Part 2

Charmeuse is a shimmering, silk-like material which lends itself admirably to summer wear, because it stains easily. But in its effect on the shopper's nerves, charmeuse is even worse than éponge. In fact, as a preparation for a summer's reading, I don't know what is more exhausting than charmeuse, unless it be crêpe de Chine. Emmeline did not drop in for lunch that day, and when I came home at night, I found her more depressed than ever. There was nothing to be had downtown. Prices were impossible and anything else wasn't fit to be touched. It might be just as well to stay in town for the summer as go away and take the chance of getting typhoid. The situation was somewhat relieved by the arrival at this juncture of several parcels, some long and narrow, and others short and square. One particularly heavy box felt as if it might contain a set of Strindberg, but turned out to be a really handsome coat in blue chinchilla which Emmeline explained would be just the thing for cool nights in the country. She had bought it in despair at obtaining the kind of crêpe de Chine she wanted. The crêpe de Chine came in a smaller box.

At breakfast the next day we were tremendously cheerful. I told Emmeline of the handsome raincoat I had bought in preparation for lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the clouds. From that we passed to the new Brieux play. But when Emmeline intimated that she was going downtown soon after breakfast, I grew anxious.

"Do you think," I said, "that it will really make any difference to Mr. Galsworthy whether you read him in a voile or in a white cotton ratine?"

"If that is the way you feel about it," said Emmeline, "I can telephone and have them take all these things back. I hate them anyhow."

"What I mean is," I said, "that you don't want to wear yourself out completely before we leave the city. We have a month's reading ahead of us. Let us begin it in peace of mind."

"With nothing to wear?" she said.

Tulle is a partly transparent material, which in the hands of a skilful milliner becomes an invaluable aid to a thorough comprehension of the plays of M. Brieux, especially when studied amid the complexities of life on Maple View Farm. As usual, it is the department stores which have been first to discover this fundamental connection in life. They have everything necessary for the thorough enjoyment of Mr. Bryce's book on South America--blouses, toques, parasols, and tennis shoes. Special bargains in linen crash and batiste are offered on the same day with a cut-rate edition of "Damaged Goods." Reading Brieux in the country is almost as complicated a diversion as lying on one's back and looking up at the clouds.

IV

NOCTURNE

Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock and midnight, when the traffic of the court is as its heaviest, and it would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners' bench and confront the magistrate.

Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A policeman in citizens' clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.

She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.

* * * * *

The Night Court is no longer a centre of general interest. During the first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its appeal to visitors from out of town. It stirred even the languid pulses of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches and took notes.

To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of the court is without its little group of social investigators, among whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women, exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.

As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing, the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress, which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop windows.

Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.

She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualise him either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate, and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.

To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in citizens' clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers, interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of this process to the taxpayer, and they took notes on the proportion of first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in civilisation. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.

Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies which constituted her usual defence. This would give her the opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the court-room with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were printed frequently on the first page.

She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court. Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the æsthetic contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she could catch mere fugitive aspects.

Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest reporters, analysed by the statisticians, defended by the social revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter, to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court, anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them? Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.

That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our subsidised dancing-schools for shop-girls, they encourage the get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage is an audience and a stage.

That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night Court. She saw life there.

V

HAROLD'S SOUL, I

I agree with the publishers of Miss Amarylis Pater's book, "The New Motherhood," that the subject is one which cannot possibly be ignored. I have not only read the book, but I have discussed it with Mrs. Hogan, and with my eldest son Harold, who will be seven next June. As a result I am confronted with certain remarkable differences of opinion.

Twenty years ago, as I plainly recall, the Sacred Function of Motherhood was not a topic of popular interest. There were a great many mothers then, of course, and there were unquestionably many more children than there are to-day. People, as a rule, spoke of their mothers with fondness, and sometimes even with reverence. The habit had been forming for several thousand years, in the course of which poets and painters never grew tired of describing mothers who were engaged in such highly useful occupations as bending over cradles, watching by sick-beds, baking, mending, teaching, laughing in play-rooms, weeping at the Cross, manipulating with equal dexterity the precious vials of love and sacrifice and the carpet slipper of justice. But though people had thus got into the way of accepting their mothers as an essential part in the scheme of things, they rarely thought it necessary to write to the editor about the Sacred Function of Motherhood. I mean in the impersonal, scientific sense in which Amarylis Pater uses the phrase.

Life in general was a pitifully unorganised, rule-of-thumb affair in those days. People fell in love because every one was doing it and without any expressed intention to advance the purposes of Evolution. They did not marry because they were anxious to render social service; but waited only till they had saved up enough to furnish a home. They bore children without regard to the future of the race. When the child came it was not a sociological event. The family did not consider the occurrence sacred, as Miss Vivian Holborn insists on calling it in her frequent communications to the press. The family contented itself with wishing the mother well and hoping the baby would not look too much like its father.

