After Stephane Dubost, editor of the ParisRéveil, had been ten days in this country, and had collected all his material for a series of volumes on the American Woman, Yankee and Yellow Peril, Democracy Décolleté, and Footballversusthe Fine Arts—to name only a few—he was asked what single feature of our life had impressed him as most characteristically American. He replied, "The headlines in your daily press." Just what M. Dubost did think of our achievements in that department of journalism may be gathered from a letter he addressed the very same day to his friend, Marcel Complans, director of the Bureau of Cipher Codes in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
"In nothing, my dear Marcel, is the American genius for saving time so strikingly exemplified as in their newspaper headlines. Think of ourFigaroorTempswith its dreary columns of solid type introduced by a minute solitary heading, and then pick up one of Uncle Sam's great dailies. It may be only an item of four or five inches, what they call here a stickful or two, but are you left to make your way unassisted through the brief account? No. Your eye immediately catches a time-saving headline like this:
DESERTED GIRL WIFETO HOLD UP MAN.
Having that concise legend before you, all you need to do, my dear Marcel, is simply to decide for yourself whether our story deals with an unscrupulous wretch who abandons his young wife to engage on a career of highway robbery;or whether it is the history of a deserted girl who becomes the wife of a professional outlaw; or whether it is a betrayed young wife who gives herself up to the cause of elevating the human race. A French reader, under the circumstances, would be compelled to go through as much as thirty or forty lines of small print before he secured the desired information. Thus it requires but a brief experience with American headlines to recognise that when the ChicagoEvening Postsays
FINDS ENGLISH FOODFOR LAND TAX FAITH
it means that an American single-taxer, who has just returned from Great Britain, believes that the English people is ready to listen to the principles of the single-tax theory. And when the New YorkSunsays
LA FOLLETTE TALKING BOLT
it does not mean that the Senator from Wisconsin is a manifestation of crashing, celestial eloquence, but that he is advocating a secession from the Republican party. Can you not see, my friend, what magnificent economies of time are effected by headlines like
WATCH SPRINGS TRAPFOR JAPANESE SPY
over a story dealing with the capture of an Oriental suspect by a sentinel at one of the Pacific Coast forts, or
SCREAMING FRIARS TORTUREDCHILD MOTHER FAINTS
which does not mean that a society of howling friars have been guilty of an atrocious crime upon an infant in the presence of its mother; or that a band of religionists are driven by torture to cries of pain, while a young mother faints at the sight. It only means that a poormother, who has suddenly gone insane, breaks into a house of refuge, where her little boy is being cared for by a religious fraternity, accuses, without warrant, the brothers of torturing her child, and faints. Or take
FRENCH RACE WORN OUTENGLISH TO TRIUMPH.
These lines are not the summary of a study in national growth and decay, but expressive of the fact that a French bicycle team wins a signal victory over a group of exhausted English competitors. Do you see now how far towards the art of simplified story-telling these Americans have gone?
"I can only express my profound admiration, as I pass, for the genius of those men who almost automatically will dig the heart out of a 'story,' and blazon it before the reader not only with marvellous brevity and meaning,but with extraordinary appropriateness of characterisation. Can you seize, for instance, the full relevancy of a headline like
PRESBYTERIAN FALLSTWENTY FEET
or,
PROFESSOR THRICE MARRIEDDENIES AUTHENTICITY OF BIBLE
or see how the essential point is caught when a 'head' writer places
FLORODORA GIRL EXPELLEDFROM CZAR'S CAPITAL
over an account of the latest ukase which banishes from St. Petersburg two hundred members of the Duma, twelve professors, fifty-five Jewish bankers and artists, all the labour delegates, as well as the agent of the American Plough Corporation, whose wife was one of the original sextette?
"I will conclude with what to me is an example of the art of headline writing carried almost to perfection. Suppose that at Paris a long-distance foot-race between one of our countrymen and a foreign athlete had been won by our compatriot. TheRéveilwould probably say, 'Armand Wins at Auteuil,' and go on to give the details. But observe what they do here. I cite the article complete, headline and text:
HAYES WINS
VICTOR IN DUAL MATCH OVER DORANDO
AMERICAN LEADS ITALIAN TO THE TAPE,AND CARRIES OFF PRIZE
DORANDO CAN DO NOTHING BETTER THANSECOND
ONE MORE VICTORY ADDED TO GREATRUNNER'S STRING
TEN THOUSAND CHEERING SPECTATORSSEE THE AMERICAN RUNNER REPEATHIS VICTORY AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES
"New York, November 26.—The race between Hayes and Dorando this afternoon was won by the former."
...a certain class of verbal critics who can never free themselves from the impression that man was made for language and not language for man.—Professor Lounsbury.
...a certain class of verbal critics who can never free themselves from the impression that man was made for language and not language for man.—Professor Lounsbury.
From a large number of readers we have received requests for a ruling on disputed cases of English usage. We now proceed to answer these inquiries in accordance with the liberal standard for which Professor Lounsbury pleads. One man writes:
Question:Which is right, "To-morrow is Sunday and we are going out," or "To-morrow will be Sunday and we shall go out?"Answer:Both forms are right, but as a matter of fact, if to-morrow is like other Sundays, it will probablyrain all day, and your chances of going out are not bright.
