masterly musicianship. Twenty-four ladies in the parquette shrank back
into their seats with a half-sob of brimming emotion, and implored their
escorts to look at the artist's face. Eleven ladies in the lower boxes
interrupted their conversation to remark that it was wonderful what soul
those Slavs managed to put into their playing. In the upper balconies
listeners strained forward in their seats so that from below it seemed
as if they were about to precipitate themselves over the railings. What
expert opinion had described as the sublimest ten minutes in the great
pianist's greatest concerto had just begun. The conductor slightly
raised himself on his toes. Instantly through the weaving of the violins
the voices of the wood instruments began to break out. The contest
between the two came quickly to its climax. The strings were forced back
and back, wailing an ineffective protest against the shrilling advance
of the woods. A solitary 'cello made dogged resistance, knowing its
cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But
the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes
sang a pæan of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, swept
down a hurricane of brasses and shook the hall with its resonant
thunders.
That was the moment our artist at the piano had been waiting for. His
heavy figure straightened up; it seemed to swell to monstrous
proportions, forcing orchestra and leader out of the vision and
consciousness of his listeners. His face now was all eloquence. A divine
wrath almost made his eyes blaze as he prepared to hurl himself at the
silent, yet quivering instrument. His huge hands hovered over the
keyboard ready to fall and destroy. His eyes ran over the keys as if
searching for the vulnerable, for the vital spot. Back and forth his
eyes ran, and his outstretched fingers kept pace with them in the air.
But those fingers could find no resting-place. Still the piano remained
silent. And then came the inevitable reaction. Such passion could not
last without crushing player and audience alike. Seven ladies in the
parquette were grasping the arms of their chairs, and three women in the
upper balcony had seized the arms of their escorts, as the brasses
crashed once and died out. The flutes for an instant reappeared, to make
way in turn for the violins, which now began timidly to peep out from
their hiding-places. They grew bolder; they joined hands, and once more
their insistent story quivered and sang throughout the house. And as
they sang, the player at the piano, exhausted by his supreme effort,
sank more and more into his indifferent former self. His form collapsed,
the fire in his eyes died out, and the powerful hands wearily drooped
and drooped till they rested once more on the player's knees. A sigh of
relief swept over the hall. Human emotion could stand no more. The
audience could hardly wait for the last throb of the violins, to break
out in rapturous applause. The master rose, bowed sorrowfully towards
nobody in particular, and walked off.
"Did you watch his face?" asked my neighbour. "Have you ever come across
such utterly overpowering individuality? I have played for fifteen
years, but if I played for fifty years I could never even approach art
like this."
XXXIII
THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
"The arguments for and against woman suffrage," said Harding, "seem to
me very evenly balanced. I agree with Dr. Biddle of the Society for the
Promotion of Beautiful Manners, that it is unseemly for a woman to climb
a truck and demand the ballot. Dr. Biddle maintains that if woman wants
the ballot she should wait until every one is asleep and then go through
somebody's pockets for it. Woman, Dr. Biddle thinks, has her own
peculiar sphere, which, as the latest Census figures show, includes the
nursery, the kitchen, the vaudeville stage, college teaching,
stenography, the law, medicine, the ministry, as well as the manufacture
of agricultural implements, ammunition, artificial feathers and limbs,
automobiles, axle-grease, boots and shoes, bread-knives, brooms,
brushes, buttons, carriages and wagons, charcoal, cheese, cigars,
clocks, clothing and so on to x, y, and z.
"Can anything be more fatal to our ideals of true womanliness, Dr.
Biddle asks, than a suffragette who throws stones? In reply to this,
Miss Annabelle Bloodthurst asserts that if we count the number of
successful suffragette hits woman is never so true to her sex as when
she is heaving bricks at a British prime minister.
"Professor Tumbler lays particular stress on the outrageous conduct of
the English suffragettes. He recalls how the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, while eating a charlotte russe, felt his teeth strike against a
hard object, which turned out to be a cardboard cylinder inscribed
'Votes for Women.' The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was about to
light his after-dinner cigar the other day when the cigar suddenly
expanded into a paper fan bearing the legend, 'Tyrants, beware!' The
newest Dreadnought with the First Lord of the Admiralty on board was
preparing to set out on her trial trip when it was discovered that the
boilers were not making steam. When the furnace doors were opened two
dozen suffragettes, concealed within, began to shout, 'We want votes!'
The leader of the Opposition is known to have walked all the way down
Piccadilly with a tag tied to his coattails inscribed: 'I see no reason
for bestowing the suffrage on women.'
"But perhaps the most dastardly outrage occurred at the baptism of the
youngest child of a prominent treasury official. It seems that the
nurse, who was a suffragette in disguise, had removed the child, a girl,
and substituted a mechanical doll, with a phonographic attachment. The
clergyman was in the middle of his discourse when the doll began to
scream, 'Votes for women.' The father gasped, 'What! So early?' and
fainted.
"The more you weigh the reasons pro and con," continued Harding, as he
lit one of my cigars, "the harder it is to decide. Mrs. Cadgers has
pointed out that under our present system the wife of a college
professor is not allowed to vote, whereas an illiterate Greek fruit
peddler may. But Mr. Rattler replies that the college professor, too,
seldom votes, and if he does he spoils his ballot by trying to split his
ticket. Why, demands Mrs. Cadgers, should women who pay taxes be refused
a voice in the management of public affairs? Because, replies Mr.
Rattler, the suffrage and taxes do not necessarily go together. In our
country at the present day many millionaires who regularly cast their
votes never pay their taxes.
"Mr. Rattler is particularly afraid that woman suffrage will break up
the family. 'Imagine,' he says, 'a family in which the husband is a
Democrat and the wife a Cannon Republican. Imagine them constantly
fighting out the subject of tariff revision over the supper-table, and
conceive the dreadful effect on the children, who at present are
accustomed to see father light his cigar after supper and fall asleep.
Or suppose the wife develops a passion for political meetings. That
means that the husband will have to stay at home with the baby.' 'Well,'
replies Mrs. Cadgers, 'such an arrangement has its advantages. It would
not only give the wife a chance to learn the meaning of citizenship, but
it would give the husband a chance to get acquainted with the baby.' And
besides, Mrs. Cadgers goes on to argue, a woman's political duties need
not take up more than a small fraction of her time. That, retorts Mr.
Rattler, with a sneer, is because woman derives her ideas on the subject
from seeing her husband fulfil his duties as a citizen once every two
years when he forgets to register.
"An excellent debate on the subject was the one between Mrs. Excelsior,
who spoke in favour of the ballot for women, and Professor Van Doodle,
who upheld the negative. Professor Van Doodle maintained that women are
incapable of taking a genuine interest in public affairs. What is it
that appeals to a woman when she reads a newspaper? A Presidential
election may be impending, a great war is raging in the Far East, an
explorer has just returned from the South Pole, and, woman, picking up
the Sunday paper, plunges straight into the fashion columns! She hardly
finds time to answer her husband's petulant inquiry as to what she has
done with the comic supplement. Can woman take an impersonal view of
things? No, says Professor Van Doodle. In a critical Presidential
election, one in which the fate of the country is at stake, she will
vote for the candidate from whom she thinks she can get most for her
husband and her children, whereas, her husband under the same
circumstances will cast aside all personal interests and vote the same
ticket his father voted for. Woman, concluded the professor, is
constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong,
between truth and falsehood.
"Mrs. Excelsior made a spirited defence. She showed that woman's
undeveloped sense of what truth and honesty are, would not handicap her
in the pursuit of practical politics. She argued that the complicated
problems of municipal finance are no easier for the man who sets out to
raise a family on fifteen dollars a week than for the woman who succeeds
in doing so. She declared that a person who can travel thirty miles by
subway and surface car, price $500 worth of dressgoods, and buy her
lunch, all on fifteen cents in cash and a transfer ticket, would make a
good comptroller for New York City.
"Professor Van Doodle claimed that under woman suffrage only a
good-looking candidate would stand a chance of being elected. Mrs.
