Under such sympathetic attention the patient's spirits rise._The Patient Observer and His Friends

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THE PATIENT OBSERVER

And His Friends

SIMEON STRUNSKY

New York

Dodd, Mead and Company

1911

_M. G. S._

CONTENTS

I Cowards Page 1

II The Church Universal 10

III The Doctors 19

IV Interrogation 29

V The Mind Triumphant 37

VI On Calling White Black 45

VII The Solid Flesh 57

VIII Some Newspaper Traits 67

IX A Fledgling 80

X The Complete Collector--I 92

XI The Everlasting Feminine 100

XII The Fantastic Toe 111

XIII On Living in Brooklyn 119

XIV Palladino Outdone 130

XV The Cadence of the Crowd 138

XVI What We Forget 147

XVII The Children That Lead Us 159

XVIII The Martians 179

XIX The Complete Collector--II 189

XX When a Friend Marries 198

XXI The Perfect Union of the Arts 209

XXII An Eminent American 216

XXIII Behind the Times 227

XXIV Public Liars 238

XXV The Complete Collector--III 249

XXVI The Commuter 257

XXVII Headlines 270

XXVIII Usage 278

XXIX 60 H.P. 285

XXX The Sample Life 296

XXXI The Complete Collector--IV 313

XXXII Chopin's Successors 320

XXXIII The Irrepressible Conflict 327

XXXIV The Germs of Culture 336

NOTE

Of the papers that go to make up the present volume, the greater number

were published as a series in the columns of the New York _Evening Post_

for 1910, under the general title of The Patient Observer. For the

eminently laudable purpose of making a fairly thick book, the Patient

Observer's frequently recurrent "I," "me," and "mine" have now been

supplemented with the experiences and reflections of his friends

Harrington, Cooper, and Harding as recorded on other occasions in the

New York _Evening Post_, as well as in the _Atlantic Monthly_, the

_Bookman_, _Collier's_, and _Harper's Weekly_.

COWARDS

It was Harrington who brought forward the topic that men take up in

their most cheerful moments. I mean, of course, the subject of death.

Harrington quoted a great scientist as saying that death is the one

great fear that, consciously or not, always hovers over us. But the five

men who were at table with Harrington that night immediately and sharply

disagreed with him.

Harding was the first to protest. He said the belief that all men are

afraid of death is just as false as the belief that all women are afraid

of mice. It is not the big facts that humanity is afraid of, but the

little things. For himself, he could honestly say that he was not

afraid of death. He defied it every morning when he ran for his train,

although he knew that he thereby weakened his heart. He defied it when

he smoked too much and read too late at night, and refused to take

exercise or to wear rubbers when it rained. All men, he repeated, are

afraid of little things. Personally, what he was most intensely and most

enduringly afraid of was a revolving storm-door.

Harding confessed that he approaches a revolving door in a state of

absolute terror. To see him falter before the rotating wings, rush

forward, halt, and retreat with knees trembling, is to witness a

shattering spectacle of complete physical disorganisation. Harding said

that he enters a revolving door with no serious hope of coming out

alive. By anticipation he feels his face driven through the glass

partition in front of him, and the crash of the panel behind him upon

his skull. Some day, Harding believed, he would be caught fast in one

of those compartments and stick. Axes and crowbars would be

requisitioned to retrieve his lifeless form.

Bowman agreed with Harding. His own life, Bowman was inclined to

believe, is typical of most civilised men, in that it is passed in

constant terror of his inferiors. The people whom he hires to serve him

strike fear into Bowman's soul. He is habitually afraid of janitors,

train-guards, elevator-boys, barbers, bootblacks, telephone-girls, and

saleswomen. But his particular dread is of waiters. There have been

times when Bowman thought that to punish poor service and set an example

to others, he would omit the customary tip. But such a resolution,

embraced with the soup, has never lasted beyond the entrée. And, as a

matter of fact, Bowman said, such a resolution always spoils his dinner.

As long as he entertains it, he dares not look his man in the eye. He

stirs his coffee with shaking fingers. He is cravenly, horribly afraid.

Bowman is afraid even of new waiters and of waiters he never expects to

see again. Surely, it must be safe not to tip a waiter one never

expected to see again. "But no," said Bowman, "I should feel his

contemptuous gaze in the marrow of my backbone as I walked out. I could

not keep from shaking, and I should rush from that place in agony, with

the man's derisive laughter ringing in my ears."

The only one of the company who was not afraid of something concrete,

something tangible, was Williams. Now Williams is notoriously,

hopelessly shy; and when he took up the subject where Bowman had left

it, he poured out his soul with all the fervour and abandon of which

only the shy are capable. Williams was afraid of his own past. It was

not a hideously criminal one, for his life had been that of a bookworm

and recluse. But out of that past Williams would conjure up the

slightest incident--a trifling breach of manners, a mere word out of

place, a moment in which he had lost control of his emotions, and the

memory of it would put him into a cold sweat of horror and shame.

