Cooper was in a confidential mood.
"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels
impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"
"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor
except, possibly, his wife and the children."
"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man
hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently
published an article on Social Decadence in the _North American Review_.
He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small
families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our
low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of
their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be
increasing most rapidly from that group least fitted by heredity or by
income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of
"reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in
the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a
good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to
recall what they are."
"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out
the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."
"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a
subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of
saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't
write the way Madame de Sévigné did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.
"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American
residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a
letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that
unhappy predilection for getting into tight places which is one of the
characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl
happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when
an explosion of gas--unavoidable, as in all mine disasters--killed
nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after
creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from
him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the
following letter:
"'Good-bye, my children, God bless you.'
"He had two children, which for a man of low social worth was doing
quite well. But on the other hand he was improvident enough to leave his
children without a mother. When I was at college, my instructor in
rhetoric was always saying that my failure to write well was due to the
fact that I had nothing to say; and he used to quote passages from
Isaiah to show how the thing should be done. I think my rhetoric teacher
would have approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary style. I think Isaiah
would have."
"But we can't all of us work in the mines," I said.
"Therefore it is not to you that America is looking for the development
of an epistolary art," said Cooper; "an art in which we are bound to
take first place long before our coal deposits are exhausted. Charles
Crawl had his predecessors. In November, 1909, Samuel Howard was
thoughtless enough to let himself be killed, with several hundred
others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illinois. He, too, left a
letter behind him. He wrote:
"If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is
at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret
is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone.
I tried my best to get out and could not.
"You see, being a low-income man, of small social worth and pitifully
inefficient, even when he did his best to get out, he could not. But
perhaps the subject tires you?"
"You might as well go on," said Harding. "If you finish with this
subject you will have some other grievance."
"I have only two more examples of the vulgar epistolary style to cite,"
said Cooper. "Strictly speaking one of them is not a letter. But it is
to the point. On the night of April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon
of low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to be swimming in the
North Atlantic. The _Titanic_ had just sunk from beneath his feet. But
perhaps I had better quote the testimony before the Mersey Commission,
which, being an official communication, is necessarily unanswerable, as
the late Sir W. S. Gilbert pointed out:
"Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny
Bannon on a grating--
"From the fact that Johnny Bannon had managed to possess himself of a
grating we are justified in concluding that he was a man of somewhat
higher social worth than the witness, Dillon. However,
"--came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. He said, "Cheero,
Johnny," and Bannon answered, "I am all right, Paddy." There was
not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, saying, "Well, so
long, Johnny," swam off--
In thus leaving Johnny Bannon in undisputed possession of the grating
you see that Dillon once more wrote himself down as a low-grade man
unfit for competitive survival. However,
--"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star
where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.
And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flashlight, and Dillon was
pulled out of the water to go on stoking and accelerating the process of
national decadence.
"My last letter," continued Cooper, "was written in October, 1912, in
the Tombs. The author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the patrons of
educational moving-picture shows all over the country as Dago Frank. It
was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a distinguished ornament of our
Great White Way, cut down before his time by a bullet from behind.
Cirofici wrote:
"I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like
a little baby.--Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any
living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my
heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for
you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of
course, you don't know what I know."
"Please," said Harding, "please don't knock a hole into your own
argument by asking us to shed tears over the undefiled wells of purity
that lie deep in the soul of the Bowery gunman. You won't contend that
Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss to the nation."
"It would be an act of delusion on my part," said Cooper, "to expect you
to see what I am driving at without going to the trouble of spelling it
out for you, Harding, even if you do belong to the classes of superior
social worth. What I want to express is the justifiable wrath which
possesses me at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures and adding
them up and dividing by three and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of
Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafalgar, and all that rot. What if
empires, and republics, and incomes, and the size of families do rise
and fall? Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay?
As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you
think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their
kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,'
is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human
race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. And Cirofici, pouring
his soul out to his 'pal,' crying like a child over those poor lambs,
Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood--"
"If that's what you mean," said Harding with suspicious humility, "I
quite agree with you. You know, I have often--"
"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary
for you to continue."