is an acquired habit or a pose in which we take any measure of pride.
Our attitude towards those happy people who are always in fashion is one
of sincere and profound envy. I think there is nothing more wonderful
under the sun than the unknown force that impels the great majority to
begin doing the same new thing at the same time. It must be a precious
gift to feel instinctively what the right new thing is to do. A
mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on
black straw hats surmounted by a cock in his pride. Another mysterious
order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the
latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this
instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only
where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such
people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of
fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and
direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age
who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation.
Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.
In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in
a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of
his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically
up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only
yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a
three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told
him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and
asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken
aback, told him that I was just finishing Frank Norris's "McTeague" and
was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality
characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a
review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy. I told him that I
might very well do so if it were a question of writing something he
would find personally instructive, and rose to go, with the intention of
slamming the door behind me.
But he called me back and insisted that he meant no offence, that he
simply must have live, up-to-date copy or nothing at all. He proposed a
popular article on art, and wondered if I could write something about
the Dutch masters, with special reference to the recent notable
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. I was obliged to confess that I
had missed the exhibition by two weeks. "Well," he said, patiently,
"there is opera. You might do something about the singers. You have
heard Mary Garden, of course?" I told him no. Only the other day I had
irrevocably decided to hear Mary Garden in "Thaïs" next season; and the
next morning I learned that Mr. Hammerstein had gone out of business.
He continued to be patient with me. "There's 'Chantecler,' to be sure,
although that is ancient history by this time. Have you read the play?"
I had not, but just here an inspiration came. "You sneered at Homer just
now," I said. "Well, there was another Greek who wrote a bird play 2,300
years before Rostand. I mean Aristophanes----" The editor leaped from
his chair. "Great, great!" he cried. "We'll call it 'Chantecler 400
B.C.'" I caught the infection of his enthusiasm. "And Aristophanes had
another play on woman's rights," I told him. "You might call it 'An
Athenian Suffragette.'" "Splendid!" he cried; "splendid; we can make a
whole series, and Goulden will do the pictures in colours. It's the most
novel thing I have heard of for a long time. It will beat the others by
a mile." And he sent me away happy.
XXIV
PUBLIC LIARS
There are three things that puzzle me; yes, four things that I cannot
explain: Why street clocks never show the right time; why thermometers
hanging outside of drug stores never indicate the right temperature; why
slot machines on a railway platform never give the right weight; and why
weather-vanes always point in the wrong direction. At bottom, I imagine,
these are really not four things, but one. For it must be the same
mysterious and malicious principle that takes each of these
contrivances, set up to be a public guide to truth, and turns it into an
instrument for the dissemination of error.
What makes me think that there is some animate principle behind such
clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are
persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on
the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I
have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of
Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my
own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently
Jones will break in upon me in the middle of a column of figures and
tell me that the largest ranch in the world is situated in the State of
Sonora, Mexico. "Yes?" I say, hoping that he will go away. "Yes," he
assures me. "It is so large that the proprietor can ride 200 days on
horseback without leaving his own grounds. He has 2,000,000 men working
for him and he lives in a marble palace of 700 rooms. No one can be
elected President of Mexico against his will."
Now obviously it would have been better for me to remain altogether
unacquainted with Mexican conditions than to share Jones's distorted
view of affairs in that interesting republic. But Jones insists on
taking the innocent blank spaces in my knowledge of the world and
filling them up with the most incorrect data. He tells me, for instance,
that Mme. Finisterra once sang the mad scene from "Lucia" before the
late Sultan of Morocco, who wept so bitterly that the performance was
interrupted lest the monarch should go into convulsions. At the age of
eight Mme. Finisterra knew twelve operatic soprano rôles by heart, and
when she was ten she played Juliet to Tamagno's Romeo. She now gets
$10,000 a night, in addition to the service of a maid, a chef, and two
private secretaries. In private life she is very stout. All this,
needless to say, is not true.
But I must not forget the clocks. The worst of the class, oddly enough,
are those found in front of watchmakers' and opticians' shops. I
sometimes think that such clocks are purposely put out of order by the
shop-keeper. The object is apparently to induce irascible old gentlemen
to enter the store, watch in hand, in order to protest against the
maintenance of a public nuisance. It is then a comparatively easy task
to sell them a pair of solid gold spectacles with double lenses at a
handsome profit. I, for one, would not blame the old gentleman who
should pick up a stone and hurl it at one of these Tartuffes and
Chadbands of the street-corner with their chubby, gilded hands reposing
on their prosperous stomachs, sleek and smug and ultra-respectable, but
unconscionable liars for all that. They are not content with their own
success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a
faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and
actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old
sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent assurance on the
ordinary man.
The difference between the typical public clock and a watch out of order
is obvious. Every prudent man knows the peculiarities of his own watch,
just as he knows the peculiarities of his own wife and children; and he
is consequently prepared to make allowances. But the clock on the street
corner persists in thrusting false information upon you. The man who
consults his watch does so with a purpose, and is naturally on the
alert. But the cheating clock confronts him in moments of unsuspecting
security, and throws him into a condition of the wildest alarm. It is
peculiarly active on bright spring days, when people rise early and look
forward to being at their desks half an hour before their usual time. On
such occasions they invariably come upon a clock which points to a
quarter of ten, and sends them scurrying breathless up four flights of
stairs, to find the janitor engaged in cleaning out the baskets.
Church clocks are not so bad as jewellers' clocks; but they are bad
enough, and, in the nature of things, we have a right to expect more
from a church clock than from any other kind. For the same reason the
weathercock on a church steeple is to be judged by a higher standard
than the one over a carpenter's shop or the ordinary dwelling. I cannot,
for instance, imagine a more dangerous moral _ensemble_ than a church
with a clergyman preaching bad doctrine in the pulpit, a clock
indicating the wrong time on the tower, and, over all, a clogged weather
vane pointing to the south when the wind blows from the east.
With reference to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks
are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest
clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in
Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is
just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this
clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or
consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the
window at 9:30 and find this clock pointing to eleven, and to look out
ten minutes later and find it pointing to 9:35, is extremely
disconcerting. One is inclined to expect something more restrained in a
clock connected with the most prosperous parish of one of our most
conservative denominations.
What I have said of clocks is largely true of the weighing-machine. Like
the public clock, it thrusts itself upon us, and like the clock it
betrays the confidence which it invites. I feel convinced that no one
would ever think of using a weighing-machine if it did not constitute
the most characteristically national piece of furniture in our railway
stations. All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me
the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has
swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on
which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes
and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should
immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil. Yet even
this mockery of a weighing-machine is preferable to the emotional type
of scales which simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your
fortune in utter disregard of age and sex, and plays a tune that cannot
be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's
weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be
President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a
tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval
after walking across the room on his hind legs.
As for the ordinary street thermometer, there is this to be said for it:
It may deceive, but it gives pleasure in deceiving. When a person is
sagging beneath the heat of an August midday, it is a distinct source of
comfort and pride to have the thermometer register 98 degrees. Even when
we are fully aware that the mercury is too high by three or four
degrees, it is easy enough to make one's self believe for the moment in
the higher figure. If it were not for this spiritual stimulus, I should
be inclined to regard all thermometers as a nuisance. Translating
Fahrenheit into Centigrade and _vice versa_, is one of the most painful
mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the
operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European
monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that
his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put
38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the
constitution of that European monarch that he should have survived the
violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand
Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142
degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from
the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should
multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.
I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I
have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and
weighing-machines--they are but the remnants of the fine old communal
life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too
little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares
as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill
our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or
regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile.
Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind
closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because
it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above
reproach and above suspicion.
XXV
THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--III
Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of
delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by
fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he
succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws--the
straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a
drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of
bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper
stand the blow, his friends wondered. He took it very well. Within a
week he had set to work on a new fad, the collection of Statistical
Realities, and in a half-year he had filled three good-sized lofts and
a large back-yard with his treasures. Yesterday he took me through his
galleries.
"What do you make of this?" he said, stopping before a glass jar some
four feet high, in which, to the peril of one's nerves, you could
distinctly see the upper two-thirds of a child's body. Head, trunk, and
arms were beautifully fashioned, but there was no vestige of growth
below the knee-caps. I could only show my astonishment. "Well," he went
on, "you must have seen the statement by the president of Bryn Mawr that
the average number of children among college-bred mothers is 3-6/10.