Years ago, at a small dinner party, Williams had overturned a glass of

water on the table-cloth; and whenever he thinks of that glass of water,

his heart beats furiously, his palate goes dry, and there is a horribly

empty feeling in his stomach. Once, on some similar occasion, Williams

fell into animated talk with a beautiful young woman. He spoke so

rapidly and so well that the rest of the company dropped their chat and

gathered about him. It was five minutes, perhaps, before he was aware of

what was going on. That night Williams walked the streets in an agony

of remorse. The recollection of the incident comes back to him every now

and then, and, whether he is alone at his desk, or in the theatre, or in

a Broadway crowd, he groans with pain. Take away such memories of the

past, Williams told us, and he knew of nothing in life that he is afraid

of.

Gordon's was quite a different case. The group about the table burst out

laughing when Gordon assured us that above all things else in this world

he is afraid of elephants. He agreed with Bowman that in the latitude of

New York City and under the zoölogic conditions prevailing here, it was

a preposterous fear to entertain. Gordon lives in Harlem, and he

recognises clearly enough that the only elephant-bearing jungle in the

neighbourhood is Central Park, whence an animal would be compelled to

take a Subway train to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and lie in

wait for him as he came home in the twilight. But irrational or no,

there was the fact. To be quashed into pulp under one of those

girder-like front legs, Gordon felt must be abominable. To make matters

worse, Gordon has a young son who insists on being taken every Sunday

morning to see the animals; and of all attractions in the menagerie, the

child prefers the elephant house. He loves to feed the biggest of the

elephants, and to watch him place pennies in a little wooden box and

told us, can be neither imagined nor described.

My own story was received with sympathetic attention. I told them that

the one great terror of my life is a certain man who owes me a fairly

large sum of money, borrowed some years ago. Whenever we meet he insists

on recalling the debt and reminding me of how much the favour meant to

him at the time, and how he never ceases to think of it. Meeting him has

become a torture. I do my best to avoid him, and frequently succeed. But

often he will catch sight of me across the street and run over and grasp

me by the hand and inquire after my health in so hearty, so honest a

fashion that I cannot bear to look him in the face. And as he beams on

me and throws his arm over my shoulder, I can only blush and shift from

one foot to the other and stammer out some excuse for hurrying away.

Passers-by stop and admire the man's affection and concern for one who

is evidently some poor devil of a relation from the country. One Sunday

he waylaid me on Riverside Drive and introduced me to his wife as one of

his dearest friends. I mumbled something about its not having rained the

entire week, and his wife, who was a stately person in silks, looked at

me out of a cold eye. Then and there I knew she decided that I was a

person who had something to conceal and probably took advantage of her

husband.

No; the more I think of it, the more convinced am I that very few men

pass their time in contemplating death, which is the end of all things.

Only those people do it who have nothing else to be afraid of, or who,

like undertakers and bacteriologists, make a living out of it.

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL

Harding declares that a solid thought before going to bed sets him

dreaming just like a bit of solid food. One night, Harding and I

discussed modern tendencies in the Church. As a result Harding dreamt

that night that he was reading a review in the _Theological Weekly_ of

November 12, 2009.

"Seldom," wrote the reviewer, "has it been our good fortune to meet with

as perfect a piece of work as James Brown Ducey's 'The American

Clergyman in the Early Twentieth Century.' The book consists of exactly

half a hundred biographies of eminent churchmen; in these fifty brief

sketches is mirrored faithfully the entire religious life, external and

internal, of the American people eighty or ninety years ago. We can do

our readers no better service than to reproduce from Mr. Ducey's pages,

in condensed form, the lives of half a dozen typical clergymen, leaving

the reader to frame his own conception of the magnificent activity which

the Church of that early day brought to the service of religion.

"The Rev. Pelatiah W. Jenks, who was called to the richest pulpit in New

York in 1912, succeeded within less than three years in building up an

unrivalled system of dancing academies and roller-skating rinks for

young people. Under him the attendance at the Sunday afternoon sparring

exhibitions in the vestry rooms of the church increased from an average

of 54 to an average of 650. In spite of the nominal fee charged for the

use of the congregation's bowling alleys, the income from that source

alone was sufficient to defray the cost of missionary work in all

Africa, south of the Zambesi River. Dr. Jenks's highest ambition was

attained in 1923 when the Onyx Church's football team won the

championship of the Ecclesiastical League of Greater New York. It was in

the same year that Dr. Jenks took the novel step of abandoning services

in St. Basil's Chapel, now situated in a slum district, and substituting

a moving-picture show with vaudeville features. Thereafter the empty

chapel was filled to overcrowding on Sundays. To encourage church

attendance at Sunday morning services, Dr. Jenks established a tipless

barber shop. Two years later, in spite of the murmured protests of the

conservative element in his congregation, he erected one of the finest

Turkish baths in New York City.

