_"Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two": as performed for the
First and Only Time by Sharlee Weyland._
The Star that fought in its course for men through Sharlee Weyland was
of the leal and resolute kind. It did not swerve at a squall. Sharlee
had thought the whole thing out, and made up her mind. Gentle raillery,
which would do everything necessary in most cases, would be wholly
futile here. She must doff all gloves and give the little Doctor the
dressing-down of his life. She must explode a mine under that enormously
exaggerated self-esteem which swamped the young man's personality like a
goitre. Sharlee did not want to do this. She liked Mr. Queed, in a
peculiar sort of way, and yet she had to make it impossible for him ever
to speak to her again. Her nature was to give pleasure, and therefore
she was going to do her utmost to give him pain. She wanted him to like
her, and consequently she was going to insult him past forgiveness. And
she was not even sure that it was going to do him any good.
When her guest walked into her little back parlor that evening, Sharlee
was feeling very self-sacrificing and noble. However, she merely looked
uncommonly pretty and tremendously engrossed in herself. She was in
evening dress. It was Easter Monday, and at nine, as it chanced, she was
to go out under the escortage of Charles Gardiner West to some
forgathering of youth and beauty. But her costume was so perfectly
suited to the little curtain-raiser called Taking the Little Doctor Down
a Peg or Two, that it might have been appointed by a clever
stage-manager with that alone in mind. She was the haughty beauty, the
courted princess, graciously bestowing a few minutes from her crowding
fêtes upon some fourth-rate dependant. And indeed the little Doctor,
with his prematurely old face and his shabby clothes, rather looked the
part of the dependant. Sharlee's greeting was of the briefest.
"Ah, Mr. Queed.... Sit down."
Her negligent nod set him away at an immense distance; even he was aware
that Charles Weyland had undergone some subtle but marked change since
the morning. The colored maid who had shown him in was retained to
button her mistress' long gloves. It proved to be a somewhat slow
process. Over the mantel hung a gilt-framed mirror, as wide as the
mantel itself. To this mirror, the gloves buttoned, Miss Weyland passed,
and reviewed her appearance with slow attention, giving a pat here,
making a minor readjustment there. But this survey did not suffice for
details, it seemed; a more minute examination was needed; over the floor
she trailed with leisurely grace, and rang the bell.
"Oh, Mary--my vanity-box, please. On the dressing-table."
Seating herself under the lamp, she produced from the contrivance the
tiniest little mirror ever seen. As she raised it to let it perform its
dainty function, her glance fell on Queed, sitting darkly in his
rocking-chair. A look of mild surprise came into her eye: not that it
was of any consequence, but plainly she had forgotten that he was there.
"Oh ... You don't mind waiting a few minutes?"
"I do m--"
"You promised half an hour I think? Never fear that I shall take
longer--"
"I did not promise half an hour for such--"
"It was left to me to decide in what way the time should be employed, I
believe. What I have to say can be said briefly, but to you, at least,
it should prove immensely interesting." She stifled a small yawn with
the gloved finger-tips of her left hand. "However, of course don't let
me keep you if you are pressed for time."
The young man made no reply. Sharlee completed at her leisure her
conference with the vanity-box; snapped the trinket shut; and, rising,
rang the bell again. This time she required a glass of water for her
good comfort. She drank it slowly, watching herself in the mantel mirror
as she did so, and setting down the glass, took a new survey of her
whole effect, this time in a long-distance view.
"Now, Mr. Queed!"
She sat down in a flowered arm-chair so large that it engulfed her, and
fixed him with a studious, puckering gaze as much as to say: "Let's see.
Now, what was his trouble?"
"Ah, yes!--the _Post_."
She glanced at the little clock on the mantel, appeared to gather in her
thoughts from remote and brilliant places, and addressed the dingy youth
briskly but not unkindly.
"Unfortunately, I have an engagement this evening and can give you very
little time. You will not mind if I am brief. Here, then, is the case. A
man employed in a minor position on a newspaper is notified that he is
to be discharged for incompetence. He replies that, so far from being
discharged, he will be promoted at the end of a month, and will
eventually be made editor of the paper. Undoubtedly this is a
magnificent boast, but to make it good means a complete transformation
in the character of this man's work--namely, from entire incompetence to
competence of an unusual sort, all within a month's time. You are the
man who has made this extraordinary boast. To clear the ground before I
begin to show you where your trouble is, please tell me how you propose
to make it good."
Not every man feeling inside as the little Doctor felt at that moment
would have answered with such admirable calm.
"I purpose," he corrected her, "to take the files of the _Post_ for the
past few years and read all of Colonel Cowles's amusing articles. He, I
am informed, is the editorial mogul and paragon. I purpose to study
those articles scientifically, to analyze them, to take them apart and
see exactly how they are put together. I purpose to destroy my own
style and build up another one precisely like the Colonel's--if
anything, a shade more so. In short I purpose to learn to write like an
ass, of asses, for asses."