Q.Must a sentence always have coherence? What is the practice of our great writers on this point?A.Coherence is not essential. Thus: "Conquests! Thousands! Don Bolaro Fizzgig—Grandee—only daughter—Donna Christina—Splendid creature—loved me to distraction—jealous father—high-souled daughter—handsome Englishman—Donna Christina in despair—prussic acid—stomach pump in my portmanteau—operation performed—old Bolaro in ecstasies—consent to our union—join hands and floods of tears—romantic story—very." (Charles Dickens.)
Q.Must a sentence always have a predicate?A.No. For example: (1) "The Universe smiles to me. The World smiles to me. Everything. Man. Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything smilesto me." (The Complete Whitmanite) (2) "From the frowning tower of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools that stud the sides of Pentelicus, down to our own Washington, throned like an empress on the banks of the beautiful Potomac, waiting for the end which we trust may never come." (From theCongressional Record.)
Q.Is "ivrybody" a permissible variant for "everybody"?A.It is. For instance, "His dinners [our ambassador's at St. Petersburg] were th' most sumchuse ever known in that ancient capital; th' carredge of state that bore him fr'm his stately palace to th' comparativelysqualid quarters of th' Czar was such thativrybodyexpicted to hear th' sthrains iv a calliope burst fr'm it at anny moment." (Mr. Dooley.)
Q.Is there good authority for saying, "He was given a hat," "He was shown the door," etc.?A.The form is common, and therefore correct. As, "The Senatorwas paidtwenty thousand dollars for voting against the Governor"; "Hewas offereda third term, but declined"; "The coloured delegateswere handeda lemon." (From the contemporary press.)
Q.The use of "who" and "whom" puzzles me. Must "who" always be used in the nominative case and "whom" in the objective?A.Not necessarily. Thus, "I told him who I wanted to see and that it wasn't none of his business" (W. S. Devery); "That's the first guy whom he said put him into the cooler." (Battery Dan Finn.)
Q.I am told that it is wrong to place apreposition at the end of a sentence. Why can't I say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talkingwith"?A.Your example is unfortunate. You should say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talkingafter."
Q.Is it wrong to split infinitives? Is a phrase like "to seriously complain" really objectionable?A.We hasten to most emphatically say "Yes!"
Q.Is there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"?A.Two examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did that, andbegunat two yards; but he never tried it on ag'in; for heblowedthe bird right clean away at the first fire, and nobody everseeda feather on him arterwards.'" (2) "So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear—as the gen'lem'n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday—to tell you that the first and only time Iseeyou your likeness wastookon my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheens (wich p'r'aps you may haveheerdon Mary my dear) altho it does finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete with a hook at the end to hang it up by and all in two minutes and a quarter." (Charles Dickens.)
Q.What is "elegance" in style? I know it does not mean long words and many of them; but just what does it mean?A.Elegance is appropriateness. Long and circumlocutory terms are just as elegant in the mouth of a fashionable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angelsand ministers of grace defend us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are equally elegant.
Q.What is force in style?A.We may illustrate with a quotation from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her as men and women have kissed through the æons, since the first star hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is nevertheless a very forcible one.
For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a balloon at 2.30a.m.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediæval Florentine altar-piece made in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family prefers not to allude to thesubject. Good men occasionally ride, but as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has been seen in a garage.
To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not want the tariff revised; for foreign observersto prove that we are developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.
Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give her personal attention to the car going south.
It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders, without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin," and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, but when you get there theyare there. "Ladies," you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you will kindly step into the car, I will."
Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being. It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the spirit ofdolce far niente, than the American farmer on his wagon in a narrow road with an auto behindhim. The grunt of the horn invariably stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years, and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.
The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is a kindredsoul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams, and 'crap' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right," says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a sleeping man. One hundred dollars."
Such incidents make it clear that the automobile as an annihilator of space has established its reputation. In the days before the auto a drive of fifteen or twenty miles constituted a good Sunday's outing. To-day a man can leave New Rochelle at eight o'clock in the morning and pay a fine at Poughkeepsie at one in the afternoon, or he can leave Poughkeepsie at eight in the morning and at one in the afternoon be in the lock-up at New Rochelle.
What hurts the motorist's feelings most of all, however, is to be regarded by the public as a sort of licensed assassin. Yet almost any one can think of people who drive a car and take no pleasure in spilling blood. The common belief that automobile killing is a favourite sport among our best families seems to be based on the fact that in nine cases out of ten the occupants of a man-slaying automobilebear such well-known Knickerbocker names as Mr. William Moriarty, chauffeur; his friend, Mr. James Dugan, who is prominent in coal-heaving circles; and their friends, the Misses Mayme Schultz and Bessie Goldstein. At bottom, it would seem, most of the criticism directed against the automobile is based on its failure to take a hog and turn him into a gentleman. But in this respect automobiles are like many of our colleges. The comforting thing is that the life of the automobile hog is an uncertain one. Sooner or later he runs down a steep place into the sea, like certain of his species mentioned in the Bible, and the question adjusts itself.
Meanwhile, however, the decent motorist must suffer for the other's sins. A friend says: "The only time I dare be seen in my machine is between 11a.m.and 4p.m.Before that time people point me out as a 'joy-rider' returningfrom a night's debauch. After that time I am a 'joy-rider' bound for a night of it." The complaint rings true. The exhilaration aroused by a punctured tire in the open country gathers strength from the remarks of the spectators who wonder if you made your money honestly. In town a defective sparkplug brings the close attention of a crowd which exchanges opinions as to whether the lady in the tonneau is your wife. All agree that you must have mortgaged your home to buy the machine.