"The Rev. Coningsby Botts, Ph.D., LL.D., D.D., was regarded as the

greatest pulpit orator of his day. His Sunday evening sermons drew

thousands of auditors. Of Dr. Botts's polished sermons, our author gives

a complete list, together with short extracts. We should have to go far

to discover a specimen of richer eloquence than the sermon delivered on

the afternoon of the third Sunday after Epiphany, in the year 1911, on

'Dr. Cook and the Discovery of the North Pole.' On the second Sunday in

Lent, Dr. Botts moved an immense congregation to tears with his sermon,

'Does Radium Cure Cancer?' Trinity Sunday he spoke on 'Zola and His

Place in Literature.' The second Sunday in Advent he discussed 'The

Position of Woman in the Fiji Islands.' We can only pick a subject here

and there out of his other numerous pastoral speeches: 'Is Aviation an

Established Fact?' 'The Influence of Blake Upon Dante Gabriel Rossetti,'

'Dalmatia as a Health Resort,' and 'Amatory Poetry Among the Primitive

Races.'

"The Rev. Cadwallader Abiel Jones has earned a pre-eminent place in

Church history as the man who did most to endow Pittsburg with a

permanent Opera House. Our author relates how in the winter of 1916,

when the noted impresario Silverman threatened to sell his Opera House

for a horse exchange unless 100 Pittsburg citizens would guarantee

$5,000 each for a season of twenty weeks, Dr. Jones made a

house-to-house canvass in his automobile and went without sleep till the

half-million dollars was pledged. He fell seriously ill of pneumonia,

but recovered in time to be present at the signing of the contract. Dr.

Jones used to assert that there was more moral uplift in a single

performance of the 'Mikado' than in the entire book of Psalms. One of

his notable achievements was a Christmas Eve service consisting of some

magnificent kinetoscope pictures of the Day of Judgment with music by

Richard Strauss. Tradition also ascribes to Dr. Jones a saying that the

two most powerful influences for good in New York City were Miss Mary

Garden and the Eden Musée. But our author thinks the story is

apocryphal. He is rather inclined to believe, from the collocation of

the two names, that we have here a distorted version of the Biblical

creation myth.

"The Fourteenth Avenue Church of Cleveland, Ohio, under its famous

pastor, the Rev. Henry Marcellus Stokes, exercised a preponderant

influence in city politics from 1917 to 1925. Dr. Stokes was remorseless

in flaying the bosses and their henchmen. At least a dozen candidates

for Congress could trace their defeat directly to the efforts of the

Fourteenth Avenue Church. The successful candidates profited by the

lesson, and, during the three years' fight over tariff revision, from

1919 to 1922, they voted strictly in accordance with telegraphic

instructions from Dr. Stokes. In the fall of 1921 Dr. Stokes's

congregation voted almost unanimously to devote the funds hitherto used

for home mission work to the maintenance of a legislative bureau at the

State capital. The influence of the bureau was plainly perceptible in

the Legislature's favourable action on such measures as the Cleveland

Two-Cent Fare bill and the bill abolishing the bicycle and traffic

squads in all cities with a population of more than 50,000.

"Our author lays particular stress on the career of the Rev. Dr. Brooks

Powderly of New York, who, at the age of thirty-five, was recognized as

America's leading authority on slum life. Dr. Powderly's numerous books

and magazine articles on the subject speak for themselves. Our author

mentions among others, 'The Bowery From the Inside,' 'At What Age Do

Stevedores Marry?' 'The Relative Consumption of Meat, Pastry, and

Vegetables Among Our Foreign Population,' 'How Soon Does the Average

Immigrant Cast His First Vote?' 'The Proper Lighting for Recreation

Piers,' and, what was perhaps his most popular book, 'Burglar's Tools

and How to Use Them.'

"In running through the appendix to Mr. Ducey's volume," concludes the

reviewer, "we come across an interesting paragraph headed, 'A Curious

Survival.' It is a reprint of an obituary from the New York _Evening

Post_ of August, 1911, dealing with the minister of a small church far

up in the Bronx, who died at the age of eighty-one, after serving in the

same pulpit for fifty-three years. The _Evening Post_ notice states that

while the Rev. Mr. Smith was quite unknown below the Harlem, he had won

a certain prestige in his own neighbourhood through his old-fashioned

homilies, delivered twice every Sunday in the year, on love, charity,

pure living, clean thinking, early marriage, and the mutual duties of

parents towards their children and of children towards their parents.

'In the Rev. Mr. Smith,' remarks our author, 'we have a striking

vestigial specimen of an almost extinct type.'"

III

THE DOCTORS

The quarrels of the doctors do not concern me. I have worked out a

classification of my own which holds good for the entire profession. All

doctors, I believe, may be divided into those who go clean-shaven and

those who wear beards. The difference is more than one of appearance. It

is a difference of temperament and conduct. The smooth-faced physician

represents the buoyant, the romantic, what one might almost call the

impressionistic strain in the medical profession. The other is the

conservative, the classicist. My personal likings are all for the newer

type, but I do not mind admitting that if I were very ill indeed, I

should be tempted to send for the physician who wears a Vandyke and

smiles only at long intervals.

The reason is that when I am really ill I want some one who believes me.