"That is your whole programme?"
"It is more than enough, I think."
"Ah?" She paused a moment, looking at him with faint, distant amusement.
"Now, as my aunt's business woman, I, of course, take an interest in the
finances of her boarders. Therefore I had better begin at once looking
about for a new place for you after May 15th. What other kinds of work
do you think yourself qualified to do, besides editorial writing and the
preparation of thesauruses?"
He looked at her darkly. "You imagine that the _Post_ will discharge me
on May 15th?"
"There is nothing in the world that seems to me so certain."
"And why?"
"Why will the Post discharge you? For exactly the same reason it
promises to discharge you now. Incompetence."
"You agree with Colonel Cowles, then? You consider me incompetent to
write editorials for the _Post_?"
"Oh, totally. And it goes a great deal deeper than style, I assure you.
Mr. Queed, you're all wrong from the beginning."
Her eyes left his face; went first to the clock; glanced around the
room. Sharlee's dress was blue, and her neck was as white as a wave's
foamy tooth. Her manner was intended to convey to Mr. Queed that he was
the smallest midge on all her crowded horizon. It did not, of course,
have that effect, but it did arrest and pique his attention most
successfully. It was in his mind that Charles Weyland had been of some
assistance to him in first suggesting work on the _Post_; and again
about the roses for Fifi. He was still ready to believe that she might
have some profitable suggestion about his new problem. Was she not that
"public" and that "average reader" which he himself so despised and
detested? Yet he could not imagine where such a little pink and white
chit found the hardihood to take this tone with one of the foremost
scientists of modern times.
"You interest me. I am totally incompetent now; I will be totally
incompetent on May 15th; this because I am all wrong from the beginning.
Pray proceed."
Sharlee, her thoughts recalled, made a slight inclination of her head.
"Forgive my absent-mindedness. First, then, as to why you are a failure
as an editorial writer. You are quite mistaken in supposing that it is a
mere question of style, though right in regarding your style as in
itself a fatal handicap. However, the trouble has its root in your
amusing attitude of superiority to the work. You think of editorial
writing as small hack-work, entirely beneath the dignity of a man who
has had one or two articles accepted by a prehistoric magazine which
nobody reads. In reality, it is one of the greatest and most splendid of
all professions, fit to call out the very best of a really big man. You
chuckle and sneer at Colonel Cowles and think yourself vastly his
superior as an editorial writer, when, in the opinion of everybody else,
he is in every way your superior. I doubt if the _Post_ has a single
reader who would not prefer to read an article by him, on any subject,
to reading an article by you. I doubt if there is a paper in the world
that would not greatly prefer him as an editor to you--"
"You are absurdly mistaken," he interrupted coldly. "I might name
various papers--"
"Yes, the _Political Science Quarterly_ and the _Journal of the
Anthropological Institute_." Sharlee smiled tolerantly, and immediately
resumed: "When you sit down at the office to write an article, whom do
you think you are writing for? A company of scientists? An institute of
gray-bearded scholars? An academy of fossilized old doctors of laws?
There are not a dozen people of that sort who read the _Post_. Has it
never occurred to you to call up before your mind's eye the people you
actually are writing for? You can see them any day as you walk along the
street. Go into a street car at six o'clock any night and look
around at the faces. There is your public, the readers of the
_Post_--shop-clerks, stenographers, factory-hands, office-men, plumbers,
teamsters, drummers, milliners. Look at them. Have you anything to say
to interest them? Think. If they were to file in here now and ask you to
make a few remarks, could you, for the life of you, say one single thing
that would interest them?"
"I do not pretend, or aspire," said Mr. Queed, "to dispense frothy
nothings tricked out to beguile the tired brick-layer. My duty is to
give forth valuable information and ripened judgment couched in
language--"
"No, your duty is to get yourself read; if you fail there you fail
everywhere. Is it possible that you don't begin to grasp that point yet?
I fancied that your mind was quicker. You appear to think that the duty
of a newspaper is to back people up against a wall and ram helpful
statistics into them with a force-pump. You are grotesquely mistaken.
Your ideal newspaper would not keep a dozen readers in this city: that
is to say, it would be a complete failure while it lasted and would
bankrupt Mr. Morgan in six months. A dead newspaper is a useless one,
the world over. At the same time, every living and good newspaper is a
little better, spreads a little more sweetness and light, gives out a
little more valuable information, ripened judgment, et cetera, than the
vast majority of its readers want or will absorb. The _Post_ is that
sort of newspaper. It is constantly tugging its readers a little higher
than they--I mean the majority, and not the cultured few--are willing to
go. But the _Post_ always recognizes that its first duty is to get
itself read: if it does not succeed in that, it lacks the principle of
life and dies. Perhaps the tired bricklayer you speak of, the
middle-class, commonplace, average people who make up nearly all of the
world, ought to be interested in John Stuart Mill's attitude toward the
single-tax. But the fact is that they aren't. The _Post_ wisely deals
with the condition, and not a theory: it means to get itself read. It is
your first duty, as a writer for it, to get yourself read. If you fail
to get yourself read, you are worse than useless to the _Post_. Well,
you have completely failed to do this, and that is why the _Post_ is
discharging you. Come, free yourself from exaggerated notions about your
own importance and look at this simple point with the calm detachment of
a scientist. The _Post_ can save money, while preserving just the same
effect, by discharging you and printing every morning a half-column from
the Encyclopedia Britannica."
