THETAILOR—Don't say that, your majesty. You're a King, your majesty. Think of that. You mustn't tap in front of you, like a blind man with a stick. You mustn't fear to bump your head. If you hold it high, you know, there'd be nothing to fear but the stars.
THEKING—You are eloquent, O stranger from a far country, and what do you mean?
THETAILOR—Only this: if you wear my robe you must cast off compromise and expediency.
THEKING—Oh, that's all right. I was only thinking about trousers.
THETAILOR—They were a compromise of Adam's, your majesty.
THEKING—Quite true, but I hope you wouldn't go so far as to object to essentials. It's mesh stuff, you know, and very thin. Practically nothing at all. Just one piece. Somehow or other I don't believe I'd feel easy without it. Sort of a habit with me.
THETAILOR—If you wear my robe you must put aside every other garment.
THEKING—But this is December.
THETAILOR—Your majesty, the man who wears this cloth will never fear cold.
THELEADINGDEMOCRAT—It seems to me that the only question is, Does his majesty trust the people fully and completely?
THEKING—Of course I trust the people.
THELEADINGDEMOCRAT—Then why are you afraid to show yourself before them in this magnificent new robe? Is there any reason to believe that they who are the real rulers of Marma cannot see this cloth which the Tailor sees, which I see and admire so much and (pointedly) which your majesty, Timothy the Third, cannot conceivably fail to see? It would be unfortunate if it became a matter of news that your majesty did not believe in the capabilities and worthiness of the people.
THEKING—- Oh, I believe all right.
THELEADINGDEMOCRAT—Then why are you afraid?
THEKING—Give me the robe. I am not afraid. (The Tailor stoops and seems to take something out of a bag. He extends the invisible object to the King, who clumsily pretends to hang it over his arm.)
THETAILOR—Oh, not that way, your majesty. It will wrinkle. (Painstakingly he smooths out a little air and returns it to the astonished monarch.)
THEKING(to the Leading Republican, the Leading Democrat and the two Courtiers)—You will meet me at the great gate of the palace in three minutes and accompany me on my promenade through the city. (Exit the King. The Leading Republican draws close to the first Courtier.)
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Wonderful fabric that, was it not?
FIRSTCOURTIER—Much the finest I have ever seen.
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Now, what shade should you say it was? It's hard to tell shades in this light, isn't it?
FIRSTCOURTIER—I had no trouble, sir. The robe is a bright scarlet.
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Scarlet, eh? (He moves over close to the second Courtier.)
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Wonderful fabric that we saw just now, wasn't it?
SECONDCOURTIER—It was like a lake under the moonlight.
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Moonlight?
SECONDCOURTIER—Yes, it was easy to see that it was a miraculous fabric. Man could never have achieved that silver green.
LEADINGREPUBLICAN—Yes, it was a mighty fine color. (Raising his voice.) I think we had better join his majesty now, gentlemen, and I believe we shall have an interesting promenade. Good-by until later, Mr. Tailor.
ALL—Good-by, Mr. Tailor!
(The Tailor moves to a great window at the back of the stage and opens it. He leans out. He bows low to some one who is passing by underneath. The rattle of wagons may be heard distinctly, and the rumble of cars, with occasionally the honk of an automobile horn. Suddenly there is a noise much louder and shriller than any of these. It is the voice of a child, and it cries: "He hasn't got anything on!" Voice after voice takes up the shout. Seemingly thousands of people are shouting, "He hasn't got anything on!" Finally the shouting loses all coherence; it is just a great, ugly, angry noise. A shot breaks the glass of the window just above the Tailor's head. Quickly he protects himself from further attack in that direction by swinging two iron shutters together and fasteningthem. Then he locks the great door through which the King and the Courtiers have just passed.)
THETAILOR(in sorrow and anger)—More blind men. (He moves to his bag and, dipping his hands in, raises them again to fondle an invisible something. As he is so engaged a little door at the right opens and a meanly dressed girl of about eighteen enters.)
THETAILOR—Keep your distance. I won't be taken alive. Not until I can find some one to care for my cloth.
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—Oh, please, don't hurt me, mister. I just ran up here because there were soldiers down in the garden, and shooting and things.
THETAILOR—Who are you?
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—I'm the sixth assistant helper of the cook.
THETAILOR—The sixth?
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—Yes, I clean the butter plates.
THETAILOR—And that's all you do? Just clean butter plates? How terrible!
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—But it isn't. The cook says I'm the best butter dish cleaner in the world. I like butter. I like to touch it. There's no color in the world so beautiful. It's like that bit of cloth you have in your hands.
THETAILOR—You see the cloth?
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—Of course I see it.Why, it's right there in your hands. And it's yellow like the butter.
THETAILOR—Or gold. (He reaches into the bag again.) And what's this? (He holds his right hand high above his head.)
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—Why, it's a yellow rope.
THETAILOR—Yes, that's it, a rope. I'm going to give you the other piece of cloth now, and later the rope, too. You must guard it as carefully, as carefully as you would watch one of your butter dishes. Do you understand?
THEGIRL—I wouldn't lose it. It's pretty.
THETAILOR—Yes, it's pretty and the world mustn't lose it. You will find that most people can't see. I know only two, you and I, but there must be others. That's your task now, finding people who can see the cloth and cleaning butter plates, of course. (There is a loud pounding on the great door and a shout of "Open, in the King's name!" The knocking increases in violence and the command is repeated. Then men begin to swing against the door with heavy bars and hatchets.)
THETAILOR—Here (he makes a gesture toward the girl), take the cloth. Go quickly to the kitchen. Then come back in a moment and save the rope, too.
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—But what do they want?
THETAILOR—They want to kill me.
THEGIRLFROMTHE KITCHEN—They mustn't.
THETAILOR—They won't if you get out and leave me alone. Here, hurry. (He half pushes her out the little door. Then he returns to the bag and seems to pull out something. He looks to the ceiling and finds a hook fairly in the middle of it. He moves his hand upward as if tossing something, and goes through the motions of tying a knot around his neck. Then the Tailor takes a chair and moves it to the center of the room. He stands upon it. The violent assault upon the door begins with renewed vigor. Some of the axes bite through the wood. The Tailor steps off the chair and dangles in the air. He floats in space, like a man in a magic trick, but one or two in the audience, dramatic critics, perhaps, or scullery maids, may see that round his neck and fastened to the hook in the ceiling is a yellow rope.)
(Curtain.)
"Margaret Fuller's father was thirty-two when she was born," writes Katharine Anthony in her biography of the great feminist. "A self-made man, he had been obliged to postpone marriage and family life to a comparatively advanced age."
