"Since an editorial writer," said Sharlee, seating herself and beginning
with a paragraph as neat as a public speaker's, "must be able, as his
first qualification, to interest the common people, it is manifest that
he must be interested in the common people. He must feel his bond of
humanity with them, sympathize with them, like them, love them. This is
the great secret of Colonel Cowles's success as an editor. A fine
gentleman by birth, breeding, and tradition, he is yet always a human
being among human beings. All his life he has been doing things with and
for the people. He went all through the war, and you might have thought
the whole world depended on him, the way he went up Cemetery Ridge on
the 3rd of July, 1863. He was shot all to pieces, but they patched him
together, and the next year there he was back in the fighting around
Petersburg. After the war he was a leader against the carpet-baggers,
and if this State is peaceful and prosperous and comfortable for you to
live in now, it is because of what men like him and my father did a
generation ago. When he took the _Post_ he went on just the same,
working and thinking and fighting for men and with men, and all in the
service of the people. I suppose, of course, his views through all these
years have not always been sound, but they have always been honest and
honorable, sensible, manly, and sweet. And they have always had a
practical relation with the life of the people. The result is that he
has thousands and thousands of readers who feel that their day has been
wanting in something unless they have read what he has to say. There is
Colonel Cowles--Does this interest you, Mr. Queed? If not, I need not
weary us both by continuing."
He again requested her, in the briefest possible way, to proceed.
"Well! There is Colonel Cowles, whom you presume to despise, because you
know, or think you know, more political and social science than he does.
Where you got your preposterously exaggerated idea of the value of
text-book science I am at a loss to understand. The people you aspire to
lead--for that is what an editorial writer must do--care nothing for it.
That tired bricklayer whom you dismiss with such contempt of course
cares nothing for it. But that bricklayer is the People, Mr. Queed. He
is the very man that Colonel Cowles goes to, and puts his hand on his
shoulder, and tries to help--help him to a better home, better education
for his children, more and more wholesome pleasures, a higher and
happier living. Colonel Cowles thinks of life as an opportunity to live
with and serve the common, average, everyday people. You think of it as
an opportunity to live by yourself and serve your own ambition. He
writes to the hearts of the people. You write to the heads of
scientists. Doubtless it will amaze you to be told that his paragraph on
the death of Moses Page, the Byrds' old negro butler, was a far more
useful article in every way than your long critique on the currency
system of Germany which appeared in the same issue. Colonel Cowles is a
big-hearted human being. You--you are a scientific formula. And the
worst of it is that _you're proud of it!_ The hopeless part of it is
that you actually consider a few old fossils as bigger than the live
people all around you! How can I show you your terrible mistake?... Why,
Mr. Queed, the life and example of a little girl ..." she stopped,
rather precipitately, stared hard at her hands, which were folded in her
lap, and went resolutely on: "The life and example of a little girl like
Fifi are worth more than all the text-books you will ever write."
A silence fell. In the soft lamplight of the pretty room, Queed sat
still and silent as a marble man; and presently Sharlee, plucking
herself together, resumed:--
"Perhaps you now begin to glimpse a wider difference between yourself
and Colonel Cowles than mere unlikeness of literary style. If you
continue to think this difference all in your own favor, I urge you to
abandon any idea of writing editorials for the _Post_. If on the other
hand, you seriously wish to make good your boast of this morning, I urge
you to cease sneering at men like Colonel Cowles, and humbly begin to
try to imitate them. I say that you are a failure as an editorial writer
because you are a failure as a man, and I say that you are a failure as
a man because you have no relation at all with man's life. You aspire to
teach and lead human beings, and you have not the least idea what a
human being is, and not the slightest wish to find out. All around you
are men, live men of flesh and blood, who are moving the world, and you,
whipping out your infinitesimal measuring-rod, dismiss them as inferior
cattle who know nothing of text-book science. Here is a real and living
world, and you roll through it like a billiard-ball. And all because you
make the fatal error of mistaking a sorry handful of mummies for the
universe."
"It is a curious coincidence," said Queed, with great but deceptive
mildness, "that Fifi said much the same thing to me, though in quite a
different way, this afternoon."
"She told me. But Fifi was not the first. You had the same advice from
your father two months ago."
"My father?"
"You have not forgotten his letter that you showed me in your office one
afternoon?"
It seemed that he had; but he had it in his pocket, as it chanced, and
dug it out, soiled and frayed from long confinement. Stooping forward to
introduce it into the penumbra of lamplight, he read over the
detective-story message: "_Make friends: mingle with people and learn to
like them. This is the earnest injunction of Your father_."