That is something which the clean-shaven doctor seldom does. He is of

the breezy, modern school which maintains that nine patients out of ten

are only the victims of their own imagination. He greets you in a jolly,

brotherly fashion, takes your pulse, and says: "Oh, well, I guess you're

not going to die this trip," and he roars, as if it were the greatest

joke in the world to call up the picture of such dreadful possibilities.

When he prescribes, it is in a half-apologetic, half-quizzical manner,

and almost with a wink, as if he were to say, "This is a game, old man,

but I suppose it's as honest a way of earning one's living as most

ways." While he writes out his directions, he comments: "There is

nothing the matter with you, and you will take this powder three times a

day with your meals. It is just a case of too much tobacco supplemented

by a fertile fancy. Rub your chest with this before you go to bed and

avoid draughts. And what you need is not medicine but the active

agitation for two hours every day of the two legs which the Lord gave

you, and which you now employ exclusively for making your way to and

from the railway station. This is for your digestion, and you can have

it put up in pills or in liquid form, according to taste. And the next

time you feel inclined to call me in, think it over in the course of a

ten-mile walk."

Now this may be cheering if somewhat mixed treatment, but it has nothing

of that sympathy which the ailing body craves. The case is much worse if

your smooth-faced physician happens to be a personal friend. The

indifference with which such a man will listen to the most pitiful

recital of physical suffering is extraordinary. You may be out on the

golf links together, and he has just made an exceptionally fine iron

shot from a bad lie and in the face of a lively breeze. He is naturally

pleased, and you take courage from the situation. "By the way, Smith,"

you say, "I have been feeling rather queer for a day or two. There is a

gnawing sensation right here, and when I stoop----" "That must have been

180 yards," he says, "but not quite on the green. You don't chew your

food enough. Take a glass of hot water before your breakfast--and you

had better try your mashie!" Of course, no one likes to talk shop,

especially on the golf links. Still you think, if you were a physician

and you had a friend who had a gnawing sensation, you would be more

considerate. After the game he lights his cigar and orders you not to

smoke if the pain in your chest is really what you have described it.

"In me," he says, cheerfully, "you get a physician and a horrible

example for one price."

But there is one thing that this impressionistic school of medicine has

in common with the other kind. Both types are faithful to the funereal

type of waiting-room which is one of the signs of the trade. It is a

room in which all the arts of the undertaker have seemingly been called

upon to bring out the full possibilities of the average New York

brownstone "front-parlour." I have often tried to decide whether, in a

doctor's waiting-room, night or day was more conducive to thoughts of

the grave. At night a lamp flickers dimly in one corner of the long

room, and the shadows only deepen those other shadows which lie on the

ailing spirit. But this same darkness mercifully conceals the long line

of ash-coloured family portraits in gold frames, the ash-coloured carpet

and chandelier, and the hideous aggregation of ash-coloured couches and

chairs which make up the daylight picture. Why doctors' reception rooms

should always so strongly combine the attractiveness of a popular

lunch-room on a rainy day with the quiet domestic atmosphere of a county

jail, I have never been able to find out, unless the object is to reduce

the patient to such a horrible state of depression that the mere summons

to enter the doctor's presence makes one feel very much better already.

There are times when to be told that one has pneumonia or an incipient

case of tuberculosis must be a relief after an hour spent in one of

those dreadful ante-chambers.

The literature in a physician's waiting-room is not exhilarating.

Usually, there is an extensive collection of periodicals four months old

and over. From this I gather that physicians' wives and daughters are

persistent but somewhat deliberate readers of current literature. The

sense of age about the magazines on a doctor's table is heightened by

the absence of the front and back covers. The only way of ascertaining

the date of publication is to hunt for the table of contents. That,

however, is a task which few able-bodied men in the prime of life are

equal to, not to say a roomful of sick people, nervous with

anticipation. Most patients under such circumstances set out

courageously, but only to lose themselves in the first half-dozen pages

of the advertising section. Yet the result is by no means harmful. There

is something about the advertising agent's buoyant, insinuating,

sympathetic tone that is very restful to the invalid nerves. Harrington

tells me that the small suburban house in which he lives, the paint and

roofing with which he protects it against the weather, the lawn-mower

which he has secured in anticipation of a good crop of grass, and the

small stock of poultry he experiments with, were all acquired through

advertisements read in doctors' waiting-rooms. Some physicians take in

the illustrated weeklies as well as the monthly magazines. In one of the

former I found the other day an excellent panoramic view of the second

inauguration of President McKinley.

But I am afraid I have wandered somewhat from what I set out to say. I

meant to show how different from your clean-shaven doctor is the

physician of the conventional beard. There is no trifling with him. He

takes himself seriously, and he takes you seriously. His examination is

as thorough as the stethoscope can make it; in fact, he listens to your

heart-action long enough to make you fear the worst. This is in marked

contrast with the smooth-faced doctor, who, as a rule, asks you to show

your tongue, and when you obey he does not look at it, but begins to go

through his mail, whistling cheerfully. He puts such vital questions as,

how far up is your bedroom window at night, and do you ever have a

sense of eye-strain after reading too long, and when you reply, he pays

no attention. His entire attitude expresses the conviction that either

you are not ill at all, or that if you are, you are not in a position to

give an intelligent account of yourself. That is not the case with the

other physician. He asks precise questions and insists on detailed

replies. Nothing escapes him. While you are describing the sensations in

the vicinity of your left lung, he will ask quietly whether you have

always had the habit of biting your nails.