The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. For years and years we had been going along buoyed up by the comments of readers who wrote in from time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young man. You will learn better as you grow older." And now we find that we have grown older. We have reached a comparatively advanced age, and the problem of whether or not we have learned better is present and persistent. It can no longer be put off as something which will work out all right in time.
"Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm going to sit down and write a novel, or the great American drama, or an epic poem." Then some day comes and the young man finds that his joints are stiff and he can't sit down.
However, we are not quite prepared to admit that thirty-two is the deadline. It seemed old age to us for a long time. When we were reporting baseball theplayers used to call Roy Hartzell, over on third base, "the old man," because he was all of twenty-nine, and veterans of thirty were constantly dropping out because of advancing age and the pressure of recruits of nineteen and twenty. Yes, thirty-two was a comparatively advanced age at that time. But then we got on to plays and books, and Bernard Shaw was doing all the timely hitting in the pinches, and, to mix the metaphor, breaking loose and running the length of the field, putting a straight arm into the faces of all who would tackle him. De Morgan started to blaze at the age of fifty, and James Huneker was the keenest of all the critics to hail anything in any art which was new and hitherto unclassified. And he, too, wrote his first novel,Painted Veils, long after fifty. It was a novel which we did not like very much, but all its faults were those of youth. Some of it actually sophomoric. It was more like the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald than any living author. We felt that it was a first novel by a "promising" man, and thirty and twenty-nine and all those ages seemed to us mere verdant days in the hatchery.
We remember a sweet girl reporter going to Major General Sibert, commander of the First Division in its early days in France, and asking: "General, don't you think this is a young man's war?" Sibert grinned behind his gray mustache, and said: "When I was in West Point I used to bear in mind that Napoleon wonsome of his greatest victories while he was in his thirties, but now I find my attention turning more and more to the fact that Hindenburg is seventy-two and Joffre is seventy."
Time, we know, is fleeting, but there is always a little more left for the man who can look senility and destruction and all that sort of business straight in the eye and remark calmly, "I'm too busy this afternoon; drop around to-morrow." Thirty-two isn't a comparatively advanced age. Some day we are going to write that epic poem, and the novel, and the great American drama.
Turning toThe Art of Lawn Tennis, by William Tilden, 2nd, we find the comforting information that "William A. Larned won the singles at past forty. Men of sixty are seen daily on the clubs' courts of England and America enjoying their game as keenly as any boy. It is to this game, in great measure, that they owe the physical fitness which enables them to play at their advanced age."
Yet after all this is not quite so comforting. We know one or two of these iron athletes who have outlived their generation and they are among the bores of the world. After one of them has captured the third set by dashing to the net and volleying your shot off at a sharp angle he invariably rubs it in by asking you to guess how old you think he is. We always answer, "Ninety-six," but there is no discouraging him or stoppinghim before he has gone on to tell you about breaking the ice in the tub for his morning plunge.
There is an unearthly air about these men whom God has forgotten. They are like those Prussian soldiers of Frederick who continued to stand after swords and bullets had gone through them and required the services of some one to go about the field and push them over so that they might be decently buried. There were men like that in one of the lands which Gulliver visited. They never died and probably they played a sharp game of tennis and later in the clubhouse they were accustomed to sit around and say how much better the actors used to be fifty years ago. Everybody hated them and stayed away from their company in droves.
No, we set no store of hope on being a sixty-year-old prodigy at lawn tennis. We dodder about the court already. We had just as soon be gray and bald and all the rest of it if only we can ever grow young enough to write a bold and slashing novel and be suppressed by Mr. Sumner.
Katharine Anthony'sMargaret Fulleris biography in new and fascinating form. "A psychological biography," Miss Anthony calls it, and she takes advantage of the theories of Freud and Jung to reveal new facts about the life of a woman long dead, by the process of submitting well known material to the psychoanalytic test. This is an engrossing game. There is something about it quite suggestive of the contrast between Sherlock Holmes and the more dull-witted detectives of Scotland Yard. Holmes, you remember, could come into a room after all the members of the force had pawed the evidence and interpret something new from the cigar ash on the table which had been to them just cigar ash, but was to Holmes convincing evidence that the crime had been committed by a red-haired man, six feet in height, born in Kentucky and an enrolled member of the Democratic Party. Other biographers were content to record the fact that Margaret Fuller was a nervous child who received all her early education at home from her father. There they paused, and it is just here that Miss Anthony leaps in to explain the exact emotional relation between father and daughter which simmered about in Margaret's subconsciousness and contributed to the convulsions of her early schooldays.
It is fascinating to watch the skilled biographer reveal all sorts of facts about Margaret Fuller of which she herself had not the ghost of a notion. We can't say that the theory of the biographer is always convincing, although we must admit that her case is full and logical at every turn. To us it is just a little too logical. There is so much proof that we are rather inclined to believe that the theory is not altogether so. It is only fair to admit that Margaret seems to have been a Freudian herself long before there was a Freud. Again and again her own observations, quick, intuitive leaps, coincide almost exactly with theories worked out later by much more difficult and rational processes. Nathaniel Hawthorne, also, seems to have had some conception of the unconscious quite consistent with the most modern theorists, for he records a conversation between himself and Margaret Fuller in which they talked about "the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away."
Margaret Fuller, laboratory specimen, is an interesting study; Margaret Fuller, feminist, an inspiring figure in American history; but most of all our interest is captured by that portion of the book which deals with Margaret Fuller, literary critic ofThe New York Tribune. She wrote three critical articles a week,which appeared on the first page of the paper, and since her day newspaper reviewing has gone back in other respects than the mere process of burying itself more deeply within the paper. Opinions about books seem to have been more exciting and provocative in the days of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley. At any rate, one or the other wrote an article inThe Tribunewhich inspired a libel suit by James Fenimore Cooper in which he won a verdict of $200. Nothing like that happens to-day. Once we managed to incite an actor into a lawsuit, but the only sign of recognition which we ever obtain from belaboring an author is a telephone message or a letter saying that our adverse notice has amused him very much and greatly contributed to the sale of his little book and would we come around and have lunch.
Miss Fuller managed to cut deeper. James Russell Lowell never recovered from the shock of her poor opinion of him, and was forever lampooning her in public life and private. She seems to have been singularly free from awe for the great literary figures of her day. In an age when not liking Longfellow was almost as much a mark of national treason as urging a reduction in the German indemnity would be to-day Miss Fuller wrote of Longfellow in exactly the spirit in which he is regarded by the later critics who looked at him dispassionately.
