Part 4

"Dear Dr. Gunther: The article is altogether admirable. It seems to me that there are just two subjects which never lose their appeal to the average man. One is the food by which he lives. The other is the universe in which he lives. They represent the opposite poles in his nature, one being no less important than the other. Let the primitive man but satisfy the cravings of his stomach, and his awed gaze will turn to the illimitable glory of the stars. I think of Pasteur's epoch-making researches into the processes of food-fermentation and then I think of Galileo. If you ask me which is the greater man, I will say frankly I do not know. Your article will duly appear in our magazine, though not for some time. In the meanwhile, it may be that additions or changes will suggest themselves to you. Very likely you have a carbon copy of your manuscript at home. Make such alterations as you see fit and send the new manuscript to us as soon as you are satisfied with it."

The foregoing letter was addressed to Dr. Gunther in Boston. Two days later he wrote from his home address in New York. He said: "I cannot speak adequately of the consideration you have given to my poor literary effort. Your letter offering me an opportunity to revise the manuscript reached me just before I left for New York. At home I found the original article awaiting me, in my own envelope. Evidently it had occurred to you that I might not have a copy of the article at hand--which is indeed the case--and so you hastened to send me the original."

Of course the envelope containing the good Doctor's manuscript had not fallen into the hands of the janitor at all. It had caught the quick eye of our conscientious mail-boy, who saw his duty and promptly did it. It only remains for me to persuade the managing editor to print the article when it comes back. After what I have gone through, this should not be difficult. Our readers, therefore, may look forward to a masterly article on a subject of great interest. Whether it is an astronomical article or a pure food article the reader will learn for himself.

X

LOW-GRADE CITIZENS

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."

XI

ROMANCE

At 5:15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally sultry day in August, John P. Wesley, forty-seven years old, in business at No. 634 East Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and hardware, was descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway at Twenty-eighth Street, when it occurred to him suddenly how odd it was that he should be going home. His grip tightened on the hand rail and he stopped short in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the ground in pained perplexity. The crowd behind him, thrown back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful office-boys looked back at him and asked what was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him aside without apology. But Wesley did not mind. He was asking himself why it was that the end of the day's work should invariably find him descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway. Was there any reason for doing that, other than habit? He wondered why it would not be just as reasonable to cross the avenue and take an uptown train instead.

Wesley had been taking the downtown train at Twenty-eighth Street at 5:15 in the afternoon ever since there was a Subway. At Brooklyn Bridge he changed to an express and went to the end of the line. At the end of the line there was a boat which took him across the harbour. At the end of the boat ride there was a trolley car which wound its way up the hill and through streets lined with yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family houses, out into the open country, where it dropped him at a cross road. At the end of a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of stucco and timber, standing away from the road, its angular lines revealing mingled aspirations toward the Californian bungalow and the English Tudor. In the house lived a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who was Wesley's wife, and two young girls who were his daughters. They always came to the door when his footsteps grated on the garden path, and kissed him welcome. After dinner he went out and watered the lawn, which, after his wife and the girls, he loved most. He plied the hose deliberately, his eye alert for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not been coming on well, because of a scorching sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with his wife on matters of domestic economy ushered in the end of a busy day. At the end of the day there was another day just like it.

* * * * *

And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley was asking whether right to the end of life this succession of days would continue. Why always the south-bound train? He was aware that there were good reasons why. One was the tall grey-haired woman and the two young girls at home who were in the habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the garden path. They were his life. But apparently, too, there must be life along the uptown route of the Interborough. He wanted to run amuck, to board a north-bound train without any destination in mind, and to keep on as far as his heart desired, to the very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park, where they played polo, or the Bronx, where there was a botanical museum and a zoo. Even if he went only as far as Grand Central Station, it would be an act of magnificent daring.

Wesley climbed to the street, crossed Fourth Avenue, descended to the uptown platform, and entered a train without stopping to see whether it was Broadway or Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of the three women at home in a remote, objective mood. They would be waiting for him, no doubt, and he was sorry, but what else could he do? He was not his own master. Under the circumstances it was a comfort to know that all three of them were women of poise, not given to making the worst of things, and with enough work on their hands to keep them from worrying overmuch.

Having broken the great habit of his life by taking an uptown train at 5:15, Wesley found it quite natural that his minor habits should fall from him automatically. He did not relax into his seat and lose himself in the evening paper after his usual fashion. He did not look at his paper at all, but at the people about him. He had never seen such men and women before, so fresh-tinted, so outstanding, so electric. He seemed to have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid colours and sharp contours. It was the same sensation he experienced when he used to break his gold-rimmed spectacles, and after he had groped for a day in the mists of myopia, a new, bright world would leap out at him through the new lenses.

Wesley did not make friends easily. In a crowd he was peculiarly shy. Now he grew garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose up and choked him, but he fought it down. He turned to his neighbour on the right, a thick-set, clean-shaven youth who was painfully studying the comic pictures in his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a style utterly strange to him:

"Looks very much like the Giants had the rag cinched?"

The thick-set young man, whom Wesley imagined to be a butcher's assistant or something of the sort, looked up from his paper and said, "It certainly does seem as if the New York team had established its title to the championship."

Wesley cleared his throat again.

"When it comes to slugging the ball you've got to hand it to them," he said.

"Assuredly," said the young man, folding up his paper with the evident design of continuing the conversation.

Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation. He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who make friends in Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be. But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon him. He did not know how to go on.