And yet it is evident that much misunderstanding could be avoided if we had a simple code of rules for people who cross the street just as there are regulations for the autoist. A few such rules suggest themselves: 1. If one is about to cross the street in front of an auto, one should do so either before the man in the car succumbs to heart failure or after, but notwhile the driver is wrestling with death; it is in such cases that one is apt to get hurt. 2. If one is in the middle of the road and sees a car approaching, one should move either (a) away from the car, (b) towards the car, (c) to the right, (d) to the left, or (e) stand still; under no circumstances should one attempt to combine (a), (b), (c), (d), and (e). 3. The safest place from which to ascertain the make of an automobile or to estimate its cost is the sidewalk.
The hour, the occasion, and the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from me, wretchedly fluttered the pages of a popular magazine and looked ill-natured and horribly unkempt. The new table-cloths had not yet been laid for dinner. The sawdust on the floorwas mostly mire. Angelina, the cook, was screaming at Paolo and Francesca, who were trying to boil the cat. It was very dreary.
"Harding," I said, "you were insisting only a little while ago that life is always beautiful."
"So it is," he replied, too listless to be defiant. "To some people."
"To whom?"
"Well, to the two here, for instance," and he pointed to a pair of handsome lovers playing golf all over a double page in the advertising section of his magazine. "Do you mean to say these two ever know what ugliness is, or pain, or want? Or ever grow old? Or cease to love? Here is the perfect life for you."
"Are you so sure of that?" said some one over my shoulder, and I turned about sharply to look into the most entrancing face I have ever beheld in man or woman. It was Apollo standing there above me, or if not he, at leastone of the divine youths that the Greeks have left for us in undying marble. He made Scipione's grimy cellar luminous with beauty.
"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, seating himself at our table as joyously confident and as simple as an immortal should be. "But I feel myself competent to speak on the point you have raised because the Advertising Supplement you refer to is my own home. This very young man playing golf is, as you will observe, no other than myself."
There was no denying the amazing resemblance.
"You say the Advertising Supplement is your home," I collected myself sufficiently to ask, "but just how do you mean that?"
"Literally," he replied. "My whole life, and for that matter my parents' life before me, has been spent in the pages you are now fingering. My name is Pinckney, Walter Pinckney,and if you are sufficiently interested in my career I should be glad to describe it."
"Go ahead," cried Harding, with almost ferocious earnestness.
"If I begin a bit back before my birth," said Pinckney, "you will be patient with me. I will not detain you very long."
"Begin where you please," said Harding in the same grim manner; "only begin."
"My father," commenced young Pinckney, "at eighteen, was a sickly country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by investing the smallsum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his daily training—an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an important Eastern railroad. It was shortly after he had won this place that he met my mother."
The caressing fondness with which he uttered the last word imparted to his seemingly supreme beauty an added warmth of appeal.
"Her, too, you have met in the Advertising Columns. She had begun to teach school when a mere girl; but when her father's death threw upon her young shoulders the burden of three little children and a helpless mother, she had risen to her greater needs. She succeeded in quadrupling her income by learning to write short stories, criticism, and verse, from a literary bureau which charged her a nominal fee for instruction and purchased her output at extremely generous rates for disposal among the leading magazines. When my father first saw her—it was in the course of a Fourth of July excursion to Niagara Falls which, including a three days' stay at the best hotels, was offeredto the public at half the usual cost—she had sent the eldest boy through college, her younger sister was teaching school, and she was free to follow the inclinations of her heart."
"You were fortunate in the selection of your immediate ancestry," said Harding.
"Was I not?" Pinckney responded in a flush of grateful recognition. "But that is not all. The house in which I was born, though generally recognized as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in reinforced concrete, was put up by my father, unassisted, from plans which he purchased for a ridiculously small sum. Its every nook was the abiding-place of love, of quiet content, and of nurturing comfort. The furnace was equipped with the latest automatic devices so that it had to be started only once a year. It was then left to the care of my mother, who used to give it only a few minutes' attention every day without going to the trouble of divesting herself of the gown of fine white lawn which she always wore."
"My dear fellow," I could not keep from exclaiming, "you have almost explained yourself. In such surroundings how could you help growing up into what you are?"
"That is what I say, sir," he came back at me eagerly. "But you must call to mind, also, the fostering personal care that was bestowed upon us children. Take the matter of diet. Coffee, cocoa, excessive sweets, every food-element tending to narcotise or over-stimulate the system was rigorously excluded. Instead we had the numerous grain preparations that assist nature by contributing directly to the development of our particular faculties. In my case, for instance, it had been decided some time before I was born that in the course of time I should enter West Point. With that end inview Farinette, because of its muscle-building powers, was made the principal constituent of my bill of fare. Later, when my parents thought that the pulpit offered better chances of a successful career, Farinette was replaced by Panema, which is notably efficacious in the production of cerebral tissue. Just as I was taking my examinations for college it was finally determined that the sphere of corporation finance held out unrivalled facilities for advancement, and Panema gave way to Hydronuxia, which acts particularly on the imaginative faculties. As for my sisters, they fared no worse than I. You surely have seen them in the Advertising Pages in all their splendid bloom. Saved from overwork by soaps that make heavy washing a pleasure, eternally youthful through the use of electric massage, they smile at you through the reticulations of the tennis racket which the champion playedwith at Newport, or recline under parasols in the bow of canoes that will neither sink nor upset. They are very fond of playing Chopin on a mechanical piano while the moonlight streams over the floor of the open veranda."