"When we see a person of moderate powers," shewrote, "receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows. And yet this is, perhaps, ungenerous.... He (Longfellow) has no style of his own, growing out of his experiences and observations of nature. Nature with him, whether human or external, is always seen through the windows of literature.... This want of the free breath of nature, this perpetual borrowing of imagery, this excessive, because superficial, culture which he has derived from an acquaintance with the elegant literature of many nations and men, out of proportion to the experience of life within himself, prevent Mr. Longfellow's verses from ever being a true refreshment to ourselves."
Ralph Waldo Emerson was her close friend, and yet she could see him clearly enough from a critical point of view to write: "We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular, and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the whispers of our parent life. We would wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of Mother Earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers."
The feminism of Margaret Fuller is passionate and far reaching. It does not stop merely with the plea for the vote, but includes a newer and freer ideal of marriage. There is inspiration in this, and yet somethinga little disturbing in the article which she wrote about the London Reform Club, in which she said: "I was not sorry, however, to see men predominant in the cooking department, as I hope to see that and washing transferred to their care in the progress of things, since they are 'the stronger sex.'"
When Adam delved and Eve span, the fiction that man is incapable of housework was first established. It would be interesting to figure out just how many foot-pounds of energy men have saved themselves, since the creation of the world, by keeping up the pretense that a special knack is required for washing dishes and for dusting, and that the knack is wholly feminine. The pretense of incapacity is impudent in its audacity, and yet it works.
Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.
It might be said, of course, that the safety of suspension bridges is so much more important than that of suspenders that the division of labor is only fair, but there are many of us who have never thrown a railroad in our lives, and yet swagger in all the glory of masculine achievement without undertaking any of the drudgery of odd jobs.
Probably men alone could never have maintained the fallacy of masculine incapacity without the aid of women. As soon as that rather limited sphere, onceknown as woman's place, was established, women began to glorify and exaggerate its importance, by the pretense that it was all so special and difficult that no other sex could possibly begin to accomplish the tasks entailed. To this declaration men gave immediate and eager assent and they have kept it up. The most casual examination will reveal the fact that all the jokes about the horrible results of masculine cooking and sewing are written by men. It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
Naturally there are other factors. Biology has been unscrupulous enough to discriminate markedly against women, and men have seized upon this advantage to press the belief that, since the bearing of children is exclusively the province of women, it must be that all the caring for them belongs properly to the same sex. Yet how ridiculous this is.
Most things which have to be done for children are of the simplest sort. They should tax the intelligence of no one. Men profess a total lack of ability to wash baby's face simply because they believe there's no great fun in the business, at either end of the sponge. Protectively, man must go the whole distance and pretend that there is not one single thing which he can do for baby. He must even maintain that he doesn't know how to hold one. From this pretense has grown the shockingly transparent fallacy that holding a baby correctly is one of the fine arts; or, perhaps even morefearsome than that, a wonderful intuition, which has come down after centuries of effort to women only.
"The thing that surprised Richard most," says a recent woman novelist, "was the ease and the efficiency with which Eleanor handled Annabel.... She seemed to know by instinct, things that Richard could not understand and that he could not understand how she came by. If she reached out her hands to take Annabel, her fingers seemed, of themselves, to curve into the places where they would fit the spineless bundle and give it support."
At this point, interruption is inevitable. Places indeed! There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways of holding a baby—and all are right! At least all will do. There is no need of seeking out special places for the hands. A baby is so soft that anybody with a firm grip can make places for an effective hold wherever he chooses. But to return to our quotation: "If Richard tried to take up the bundle, his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless. 'How do you do it?' he would say. And he would right Annabel and try to still her protests. And Eleanor would only smile gently and send him on some masculine errand, while she soothed Annabel's feelings in the proper way."
You may depend upon it that Richard also smiled as soon as he was safely out of the house and embarkedupon some masculine errand, such as playing eighteen holes of golf. Probably, by the time he reached the tenth green, he was too intent upon his game to remember how guile had won him freedom. Otherwise, he would have laughed again, when he holed a twenty-foot putt over a rolling green and recollected that he had escaped an afternoon of carrying Annabel because he was too awkward. I once knew the wife of the greatest billiard player in the world, and she informed me with much pride that her husband was incapable of carrying the baby. "He doesn't seem to have the proper touch," she explained.
As a matter of fact, even if men in general were as awkward as they pretend to be at home, there would still be small reason for their shirking the task of carrying a baby. Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn. As I ventured to suggest before, almost any firm grip will do. Of course the child may cry, but that is simply because he has become over-particular through too much coddling. Nature herself is cavalier. Young rabbits don't even whimper when picked up by the ears, and kittens are quite contented to be lifted by the scruff of the neck.
This same Nature has been used as the principal argument for woman's exclusive ability to take care of the young. It is pretty generally held that all a woman needs to do to know all about children is to have some. This wisdom is attributed to instinct. Again and againwe have been told by rapturous grandmothers that: "It isn't something which can be read in a book or taught in a school. Nature is the great teacher." This simply isn't true. There are many mothers in America who have learned far more from the manuals of Dr. Holt than instinct ever taught them—and Dr. Holt is a man. I have seen mothers give beer and spaghetti and Neapolitan ice-cream to children in arms, and, if they got that from instinct, the only conclusion possible is that instinct did not know what it was talking about. Instinct is not what it used to be.
I have no feeling of being a traitor to my sex, when I say that I believe in at least a rough equality of parenthood. In shirking all the business of caring for children we have escaped much hard labor. It has been convenient. Perhaps it has been too convenient. If we have avoided arduous tasks, we have also missed much fun of a very special kind. Like children in a toy shop, we have chosen to live with the most amusing of talking-and-walking dolls, without ever attempting to tear down the sign which says, "Do not touch." In fact we have helped to set it in place. That is a pity.
Children mean nothing at long range. For our own sake we ought to throw off the pretense of incapacity and ask that we be given a half share in them. I hope that this can be done without its being necessary for us to share the responsibility of dishes also. I don't think there are any concealed joys in washing dishes.Washing children is quite a different matter. After you have washed somebody else's face you feel that you know him better. This may be the reason why so many trained nurses marry their patients—but that is another story. A dish is an unresponsive thing. It gives back nothing. A child's face offers competitive possibilities. It is interesting to see just how high a polish can be achieved without making it cry.
There is also a distinct sense of elation in doing trifling practical things for children. They are so small and so helpless that they contribute vastly to a comforting glow in the ego of the grown-up. When you have completed the rather difficult task of preparing a child for bed and actually getting him there, you have a sense of importance almost divine in its extent. This is to feel at one with Fate, to be the master of another's destiny, of his waking and his sleeping and his going out into the world. It is a brand-new world for the child. He is a veritable Adam and you loom up in his life as more than mortal. Golf is well enough for a Sunday sport, but it is a trifling thing beside the privilege of taking a small son to the zoo and letting him see his first lion, his first tiger and, best of all, his first elephant. Probably he will think that they are part of your own handiwork turned out for his pleasure.