Under such sympathetic attention the patient's spirits rise. From an

apologetic state of mind he passes to a sense of his own importance.

Instead of being ashamed of his ailments he tries to describe as many as

he can think of. His specific complaint may be a touch of sciatica, but

he takes pleasure in recalling a bad habit of breathing through the

mouth in moments of excitement, and a tricky memory which often leads

him to carry about his wife's letters an entire week before mailing

them. The need for a certain amount of self-castigation is implanted in

all of us, and it is satisfied in the form of confession. Many people do

it as part of their religious beliefs. Others belabour themselves in the

physician's office. Men who in the bosom of the family will deny that

they read too late at night and smoke too many cigars will call such

transgressions to the doctor's attention if he should happen to overlook

them. I know of one man suffering from neuralgia of the arm who insisted

on telling his doctor that it made him ill to read the advertisements in

the subway cars. But the doctor who wears no beard does not invite such

confidences.

INTERROGATION

One day a census enumerator in the employ of the United States

government knocked at my door and left a printed list of questions for

me to answer. The United States government wished me to state how many

sons and daughters I had and whether my sons were males and my daughters

females. I was further required to state that not only was I of white

descent and that my wife (if I had one) was of white descent, but that

our children (if we had any) were also of white descent. I was also

called upon to state whether any of my sons under the age of five (if I

had any) had ever been in the military or naval service of the United

States, and whether my grandfather (if I had one) was attending school

on September 30 last. There were other questions of a like nature, but

these are all I can recall at present.

Halfway through the schedule I was in a high state of irritation. The

census enumerator's visit in itself I do not consider a nuisance. Like

most Americans who sniff at the privileges of citizenship, I secretly

delight in them. I speak cynically of boss-rule and demagogues, but I

cast my vote on Election Day in a state of solemn and somewhat nervous

exaltation that frequently interferes with my folding the ballot in the

prescribed way. I have never been summoned for jury duty, but if I ever

should be, I shall accept with pride and in the hope that I shall not be

peremptorily challenged. It needs some such official document as a

census schedule to bring home the feeling that government and state

exist for me and my own welfare. Filling out the answers in the list

was one of the pleasant manifestations of democracy, of which paying

taxes is the unpleasant side. The printed form before me embodied a

solemn function. I was aware that many important problems depended upon

my answering the questions properly. Only then, for instance, could the

government decide how many Congressmen should go to Washington, and what

my share was of the total wealth of the country, and how I contributed

to the drift from the farm to the city, and what was the average income

of Methodist clergymen in cities of over 100,000 population.

What, then, if so many of the questions put to me by the United States

government seemed superfluous to the point of being absurd? The process

may involve a certain waste of paper and ink and time, but it is the

kind of waste without which the business of life would be impossible.

The questions that really shape human happiness are those to which the

reply is obvious. The answers that count are those the questioner knew

he would get and was prepared to insist upon getting. Harrington tells

me that when he was married he could not help smiling when the minister

asked him whether he would take the woman by his side to be his wedded

wife. "What," said Harrington, "did he think I was there for? Or did he

detect any sign of wavering at the last moment?" What reply does the

clergyman await when he asks the rejoicing parents whether they are

willing to have their child baptized into the community of the redeemed?

What is all ritual, as it has been framed to meet the needs of the human

heart, but a preordained order of question and response? In birth and in

burial, in joy and in sorrow, for those who have escaped shipwreck and

those who have escaped the plague, the practice of the ages has laid

down formulæ which the soul does not find the less adequate because they

are ready-made.

Consider the multiplication-table. I don't know who first hit upon the

absurd idea that questions are intended to elicit information. In so

many laboratories are students putting questions to their microscope. In

so many lawyers' offices are clients putting questions to their

attorneys. In so many other offices are haggard men and women putting

questions to their doctors. But the number of all these is quite

insignificant when compared with the number of questions that are framed

every day in the schoolrooms of the world. Wherefore, I say, consider

the multiplication-table. A greater sum of human interest has centred

about the multiplication-table than about all doctors' and lawyers' and

biologists' offices since the beginning of time. Millions of

schoolmasters have asked what is seven times eleven and myriads of

children's brains have toiled for the answer that all the time has been

reposing in the teacher's mind. What is seven times eleven? What is the

capital of Dahomey? When did the Americans beat the British at

Lexington? What is the meaning of the universe? We shall never escape

the feeling that these questions are put only to vex us by those who

know the answer.