Here Harding broke in sharply. "You began by differing with me on the possibility of finding complete happiness in life, and you have done nothing but refute your own position from the very first. I admit there are certain essentials toward the perfect life that you have not mentioned, but I haven't the least doubt that you already possess them or that they will come to you in time. I mean such things as riches or love."
"Ah, love," Pinckney murmured, and the shadow of a cloud passed over his divine brow.
"Surely," I said, "youhave not sought for what love has to give and sought in vain?"
"No," he replied thoughtfully, "I have not failed to win love. But does love bring with it untouched felicity; that is what I ask." He hesitated. "I will not attempt to describe her. I really could not, you know, except in a feeble way, by saying that even to other eyes than mine she is a woman more wonderful than any of my sisters, if that is at all possible. We loved at first sight. I had run down for a Sunday afternoon to Garden Towers-by-the-Sea, a beautiful suburb which a number of enterprising citizens had built up out of a sand waste to meet the needs of the tired urban worker who, in his expensive and uncomfortable city flat, finds himself longing for the life-giving breeze of the ocean and the sight of a bit of God's open country. I was walking down the main street of the village, wearing the loosely shaped and well-padded garments that were then popular with young men, and carryinga set of golf-sticks in my right hand and a bull terrier under my arm. Then I saw her. She was sitting on the porch of the house which her father had purchased for one-third of what its value became when the completion of extensive rapid-transit improvements brought it within thirty-five minutes of the New York City Hall. We loved and told each other. My father, at first, insisted that before assuming the responsibilities of marriage a man should be in receipt of a larger independent income than I could boast of. But when Alice pleaded that she could be of help by raising high-grade poultry for the urban market and organising subscribers' clubs for the magazines, my father yielded. We are to be married in two months, sir."
Harding spoke up impatiently. "Still I fail to see where your unhappiness lies."
"Did I say unhappiness? That is not atall the word, sir. It is rather a sense of awe that seizes us both at times, when we are together, as though we were in the presence of unseen influences; as though, rather, a world not our own were projecting itself into our well-defined lives. I have shown you that Alice and I belong to a very real, very matter-of-fact world. But there are times when we seem to be walking in a land of strange sounds and sights and of shadows that fan our cheeks as they flit by."
"Oh, well," I said, "when two fond young people are together the limits of the visible world are apt to undergo undue extension."
"Let me be specific," said Pinckney. "We first became aware of this state of things some weeks ago. We were walking one afternoon at twilight through a stretch of woods not far from the shore when all at once we were conscious that the familiar aspect of things had vanished. The park had become a virgin forest. Two savage figures girded with skins were panting in deadly combat. One had sunk his thumbs into the eye-sockets of his opponent, who, in turn, had buried his teeth in the flesh of the other's arm. A wild creature, almost hidden in the long tangle of her hair, crouched there, the only spectator of the battle, chanting in weird tones: 'Ai! Ai! the call of the wild summons you to the death-grapple, oh Men, and me to sing who am Woman! Fight on, oh Men; for it is Good! The Race, the Sons of your strong loins through the dizzy whirl-dance of all time, are watching you. Match man-strength against man-strength, breath-rhythm against breath-rhythm, and knee-thrust against knee-thrust!' And then one of the combatants fell, and the victor with a yell of triumph seized the woman by the hair and, flinging her over his shoulder, staggered off,and we heard them call to each other, 'Oh, my Male!' 'Oh, my Female!' Then we were in our own grove by the beach and Alice whispered dreamily, 'Dearest, how tame are our lives.'"
"I think I begin to understand," said I. "What happened was simply that you had walked right out of the Advertising Supplement into the Fiction pages; and that was Jack London. Had you other experiences of the kind?"
"On another occasion," he resumed, "we were walking on the beach and again in a flash we had lost our footing in the world we knew. We were in a magnificent ballroom. The chandeliers were Venetian, the orchestra was Hungarian, the decorations were priceless orchids. Every woman wore a tiara with chains of pearls. There were stout dowagers, callow youths, gamblers, and blacklegs, and, amongthe many handsome men, one of about five-and-thirty, with a wonderfully cut chin, bending sedulously over a glorious, slender girl whose eyes attested the purity of her soul and fidelity unto death. 'Dearest,' she was saying, 'what does it matter that my father was the greatest Greek scholar in America and my mother the most beautiful woman south of Mason and Dixon's line? What that I have ten million dollars and can ride, shoot, swim, golf, tennis, dance, sing, compose, cook, and interpret the Irish sagas? I love you though you have only twelve thousand a year.' And all over the hall we caught such phrases as, 'Yes, he dropped 25,000 on Non Sequitur at Bennings.' 'Oh, just down for three weeks at Palm Beach, you know.' 'Two millions in three weeks, they say, mostly out of Copper and Q.C.B.' 'Yes, just back from South Dakota on the best of terms.' Then the room vanished, we were by the sea,and Alice said wistfully, 'How limited our lives are, dear.'"
I said: "My theory holds good. That was Robert Chambers, I am sure. Go on."
"I have told you enough," said Pinckney, "to show what I mean by the shadow over our happiness. It will pass away, of course. In the meantime I try to explain to Alice that these are phantoms we vision, of no relation to the practical life that we must lead on our side of the boundary line; I tell her that these things we see are not, and never have been and never will be. Am I right, do you think, sir?"
"Quite right," I told him.
"My latest fad," said Cooper, "is this little library of the greatest names in literature. It is by no means complete, but the nucleus is there."
When Cooper speaks of his fads he does himself injustice. The world might think them fads, or worse. But I, who know the man, know that his fondness for the insignificant or the extraordinary is something more than eccentricity, something more than a collector's appetite run amuck. In reality, Cooper's soul goes out to the worthless objects he frequently brings together into odd little museums. He loves them precisely because they are insignificant. His whole life has been asilent protest against the arrogance of success, of high merit, of rare value. His heart is always on the side of theUntermensch, a name given by the Germans, a learned people, to what we call the under-dog.
"My collection," said Cooper, "is as yet confined almost entirely to authors in the English language. Here is my Shakespeare, a first edition, I believe, though undated. The year, I presume, was about 1875. The title, you see, is comprehensive: 'The Nature of Evaporating Inflammations in Arteries After Ligature, Accupressure, and Torsion.' Edward O. Shakespeare, who wrote the book, is not a debated personality. His authorship of the book is unquestioned, and I assure you it is a comfort to handle a text which you know left its author's mind exactly as it now confronts you in the page.
"Next to the Shakespeare you find my Dickensvolumes, two in number. Albert Dickens published, in 1904, his 'Tests of Forest Trees.' It has been praised in authoritative quarters as an excellent work of its kind. An older book is 'Dickens's Continental A B C,' a railway guide which I am fond of thinking of as the probable instrument of a vast amount of human happiness. Imagine the happy meetings and reunions which this chubby little book has made possible—husbands and wives, fathers and children, lovers, who from the most distant corners of the earth have sought and found each other by means of the Dickens railway time-tables. To how many beds of illness has it brought a comforter, to how many habitations of despair—but I must not preach. I call your attention to the next volume, Byron. From the title, 'A Handbook of Lake Minnetonka,' you will perceive that it is in the same class as my Dickens."
Cooper drew his handkerchief to flip the dust from a thin octavo in sheepskin. "This Emerson," he said, "is the earliest in date of my Americana. William Emerson's 'A Sermon on the Decease of the Rev. Peter Thacher' appeared in 1802, at a time when people still thought it worth while to utilise the death of a good man by putting him into a book for the edification of the living. The adjoining two volumes are by Spencer. Charles E. Spencer's 'Rue, Thyme, and Myrtle' is a sheaf of dainty poetry which was very popular in Philadelphia during the second decade after the Civil War. Do we still write poetry as single-heartedly as people did? It may be. Perhaps we might find out by comparing this other volume by Edwin Spencer, 'Cakes and Ale,' published in 1897, with the Philadelphia Spencer of forty years ago.
"I must hurry you through the rest of mybooks," said Cooper. "Thomas James Thackeray's 'The Soldier's Manual of Rifle-Firing' appeared in 1858, and undoubtedly had its day of usefulness. Thomas Kipling was professor of divinity at Cambridge University toward the end of the eighteenth century. In 1793 he edited the volume I now hold in my hand, 'Codex Bezæ,' one of the most precious of our extant MSS. of the New Testament. I like to think of that fine old Cambridge professor's name as bound up with patient, self-effacing scholarship and a highly developed spirituality. But I digress. Cast your eye over this little group of foreign writers. Here is Dumas,—Jean Baptiste Dumas,—whose 'Leçons sur la philosophic chimique,' delivered in 1835, were considered worthy of being published thirty years later. The quaint volume that comes next is by Du Maurier, who was French ambassador to the Hague about 1620. Thetitle, in the Dutch, is 'Propositie gedan door den Heere van Maurier,' etc.—'Propositions Advanced by the Sieur du Maurier,' one of the Regent's able and merry-hearted diplomats, I take it. And here is Goethe; he would repay your reading. Rudolf Goethe's 'Mitteilungen ueber Obst- und Gartenbau' is one of the standard works on horticulture.
"And finally," said Cooper with a flash of pride quite unusual in him, "the treasure of my little library—Homer; again a first edition."
"Homer!" I cried. "Aneditio princeps!"
"Nearly one hundred and fifty years old," he said. "The Rev. Henry Homer deserved well of his British countrymen when he gave to the world—it was in 1767—his 'Inquiry Into the Measures of Preserving and Improving the Publick Roads of this Kingdom.'"
Cooper sat down and eyed me doubtfully, asif awaiting an unfavourable opinion. His face quite lit up when I hastened to assure him that his library was one of the most impressive collections it had ever been my good fortune to know.
"Very few collections," I told him, "bear the impress of a personality. As a rule they are shopfuls of costly masterpieces such as any multi-millionaire may have if he doesn't prefer horses or monkey dinners. But how often does one find a treasure-house like yours, Cooper, revealing an exquisitely discriminating taste in co-operation with the bold originality of the true amateur?"
"It is his own composition, the final word in modern music," I had been told. "He does not merely play the concerto; he lives it. Be sure to watch his face." It was not a very impressive face as artists go. It was rather heavy, rather sullen, and seemingly incapable of mirroring more than the elementary passions. The great pianist entered the hall almost unwillingly, and wound his way among the musicians with consummate indifference to the roar of applause that greeted him. You might have said that he was once more a little boy being scourged to his piano day after day by parents who had been told that they had brought forth a genius. He half-dropped intohis seat, glanced wearily about him, then let his eyes sink expressionless on the keyboard and his hands fall flat on his knees, nerveless, heavy, apathetic.