To a child, at least, even the meanest of us may seem glamourous with magic and wisdom. It seems a pitynot to take the fullest advantage of this chance before the opportunity is lost. There must come a day when even the most nimble-witted father has to reply, "I don't know." On that day the child comes out of Eden and you are only a man again. Cortes on his lonely peak in Darien was a pigmy discoverer beside the child eating his first spoonful of ice-cream. There is the immediate frightened and angry rebellion against the coldness of it, and then the amazing sensation as the strange substance melts into magic of pleasant sweetness. The child will go on to high adventure, but I doubt whether the world holds for any one more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream. No, there is nothing dull in feeding a child.
There is less to be said for dressing a child, from the point of view of recreation. This seems to us laborious and rather tiresome, both for father and child. Still I knew one man who managed to make an adventure of it. He boasted that he had broken all the records of the world for changing all or any part of a child's clothing. He was a skilled automobile mechanic, much in demand in races, where tires are whisked on and off. He brought his technic into the home. I saw several of his demonstrations. He was a silent man who habitually carried a mouthful of safety pins. Once the required youngster had been pointed out, he wasted no time in preliminary wheedlings but tossed her on the floor without more ado.Even before her head had bumped, he would be hard at work. With him the thrill lay in the inspiration of the competitive spirit. He endeavored always to have his task completed before the child could begin to cry. He never lost. Often the child cried afterward, but by that time my friend felt that his part of the job was completed—and would turn the youngster over to her mother.
Everybody said it was a great opportunity for Hans. The pay was small, to be sure, but the hours were short and the chance for advancement prodigious. Already the boy could take a pair of rabbits out of a high hat, or change a bunch of carrots into a bowl of goldfish. Unfortunately, the Dutchmen of Rothdam were vegetarians, and Hans was not yet learned enough in magic to turn goldfish back to carrots. Many times he had asked his master, Kahnale, for instruction in the big tricks. He longed to go in for advanced magic, such as typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. He even aspired to juggle planets and keep three stars in the air at once.
Kahnale only smiled and spoke of the importance of rudiments. He pointed out that as long as inexperience made mistakes possible it would be better to mar a carrot or two than the solar system.
Not all the boy's projects were vast. It seemed as if there was as much enthusiasm in his voice when he asked about love philters as when he spoke of earthquakes. His casual inquiry as to the formula for making a rival disappear into thin air betrayed an eagerness not present in his planetary researches.
But to every question Kahnale replied, "Wait." The magician intimated that a bachelor of black arts might play pranks with the winds, the mountains and the stars forbidden to a freshman. True love, he declared, would be the merest trifle for one who knew all the lore. Hans found surprisingly small comfort in these promises. He had seen the sixteen foot shelf of magic in the back room where the skeletons swung in white arcs through the violet haze. Millions of words stood between him and Gretchen, and she was already seventeen and he had turned twenty. It irked him that he should be forced to learn Arabic, Chaldean and a little Phœnician to win a Dutch girl. Sometimes he imagined she cared for him in spite of a seeming disdain and he hoped that he might win her without recourse to magic, but then she grew coy again. Anyway, Kahnale had told him that only post-graduate students should seek to read the heart of a woman.
And so Hans polished the high hats, fed the rabbits, read the prescribed pieces in Volume One and learned a little day by day. He yearned more. It seemed as if there must be a short cut to the knowledge which he wanted, and this belief was strengthened one day when he discovered a thin and ever so aged volume hidden behind the books of the sixteen foot shelf. Before he had a chance to open the little book Kahnale rushed into the room and cried out to him in a great and terrible voice to drop the volume. Carefully,the magician returned the book to its hiding place and he warned Hans never to touch it again upon the pain of the most extensive and prodigious penalties. He not only intimated that disobedience would be dangerous to Hans, but to his family, to the town of Rothdam, to Holland and to the world.
Six months passed and Hans had striven to remember so many things since the day of the warning that he had all but forgotten the words of Kahnale. Lying atop the dyke, Hans gave the magician never a thought. The boy drew pictures in the loose sand with the toe of his sabot and brushed them away one after the other. At last he completed a design which struck his fancy and he ceased work to admire it. He had drawn a large heart and exactly in the center he had written "Gretchen."
It may have been a charm or a coincidence, but he looked up from the sand design just in time to see her passing along the road which ran parallel to the dyke. He shouted after her, but it was a capricious day with Gretchen, and she went along about her business without once looking back, under the pretense that she had not heard the greeting.
Hans raged and made as if to demolish the heart, and Gretchen, and indeed the whole dyke, but then he thought of something better. He got up and entering the house of Kahnale, went into the back room without even stopping to rattle the skeletons. The roomwas empty and Hans rummaged behind the long row of magic books until he found the old volume which he felt sure would give him some of the needful secrets which had been withheld from him. Opening the book, he blew away a thick top soil of ancient dust and was chagrined to find that whatever knowledge lay before him was concealed in some language so ancient that he could not understand a single word.
"Perhaps," he thought to himself, "this is a charm I can set to ticking even if I can't understand it." Fearing that Kahnale might come upon him, he hid the book under his coat and carried it out to his retreat on top of the dyke. In a low voice he began to read the strange and fearsome sentences in the book. Although they meant nothing to him, they possessed a fine rolling cadence which captured his fancy, and more boldly and more loudly Hans went on with his reading.
While Hans meddled with the book of magic, Kahnale was in consultation with the Mayor of Rothdam, who sought some charm or potion which would insure him reëlection. He had been a thoroughly inefficient Mayor, but the magician dealt with clients as impartially as a lawyer or doctor, and he agreed to weave the necessary spells. He stipulated only that the Mayor should accompany him to the house on the dyke, where there was a more propitious atmosphere for black art than in the town hall. After some little fuss and fume about the price and the long walk andhis dignity, the Mayor consented, and the two men descended the great stairway of the town hall. No sooner had they reached the street than Kahnale looked at the sky in amazement. The day had been the most stolid and fair of days when he entered the Mayor's office, but now the western sky was filled with tier upon tier of angry black clouds, and as he looked there was a fearsome flash of fire broad as a canal and a roll of thunder which shook the ground beneath their feet.
"Quick!" cried Kahnale, and seizing the Mayor by the arm he rushed him down the road which led to the sea. As they ran a rising wind with a salt tang smote their faces. The clouds were growing blacker and heavier. It almost seemed as if they might topple. There was another flash bright as the light which blinded Saul. The Mayor crossed himself and prayed. Kahnale cursed. They were within a hundred feet of the sea when a second flare of fire outlined a figure on the dyke. It swayed to and fro and moaned above the growing roar of the wind.