The stranger went out, but Wesley did not care. He was lost in a delicious reverie, conscious only of being carried forward on free-beating wings into a wonderful, unknown land. The grinding of wheels and brakes as the train halted at a station and pulled out again made a languorous, soothing music. The train clattered out of the tunnel into the open air, and Wesley was but dimly aware of the change from dark to twilight. The way now ran through a region of vague apartment houses. There were trees, stretches of green field waiting for the builder, and here or there a colonial manor house with sheltered windows, resigned to its fate. Then came cottages with gardens. And in one of these Wesley, shocked into acute consciousness, saw a man with a rubber hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his feet.

The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know that he was being laughed at. He merely knew that he must go home. He got out at the next station, and when he was seated in a corner of the south-bound train, he sighed with unutterable relief. He was once more in a normal world where trains ran to South Ferry instead of away from it. He dropped off at his road crossing, just two hours late, and found his wife waiting.

They walked on side by side without speaking, but once or twice she turned and caught him staring at her with a peculiar mixture of wonder and unaccustomed tenderness.

Finally he broke out.

"It's good to see you again!"

She laughed and was happy. His voice stirred in her memories of long ago.

"It's good to have you back, dear," she said.

"But you really look remarkably well," he insisted.

"I rested this afternoon."

"That's what you should do every day," he said. "Look at that old maple tree! It hasn't changed a bit!"

"No," she said, and began to wonder.

"And the girls are well?"

"Oh, yes."

"I can hardly wait till I see them," he said; and then, to save himself, "I guess I am getting old, Alice."

"You are younger to-night than you have been for a long time," she said.

Jennie and her sister were waiting for them on the porch. They wondered why father's kiss fell so warmly on their cheeks. He kissed them twice, which was very unusual; but being discreet young women they asked no questions. After dinner Wesley went out to look at the lawn.

XII

WANDERLUST

April sunlight on the river and the liners putting out to sea. Paris! Florence! the Alps! the Mediterranean! I turned away and let my thoughts run back to the time when Emmeline and I were in the habit of making, once a year, the trip to Prospect Park South.

The Subway has brought this delightful region within the radius of ordinary tourist travel, though I am told that the element of adventure has not been completely eliminated, owing to the necessity of transferring at Atlantic Avenue, where it is still the custom of the traffic policemen to direct passengers to the wrong car. At the time of which I am speaking, Prospect Park South lay off the beaten track, but the difficulties of the venture were atoned for by the delight of finding one's self, at the journey's end, in a world of new impressions, a world untouched by the rush and clamour of our own days, and steeped in the colour and poetry which Cook's, cotton goods, and the cinematograph have been wiping out in Europe and the Near East.

There were no Baedekers then for travellers to Prospect Park South. To-day I presume guide-books and maps may be purchased at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge if people still go by that route. We did without guide-books or guides, because the inhabitants of Prospect Park South were a kindly folk and as a rule would wait for visitors at the trolley stops, with an umbrella. When this did not happen, we asked our way from passers-by. These were always strangers who had lost their way. The inhabitants were either peacefully at home or waiting at the trolley stops. For that matter an inhabitant, when encountered by rare chance, was not really of assistance. A resident always referred to streets and avenues by the names they bore when he first moved in; and inasmuch as the streets in Prospect Park South are renamed every year and the street numbers altered at the same time, the settlers, who would find their own homes by intuition, were worse than useless as guides. On the other hand, to meet a stranger who was lost was always a help. It was a peculiarity of strangers who were lost in Prospect Park South that they would always be passing the street you were looking for, while you in turn had just turned in from the street they were looking for, so that an exchange of information was always mutually profitable.

The following hints for travellers to Prospect Park South are based upon our experiences of some years ago. Those who go by the Interborough tube will probably find that changed conditions have rendered many of these rules obsolete. But for those who go by way of Brooklyn Bridge they may still be of some value. First then as to dress. As a rule one should dress for Prospect Park South very much as for a short run to Europe. That is to say, woollens are always preferable, especially in the rainy season (which in Prospect Park South is coextensive with the visiting season), owing to the long waits between cars. It is true, as I have said, that the inhabitants of Prospect Park South are accustomed to wait at the trolley stations with an umbrella, and no household is without a full assortment of old mackintoshes and rubbers to lend to improvident visitors who believed the weather reports in the paper. But house parties in Prospect Park South are frequently large and there may not be enough old raincoats to go around. A light overcoat, an umbrella, rubbers or a pair of stout shoes, and a pocket electric light for reading names on the street lamps at night, will be found sufficient for the ordinary traveller.

The choice of route is important. Those who, like us, live in upper Manhattan may lay their plans (excluding the Subway) either for the Ninth Avenue L or the Sixth Avenue L. As far south as Fifty-third Street the two lines coincide. Below Fifty-third Street the question of route should be determined by one's personal preferences in the matter of scenery; though not entirely. Veteran travellers assure me that there is also a difference in comfort. The curves are sharper on Sixth Avenue, but there are more flat wheels on the Ninth Avenue line. According as the tourist is susceptible to lateral or vertical disturbances he will make his choice. The front and rear cars are to be recommended above all others because a seat may always be obtained. I recognise, however, that if the traveller has long been a resident of New York he will force his way into the middle cars. Then, hanging from a strap, he may curse the company and be in turn cursed by the quick-tempered gentleman upon whose feet he is standing.