"You complain of your father's treatment of you," said Sharlee, "but he
offered you a liberal education there, and you declined to take it."
She glanced at the clock, turned about to the table and picked up her
beautiful bouquet. A pair of long bodkins with lavender glass heads were
waiting, it appeared; she proceeded to pin on her flowers, adjusting
them with careful attention; and rising, again reviewed herself in the
mantel-mirror. Then she sat down once more, and calmly said:
"As you are a failure as an editorial writer and as a man, so you are a
failure as a sociologist ..."
It was the last straw, the crowning blasphemy. She hardly expected him
to endure it, and he did not; she was glad to have it so. But the
extreme mildness with which he interrupted her almost unnerved her, so
confidently had she braced herself for violence.
"Do you mind if we omit that? I think I have heard enough about my
failures for one night."
He had risen, but stood, for a wonder, irresolute. It was too evident
that he did not know what to do next. Presently, having nowhere else to
go, he walked over to the mantel-shelf and leant his elbow upon it,
staring down at the floor. A considerable interval passed, broken only
by the ticking of the clock before he said:--
"You may be an authority on editorial writing--even on manhood--life.
But I can hardly recognize you in that capacity as regards sociology."
Sharlee made no reply. She had no idea that the young man's dismissal
from the _Post_ had been a crucifixion to him, an unendurable infamy
upon his virginal pride of intellect. She had no conception of his
powers of self-control, which happened to be far greater than her own,
and she would have given worlds to know what he was thinking at that
moment. For her part she was thinking of him, intensely, and in a
personal way. Manners he had none, but where did he get his manner? Who
had taught him to bow in that way? He had mentioned insults: where had
he heard of insults, this stray who had raised himself in the house of a
drunken policeman?
"Well," said Queed, with the utmost calmness, "you might tell me, in a
word, why you think I am a failure as a sociologist."
"You are a failure as a sociologist," said Sharlee, immediately, "for
the same reason as both your other failures: you are wholly out of
relation with real life. Sociology is the science of human society. You
know absolutely nothing about human society, except what other men have
found out and written down in text-books. You say that you are an
evolutionary sociologist. Yet a wonderful demonstration in social
evolution is going on all around you, and _you don't even know it_. You
are standing here directly between two civilizations. On the one side
there are Colonel Cowles and my old grandmother--mother of your
landlady, plucky dear! On the other there are our splendid young men,
men who, with traditions of leisure and cultured idleness in their
blood, have pitched in with their hands and heads to make this State
_hum_, and will soon be meeting and beating your Northern young men at
every turn. On one side there is the old slaveholding aristocracy; on
the other the finest Democracy in the world; and here and now human
society is evolving from one thing to the other. A real sociologist
would be absorbed in watching this marvelous process: social evolution
actually surprised in her workshop. But you--I doubt if you even knew it
was going on. A tremendous social drama is being acted out under your
very window and you yawn and _pull down the blind_."
There was a brief silence. In the course of it the door-bell was heard
to ring; soon the door opened; a masculine murmur; then the maid Mary's
voice, clearly: "Yassuh, she's in.... Won't you rest your coat, Mr.
West?"
Mary entered the little back parlor, a card upon a tray. "Please draw
the folding doors," said Sharlee. "Say that I'll be in in a few
minutes."
They were alone once more, she and the little Doctor; the silence
enfolded them again; and she broke it by saying the last word she had to
say.
"I have gone into detail because I wanted to make the unfavorable
impression you produce upon your little world clear to you, for once.
But I can sum up all that I have said in less than six words. If you
remember anything at all that I have said, I wish you would remember
this. Mr. Queed, you are afflicted with a fatal malady. Your cosmos is
all Ego."
She started to rise, thought better of it, and sat still in her flowered
chair full in the lamplight. The little Doctor stood at the
mantel-shelf, his elbow upon it, and the silence lengthened. To do
something, Sharlee pulled off her right long glove and slowly put it
back again. Then she pulled off her left long glove, and about the time
she was buttoning the last button he began speaking, in a curious,
lifeless voice.