In a sudden hush between the gusts the figure turned and they could hear the voice distinctly enough, though it seemed to be the voice of some one a long way off. "Eb dewollah," said the voice, and Kahnale clapped his hands to his head in horror.
"It is the end," cried the wizard. "There is no hope. This is the final charm. The Lord's Prayer is last of all."
"I do not hear the Lord's Prayer. What is it?" pleaded the Mayor.
"You would not understand," explained Kahnale. "The prayer is said backward, as in all charms. He has reached 'Eb Dewollah,' and that is 'Hallowed Be!' The prayer is the last of the charm."
"Charm? What charm?" said the Mayor querulously, clinging dose to Kahnale.
"The master charm," said the magician. "This is the spell which when said aloud summons all the forces of the devil and brings the destruction of the world."
"The world!" interrupted the Mayor in amazement. "Then Rothdam will be destroyed," and he began to weep.
Kahnale paid no heed. "It can't be stopped," he muttered. "It must go on. He has the book and there is no power strong enough to stop the spell."
"If I only had my policemen and my priest," moaned the Mayor.
"Is that all?" said Kahnale. "I have enough magic for that."
The magician spoke three words and made two passes in the air before he turned and pointed to Rothdam. Instantly the bell in the town hall which called all villagers to the dyke tolled wildly. The wind was rising and shrilling louder and louder, and the sky was now of midnight blackness. The Mayor looked up in wretched terror at the figure on the dykeand started to rush at him as if to pitch him into the sea. Kahnale held him back. "Wait," he said. "If you touched the devil servant you would die."
Above the shriek of the wind rose the voice from the dyke. "Nevaeh ni," said the voice. "In heaven," muttered Kahnale. "It is almost done."
Down the road in the teeth of the gale came the villagers of Rothdam. In the van were the Mayor's police in red coats. They carried clubs and blunderbusses, and one, more hurriedly summoned than his companions, held a poker.
"There," cried the Mayor, "shoot that man on the dyke!" And with the first flash of light the foremost guard ran halfway up the steep embankment and leveled his blunderbuss. He fired. The roar of the gun was answered by a crash of thunder. A fang of fire darted from the center of the clouds and the guard rolled down the dyke and lay still at the bottom.
"Tra ohw," came the voice from the dyke. The priest, not daunted by the fate of the guard, hurried close to the side of the swaying figure and sprinkled him with holy water, but no sooner had the water left his hands than each drop changed to a tiny tongue of fire, leaping and dancing on the shoulder of the devil servant. The priest drew back in horror and the Mayor, with a cry of fear, threw himself at the foot of the dyke and buried his face in the long grasses. High above the booming of the gale and the crash ofthe waves against the barrier came the voice from the dyke, "Rehtaf."
"Father," said Kahnale, "I come, master devil!" he cried with one hand raised.
The sea which had almost reached the top of the dyke suddenly receded. Back and back it went and bared a deep and slimy floor. On that floor were many unswept things of horror. The earth trembled. The black clouds were banks of floating flame. The villagers turned to run from the dyke, for now the sea was returning. It rushed toward the dyke in a wave a hundred feet high.
Out of the crowd one ran forward and not back. It was a girl with flaxen hair and red ribbons. She ran straight to the figure on the dyke.
"It's Gretchen," she called. "Save me, Hans, save me." She threw her arms around the boy's neck and kissed him. The wall of water hung on the edge of the dyke like a violin string drawn tight. Then it surged forward and swallowed up both boy and girl.
Some folk in Rothdam say that Hans dropped the book of black magic and kissed Gretchen before the water swept over them, but the villagers are not sure about this trifle, since at that moment they were watching the rebirth of a lost world.
The wave of water a hundred feet high dwindled until it was no wave, but only a few tall grasses swayinggently in the dying land breeze. The clouds of fire faded to mist, pink tinted by the setting sun. Somewhere about were roses.
The villagers rushed to the top of the dyke. A policeman who had muddied his uniform as if by a fall rose to his feet and followed them, rubbing his head. Far below the dyke lay a calm sea. On the horizon were ships.
"Rothdam and its brave citizens are saved," said the Mayor. "To-night I will burn two hundred candles in honor of our patron saint, who has this day delivered us and enabled us to continue a happy existence under the best municipal government Rothdam has ever known." There were cheers.
That night Kahnale walked on the dyke alone. Everybody else was in the cathedral. That is, everybody but one policeman, who pleaded a severe headache. The magician listened to the bells of the cathedral and then he shook his head. "It was not the saint who saved us," he muttered. "There are no miracles. Somewhere there is a rational magical explanation for all this." But he had to shake his head again. "It is not in the books," he muttered.
Just then the moon came from behind a cloud and silvered some marks in the path of Kahnale. The magician stooped and looked. There on the top of the wave swept dyke, drawn in the loose sand, was a large heart, and in the center of it was written "Gretchen."
"Ours is an easy-going and optimistic age," writes John Roach Straton in one of his "messages and wrath and judgment," which are combined in a volume calledThe Menace of Immorality. "We do not like to be disturbed with unpleasant thoughts," continues the genial doctor, "and yet, if we are wise men and women, we will give due consideration to these things, in the light of the tremendous times in which we live. There never has been such a day as this before in the world's history. This is a time already of judgment upon a wicked world. The whole world is now standing in the shadow of anarchy and starvation. Unless we repent and turn to God, we will have to pay the price of our folly and sins. And New York, let us understand, is no exception to these great truths of God. Though she exalt herself to the very heavens, she shall be laid low, unless she repents and turns from her wicked ways. We have become so vain to-day over scientific achievements and education and all that, that we have tended to condescend even to God. We tend to look down upon Him from our lordly human heights. But what folly it is! He who sitteth in the heavens shall laugh! May He not laugh at us! And let us well know that God's arm is not shortened and that He hasthe means, even of temporal judgment, in His almighty hands. Have you ever thought of what a good, husky tidal wave would do to 'Little Old New York,' as we call her? Have you ever imagined the Woolworth skyscraper butting headlong into the Equitable Building, through such an earthquake as that which laid San Francisco's proud beauty in the dust? Have you ever imagined the Metropolitan Tower crashing over on Madison Square Garden sometime, when there were tens of thousands of people in there at some worldly, godless celebration of the Lord's Day? Ah, yes, don't worry about God's not having the means for judgment, even in this world!"
As a matter of fact, that is a subject concerning which we never have worried. There isn't a doubt in our mind that the earthquake, or the tidal wave or any of the other dooms so gleefully mentioned by Dr. Straton are well within the power of the Creator. Yet it seems to us that it would hardly be to the Creator's credit if he should turn a tidal wave upon New York because Dr. Straton has revealed the fact, that in some dance halls in New York, young men and women dance cheek to cheek. It is, of course, a terrible thing that there are still restaurants in New York where one may procure Scotch highballs, but we do not think the condition justifies an earthquake. It may be, as Dr. Straton says, that God will do one of these things and then laugh at us, but if such is the case we must saythat we will not have much respect for the cosmic sense of humor. We want a God who is a good deal more like God and somewhat less like Dr. John Roach Straton.
When a child grows cross and tired he will trample every card house you build for him and toss his toys about and knock over his blocks, but at such times H. 3rd has never seemed divine to us. We have rather laid such tantrums to the original Adam who is in us all. As a matter of fact, we don't believe that Dr. Straton himself would have as good a time at any of his predicted catastrophes as he imagines. To be sure, it is pleasant to imagine oneself sitting on top of a tidal wave and thumbing a nose at the struggling sinners who are being engulfed. But has Dr. Straton ever stopped to consider what a dreary and dull life he would lead if there were nothing for him to thunder against? He must know by now what a delightful inspiration there is in the daily shock. Though he may not believe it, he will do well to mark our words that he will miss the dancing and the immoral gowns and the furtive highballs when all these things are gone. He will find that there is a great deal more fun in preaching about hell than about heaven.
We are not even sure that, in a thoroughgoing civic catastrophe, Dr. Straton would escape. When Sodom and Gomorrah fell Lot was allowed to escape. And so it may be with Dr. Straton. That is not the danger.We have a very definite foreboding that when he is well out of the doomed city and the destruction has begun, Dr. Straton will not be able to resist the temptation to look back even though he turn to salt. If we understand the man, he will not be able to depart without ascertaining whether his name has been mentioned in the special five-star annihilation extras as having foretold the disaster.
We have receivedThe Literary Digest Parents' League Series, in which the training of children is discussed in seven volumes by William Byron Forbush. Much of it seems sound and shrewd, but it also seeks, by implication at any rate to encourage parents to maintain with their children the old nonsense of parental infallibility. Thus, in one volume, which suggests the manner in which a father may impart certain information to his son, he is quoted as saying, "I tell you this, Frank, because I know all about it." And in another volume mothers are urged to hold before their children the ideals of the Light Brigade, "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."
Now there is no denying that this is a comfortable doctrine for parents, if they can put it over, but they must make up their minds that sooner or later they will be found out.
Also, we are in entire disagreement with the author when he says that spankings should be administered in a cool and deliberate manner, that "punishment must partake of the nature of a ceremony." The only excuse for a parent who spanks his child is that he has lost his temper and his patience and his ability to thinkup any better remedy. If he is asked why he does it he would do well to explain all that very frankly to the child and to add that it is the rather harsh rule of the world that stronger people usually adopt force against weaker people to get what they want. The child may regard him as a bully, but he will not be in danger of being thought a hypocrite as well.
This system seems far preferable to the one suggested by the author in a quotation from Charles Werner: "My boy, listen: I love you and I do not like to hurt you. But every boy must be made to obey his father and mother, and this seems to be the only way to make you do it. So remember! Every time you disobey me you shall be punished. When I tell you to do a thing, you must do it instantly without a moment's delay. If you hesitate, if you wait to be told the second time, you will be punished. When I speak you must act. Just as sure as you are standing here before me this punishment will follow every time you do not do as you are told."
This would be, at least, a commendably frank statement of the tyranny under which most children are held if it were not for the unjustified intrusion of the love motive. This occurs, however, in a still more objectionable form in a reply to a mother, in which the author writes, "Should it ever be necessary to spank him I should not refuse to kiss him, even while you are doing so. He can learn that no punishment is inflictedin anger and that punishment does not turn aside your affection."
Such conduct is adding insult to indignity. It goes beyond the tyranny which few parents can resist in a state in which interests are necessarily so conflicting as one which is inhabited by growing persons and grown-ups. It is probably not to be expected, or even desirable, that parents should always allow the interests of the child to displace their own, but when they cannot resist the temptation to sweep over the borders of childhood with all their armed forces it is a little too much to ask that the conquered people should be not only docile but grateful. In other words, the father or mother who says as a prelude to punishment, "I am doing this for your own good," is a liar at least nine times out of ten. What he means is, "I am doing this for my own convenience," and he ought to be frank enough to say so.
The trouble is, as Mr. Floyd Dell has pointed out, that the parent wants complete submission and complete affection too. He can't have both without making a hypocrite of his child. It is perfectly healthy that the child should have fierce outbursts of resentment against his parents when they get in his way, and he should be allowed, and even encouraged, to express his protest. It is the most arrant nonsense to suppose that a relationship of continual love is a desirable thing to keep up. It is much too wearing.
The other day I tried to take a small fragment of newspaper out of H. 3rd's mouth, and he tried to swing his right to the jaw. I still have the reach, and I was able to protect myself by a frequent use of a lightning left jab. Finally I rescued the paper. It was only a small section of an editorial in an evening newspaper about the trial of the five Socialist Assemblymen. Probably I might just as well have permitted H. 3rd to swallow it. Without doubt, the paper would have taken it back the next day, anyway.
In speaking of his endeavor "to make the small duties of life pleasant to the child" one parent writes: "These items should never enter the arena of argument; they may, if taken up early, by a gentle, loving firmness, be treated always as though they were as certain as sunrise, for there is a curious conventionality, a liking for having things done in a dependable fashion, with little folks, and there is nothing to which human nature in young or old more cheerfully submits than the inevitable."
Yes, and there is a curious conventionality in the man who has been hopping about the office all day in obeying the orders of the junior partner or the city editor, which inspires him when he comes home to his children to pretend that he is Kaiser, Fate, or God Himself.
"No time of day is more heavenly in a home thanthe hour when little children, like white angels, go up the stairs to bed."
We wonder if our continued failure to get any such impression rests only on the fact that we have no stairs.
"One wise mother tells her children to divide all people into two classes—friends and strangers. Friends we love too well to gossip about; strangers we know too little.
"Another suggests to her children to meet a proposal toward gossip with the quiet remark, 'I like all my friends.' Nothing more can be said."
But it can; the child rebuked by the quiet remark has only to say, "Well, then, let's talk about Gaby Deslys or King Edward VII."
It is difficult for us to tell how accurately Philip Gibbs has pictured Fleet Street in his novelThe Street of Adventure; for, externally at least, there is little resemblance to Park Row. We cite, for instance, a description of the city room ofThe Staras Francis Luttrell found it on his first day:
"It was a large room, with a number of desks divided by glass partitions and with a large table in the center. At the far end of the room was a fire burning brightly in the grate, and in front of it were two men and a girl, the men in swing chairs with their legs stretched out, the girl on the floor in the billows of a black silk skirt, arranging chestnuts on the first bar of the grate."
