Chapter 11

_Q._ Is it wrong to split infinitives? Is a phrase like "to seriously complain" really objectionable? _A._ We hasten to most emphatically say "Yes!"

_Q._ Is there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? _A._ Two examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did that, and _begun_ at two yards; but he never tried it on ag'in; for he _blowed_ the bird right clean away at the first fire, and nobody ever _seed_ a feather on him arterwards.'" (2) "So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear--as the gen'lem'n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday--to tell you that the first and only time I _see_ you your likeness was _took_ on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheens (wich p'r'aps you may have _heerd_ on Mary my dear) altho it does finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete with a hook at the end to hang it up by and all in two minutes and a quarter." (Charles Dickens.)

_Q._ What is "elegance" in style? I know it does not mean long words and many of them; but just what does it mean? _A._ Elegance is appropriateness. Long and circumlocutory terms are just as elegant in the mouth of a fashionable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are equally elegant.

_Q._ What is force in style? _A._ We may illustrate with a quotation from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her as men and women have kissed through the æons, since the first star hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is nevertheless a very forcible one.

XXIX

60 H.P.

For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a balloon at 2.30 A.M.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediæval Florentine altar-piece made in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has been seen in a garage.

To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.

Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give her personal attention to the car going south.

It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders, without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin," and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, but when you get there they are there. "Ladies," you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you will kindly step into the car, I will."

Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being. It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the spirit of _dolce far niente_, than the American farmer on his wagon in a narrow road with an auto behind him. The grunt of the horn invariably stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years, and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.

The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is a kindred soul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams, and 'crap' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right," says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a sleeping man. One hundred dollars."

Such incidents make it clear that the automobile as an annihilator of space has established its reputation. In the days before the auto a drive of fifteen or twenty miles constituted a good Sunday's outing. To-day a man can leave New Rochelle at eight o'clock in the morning and pay a fine at Poughkeepsie at one in the afternoon, or he can leave Poughkeepsie at eight in the morning and at one in the afternoon be in the lock-up at New Rochelle.

What hurts the motorist's feelings most of all, however, is to be regarded by the public as a sort of licensed assassin. Yet almost any one can think of people who drive a car and take no pleasure in spilling blood. The common belief that automobile killing is a favourite sport among our best families seems to be based on the fact that in nine cases out of ten the occupants of a man-slaying automobile bear such well-known Knickerbocker names as Mr. William Moriarty, chauffeur; his friend, Mr. James Dugan, who is prominent in coal-heaving circles; and their friends, the Misses Mayme Schultz and Bessie Goldstein. At bottom, it would seem, most of the criticism directed against the automobile is based on its failure to take a hog and turn him into a gentleman. But in this respect automobiles are like many of our colleges. The comforting thing is that the life of the automobile hog is an uncertain one. Sooner or later he runs down a steep place into the sea, like certain of his species mentioned in the Bible, and the question adjusts itself.

Meanwhile, however, the decent motorist must suffer for the other's sins. A friend says: "The only time I dare be seen in my machine is between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. Before that time people point me out as a 'joy-rider' returning from a night's debauch. After that time I am a 'joy-rider' bound for a night of it." The complaint rings true. The exhilaration aroused by a punctured tire in the open country gathers strength from the remarks of the spectators who wonder if you made your money honestly. In town a defective sparkplug brings the close attention of a crowd which exchanges opinions as to whether the lady in the tonneau is your wife. All agree that you must have mortgaged your home to buy the machine.

And yet it is evident that much misunderstanding could be avoided if we had a simple code of rules for people who cross the street just as there are regulations for the autoist. A few such rules suggest themselves: 1. If one is about to cross the street in front of an auto, one should do so either before the man in the car succumbs to heart failure or after, but not while the driver is wrestling with death; it is in such cases that one is apt to get hurt. 2. If one is in the middle of the road and sees a car approaching, one should move either (_a_) away from the car, (_b_) towards the car, (_c_) to the right, (_d_) to the left, or (_e_) stand still; under no circumstances should one attempt to combine (_a_), (_b_), (_c_), (_d_), and (_e_). 3. The safest place from which to ascertain the make of an automobile or to estimate its cost is the sidewalk.