Here I thought it would be well to confirm my own impressions by the testimony of a competent witness. So I turned and called through the open door into the dining-room.

"Mrs. Hogan," I said, "what do you think of the Sacred Function of Motherhood?"

"What do I think of what?" said Mrs. Hogan.

"Of the Sacred Function of Motherhood," I repeated, rather timidly.

She looked at me with a distrustful eye, her broom suspended in midair.

Mrs. Hogan comes in once a week to help out. Distrust is her chronic attitude toward me. She has all of the busy woman's aversion for a man about the house while domestic operations are under way. But besides, she cannot quite understand why a full-grown and able-bodied man should be lolling at his desk, pen in hand, when he ought to be downtown working for his family. She is aware, of course, that all the members of my family are well-nourished, decently dressed, and apparently quite happy. But that only renders the source of my income all the more dubious. When any one asks Mrs. Hogan how many children she has, she stares for some time at the ceiling before replying. From which I gather that there must be several.

"I refer to the business of being a mother, Mrs. Hogan. Have you never felt what a sacred thing that is?"

"An' what would there be sacred about the same?" she asked, seeing that I was quite serious. "Bearin' a child every other year, an' nursin' them, an' bringin' them through sickness, an' stayin' up nights to sew an' wash an' darn, an' drivin' them out to school, an' goin' out by the day's wurrk, where's the time for anythin' sacred to come into the life of a woman?"

"Just the same it does," I said. "Motherhood, Mrs. Hogan, is so holy a thing nowadays that a great many women are afraid to touch it, preferring to write in the magazines about it. Are you aware that when you married Mr. Hogan you were performing an act of social service?"

"I was not that," said Mrs. Hogan, "I was doin' a service to Jim, besides plazin' myself. 'Twas himself needed some one to take care of him."

"But that would mean," I said, "that you were false to your own highest self. If you had read Miss Pater's book you would know that any marriage entered into without the sense of social service merely means that a woman is selling herself to a man for life for the mere price of maintenance."

"When I married Jim," said Mrs. Hogan, "he was after being out of a job for six months."

She went back to her work more than ever puzzled why my wife and the children should look so well taken care of.

In those days--I mean about the time Mrs. Hogan was married to Jim, and I was at college constructing my world of ideas out of the now forgotten books which Mr. Gaynor was always quoting--I recall distinctly that the sacred things were also the secret things. What burned hot in the heart was allowed to rest deep in the heart. Partly this was because of a common habit of reticence which we have so fortunately outgrown. But another reason must have been that life then, as I have said, was imperfectly organised. To-day we have applied the principle of the division of labour so that we no longer expect the same person to do the work of the world and to feel its sacred significance. Thus, to-day there are women who are mothers and other women who proclaim the sacred function of motherhood. To-day there are women who bring up their children, and other women who, at the slightest provocation, thrill to the clear, immortal soul that looks out of the innocent eyes of childhood.

At this moment the clear, immortal soul of my boy, Harold, finds utterance in a succession of blood-curdling howls. He is playing Indians again. The wailing accompaniment in high falsetto emanates from the immortal soul of the baby. Those two immortalities are at it again.

I call out, "Harold!"

There is a silence.

"Harold!"

With extreme deliberation he appears in the doorway. I recognise him largely by intuition, so utterly smeared up is he from crawling in single file the entire length of the hall on his stomach. Beneath that thick deposit of rich alluvial soil I assume that my son exists. I ask him what he has been doing with the baby.

He had been doing nothing at all. He had merely tied her by one leg to a chair and pretended to scalp her with a pair of ninepins. He had performed a war dance around her and every time his ritual progress brought him face to face with the baby he made believe to brain her, but he only meant to see how near he could come without actually touching her, and he would strike the chair instead. He didn't know why the baby shrieked.

"Harold," I said, "do you feel the sacred innocence of childhood brooding in you?"

He was alarmed, but bravely attempted a smile.

"Ah, father!" he said.

I looked at him severely.

"Do you know what I ought to do to you in the name of the New Parenthood?"

"Ah, father!" and his lip trembled.

"You are a disgrace to the eternal spark in you," I said.

He lowered his head and began to cry. It required an effort to be stern, but I persisted.

"Harold," I said, "you will go into your room and stand in the corner for ten minutes. Close the door behind you. I will tell you when time is up."

He dragged himself away heartbroken and I found it was useless trying to write any more. I had made two people utterly miserable. I threw down my pen and rose to take a book from the shelf, but stopped in the act. Out of Harold's room came music. I stole to the door and looked in. He had not disobeyed orders. He had merely dressed himself in one of the nurse's aprons and the baby's cap, and standing erect in his corner, he sang "Dixie," with all the fervour of his fresh young voice.