There isn't any grate in our city room and we have no roasting parties. There have been days in mid-July when it might have been possible to fry eggs on the skylight of our city room, but we don't remember that anybody ever tried it. Nor is our memory stirred to any local reminiscences by the description ofThe Staroffice just before press time, when "silence reigned in the room except for the scratching of pens." Probably there are not more than half adozen pens in all Park Row and four of them are onThe Evening Post.
We find the difference in spirit not so great. There is a great deal about the terrific strain of newspaper work and how a brutal city editor will drive a finely tempered reporter until he has had the best of his brains and then toss him aside like a withered violet.
"Fleet Street," says Gibbs, who tells the story partly in the first person, "would kill you in a year—it is very cruel, very callous to the sufferings of men's souls and bodies."
Again, the heroine, who is a press woman, complains: "We women wear out sooner. Five years in Fleet Street withers any girl. Then she gets crow's feet round her eyes and becomes snappy and fretful, or a fierce creature struggling in an unequal combat with men. I am just reaching that stage."
An even more terrifying picture is painted of the book reviewer. He was, according to Gibbs, "A young, anemic-looking man with fair, wavy hair, going a little gray, and a pale, haggard, clean-shaven face, seated, with his elbows on the desk, a novel opened before him and six other novels in a pile at his elbow. He was smoking a cigarette, and the third finger of his left hand was deeply stained with nicotine. As Luttrell entered he groaned slightly and pushed back a lock of his fair hair from his forehead."
We would like to find something personal in that portrait or at least to hope that we might be like that after a few years more of this terrific strain. But we doubt it. Despite eleven years of unremitting toil we have been unable to wear ourselves gray or conspicuously haggard or clean shaven. It is not easy. To be sure, we have heard many newspaper men picturing themselves as butterflies broken on the wheel, but always with a melancholy gusto. Moreover, that was in the days when Jack's and Joel's were open all night.
We can't speak with authority about Fleet Street, nor even pretend to be infallible about Park Row, but it is our impression that newspaper work is easier than any of the other professions except the ministry. And the easiest sort of newspaper work is dramatic criticism or book reviewing. If you are not sure of your facts you can just leave them out, and even if they get in wrong it doesn't matter much. There is a certain amount of work to be done in the first two or three years, but by that time the critic should have a particular pigeonhole in his brain for practically every book or play which comes along. Upon seeing "I'll Say It Is" in 1922 all he has to do is to remember what he said about "Have Another" in 1920. Once or twice a year a book or play comes along which doesn't fit into any pigeonhole, but that can be dismissed in one paragraph as "queer" and allowed to go at that.
The novels of Leonard Merrick go a long way in reconciling us to the constitutional establishment of the single standard of morals proposed by William Jennings Bryan. Merrick's world is a hard one for women. His men starve romantically in a pretty poverty. Their dingy haunts are of the gayest. Bad luck only adds to their merriment. So it is, too, with the Kikis and Mignons, but Merrick's good women are of much more fragile stuff. Although invariably English, they grow pale and woebegone just as easily in London as in Paris. The author never gives them any fun at all. A harsh word makes them tremble, but they fear kindness even more. When they are not starving they are fluttering confoundedly because somebody has spoken to them.
With half ofWhen Love Flies Out o' the Windowbehind us, we are entirely out of patience with Meenie Weston. There is no denying, of course, that Meenie had a hard time. Well-paid singing teachers told her that she possessed a great voice, but when her father died she found that the best she could do was an engagement in the chorus, and not always that.
After months without work she signed a contract to sing in what she supposed was a Parisian concerthall, but it turned out to be a dingy cabaret. Worse than that, Miss Weston found that between songs she was supposed to sit at a table and let chance patrons buy her food and drink. It was not much of a job and Miss Weston refused to mingle with the audience. Then one night the villainous proprietor locked her out of her dressing room and she was forced to venture down among the customers.
Up to this point our sympathies were generally with the heroine, except at the point, back in London, where the author recorded, "Miss Joyce proposed that they should 'drink luck' to the undertaking and have 'a glass of port wine.' The girl (our heroine) had been in the chorus too long to be startled by the suggestion—"
It seemed to us that there was nothing particularly horrifying in the suggestion, even if it had been made to a young lady who had never been on the stage. Despite this clue to Miss Weston's character, we were disappointed and surprised at her conduct in the Paris cabaret. She sat first with her one friend in the establishment, who was a kindly but hardened cabaret singer. She did her best for Meenie, but she did not understand her. "That any girl could tremble at the idea of talking to strangers across a table and imbibing beer at their expense was beyond her comprehension."
Our sympathy lay with the cabaret veteran rather than with Meenie. Of course, we did not expect MissWeston to enjoy her predicament, but when a man asked her, "Are you going to sing 'As Once in May' to-night?" we could not quite see why Mr. Merrick found it necessary to report the fact that:
"She started, and the man told himself that he had really stumbled on a singular study.
"'Yes,' she faltered."
To us it seemed a simple question simply put. After all, it was fortunate that the young man did not begin with "Will you have a drink?" Brutal and insulting language of that sort would certainly have sent Meenie straight into hysterics. Even when the young man dropped in the next night there seemed to be nothing in his conversation to alarm our heroine excessively, but Merrick is wedded to the notion that virtue in a woman is a sort of panic. A good name, he seems to believe, is something which a woman carries tightly clasped in both arms like a bowl of goldfish. To stumble would be almost as fatal as to fall.
"I came to talk to you again, if you'll let me," said the young man.
"You know very well that I can't help it," our heroine answered. This was not polite, but at least it had a more engaging quality of boldness than anything she had said before. But soon she was fluttering again. "Oh, you have only to say I'm a nuisance! I assure you that if you'd rather I left you alone I won't speak another word," continued the young man.This seemed reassuring enough, but it has a devastating effect upon our heroine, for we find that "Her mouth twitched, and she looked at the ground."
Eventually she and the young man were married. He had spoken to her without an introduction, and he was enough of a gentleman to realize that he must right the wrong and make an honest woman of her.
Although we have not yet finished the book, we rather suspect that they will not be very happy. Merrick's good women never are. They all suffer terrifically just because they lack the ability to bulwark their virtue behind a couple of snappy comebacks, such as, "Where do you get that stuff?" or, "How do you get that way?"