XXX

THE SAMPLE LIFE

The hour, the occasion, and the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from me, wretchedly fluttered the pages of a popular magazine and looked ill-natured and horribly unkempt. The new table-cloths had not yet been laid for dinner. The sawdust on the floor was mostly mire. Angelina, the cook, was screaming at Paolo and Francesca, who were trying to boil the cat. It was very dreary.

"Harding," I said, "you were insisting only a little while ago that life is always beautiful."

"So it is," he replied, too listless to be defiant. "To some people."

"To whom?"

"Well, to the two here, for instance," and he pointed to a pair of handsome lovers playing golf all over a double page in the advertising section of his magazine. "Do you mean to say these two ever know what ugliness is, or pain, or want? Or ever grow old? Or cease to love? Here is the perfect life for you."

"Are you so sure of that?" said some one over my shoulder, and I turned about sharply to look into the most entrancing face I have ever beheld in man or woman. It was Apollo standing there above me, or if not he, at least one of the divine youths that the Greeks have left for us in undying marble. He made Scipione's grimy cellar luminous with beauty.

"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, seating himself at our table as joyously confident and as simple as an immortal should be. "But I feel myself competent to speak on the point you have raised because the Advertising Supplement you refer to is my own home. This very young man playing golf is, as you will observe, no other than myself."

There was no denying the amazing resemblance.

"You say the Advertising Supplement is your home," I collected myself sufficiently to ask, "but just how do you mean that?"

"Literally," he replied. "My whole life, and for that matter my parents' life before me, has been spent in the pages you are now fingering. My name is Pinckney, Walter Pinckney, and if you are sufficiently interested in my career I should be glad to describe it."

"Go ahead," cried Harding, with almost ferocious earnestness.

"If I begin a bit back before my birth," said Pinckney, "you will be patient with me. I will not detain you very long."

"Begin where you please," said Harding in the same grim manner; "only begin."

"My father," commenced young Pinckney, "at eighteen, was a sickly country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by investing the small sum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his daily training--an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an important Eastern railroad. It was shortly after he had won this place that he met my mother."

The caressing fondness with which he uttered the last word imparted to his seemingly supreme beauty an added warmth of appeal.

"Her, too, you have met in the Advertising Columns. She had begun to teach school when a mere girl; but when her father's death threw upon her young shoulders the burden of three little children and a helpless mother, she had risen to her greater needs. She succeeded in quadrupling her income by learning to write short stories, criticism, and verse, from a literary bureau which charged her a nominal fee for instruction and purchased her output at extremely generous rates for disposal among the leading magazines. When my father first saw her--it was in the course of a Fourth of July excursion to Niagara Falls which, including a three days' stay at the best hotels, was offered to the public at half the usual cost--she had sent the eldest boy through college, her younger sister was teaching school, and she was free to follow the inclinations of her heart."

"You were fortunate in the selection of your immediate ancestry," said Harding.

"Was I not?" Pinckney responded in a flush of grateful recognition. "But that is not all. The house in which I was born, though generally recognized as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in reinforced concrete, was put up by my father, unassisted, from plans which he purchased for a ridiculously small sum. Its every nook was the abiding-place of love, of quiet content, and of nurturing comfort. The furnace was equipped with the latest automatic devices so that it had to be started only once a year. It was then left to the care of my mother, who used to give it only a few minutes' attention every day without going to the trouble of divesting herself of the gown of fine white lawn which she always wore."

"My dear fellow," I could not keep from exclaiming, "you have almost explained yourself. In such surroundings how could you help growing up into what you are?"

