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-maché 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: