"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his
right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean
the kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from
Chicago--who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is
travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom
or principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes
this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent,
and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago
wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break
into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens
and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.
and O. There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their
being here.
"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and
finds out who she is. He meets her on the _corso_ or the _strasse_ one
evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of
the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring
in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns. If you'd
take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away
from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.
"Well, you know how it runs on, if you've read any of 'em--he slaps
the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they
get in his way. He's a great fencer, too. Now, I've known of some
Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of
any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the
royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the
twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a
check for the advance royalties.
"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the
bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!'
to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's
left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then
and there. The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be
an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the
Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with
the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the
linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story
plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final
issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a
Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over
a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on
Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"
"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John. There's a saying: 'Love levels
all ranks,' you know."
"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the
level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass.
These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but
what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an international
clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh
Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up
somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that
went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-society
that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select
the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that
he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always many widow ladies
ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses. No, sir,
you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C. D.
Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside down
just because he's a Taft American and took a course at a gymnasium.
And listen how they talk, too!"
Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.
"Listen at this," said he. "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess
Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it goes:
"'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.
Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal
heaven; I am only--myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart
to do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned
sovereign; but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free
Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.'
"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing
anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He'd be much
more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."
"I think I understand you, John," said I. "You want fiction-writers
to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn't
mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long
Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or
Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."
"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.
"It don't jibe. People are divided into classes, whether we admit it
or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.
They do it, too. I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds
of thousands of books like that. You don't see or hear of any such
didoes and capers in real life."