She rose quickly, as though her time was very precious, and passed over
to the table, where a great bowl of violets stood. The room was pretty:
it had reminded Queed, when he entered it, of Nicolovius's room, though
there was a softer note in it, as the flowers, the work-bag on the
table, the balled-up veil and gloves on the mantel-shelf. He had liked,
too, the soft-shaded lamps; the vague resolve had come to him to install
a lamp in the Scriptorium later on. But now, thinking of nothing like
this, he sat in a thick silence gazing at her with unwinking sternness.
Sharlee carefully gathered the violets from the bowl, shook a small
shower of water from their stems, dried them with a pocket handkerchief
about the size of a silver dollar. Next she wrapped the stems with
purple tinfoil, tied them with a silken cord and tassel and laid the
gorgeous bunch upon a magazine back, to await her further pleasure.
Then, coming back, she resumed her seat facing the shabby young man she
was assisting to see himself as others saw him.
"I might," she said, "simply stop there. I might tell you that you are a
failure as an editorial writer because you have nothing at all to say
that is of the smallest interest to the great majority of the readers of
editorials, and would not know how to say it if you had. That would be
enough to satisfy most men, but I see that I must make things very plain
and definite for you. Mr. Queed, you are a failure as an editorial
writer because you are first a failure in a much more important
direction. You're a failure as a human being--as a man."
She was watching his face lightly, but closely, and so she was on her
feet as soon as he, and had her hand out before he had even thought of
making this gesture.
"It is useless for this harangue to continue," he said, with a brow of
storm. "Your conception of helpful advice ..."
But Sharlee's voice, which had begun as soon as his, drowned him out....
"Complimented you a little too far, I see. I shall be sure to remember
after this," she said with such a sweet smile, "that, after all your
talk, you are just the average man, and want to hear only what flatters
your little vanity. _Good_-night. So nice to have seen you."
She nodded brightly, with faint amusement, and turning away, moved off
toward the door at the back. Queed, of course, had no means of knowing
that she was thinking, almost jubilantly: "I _knew_ that mouth meant
spirit!" He only knew that, whereas he had meant to terminate the
interview with a grave yet stinging rebuke to her, she had given the
effect of terminating the interview with a graceful yet stinging rebuke
to him. This was not what he wanted in the least. Come to think of it,
he doubted if he wanted the interview to end at all.
"Miss Weyland ..."
She turned on the threshold of the farther door. "I beg your pardon! I
thought you'd gone! Your hat?--I think you left it in the hall, didn't
you?"
"It is not my hat."
"Oh--what is it?"
"God knows," said the little Doctor, hoarsely.
He was standing in the middle of the floor, his hands jammed into his
trousers pockets, his hair tousled over a troubled brow, his breast torn
by emotions which were entirely new in his experience and which he
didn't even know the names of. All the accumulation of his disruptive
day was upon him. He felt both terrifically upset inside, and interested
to the degree of physical pain in something or other, he had no idea
what. Presently he started walking up and down the room, nervous as a
caged lion, eyes fixed on space or on something within, while Sharlee
stood in the doorway watching him casually and unsurprised, as though
just this sort of thing took place in her little parlor regularly, seven
nights a week.
"Go ahead! Go ahead!" he broke out abruptly, coming to a halt. "Pitch
into me. Do it for all you're worth. I suppose you think it's what I
need."
"Certainly," said Sharlee, pleasantly.
She stood beside her chair again, flushed with a secret sense of
victory, liking him more for his temper and his control than she ever
could have liked him for his learning. But it was not her idea that the
little Doctor had got it anywhere near hard enough as yet.
"Won't you sit down, Mr. Queed?"
It appeared that Mr. Queed would.
"I am paying you the extraordinary compliment," said Sharlee, "of
talking to you as others might talk about you behind your back--in fact,
as everybody does talk about you behind your back. I do this on the
theory that you are a serious and honest-minded man, sincerely
interested in learning the truth about yourself and your failures, so
that you may correct them. If you are interested only in having your
vanity fed by flattering fictions, please say so right now. I have no
time," she said, hardly able for her life to suppress a smile, "for
butterflies and triflers."
_Butterflies and triflers!_ Mr. Queed, proprietor of the famous
Schedule, a butterfly and a trifler!