About his appearance there was nothing sacred.

VI

EDUCATIONAL

Half-minute lessons for up-to-the-minute thinkers:

I. WORD STUDY

CHILD, _noun_; a student of sex hygiene; a member of boy scout organisations and girls' camp-fire organisations for the practice of the kind of self-control that parents fail to exercise; a member of school republics for the study of politics while father reads the sporting page; a ward of the State; a student of the phenomena of alcoholism; a handicap carefully avoided by specialists in child-study; one-third of a French family; the holder of an inalienable title to happiness which the Government must supply; in general, a human being under thirteen years of age who must be taught everything so that he will be surprised at nothing when he is thirty years of age. The ignorant and innocent offspring of a human couple, obs. Synonyms: man-child; girl-child; love-child.

MOTHERHOOD, _noun_; a profession once highly esteemed, but rejected by modern spirits as too frequently automatic.

MOTHER, _noun_; a female progenitor; a term often employed by the older poets in connection with the ideas of love, sacrifice, and holiness, but now delicately described by writers of the _Harper's Weekly_ temperament as being synonymous with cow.

EUGENICS, _noun_; a condition of intense excitement over the future of the human race among those who are doing nothing to perpetuate it.

LITERATURE, _noun_; see SEX; WHITE SLAVE.

DRAMA, _noun_; see SEX; WHITE SLAVE.

PUNCH, _noun_; see DRAMA; LITERATURE; MAGAZINE ADVERTISING.

ADENOIDS, _noun_; something that is cut out of children.

SOCIAL-MINDEDNESS, _noun_; something that is injected into children.

II. GEOGRAPHY

ARGENTINA; where the tango comes from.

RUSSIA; where Anna Pavlova and ritual murder trials come from.

PERSIA; where the harem skirt comes from, and other fashions eagerly embraced by a generation which insists that woman shall no longer be man's chattel and plaything.

AMERICA; where the profits of all-night restaurants in Montmartre come from.

ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA, EGYPT, PERU, YUCATAN, PATAGONIA; where the decorations for Broadway lobster-palaces come from.

EQUATOR; the earth's waistline, unfashionably located in the same place year after year.

TENDERLOIN; where the world's wisdom comes from.

CAMBRIDGE, NEW HAVEN, PRINCETON, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS; the sites of once celebrated educational institutions whose functions have now been taken over by theatre managers on Broadway.

UNDERWORLD; the world now uppermost.

MOUNTAIN; a rugged elevation of the earth's surface which comes to every self-constituted little prophet when he snaps his fingers.

SEA; where we are all at.

MEXICO CITY; residence of Huerta, the most eminent living disciple of Nietzsche.

BULGARIA; a nation which scornfully rejected peace and reaped honour, widows, and orphans; where the Servians were the other day.

SERVIA; where the Bulgarians may be next week.

CHAUTAUQUA; any place outside the offices of the State Department.

III. ARITHMETIC

1. A ship carrying 800 passengers and crew is in collision off the banks of Newfoundland, and 700 are saved. Describe the method by which the _Evening Journal_ computes 400 souls lost.

2. The salary of a police lieutenant is about $2,500 a year. At what rate of interest must this sum be invested to produce a million dollars' worth of real estate in ten years?

3. 2+2=4. Show this to be true otherwise than by writing a four-act play with its principal scene laid in a house of ill fame.

4. The loss to the nation from disease has been estimated at $200,000,000 a year. Show the profit that would accrue to the nation from abolishing every form of disease after deducting the cost of maintaining the dependent widows and orphans of 50,000 doctors who have starved to death.

5. In a certain gubernatorial campaign several disinterested gentlemen contributed $10,000 each to the campaign fund; yet the total of campaign contributions was a little over $5,000. Explain this.

6. If you were called upon to build a bridge to the moon, which would you rather use, the total number of postage stamps on rejected magazine contributions laid end to end, or the total number of automobiles shipped from Detroit placed end to end?

7. In a recent article on mortality statistics in the _World_, the writer omitted to divide his average death rate by 2. Was his argument, because of that, two times as convincing or only half as convincing?

8. Describe the modifications in the laws of arithmetic introduced by Mr. Thomas W. Lawson.

IV. HISTORY

The supporters of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt have frequently remarked that if Abraham Lincoln were alive to-day, he would be with them. Uncle Joe Cannon has expressed the conviction that Abraham Lincoln if he were alive to-day would be on his side. Is there anything in history to indicate that Abraham Lincoln, great man though he was, could be in two places at the same time?

Mention three Republican administrations in which the rainfall was twice as heavy as in any Democratic administration since 1837, and show what this indicates for the prosperity of the country under Mr. Woodrow Wilson.