This is the six-tenths of a child. Here," he said, pointing to another
and somewhat larger jar, "you see three-fifths of a woman; 1-3/5 women
to one man is the ratio in some parts of Ireland. Here, in adjoining
bottles, are three-tenths of a physician, seven-eighths of a lawyer,
and four-fifths of a clergyman, the latest census having shown that we
have 23-3/10 physicians, 29-7/8 lawyers, and 17-4/5 physicians for every
1,000 of our population."
Stopping before a glass case containing little heaps of ordinary copper
coins, Harrington pointed out that these were the odd cents which the
scrupulous science of statistics insists on leaving attached to vast
sums of money. He showed me the 27 cents which, added to $3,469,746,854
represented the value of the foreign commerce of the United States in
1910; he showed me the twopence ha'penny which, increased by
£788,990,187, constitutes the total funded debt of Great Britain; and he
laid special emphasis on the eleven pennies which Tammany's most
vigorous efforts at economy could not pare off from New York City's
budget of $166,246,729.11 for the year 1909.
Another row of glass cases contained what appeared at first sight a
collection of comic dolls. Cooper pointed to a sturdy little mannikin in
boots and a Russian blouse, who, with mouth fearfully distended, was
endeavouring to swallow an iron bar four or five times his own size.
"You may have read," said Cooper, "that the annual consumption of
pig-iron in Russia is 3.7 tons per capita. This figure shows the fact
concretely. Here," indicating the figure of an infant apparently a week
or two old, "is a French baby. You may observe that she is engaged in
counting her share of the national wealth, which is estimated in France
at 1,254 francs 63 centimes for every man, woman, and child. She is
wondering whether she ought to invest her capital in Russian treasury
bonds or in Steel Common. This," pointing to a group of seven or eight
dolls riding on a perfectly modelled brindled cow, "represents the
proportions of domesticated cattle to the total population of the
United States."
The fire which flashes up in the eye of every amateur when he
contemplates the gem of his collection, was visible as Cooper led the
way to a good-sized platform of polished mahogany and brass on which was
set up what I took to be a beautiful reproduction of the planetary
system in miniature. I was right. "But observe," said Cooper, "the
details of construction. The sun is made up of infinitely small eggs,
since we know that the weight of all the hen's eggs consumed by the
human race since the beginning of the Christian era is equal to
one-billionth the weight of the sun. The planets are fashioned in the
same way. Jupiter you see is made up of little, squirming animal-like
units; that is because Jupiter occupies the same amount of space that
would be filled by the descendants of a single pair of Australian
rabbits in five hundred years, if left unchecked. Observe the orbit of
the earth. It is marked out in twopenny postage stamps, for
statisticians assure us that the path of the earth around the sun is
equivalent in length to all the postage stamps consumed since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, if laid end to end. In the same way
the seven rings of Saturn are made up of copper pennies, obtained by
reducing the world's annual output of gold to coins of that
denomination."
We passed into a cosy little alcove lined to the ceiling with books.
There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about them at first sight, but
my host soon undeceived me. "These," he said, "are the books that might
have been written in the last hundred years, if the time and energy that
are spent on smoking, drinking, whist, bridge, and out-door games were
devoted to the cultivation of literature. Here, for instance, are three
plays quite as good as 'Hamlet,' written by two million men named Smith,
who gave up the use of tobacco. Here is a philosophical poem which shows
on every page an inspiration higher than Goethe ever attained; it
embodies the concentrated ideas produced by twenty-five thousand former
golf players, thinking half an hour a day for three days in the week.
Here is a poetic version of the future life which completely outclasses
the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of
forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers,
seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete euchre clubs.
"Perhaps," concluded Cooper, "you should see this before you go," and he
pointed to a single shelf of books with a curious mechanical arrangement
at one side. "This shelf," he said, "is exactly five feet long. This
little electric motor at the side is so constructed that it gets into
motion every day for twenty minutes, and stops. By a system of cogs and
levers the motor propels a fine steel needle straight through the five
feet of books. A glance at this brass dial shows at once how far the
needle point has reached. At the present moment, for instance, it is
halfway through the front cover of the 'Journal of John Woolman.' And
while the dial is recording the distance covered on the five-foot shelf,
the blue liquid in this glass tube measures the rising level of culture.