The orchestra leader poised his baton and the two-score strings under his command swung into a noble andante. The artist at the piano slowly raised his eyes to a level with the top of his instrument, his lips just parted as if in halting wonder at something he alone in the great hall could see, the hands made as if to lift themselves from his knees. "Look at his face," my neighbour said. I looked and saw that the dull mask was slightly changing, that some emotion at last was rising to the surface of that stolid countenance, striking its cloudy aspect with the first anticipations of breaking light. Would that cloud dissolve? Would the light completely break and irradiate player, piano, and audience, all equally keyed up tothe delayed climax? Would those massive hands rise slowly, slowly, and hanging aloft an instant crash down in a rage of harmony upon keyboard and auditors' hearts? No. The clouds once more swept over that massive face. The player moistened his lips with his tongue, half-turned on his chair, and slowly swept the hall with an indifferent, almost a disdainful eye. Then he sank into his former lassitude. His hands dropped to his side without striking the keys. Evidently the time had not come. The violins in the orchestra sang on.
My neighbour was not the only one to fall under the spell of such masterly musicianship. Twenty-four ladies in the parquette shrank back into their seats with a half-sob of brimming emotion, and implored their escorts to look at the artist's face. Eleven ladies in the lower boxes interrupted their conversation to remark that it was wonderful what soul thoseSlavs managed to put into their playing. In the upper balconies listeners strained forward in their seats so that from below it seemed as if they were about to precipitate themselves over the railings. What expert opinion had described as the sublimest ten minutes in the great pianist's greatest concerto had just begun. The conductor slightly raised himself on his toes. Instantly through the weaving of the violins the voices of the wood instruments began to break out. The contest between the two came quickly to its climax. The strings were forced back and back, wailing an ineffective protest against the shrilling advance of the woods. A solitary 'cello made dogged resistance, knowing its cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes sang a pæan of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, sweptdown a hurricane of brasses and shook the hall with its resonant thunders.
That was the moment our artist at the piano had been waiting for. His heavy figure straightened up; it seemed to swell to monstrous proportions, forcing orchestra and leader out of the vision and consciousness of his listeners. His face now was all eloquence. A divine wrath almost made his eyes blaze as he prepared to hurl himself at the silent, yet quivering instrument. His huge hands hovered over the keyboard ready to fall and destroy. His eyes ran over the keys as if searching for the vulnerable, for the vital spot. Back and forth his eyes ran, and his outstretched fingers kept pace with them in the air. But those fingers could find no resting-place. Still the piano remained silent. And then came the inevitable reaction. Such passion could not last without crushing player and audience alike. Seven ladies in theparquette were grasping the arms of their chairs, and three women in the upper balcony had seized the arms of their escorts, as the brasses crashed once and died out. The flutes for an instant reappeared, to make way in turn for the violins, which now began timidly to peep out from their hiding-places. They grew bolder; they joined hands, and once more their insistent story quivered and sang throughout the house. And as they sang, the player at the piano, exhausted by his supreme effort, sank more and more into his indifferent former self. His form collapsed, the fire in his eyes died out, and the powerful hands wearily drooped and drooped till they rested once more on the player's knees. A sigh of relief swept over the hall. Human emotion could stand no more. The audience could hardly wait for the last throb of the violins, to break out in rapturous applause. The master rose, bowed sorrowfullytowards nobody in particular, and walked off.
"Did you watch his face?" asked my neighbour. "Have you ever come across such utterly overpowering individuality? I have played for fifteen years, but if I played for fifty years I could never even approach art like this."
"The arguments for and against woman suffrage," said Harding, "seem to me very evenly balanced. I agree with Dr. Biddle of the Society for the Promotion of Beautiful Manners, that it is unseemly for a woman to climb a truck and demand the ballot. Dr. Biddle maintains that if woman wants the ballot she should wait until every one is asleep and then go through somebody's pockets for it. Woman, Dr. Biddle thinks, has her own peculiar sphere, which, as the latest Census figures show, includes the nursery, the kitchen, the vaudeville stage, college teaching, stenography, the law, medicine, the ministry, as well as the manufacture of agricultural implements, ammunition, artificialfeathers and limbs, automobiles, axle-grease, boots and shoes, bread-knives, brooms, brushes, buttons, carriages and wagons, charcoal, cheese, cigars, clocks, clothing and so on to x, y, and z.
"Can anything be more fatal to our ideals of true womanliness, Dr. Biddle asks, than a suffragette who throws stones? In reply to this, Miss Annabelle Bloodthurst asserts that if we count the number of successful suffragette hits woman is never so true to her sex as when she is heaving bricks at a British prime minister.
"Professor Tumbler lays particular stress on the outrageous conduct of the English suffragettes. He recalls how the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, while eating a charlotte russe, felt his teeth strike against a hard object, which turned out to be a cardboard cylinder inscribed 'Votes for Women.' The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was about to light his after-dinner cigar the other day when the cigarsuddenly expanded into a paper fan bearing the legend, 'Tyrants, beware!' The newest Dreadnought with the First Lord of the Admiralty on board was preparing to set out on her trial trip when it was discovered that the boilers were not making steam. When the furnace doors were opened two dozen suffragettes, concealed within, began to shout, 'We want votes!' The leader of the Opposition is known to have walked all the way down Piccadilly with a tag tied to his coattails inscribed: 'I see no reason for bestowing the suffrage on women.'
