XII

THE FANTASTIC TOE

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

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

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

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

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

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



XIII

ON LIVING IN BROOKLYN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XIV

PALLADINO OUTDONE

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

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

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

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

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

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



XV

THE CADENCE OF THE CROWD

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVI

WHAT WE FORGET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVII

THE CHILDREN THAT LEAD US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course, dear," said Helen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVIII

THE MARTIANS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XIX

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR—II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XX

WHEN A FRIEND MARRIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXI

THE PERFECT UNION OF THE ARTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXII

AN EMINENT AMERICAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXIII

BEHIND THE TIMES

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

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