Excelsior replied that there was no reason for believing that women
would be more particular in choosing a State Senator than in selecting a
husband. The professor was foolish when he asserted that if women went
to the polls they would vote for the aldermen and the sheriffs, and
would forget to vote for the President of the United States, and would
insist on doing so in a postscript. This was of a piece with the other
ancient jest that women are sure to vote for a Democrat when at heart
they prefer a Republican, and _vice versa_.
"The whole case," concluded Harding, "was summed up by the Rev. Dr.
Hollow when he said that in theory there is no objection to the present
arrangement by which man rules the earth through his reason, and woman
rules man through his stomach; but unfortunately, the human reason and
the average man's stomach are apt to get out of order."
XXXIV
THE GERMS OF CULTURE
In my afternoon paper there was a letter by Veritas who tried to prove
something about the Trusts by quoting from the third volume of
Macaulay's history. After dinner I took the book from the shelf and as I
struck it against the table to let the dust fly up, I thought of what
Mrs. Harrington said. The Harringtons had spent an evening with me. As
they rose to go Mrs. Harrington ran the tip of her gloved finger across
half a dozen dingy volumes and sniffed. "Why don't you put glass doors
on your bookshelves?" she asked. It was a raw point with me and she knew
it. "The pretty kind, perhaps," I sneered, "with leaded panes and an
antique iron lock?" "Exactly," she replied. "The dust here is
abominable. You must be just steeped in all sorts of infection; and
perhaps if you kept your books under lock and key people wouldn't run
away with them." I was a fool to have tried irony upon Mrs. Harrington.
Her outlook upon life is literal and domestic. Books are to her
primarily part of a scheme of interior decoration. Harrington's views
come closer to my own, but Harrington is an indulgent husband.
The incident was now a week old, but something of the original fury came
back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of
dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who
will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden
dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of
the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that
is swept up by trailing skirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs?
And the dust of old beliefs in which we live, my friend? And the dust
that statesmen and prophets are always throwing into our eyes? None of
these interfere with Mrs. Harrington's peace of mind. But when it comes
to the dust on the gilt tops of my red-buckrammed Molière she fears
infection.
And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree
with me that infection from book-dust is not an ignoble form of death. I
sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says the
_Evening Star_, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after
a very brief illness. Friday night he was with a merry group of diners
in one of our best-known and most brilliantly lighted Broadway
restaurants. He partook heartily of lobster salad, of which, his closest
friends declare, he was inordinately fond. Almost immediately he
complained of being ill and was taken home in a taxicab." If I were H.
Wellington Jones and it were my fate to die of poison I could frame a
nobler end for myself. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," I would have it read,
"died yesterday of some mysterious form of bacterial poisoning
contracted while turning over the pages of an old family Bible which he
was accustomed to consult at frequent intervals. Mr. Smith had a cut
finger which was not quite healed and it is supposed that a dust-speck
from the pages of the old book must have entered the wound and induced
sepsis. He was found unconscious in his chair with the book open at the
thirtieth chapter of Proverbs." Yes, I sometimes find it hard to
understand what Harrington, a man of really fine sensibilities, sees in
Mrs. Harrington. The very suggestion of locking up books to prevent
their being carried away hurts like the screech of a pencil upon a
slate. I think of Mrs. Harrington and then I think of Cooper. Cooper's
shelves are continuously being denuded by his friends. But if you think
of Cooper as a helpless victim you are sadly mistaken. There is an
elaborate scheme behind it all, a scheme of such transcendent ingenuity
as only simple-hearted, sweet-natured, unpractised, purblind visionaries
like Cooper are capable of.
He let me into the secret one day when he saw that I was about to find
it out for myself. "I know very many dear people," he said, "who are too
busy to read books or too little in the habit of it. You know them, too;
they are men and women in whom the pulse of life beats too rapidly for
the calm pleasures of reading. They are not insensible to fine ideas,
but they must see these ideas in concrete form. If I, for instance, wish
to know something about Spain, I get one of Martin Hume's books, but
these people take a steamer and go to Spain. I have read everything of
Meredith's and they have read almost nothing, but they saw Meredith in
London and spent a week-end with him at a country-house in Sussex. I
avoid celebrities in the flesh. I don't want to minister to them and I
want still less to patronise them. I am afraid I should be disappointed
in them and I am sure they would be disappointed in me.
