Part 9

From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an empire a burning rain of steel.

This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He had come to his role from holding the kind of position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came.

Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus--and how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means required at a minimum of L400 a year. "The primary qualification for the diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its highest form, by something which is hardly examinable--by very great intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence. In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for it--how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it. Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere preference for wealth--it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a remarkable background, so redolent of "the present constitution of society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation. He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very faintest idea."

And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber--there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights.

There were a few business men on the mission--mighty few considering their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea, and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.

These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds.

OKURA SEES NEWPORT

Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in Japan. Jack said that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled, and so to Newport we went.

The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from the meat market to the book shop and from the chemist's to the Boston Store. I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue.

The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition of assorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. "So very charming!" he cried politely. "So like postcards of Milwaukee by the lake!" I enjoyed his naive enthusiasm and let it go.

He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of information with obvious gratitude.

"Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So were Astor and Belmont.

After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. "I do not see the McAlpin mansion."

"The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," I murmured indulgently.

"But that is one name I think I remember correctly," Okura answered with visible anxiety. "The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?"

It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.

Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far--well, to be frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple passed through the crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game.

Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much conversation he was rather distracted.

"I hope it does not annoy you?" I asked him.

"Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!"

At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat the fine ladies.

"I have asked you before to keep quiet," he wailed. "For God's sake, will you stop talking?"

"How very interesting," murmured Okura.

"Yes," I said, "the religious motif."

"Ah, yes!" he nodded, very gravely.

Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, and we decided to return to the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach.

Bailey's Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more adventurous sex pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups.

It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach.

"Forgive me," he said, "I see no Jews."

"That's all right," I answered. "You are studying democracy. There are no Jews here. None allowed."

"Oh!" he digested the fact. Then his eye brightened. "Ah, you have your geisha girls at the swim-beach. How very charming!"

"No," I corrected him. "Those are not our geisha girls. That is the 'shimmy set.' You know: people who are opposed to the daylight saving act and the prohibition amendment."

"Oh, I understand. Republicans," he nodded happily.

As the Servants' Hour was approaching at Bailey's Beach, and as I had no good explanation to give of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along by the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by the walk, and by the fact that it ran in front of these private houses, free to the public as to the wind. Once or twice we went down below stone walls, with everything above hidden from us, but this was exceptional. Okura thought the walk a fine example of essential democracy.

"And what are those long tubes?" he asked, as we gazed out toward Portugal.

"Sewer pipes," I said bluntly, looking at the great series of excretory organs that these handsome democratic mansions pushed into the sea.

"Are they considered beautiful?" asked Okura.

"Quite," I told him. "They are one of the features provided strictly for the public."

"So kind!" said the acquiescent Japanese.

We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose plutocracy was not entirely intact, and but for one instructive incident it was an ordinary civilized meal. That incident, however, shall live long in my memory because of my inability to interpret it to Okura.

We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat down, when the third man was called to the telephone.

He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his hostess, "I'm awfully sorry, I've got to leave."

His hostess looked apprehensive. "I hope it's nothing serious?"

"Oh, not at all; please don't worry," he responded, plumping down his napkin, "but I've just had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She's a man short and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So long. Awfully sorry!"

"What did that mean, please?" Okura inquired, as we hurried back to see Kumagae play.

"Do you mean, democratically?"

"Yes."

"I give it up," I retorted.

"But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret everything democratic to me," Okura ventured on, "and is there not some secret here hidden from me? I fear I am very stupid."

Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain.

"But," pressed Okura, "'the world has been made safe for democracy.' I want so much to understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport."

And he looked at me with his innocent eyes.

THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED

It is the boast of more than one proud author, popular or unpopular, that he never reads any criticism of his own work. He knows from his wife or his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. Sometimes in hurrying through the newspaper he catches sight of his unforgettable name. Inadvertently he may read on, learning the drift of the comment before he stops himself. But his rule is rigid. He never reads what the critics say about him.

Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial he has usually had some experience of the ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he started out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself, Of course I don't profess to _like_ criticism. Nobody likes to be criticized. But I hope I am big enough to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No man can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but so long as criticism is helpful, that's all a man has a right to ask. Is it meant to be helpful? If so, shoot.

After some experience of helpful criticism, it will often occur to the sensitive author that he is not being completely understood. A man's ego should certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn't a man a right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of criticism that is based on the critic's dislike of the author's personality? The critic who has a grudge against an author simply because he thinks and feels in a certain way is scarcely likely to be helpful. The author and the critic are not on common ground. And the case is not improved by the very evident intrusion of the critic's prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious that a man with a bias will see in a book just what he wants to see. If he is a reactionary, he will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik he will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use of reading criticism? The critic merely holds the mirror up to his own nature, when he is not content to reproduce the publisher's prepared review.

The author goes on wondering, "What does he say about me?" But the disappointments are too many. Once in a blue moon the critic "understands" the author. He manages, that is to say, to do absolutely the right thing by the author's ego. He strokes it hard and strokes it the right way. After that he points out one or two of the things that are handicapping the author's creative force, and he shows how easily such handicaps can be removed. This is the helpful, appreciative, perceptive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty bristling young egoists who want figs to grow on thistles and cabbages to turn into roses, and who blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill. These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest in the author. They are only interested in themselves. And so, having tackled them in a glow of expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, the author quits reading criticism and satisfies his natural curiosity about himself by calling up the publisher and inquiring after sales.

For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology. They don't like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should not only criticize but be criticized.

The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried in the duel of dispute.

To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic's fundamental inability to appreciate their position.

If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character. Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic where you are most expert--namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego.

BLIND

He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and help around the house--scour the bath-tub and clean windows--but for a powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind.

I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be blind, but it was terrible to be blind and at the mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. Angier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier of a woman, very tall and very bony, with a virile voice and no touch of femininity except false curls. She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. She hated her rooming-house and every one in it. Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save enough money out of her establishment to escape from it. To that end she plugged the gaps in the bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief sacrifice on the altar of her economy was Samuel Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was blind and useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, he literally ran to her, crying, "Coming, coming!" He might be out on the window-sill, risking his poor neck to polish the windows that he would never see, but, "Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I--would you be so good--ah, you are very kind. Coming, Adelaide, just one moment...." and he would paddle down stairs. She treated him like dirt. Sometimes one would arrive during an interview between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed Mrs. Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel to cringe in every limb. He was a burly man with a thick beard, iron-gray, and his sightless eyes were hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his voice booming heartily, he was a cheerful, honest figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though he was a most platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a water-bucket or leaving a duster on the stairs or forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he became infantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always changed to a sugared greeting as one was recognized. "Good e-e-evening, isn't it a pleasant e-e-evening?" But the only value in speaking to Mrs. Angier was that it permitted Samuel somehow to shamble away to the limbo of the basement.

Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind. Luckily, as Mrs. Angier had prosperous relatives in another part of Chicago, she sometimes could be counted on to be absent, and on those occasions or when she went to church, Samuel haunted my room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, and he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I really believe he liked to chatter to me: and he was more than anxious to tell me how his tragedy had befallen him.

"Oh, dear, yes," he said to me, "it happened during the strike. They hit me on the head, and left me unconscious. And I have never seen since, not one thing."

"Who hit you, Samuel?"

"Who hit me? The blackguards who were out on strike, sir. They nearly killed me with a piece of lead pipe. Oh, dear, yes."

It seemed an unspeakable outrage to me, but in Samuel there was nothing but a kind of healthy indignation. He was not bitter. He never raised his voice above its easy reminiscent pitch.

"But what did you do to them? Why did the strikers attack you? What strike was it?"

"I did nothing at all to them. But, you see, my horse slipped and when I was helpless on the ground with my hip smashed, one of them knocked me out. It was right up on the sidewalk. I had gone after them up on the sidewalk, and I suppose the flags were so slippery that the horse came down."

"But what were you doing on a horse?" I asked in despair.

"I was a volunteer policeman. These scoundrels were led by Debs, and we were out to see that there was law and order in Chicago."