We sometimes wonder just how and what Joseph Conrad would have written if he had never gone to sea. It may be that he would never have written at all if he had not been urged on by the emotion which he felt about ships and seas and great winds. And yet we regret sometimes that he is so definitely sea-struck. After all, Conrad is a man so keen in his understanding of the human heart that he can reach deep places. It is sometimes a pity, therefore, that he is so much concerned with researches which take him down into nothing more than water, which, even at its mightiest, is no such infinite element as the mind of man.
Typhoons and hurricanes make a brave show of noise and fury, but there is nothing in them but wind. No storm which Conrad ever pictured could be half so extraordinary as the tumult which went on in the soul of Lord Jim. We notice at this point that we have used heart and mind and soul without defining what we meant by any of them. We mean the same thing in each case, but for the life of us we don't know just what it is.Lord Jim, of course, is a great book, but to our mind the real battle is a bit obscured by the strangeness and the vividness of the external adventures through which the hero passes. There is danger thatthe attention of the reader may be distracted by silent seas and savage tribes and jungles from the fact that Jim's fight was really fought just behind his forehead; that it was a fight which might have taken place in Trafalgar Square or Harlem or Emporia.
Naturally, we have no right to imply that nothing of consequence can happen in wild and strange places. There is just as much romance on Chinese junks as on Jersey Central ferryboats. But no more. Here is the crux of our complaint. Conrad and Kipling and the rest have written so magnificently about the far places that we have come to think of them as the true home of romance. Indeed, we have almost been induced to believe that there is nothing adventurous west of Suez. Hereabouts, it seems as if one qualified as a true romancer simply from the fact of living in Shanghai or Singapore, or just off the island of Carimata. And yet we suppose there are people in Shanghai who cobble shoes all day long and sleep at nights, and that there are dishes to be washed in Singapore.
For our own part, we remember that we once spent ten days in Peking, and our liveliest recollection is that one night we held a ten high straight flush in hearts against two full houses. One of them was aces and kings. That was adventure, to be sure, and yet we have held a jack high straight flush in clubs against four sixes in no more distant realm than West Forty-fourth Street.
Adventure is like that. It always seizes upon a person when he least expects it. There is no good chasing to the ends of the earth after romance. Not if you want the true romance. It moves faster than tramp steamers or pirate schooners. We hold that there is no validity in the belief that a little salt will assist the capture; no, not even when it is mixed with spume, or green waves, or purple seas. Only this year we saw a play about a youngster who pined away to death because he neglected to accept an opportunity to sail around the world. He wanted adventure. He starved for romance. He felt sure that it was in Penang and not in the fields of his father's farm. It was not reasonable for him thus to break his heart. If Romance had marked him for her own the hills of Vermont would have been no more a barrier to her coming than the tops of the Andes.
Virtue, good health, efficiency and all the other subjects which are served up in the numberless thick volumes with a purpose seldom seem desirable when the propagandist has finished his say about them. For instance, we began the day with a firm determination never to smoke again—that is, not for some time—and then we ran acrossEfficiency Through Concentration, by B. Johnston. Since then we light the new cigarette from the dying embers of the old. The passage which enraged us most occurs in a chapter called "Personal Habits," in which the author writes:
"If you are a gentleman always ask a lady's permission before smoking, and if you find that her statement that it is disagreeable to her is a disappointment to you, and that your observance of her wishes causes you real discomfort, then you may know that the time has come to give up the habit entirely."
To be sure, Mr. Johnston does not specify whether "the habit" refers to smoking or to the lady, but later it is made clear that he seriously suggests that a smoker should change his whole mode of life to suit the whim of "a lady" who is not otherwise identified in the book. What this particular "lady" is to the "gentleman" we don't know, but it sounds very much like blackmail.
Nor later were we much moved to strength of will against nicotine by the author's advice, "If self-conquest seems difficult, brace yourself up with the reminder that as heir of the ages you sum up in yourself all the powers of self-restraint bequeathed by your innumerable ancestors."
To us that makes but slight appeal. After all, the ancestors most celebrated for self-restraint were those that didn't have any descendants.
Later we came across "Concentrate your thought on the blessings that accompany moderation in all things." This, however, seemed to us an excellent suggestion if followed in moderation.
Next we turned to a health book by Thomas R. Gaines which promised "a sound and certain way to health, a cure for fatigue, a preventive for disease and one of the most potent allies in the battle of life against premature old age." The book is calledVitalic Breathingand the introductory notice went on to say that the system suggested was easy to practise and cost nothing. Only when we came to facts did the new guide to health fail us, for then we read, "Vitalic breathing means inhaling in sniffs and forcibly exhaling." No dramatic critic could afford to follow such a system. He would be hurled out of every theater in town on the suspicion that he was hissing the show.
Vance Thompson's advice inLive and Be Youngis no easier. "The best is none too good for you," hewrites graciously, and continues: "Whether it is the country or the village or the city, the men and women you want to know are the best—those who are getting the best out of life—those who have beautiful homes and social influence—those who play games and make an art of pleasant things—in a word, those who are smart."
We read on and learned that, "Rich people are, nine times out of ten, pleasanter, kindlier, better bred and less selfish than poor folk—they can afford to be; and they are more enjoyable playmates and steadier friends."
No, after mature deliberation we think we would rather try the sniffing and forcibly exhaling method. We would even prefer to concentrate and give up tobacco. Addition never was one of our strong points, and Mr. Thompson's advice is not for us. We would have a terrible time in finding out whether they really were rich enough to be of any use to our arteries. Clues are simple enough. It is easy to ask nonchalantly, "How much income tax did you pay this year?" But after obtaining that you have to find out whether your potentially rich man is living with his wife and whether he has any children or bad debts or Liberty bonds of that issue which is tax exempt. Then you must calculate the first few thousands on the basis of four per cent and on up. It couldn't be done in your head, and we doubt whether it would be polite toask your host for paper and pencil. The system is all well enough after you have your rich, smart people identified, but the possibility of contracting premature old age while still in the research period seems to us too dangerous to meddle with.
After setting down all this we find that we have not been fair to Mr. Thompson. Early in the book, on a page which we had inadvertently skipped, an easy method is suggested for ascertaining whether your friends are actually rich and smart. Speaking of such words as "climbers" and "snobs" Mr. Thompson writes: "These epithets are always ready to the hand of the slack-living, uncouth man, who is more comfortable in bad society than he is in good society—and he loves to throw them about. You know that man? He stands out in the commonness and indecency of the street, as you go up to knock at the door of a smart house, and shouts, 'Snob!'"
Of course, we would like it fine, but truthfulness compels us to admit that we never met him. Whether we like it or not we will have to continue to seek health in good works and deep breathing.
Still, our own house is pretty smart. It carries three mortgages and has never dropped one yet.