"However, that's not the point," says Cooper. "The problem is to make a
man read who won't read of his own accord. I do it by asking such a man
to dinner. I pull out a volume of Marriott's and remark, without
emphasis, that after infinite exertion I have just got it back from
Woolsey, who is wild over the book. The fires of envy and acquisition
flash in my visitor's eye. Might he have the book for a day or two? Yes,
I say after some hesitation, but he must promise to bring it back. He
grows fervent. Of course he will bring it back, by Saturday at the very
latest and in person. And he is my man from that moment. I have lost the
book, of course, but I have smuggled my troops within the fort, I have
laid the train, I have transmitted the infection. The serpent is in the
garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate,
a red serpent about a golden staff.
"Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have
handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at
least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon
outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book. But if Hobson
expects me to drop in at any moment, he is afraid I may find the book on
his library table and ask him whether he has read it. So he hides the
book in his bedroom. Then he is indeed mine. Some night he will be out
of sorts and find it hard to go to sleep. His eye will fall on the book
lying there on his table, and he will pick it up, at the same time
lighting a cigar. I shall never see that book again. But, I leave it to
you, who needs that book more, I or Hobson?"
But Cooper did not tell all. I know he has made use of shrewder tactics.
Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a
half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French
criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is
just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased
trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite
ineptitude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day
politics and science, and everything else in the present that
well-informed people are supposed to know. It goes with his total
inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in
the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.
How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar
significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's
houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a
Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say,
has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna
Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have
heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him. Or Hobson
may not be going home that night, or he may object to carrying a parcel
in the subway, or for any other reason he will omit to take the book
with him. "The next day," says Cooper, "I pay Hobson a return visit, and
forget the book on his hall-table. Frequently Hobson may be too busy to
take notice of the accident. In that case I call him up on the telephone
as soon as I leave his house and ask in great agitation whether by any
chance I have left a volume of Maeterlinck on his hall-table. Sometimes
I add that Woolsey has been after that volume for weeks. That night, I
feel sure, Hobson will carry the book up to his bedroom."
And as Cooper spoke I thought of the Smith family, whom, by methods like
those I have described, Cooper succeeded in saving from themselves.
Nerves in the Smith family were badly rasped. The mother was not making
great headway in her social campaigns. Her husband chafed at his
children's idleness and extravagance. The children went in sullen
fashion about their own business. They had no resources of their own.
There was gloom in that household and stifled rancour, and the danger
of worse things to come, until the day when Cooper called and forgot at
one blow a copy of "Richard Feverel," the "Bab Ballads," and the third
volume of Ferrero's "Rome."
As I have said, Cooper was not blind to the good he was doing. False
modesty was not one of his failings. He would continually have me admire
his bookshelves. The books he was proudest of were those he had lent or
given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would
boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my
Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner
some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and,
like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I
don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I
think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next
morning. He devoured Gibbon. From him he went to Tacitus. He has since
read hundreds of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of
volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending
me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my
Montaigne--gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a
nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from
Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is
gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled at me
beatifically.
That was Cooper. But Mrs. Harrington that night saw things in quite a
different light. She grumbled and sniffed, and finally grew vehement. I
am not a saint like Cooper, but here and there my shelves, too, show the
visitations of friends. "Not a single complete set," wailed Mrs.
Harrington, "everything lugged away by people who should be taught to
know better. Browning, volumes I, II, V, and VII--four volumes gone.
Middlemarch, volume II, first volume gone. Morley's Gladstone, volumes I
and III, one volume gone. I wager you don't even know who has the second
volume of your Gladstone. Do you, now?"
To tell the truth, I did not for the moment know. And as I hesitated she
thrust one of the volumes in triumph at me and mechanically I opened the
book and saw a red serpent about a golden staff. "I remember now," I
told Mrs. Harrington. "I'll get the second volume the next time I call
on Cooper."