapers at the breakfast table should be heavily taxed. There were a great many other schedules she proposed, carrying a minimum duty of seventy-five per cent. I cannot pretend to remember all, but my impression is that plays dealing with the social evil and eugenics were among them.
By this time it will be apparent that Emmeline's views on tariff legislation were somewhat confused. She evidently made no distinction between import duties, internal revenue taxes, and the police power of the State. Before continuing our discussion I therefore insisted that we restrict debate to the specific question of import duties and the cost of living. The simple fact was that we had now changed from a high-tariff nation to a low-tariff nation. How would this affect ourselves and our neighbours?
Thereupon I was subjected to a severe examination as to tariffs and prices in other countries. My answers were, in a generalfashion, correct, though possibly I may have confused the British tariff system with that of Germany.
"From your statements, so far as I can make head or tail out of them," said Emmeline, "I gather that in protection countries the cost of food and clothing and rent is always just a little ahead of wages and salaries."
"You have followed me perfectly," I said.
"Whereas in low-tariff countries people's wages and salaries are always just a little behind the cost of food, clothing, and shelter.
"That is due to quite a different set of causes," I said.
"I imagined," she said, "that the causes must be other than those you mentioned. But the fact remains that the choice which confronts most of us is between having a little less than we need, or needing a little more than we have. If that is so, it seems to me rather a waste of time to spend—did you say seventy-five years?—in revising the tariff. I prefer my own kind of tariff."
"And the cost of living?" I said.
"My kind of tariff gets much nearer to solving that problem," she said.
"But then, why Mrs. Pankhurst?" I said. "If the making of laws has nothing to do with the comfort of life, why do you want to vote?"
"Because we want to assert our equality by sharing your illusions. Besides, we can use the vote to bring about a state of things when voting won't be necessary."
On further thought, Emmeline is not a Protectionist; she is an Anarchist.