"I learned to read when I was four years old out of a copy of the New
York _Evening Post_. It came to the house, I remember, distinctly,
wrapped around two pork chops. That seemed to be all the reading matter
we had in the house for a long time--I believe Tim was in hard luck in
those days--and by the time I was six I had read that paper all through
from beginning to end, five times. I have wondered since if that
incident did not give a bent to my whole mind. If you are familiar with
the _Evening Post_, you may appreciate what I mean.... It came out in me
exactly like a duck's yearning for water; that deep instinct for the
printed word. Of course Tim saw that I was different from him. He helped
me a little in the early stages, and then he stood back, awed by my
learning, and let me go my own gait. When I was about eight, I learned
of the existence of public libraries. I daresay it would surprise you to
know the books I was reading in this period of my life--and writing too:
for in my eleventh year I was the author of a one-volume history of the
world, besides several treatises. And I early began to think, too. What
was the fundamental principle underlying the evolution of a higher and
higher human type? How could this principle be unified through all
branches of science and reduced to an operable law? Questions such as
these kept me awake at night while I still wore short trousers. At
fourteen I was boarding alone in a kind of tenement on the East Side. Of
course I was quite different from all the people around me. Different. I
don't remember that they showed any affectionate interest in me, and why
on earth should they? As I say, I was different. There was nothing there
to suggest a conception of that brotherhood of man you speak of. I was
born with this impulse for isolation and work, and everything that
happened to me only emphasized it. I never had a day's schooling in my
life, and never a word of advice or admonition--never a scolding in all
my life till now. Here is a point on which your Christian theory of
living seems to me entirely too vague: how to reconcile individual
responsibility with the forces of heredity and circumstance. From my
point of view your talk would have been better rounded if you had
touched on that. Still, it was striking and interesting as it was. I
like to hear a clear statement of a point of view, and that your
statement happens to riddle me, personally, of course does not affect
the question in any way. If I regard human society and human life too
much as the biologist regards his rabbit, which appears to be the gist
of your criticism, I can at least cheerfully take my own turn on the
operating table as occasion requires. There is, of course, a great deal
that I might say in reply, but I do not understand that either of us
desires a debate. I will simply assert that your fundamental conception
of life, while novel and piquant, will not hold water for a moment. Your
conception is, if I state it fairly, that a man's life, to be useful, to
be a life of service, must be given immediately to his fellows. He must
do visible and tangible things with other men. I think a little
reflection will convince you that, on the contrary, much or most of the
best work of the world has been done by men whose personal lives were
not unlike my own. There was Palissy, to take a familiar minor instance.
Of course his neighbors saw in him only a madman whose cosmos was all
Ego. Yet people are grateful to Palissy to-day, and think little of the
suffering of his wife and children. Newton was no genial leader of the
people. Bacon could not even be loyal to his friends. The living world
around Socrates put him to death. The world's great wise men, inventors,
scientists, philosophers, prophets, have not usually spent their days
rubbing elbows with the bricklayer. Yet these men have served their race
better than all the good-fellows that ever lived. To each his gifts. If
I succeed in reducing the principle of human evolution to its eternal
law, I need not fear the judgment of posterity upon my life. I shall, in
fact, have performed the highest service to humankind that a finite mind
can hope to compass. Nevertheless, I am impressed by much that you say.
I daresay a good deal of it is valuable. All of it I engage to analyze
and consider dispassionately at my leisure. Meantime, I thank you for
your interest in the matter. Good-evening."
"Mr. Queed."
Sharlee rose hurriedly, since hurry was so evidently necessary. She felt
profoundly stirred, she hardly knew why; all her airs of a haughty
princess were fled; and she intercepted him with no remnant of her
pretense that she was putting a shabby inferior in his place.
"I want to tell you," she said, somewhat nervously, "that I--I--admire
very much the way you've taken this. No ordinary man would have listened
with such--"
"I never pretended to be an ordinary man."
He moved, but she stood unmoving in front of him, the pretty portrait of
a lady in blue, and the eyes that she fastened upon him reminded him
vaguely of Fifi's.
"Perhaps I--should tell you," said Sharlee, "just why I--"
"Now don't," he said, smiling faintly at her with his old air of a
grandfather--"don't spoil it all by saying that you didn't mean it."
Under his smile she colored a little, and, despite herself, looked
confused. He took advantage of her embarrassment to pass her with
another bow and go out, leaving her struggling desperately with the
feeling that he had got the best of her after all.
But the door opened again a little way, almost at once, and the
trim-cut, academic face, with the lamplight falling upon the round
glasses and blotting them out in a yellow smudge, appeared in the
crevice.
"By the way, you were wrong in saying that I pulled down my blind on the
evolutionary process now going on in the South. I give four thousand
words to it in my Historical Perspective, volume one."