"But perhaps the most dastardly outrage occurred at the baptism of the youngest child of a prominent treasury official. It seems that the nurse, who was a suffragette in disguise, had removed the child, a girl, and substituted a mechanical doll, with a phonographic attachment. The clergyman was in the middle of his discourse when the doll began to scream, 'Votesfor women.' The father gasped, 'What! So early?' and fainted.
"The more you weigh the reasons pro and con," continued Harding, as he lit one of my cigars, "the harder it is to decide. Mrs. Cadgers has pointed out that under our present system the wife of a college professor is not allowed to vote, whereas an illiterate Greek fruit peddler may. But Mr. Rattler replies that the college professor, too, seldom votes, and if he does he spoils his ballot by trying to split his ticket. Why, demands Mrs. Cadgers, should women who pay taxes be refused a voice in the management of public affairs? Because, replies Mr. Rattler, the suffrage and taxes do not necessarily go together. In our country at the present day many millionaires who regularly cast their votes never pay their taxes.
"Mr. Rattler is particularly afraid that woman suffrage will break up the family.'Imagine,' he says, 'a family in which the husband is a Democrat and the wife a Cannon Republican. Imagine them constantly fighting out the subject of tariff revision over the supper-table, and conceive the dreadful effect on the children, who at present are accustomed to see father light his cigar after supper and fall asleep. Or suppose the wife develops a passion for political meetings. That means that the husband will have to stay at home with the baby.' 'Well,' replies Mrs. Cadgers, 'such an arrangement has its advantages. It would not only give the wife a chance to learn the meaning of citizenship, but it would give the husband a chance to get acquainted with the baby.' And besides, Mrs. Cadgers goes on to argue, a woman's political duties need not take up more than a small fraction of her time. That, retorts Mr. Rattler, with a sneer, is because woman derives her ideas on the subject fromseeing her husband fulfil his duties as a citizen once every two years when he forgets to register.
"An excellent debate on the subject was the one between Mrs. Excelsior, who spoke in favour of the ballot for women, and Professor Van Doodle, who upheld the negative. Professor Van Doodle maintained that women are incapable of taking a genuine interest in public affairs. What is it that appeals to a woman when she reads a newspaper? A Presidential election may be impending, a great war is raging in the Far East, an explorer has just returned from the South Pole, and, woman, picking up the Sunday paper, plunges straight into the fashion columns! She hardly finds time to answer her husband's petulant inquiry as to what she has done with the comic supplement. Can woman take an impersonal view of things? No, says Professor Van Doodle. In a critical Presidential election, one in which the fate ofthe country is at stake, she will vote for the candidate from whom she thinks she can get most for her husband and her children, whereas, her husband under the same circumstances will cast aside all personal interests and vote the same ticket his father voted for. Woman, concluded the professor, is constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood.
"Mrs. Excelsior made a spirited defence. She showed that woman's undeveloped sense of what truth and honesty are, would not handicap her in the pursuit of practical politics. She argued that the complicated problems of municipal finance are no easier for the man who sets out to raise a family on fifteen dollars a week than for the woman who succeeds in doing so. She declared that a person who can travel thirty miles by subway and surface car, price $500 worth of dressgoods, and buy her lunch, all onfifteen cents in cash and a transfer ticket, would make a good comptroller for New York City.
"Professor Van Doodle claimed that under woman suffrage only a good-looking candidate would stand a chance of being elected. Mrs. Excelsior replied that there was no reason for believing that women would be more particular in choosing a State Senator than in selecting a husband. The professor was foolish when he asserted that if women went to the polls they would vote for the aldermen and the sheriffs, and would forget to vote for the President of the United States, and would insist on doing so in a postscript. This was of a piece with the other ancient jest that women are sure to vote for a Democrat when at heart they prefer a Republican, andvice versa.
"The whole case," concluded Harding, "was summed up by the Rev. Dr. Hollow when he saidthat in theory there is no objection to the present arrangement by which man rules the earth through his reason, and woman rules man through his stomach; but unfortunately, the human reason and the average man's stomach are apt to get out of order."
In my afternoon paper there was a letter by Veritas who tried to prove something about the Trusts by quoting from the third volume of Macaulay's history. After dinner I took the book from the shelf and as I struck it against the table to let the dust fly up, I thought of what Mrs. Harrington said. The Harringtons had spent an evening with me. As they rose to go Mrs. Harrington ran the tip of her gloved finger across half a dozen dingy volumes and sniffed. "Why don't you put glass doors on your bookshelves?" she asked. It was a raw point with me and she knew it. "The pretty kind, perhaps," I sneered, "with leaded panes and an antique iron lock?" "Exactly,"she replied. "The dust here is abominable. You must be just steeped in all sorts of infection; and perhaps if you kept your books under lock and key people wouldn't run away with them." I was a fool to have tried irony upon Mrs. Harrington. Her outlook upon life is literal and domestic. Books are to her primarily part of a scheme of interior decoration. Harrington's views come closer to my own, but Harrington is an indulgent husband.
The incident was now a week old, but something of the original fury came back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that is swept up by trailingskirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs? And the dust of old beliefs in which we live, my friend? And the dust that statesmen and prophets are always throwing into our eyes? None of these interfere with Mrs. Harrington's peace of mind. But when it comes to the dust on the gilt tops of my red-buckrammed Molière she fears infection.