It is a very ingenious application of President Eliot's idea, don't you
think?"
XXVI
THE COMMUTER
Whenever Harrington urges me to go to live in the country, his place is
only forty-three minutes from City Hall. But when he asked me last week
to spend Saturday afternoon with him, he told me that some trains are
slower than others and that I had better allow ten minutes for the
ferry. I have never known a commuter who told the truth about the time
it takes him to cover the distance from his office-door to his front
lawn. If he is exceptionally conscientious he will take into account the
preliminary ride on the Subway and possibly even the walk from his
office to the Subway station. But no commuter ever alludes to the
fifteen minutes' walk at the other end. I did know one man who never
under-estimated the length of his daily trips, but he was a cynic who
hated the country and lived there because his wife's mother owned the
house, and he multiplied by two the time it really took him to get into
town. The exact truth I have never had.
As a matter of fact, sitting there in a rather stuffy car which made its
way through much unlovely landscape, I reflected that there are really
three different schedules on which suburban traffic is conducted. One is
the time it takes a commuter's friends to come out to see him. Another
is the time he claims it takes him to come into town every day. The
third, and incomparably the shortest of the three, is the time your
friend says it will take him to come into town after the completion of
some very extensive railway improvements which, in practice, I have
found are never completed. I am quite aware that great bridges have
been built, and that railway tunnels have been opened into Long Island
and other railway tunnels into New Jersey, and that steam is being
rapidly replaced by electricity. But it is my firm belief that such of
my suburban friends as live within the zone affected by these
improvements will move away before the change for the better actually
comes. I am no pessimist. I base this expectation on the simple fact
that every commuter I know, for as long a period as I have known him,
has been looking forward to the completion of railway improvements
involving the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars. The march of
progress apparently finds the suburban resident always a little in
advance.
Harrington met me at the station and asked me if that was not a very
good train I had come down on. The suburban virus was in me. I lied and
said yes. As we sat at our luncheon I felt how peculiarly a vital factor
in out-of-town existence the railroad constitutes. Both Harrington and
his wife spoke of trains as of living, breathing people. Some trains,
with all their faults, the Harringtons evidently loved. Others they
detested, and made no attempt to conceal the fact. I had just finished
telling Mrs. Harrington about the latest woman's suffrage parade when
Harrington said: "Do you know, my dear, the 8.13 is getting worse all
the time." I was still thinking of my own story, and I failed to catch
just who or what it was that was getting worse all the time to an extent
so inimical to Harrington's peace of mind. But Mrs. Harrington looked
up, frowning slightly, and said: "Can't anything be done?" Harrington
shook his head. "It's hopeless." By this time I was convinced that it
must be some family skeleton that Harrington had rather oddly chosen to
bring out before a stranger; some scapegrace cousin, I suspected, who
probably got drunk and came to Harrington's office and demanded money. I
looked discreetly into my plate as Mrs. Harrington suggested: "You might
write to the superintendent." "We have," replied Harrington, "and he
threatened to take it off altogether. Not that it would mean any loss. I
can make just as good time now by the 8:35."
After luncheon we walked. I have never found the walking in the suburbs
very good. There is a regrettable lack of elbow-room. A short stroll
brings one either to a railway-siding, which is bad enough, or to a
promising growth of trees, which is worse. From the road these trees
look like the beginning of a primeval jungle sweeping on to far
horizons. Plunge into that timber growth and in five minutes you emerge
on a sewered road with concrete sidewalks and ornamental lamp posts and
a crew of Italian labourers drinking beer in the shadow of a
steam-roller. It is a gash of civilisation across the face of the
wilderness, and, like most deformities, it is displeasing to the eye.
Walking under such conditions is not stimulative. I miss the sense of
space and freedom I get in the streets of New York, where I know that I
can walk twenty miles north or twenty miles east without interference or
inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban
vistas are pitifully cramped.