I said that I am looking forward to be summoned for jury-duty. But I

know that the solemn business of justice, like most of the world's

business, is made up of the mumbled question that is seldom heard and

the fixed reply that is never listened to. The clerk of the court stares

at the wall and drones out the ancient formula which begins

"Jusolimlyswear," and ends "Swelpyugod," and the witness on the stand

blurts out "I do." The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court

asks the President-elect whether he will be faithful to the Constitution

and the laws of the United States, and the President-elect invariably

says that he will. The candidate for American citizenship is asked

whether he hereby renounces allegiance to foreign kings, emperors, and

potentates, and fervently responds that he does. When I took my medical

examination for a life-insurance policy, the physician asked me whether

I suffered from asthma, bronchitis, calculus, dementia, erysipelas, and

several score other afflictions, and, without waiting for an answer, he

wrote "No" opposite every disease.

Whenever I think of the world and the world's opinion, I think of Mrs.

Harrington in whom I see the world typified. Now Mrs. Harrington is

inconceivable in a scheme where the proper reply to every question is

not as thoroughly established as the rule for the proper use of forks

at dinner. In the presence of an unfamiliar reply to a familiar question

Mrs. Harrington is suspicious and uneasy. She scents either a joke or an

insult; and we are all Mrs. Harrington. If you were to ask a stranger

whom did he consider the greatest playwright of all times and, instead

of Shakespeare or Molière, he were to say Racine, it would be as if one

were to ask him whether he took tea or coffee for breakfast and he said

arsenic. It would be as though you asked your neighbour what he thought

of a beautiful sunset and he said he did not like it. It would be as if

I were to say to Mrs. Harrington, "Well, I suppose I have stayed quite

long enough," and she were to say, "Yes, I think you had better be

going."

THE MIND TRIUMPHANT

One night after dinner I quoted for Harding the following sentence from

an address by President Lowell of Harvard: "The most painful defect in

the American College at the present time is the lack of esteem for

excellence in scholarship." Thereupon Harding recalled what some one had

said on a related subject: "Athleticism is rooted in an exaggerated

spirit of intercollegiate rivalry and a publicity run mad."

That night Harding dreamt the following:

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

"Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children in the Stadium yesterday

broke into a delirium of cheers when the Cambridge team in Early

English Literature won its fourth successive victory over Yale. Both

sides were trained to the minute, however different the methods of the

two head coaches. The Harvard team during the last two weeks had been

put on a course of desultory reading from Bede to the closing of the

theatres by the Puritans in 1642, while Yale had concentrated on the

Elizabethan dramatists and signal practice.

"Harvard won the toss, and Captain Hartley led off with a question on

the mediæval prototypes of Thomas More's 'Utopia.' Brooks of Yale made

a snappy reply, and by a dashing string of three questions on the

authorship of 'Ralph Roister-Doister,' the sources of Chaucer's

'Nonne's Preeste's Tale,' and the exact site of the Globe Theatre,

carried the fight into the enemy's territory. But Harvard held well,

and the contest was a fairly even one for twenty minutes. There was an

anxious moment towards the end, when Gosse, for Harvard, muffed on the

date of the first production of 'The Tempest,' but before Yale could

frame another question the whistle blew.

"In the second half, Yale perceptibly weakened. It still showed

brilliant flashes of attack, but its defence was poor, especially

against Brooks's smashing questions on the Italian influences in

Milton's shorter poems. Harvard made its principal gains against

Burckhardt, who simply could not solve Winship's posers from Ben Jonson

and Beaumont and Fletcher. The Yale coaches finally took him out and

sent in Skinner, the best Elizabethan on the scrub team, but it was too

late to save the day. There were rumours after the game that Burckhardt

had broken training after the Princeton contest by going on a three

days' canoe trip up the Merrimac. That, however, does not detract from

the glory of Harvard's magnificent triumph."

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

"William J. Burns and Douglas Mitchell, sophomores at Harvard, were

arrested last night for creating a disturbance in the dining-room of

the Mayflower Hotel by letting loose a South American baboon with a

pack of firecrackers attached to its tail. When arraigned before

Magistrate Conroy, they declared that they were celebrating Harvard's

Early English victory over Yale, and were discharged."

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

"In the presence of twenty thousand spectators, including the President

of the United States, the greater part of his Cabinet, and several

foreign ambassadors, Yale's 'varsity eight simply ran away from

Harvard in the tenth annual competition in Romance languages and

philology. Yale took the lead from the start, and at the end of fifteen

minutes was ahead by 16 points to 7.... This splendid victory is due in

part to the general superiority of the New Haven eight, but too much

credit cannot be given to little Howells, who steered a flawless

contest. The Blue made use of the short, snappy English style of

text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German

seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were

elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid work on Corneille and

the poets of the Pléiade, while Harvard's choice fell on Butterworth,

probably the best intercollegiate expert on Cervantes. In the evening

all the contestants attended a performance of 'The Prince and the

Peach' at the Gaiety. It is reported that no less than nine out of the

sixteen men have received flattering offers to coach Romance language

teams in the leading Western universities."

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

"Princeton won the intercollegiate championship yesterday with 63

points to Harvard's 37, Yale's 18, and 7 each for Brown, Williams, and

Pennsylvania. Princeton won by her brilliant work in the classics and

biology. Firsts were made by Bentley, who did the 220 lines of Homer in

29-3/5 minutes, scanned 100 Alcaics from Horace in 62 seconds flat, and

hurdled over nine doubtful readings and seven lacunæ in the text of

Aristotle's 'Poetics' in 17-1/2 minutes. Two firsts went to Ramsdell,

who made only two errors in Protective Colouration and one error in

explaining the mutations of the Evening Primrose."

_From the editorial columns of the New York "Evening Post" for July 7,

1933, and October 11, 1938:_

(1) "Scholastic competitions have ceased to be the means to an end and

have become an end in themselves. The passion to win has swept away

every other consideration. Professionalism has laid its tainted hand on

the sports of our college youth. High-priced professors from the

University of Leipzig and the École des Hautes Études are engaged to

drill our teams to victory. Men who should have long ago taken their

Ph.D. have been known deliberately to flunk examinations so as to be

eligible for the 'varsity contests. Promising students in the

preparatory schools are bribed to enroll with this or that college. The

whole problem of summer mathematics reeks to heaven. It is not enough

that a student during eight months of the year will put in all his

time on invariants and the theory of numbers. Vacation time finds him

at some fashionable resort, tutoring the sons of millionaires in

multiplication and quadratic equations."

(2) "Thus our so-called student 'activities' are neither active in the

true sense, nor fit for students. There has grown up a small clan of

intellectual athletes who win victories while thousands of mediocre

students, six feet and over and having an average weight of 195 pounds,

stand around and cheer. Our student-managers have become men of

business, purely. The receipts at the last Harvard-Yale debate on the

popular election of United States senators amounted to more than

$50,000. The Greek philology team spends three-quarters of its time in

touring the country. The _Evening Howl_ prints the pictures of the

[Greek: Phi Beta Kappa] members every other day. It is time to call a

halt."

ON CALLING WHITE BLACK

If it were not for the deadly hatred that exists between Bob, who will

be four years old very soon, and Abdul Hamid II, late Sultan of Turkey,

I hardly know what would become of my moral standards. Whenever my sense

of right and wrong grows blunted; whenever the inextricable confusion of

good and bad in everything about us becomes unusually depressing, I have

only to recall how virulent, how inflexible, how certain is Bob's

judgment on the character and career of the deposed Ottoman despot.

Bob is Harrington's youngest son. He and Abdul Hamid II first met in the

pages of a fat new history of the Turkish Revolution having a white

star and crescent on the cover and perhaps half a hundred pictures

inside. The book immediately supplanted the encyclopædia and General

Kuropatkin's illustrated memoirs of the Russo-Japanese War, in Bob's

affections. Who, he wanted to know, was the swarthy, lean, hook-nosed

gentleman in a tasselled cap, who stood up in a carriage to acknowledge

the cheers of the crowd. That, Harrington told him, was a bad Sultan,

and tried to turn to the next picture, which showed an unhappy-looking

Armenian priest casting his first vote for a member of Parliament.

But the boy has for some years been in the stage where every fact laid

before him must be backed up with an adequate reason. What does a bad

Sultan do, he wished to know. Harrington was puzzled. It seemed a pity

to bring Bob into touch with the cruelties and pains of life. But on the

other hand here was a chance to inoculate Bob at a very early age with

a hatred for tyranny and oppression, and a love for the principles of

representative government; and on the whole I am inclined to think

Harrington did right. In any case Harrington told the boy that the bad

Sultan was in the habit of sending his soldiers to shoot people, and

burn down their homes, and take away everything they had to eat, and put

all the women into jail. He hesitated over the children. It was out of

the question to tell Bob how, by order of the bad Sultan, little

children were ripped open before their mothers' eyes, or had their

brains dashed out against the walls. The little children, Harrington

finally told Bob, were whipped by the bad Sultan's bad soldiers, and had

all their toys confiscated.

But that apparently was not enough. Bob wanted to know what else the bad

Sultan did to the little children. What else? Harrington's criminal

imagination had exhausted itself. He didn't know, and he called upon Bob

for suggestions.

"He gives them medicine," said Bob, "and sprays their throats with

peroxide, and they cry." Was there any after-thought in that remark,

Harrington wondered. Could it be that he had only succeeded in arousing

in that active young mind the recognition of a certain family

resemblance between himself and Abdul the Damned? For that matter, was

it fair to the late Commander of the Faithful to charge his name with a

crime he was probably innocent of? But then again, if that particular

crime was necessary to the lesson borne in on Bob, why hesitate? So

Harrington ponders a moment and decides; yes, even to that level of

iniquity had Abdul Hamid II sunk. The atomiser was one of the

instruments of torture he made use of. And when the bad Sultan is

finally checked in his nefarious career, and dragged off to prison,

where he gets nothing but hard bread to eat and filthy water to drink,

Bob retains the impression that all this came about because the Young

Turks grew tired of having their throats washed with peroxide solutions.