And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree with me that infection from book-dust is not an ignoble form of death. I sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says theEvening Star, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after a very brief illness. Friday night he was with a merry group of diners in one of our best-known and most brilliantly lighted Broadway restaurants. He partook heartily of lobster salad, of which, his closest friends declare, he was inordinately fond. Almost immediatelyhe complained of being ill and was taken home in a taxicab." If I were H. Wellington Jones and it were my fate to die of poison I could frame a nobler end for myself. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," I would have it read, "died yesterday of some mysterious form of bacterial poisoning contracted while turning over the pages of an old family Bible which he was accustomed to consult at frequent intervals. Mr. Smith had a cut finger which was not quite healed and it is supposed that a dust-speck from the pages of the old book must have entered the wound and induced sepsis. He was found unconscious in his chair with the book open at the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs." Yes, I sometimes find it hard to understand what Harrington, a man of really fine sensibilities, sees in Mrs. Harrington. The very suggestion of locking up books to prevent their being carried away hurts like the screech of apencil upon a slate. I think of Mrs. Harrington and then I think of Cooper. Cooper's shelves are continuously being denuded by his friends. But if you think of Cooper as a helpless victim you are sadly mistaken. There is an elaborate scheme behind it all, a scheme of such transcendent ingenuity as only simple-hearted, sweet-natured, unpractised, purblind visionaries like Cooper are capable of.
He let me into the secret one day when he saw that I was about to find it out for myself. "I know very many dear people," he said, "who are too busy to read books or too little in the habit of it. You know them, too; they are men and women in whom the pulse of life beats too rapidly for the calm pleasures of reading. They are not insensible to fine ideas, but they must see these ideas in concrete form. If I, for instance, wish to know something about Spain, I get one of Martin Hume's books, butthese people take a steamer and go to Spain. I have read everything of Meredith's and they have read almost nothing, but they saw Meredith in London and spent a week-end with him at a country-house in Sussex. I avoid celebrities in the flesh. I don't want to minister to them and I want still less to patronise them. I am afraid I should be disappointed in them and I am sure they would be disappointed in me.
"However, that's not the point," says Cooper. "The problem is to make a man read who won't read of his own accord. I do it by asking such a man to dinner. I pull out a volume of Marriott's and remark, without emphasis, that after infinite exertion I have just got it back from Woolsey, who is wild over the book. The fires of envy and acquisition flash in my visitor's eye. Might he have the book for a day or two? Yes, I say after some hesitation,but he must promise to bring it back. He grows fervent. Of course he will bring it back, by Saturday at the very latest and in person. And he is my man from that moment. I have lost the book, of course, but I have smuggled my troops within the fort, I have laid the train, I have transmitted the infection. The serpent is in the garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate, a red serpent about a golden staff.
"Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book. But if Hobson expects me to drop in at any moment, he is afraid I may find the book on his library table and ask him whether he has read it. So he hides the book in his bedroom. Thenhe is indeed mine. Some night he will be out of sorts and find it hard to go to sleep. His eye will fall on the book lying there on his table, and he will pick it up, at the same time lighting a cigar. I shall never see that book again. But, I leave it to you, who needs that book more, I or Hobson?"
But Cooper did not tell all. I know he has made use of shrewder tactics. Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite ineptitude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day politics and science, and everything else in the present that well-informed people are supposed toknow. It goes with his total inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.
How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say, has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him. Or Hobson may not be going home that night, or he may object to carrying a parcel in the subway, or for any other reason he will omit to take the book with him. "The next day," says Cooper, "I pay Hobson a return visit, and forget the book onhis hall-table. Frequently Hobson may be too busy to take notice of the accident. In that case I call him up on the telephone as soon as I leave his house and ask in great agitation whether by any chance I have left a volume of Maeterlinck on his hall-table. Sometimes I add that Woolsey has been after that volume for weeks. That night, I feel sure, Hobson will carry the book up to his bedroom."
And as Cooper spoke I thought of the Smith family, whom, by methods like those I have described, Cooper succeeded in saving from themselves. Nerves in the Smith family were badly rasped. The mother was not making great headway in her social campaigns. Her husband chafed at his children's idleness and extravagance. The children went in sullen fashion about their own business. They had no resources of their own. There was gloom in that household and stifled rancour, and the dangerof worse things to come, until the day when Cooper called and forgot at one blow a copy of "Richard Feverel," the "Bab Ballads," and the third volume of Ferrero's "Rome."
As I have said, Cooper was not blind to the good he was doing. False modesty was not one of his failings. He would continually have me admire his bookshelves. The books he was proudest of were those he had lent or given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and, like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next morning. He devouredGibbon. From him he went to Tacitus. He has since read hundreds of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne—gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled at me beatifically.
That was Cooper. But Mrs. Harrington that night saw things in quite a different light. She grumbled and sniffed, and finally grew vehement. I am not a saint like Cooper, but here and there my shelves, too, show the visitations of friends. "Not a single complete set," wailed Mrs. Harrington, "everythinglugged away by people who should be taught to know better. Browning, volumes I, II, V, and VII—four volumes gone. Middlemarch, volume II, first volume gone. Morley's Gladstone, volumes I and III, one volume gone. I wager you don't even know who has the second volume of your Gladstone. Do you, now?"
To tell the truth, I did not for the moment know. And as I hesitated she thrust one of the volumes in triumph at me and mechanically I opened the book and saw a red serpent about a golden staff. "I remember now," I told Mrs. Harrington. "I'll get the second volume the next time I call on Cooper."