"When I see the bad Sultan," says Bob, "I will punch him, like this,"

and his fist, shooting out and up, knocks the pipe from Harrington's

mouth.

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

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

And the boy has been steadfast in his hatred. He meets the Sultan every

night just before supper, when he insists on being taken right through

the fat, red volume with the star and crescent on the cover; and every

time the Sultan's face appears in the pictures, the boy smites it with

his fist. Bob goes to his meals with an excellent appetite engendered by

his violent encounters with that disreputable monarch.

Abdul Hamid II is in very bad shape from the punishment. Bob has caught

him in the act of addressing the English members of the Balkan

Committee, and left him only a pair of shoulders and one leg. Of the

Sultan driving to the Selamlik every Friday there is visible now only

one of the carriage horses and the fragments of a cavalryman. Nor is the

physical presentment of Abdul Hamid the only thing that has gone to

pieces under Bob's unrelenting hostility. The Sultan's character has

been growing worse and worse as night after night the boy insists upon

new examples of what bad Sultans do.

To satisfy that inexhaustible demand, Harrington has shouldered Abdul

Hamid with all the sins of all the epochs in history. He has made him

steep unhappy Christian prisoners in pitch and burn them for torches,

and send innocent Frenchmen to the guillotine, and tomahawk the Puritan

settlers as they worked in the fields. He has made him responsible for

St. Bartholomew's Day, and Andersonville prison. He has robbed the Czar

of his just credit by making Abdul Hamid the hero of Bloody Sunday in

St. Petersburg. I am not sure but that Harrington has not laid the

abnormally high price of meat and eggs at the Sultan's door. There are

times when I really feel that Harrington should ask Abdul Hamid's

pardon.

But no; he should _not_ beg his pardon. For that is just the point I set

out to make. It is a moral tonic to be brought into touch with Bob's

opinion of Abdul Hamid, and to get to feel that things are not all a

hodge-podge, indifferently good or indifferently bad, as you choose to

look at it. In Bob's world there are good things and bad things, and the

good is good and the bad is bad. Bob knows nothing of the cant which

makes the robber monopolist only the sad victim of forces outside his

control. Bob knows nothing of the sentimental twaddle about that

interesting class of people who are more sinned against than sinning.

Bob, like Nature, indulges in no fine distinctions. When he meets a bad

Sultan he punches his head. When he meets a good Sultan, nothing is too

good to believe concerning him.

And he accepts the one as naturally as he does the other. He has no

moral enthusiasms or enthusiasms of any kind. It is merely an obvious

thing to him that right should triumph and wrong should fail. He does

not play with his emotions. I remember how, one night, in relating the

fall of Abdul Hamid, Harrington had worked himself up to an

extraordinary pitch of excitement. Never had that despot been painted in

such horrid colours; and after he had told how the palace guards rose

against the Constitution, and how the Young Turks marched upon

Constantinople, and how the craven tyrant, crying "Don't hurt me, don't

hurt me," was dragged from his bed by the good soldiers and clapped into

prison, Harrington turned, all aglow, to Bob, and waited for the boy to

echo his enthusiasm. But Bob waited till the cell-door clanged behind

the Unspeakable Turk, and said: "Now tell me about the giraffe that fell

into the water."

I spoke of the good Sultan. Of course there had to be one, and

Harrington found him in the same book with the bad Sultan. And when he

had studied the somewhat stolid features of Mohammed V for a little

while, it was inevitable that Bob should ask what a good Sultan did.

Harrington was in difficulties again. It was impossible to explain that

at bottom there really is no such thing as a good Sultan; that they are

as a rule cruel and immoral, and always expensive; and that at best they

are harmless, if somewhat stupid, survivals. But since the very idea of

a bad Sultan demands a good one, Harrington tried to satisfy Bob by

investing Mohammed V with a large number of negative virtues. "A good

Sultan does not shoot people, or burn down houses or throw women into

jail or whip little children." The portrait failed to please. Bob's

faith demanded something robust to cling to; and in the end he compelled

his father to do for the good Sultan the opposite of what he had done

for the bad one. Mohammed V stands to-day invested with all the virtues

that have been manifested on earth from Enoch to Florence Nightingale.

And yet of the two, Bob and his father, I must say again that it is Bob

who has the more truthful and healthy outlook upon life, and it is good

for Harrington to rehearse with him the history of the fall of Abdul

Hamid II three or four times a week. Bob has no flabby standards. He

wastes no time in looking for lighter shades in what is black or dark

spots in the white. Bob holds, for instance, that bad soldiers shoot

down good people, and that good soldiers shoot down bad people. He is

quite as close to the truth as I am, who believe that there is no such

thing as a good soldier and that the business of shooting down people,

whether good or bad, is a wretched one. For all that, I know there come

times when a man must take human life, and in such cases Bob has the

advantage over Hamlet and me. Where we falter and speculate and end by

making a mess of it all, Bob just punches the bad Sultan's head and

passes on to the giraffe that fell into the water.

VII

THE SOLID FLESH