"That is what I say, sir," he came back at me eagerly. "But you must call to mind, also, the fostering personal care that was bestowed upon us children. Take the matter of diet. Coffee, cocoa, excessive sweets, every food-element tending to narcotise or over-stimulate the system was rigorously excluded. Instead we had the numerous grain preparations that assist nature by contributing directly to the development of our particular faculties. In my case, for instance, it had been decided some time before I was born that in the course of time I should enter West Point. With that end in view Farinette, because of its muscle-building powers, was made the principal constituent of my bill of fare. Later, when my parents thought that the pulpit offered better chances of a successful career, Farinette was replaced by Panema, which is notably efficacious in the production of cerebral tissue. Just as I was taking my examinations for college it was finally determined that the sphere of corporation finance held out unrivalled facilities for advancement, and Panema gave way to Hydronuxia, which acts particularly on the imaginative faculties. As for my sisters, they fared no worse than I. You surely have seen them in the Advertising Pages in all their splendid bloom. Saved from overwork by soaps that make heavy washing a pleasure, eternally youthful through the use of electric massage, they smile at you through the reticulations of the tennis racket which the champion played with at Newport, or recline under parasols in the bow of canoes that will neither sink nor upset. They are very fond of playing Chopin on a mechanical piano while the moonlight streams over the floor of the open veranda."

Here Harding broke in sharply. "You began by differing with me on the possibility of finding complete happiness in life, and you have done nothing but refute your own position from the very first. I admit there are certain essentials toward the perfect life that you have not mentioned, but I haven't the least doubt that you already possess them or that they will come to you in time. I mean such things as riches or love."

"Ah, love," Pinckney murmured, and the shadow of a cloud passed over his divine brow.

"Surely," I said, "_you_ have not sought for what love has to give and sought in vain?"

"No," he replied thoughtfully, "I have not failed to win love. But does love bring with it untouched felicity; that is what I ask." He hesitated. "I will not attempt to describe her. I really could not, you know, except in a feeble way, by saying that even to other eyes than mine she is a woman more wonderful than any of my sisters, if that is at all possible. We loved at first sight. I had run down for a Sunday afternoon to Garden Towers-by-the-Sea, a beautiful suburb which a number of enterprising citizens had built up out of a sand waste to meet the needs of the tired urban worker who, in his expensive and uncomfortable city flat, finds himself longing for the life-giving breeze of the ocean and the sight of a bit of God's open country. I was walking down the main street of the village, wearing the loosely shaped and well-padded garments that were then popular with young men, and carrying a set of golf-sticks in my right hand and a bull terrier under my arm. Then I saw her. She was sitting on the porch of the house which her father had purchased for one-third of what its value became when the completion of extensive rapid-transit improvements brought it within thirty-five minutes of the New York City Hall. We loved and told each other. My father, at first, insisted that before assuming the responsibilities of marriage a man should be in receipt of a larger independent income than I could boast of. But when Alice pleaded that she could be of help by raising high-grade poultry for the urban market and organising subscribers' clubs for the magazines, my father yielded. We are to be married in two months, sir."

Harding spoke up impatiently. "Still I fail to see where your unhappiness lies."

"Did I say unhappiness? That is not at all the word, sir. It is rather a sense of awe that seizes us both at times, when we are together, as though we were in the presence of unseen influences; as though, rather, a world not our own were projecting itself into our well-defined lives. I have shown you that Alice and I belong to a very real, very matter-of-fact world. But there are times when we seem to be walking in a land of strange sounds and sights and of shadows that fan our cheeks as they flit by."

"Oh, well," I said, "when two fond young people are together the limits of the visible world are apt to undergo undue extension."

"Let me be specific," said Pinckney. "We first became aware of this state of things some weeks ago. We were walking one afternoon at twilight through a stretch of woods not far from the shore when all at once we were conscious that the familiar aspect of things had vanished. The park had become a virgin forest. Two savage figures girded with skins were panting in deadly combat. One had sunk his thumbs into the eye-sockets of his opponent, who, in turn, had buried his teeth in the flesh of the other's arm. A wild creature, almost hidden in the long tangle of her hair, crouched there, the only spectator of the battle, chanting in weird tones: 'Ai! Ai! the call of the wild summons you to the death-grapple, oh Men, and me to sing who am Woman! Fight on, oh Men; for it is Good! The Race, the Sons of your strong loins through the dizzy whirl-dance of all time, are watching you. Match man-strength against man-strength, breath-rhythm against breath-rhythm, and knee-thrust against knee-thrust!' And then one of the combatants fell, and the victor with a yell of triumph seized the woman by the hair and, flinging her over his shoulder, staggered off, and we heard them call to each other, 'Oh, my Male!' 'Oh, my Female!' Then we were in our own grove by the beach and Alice whispered dreamily, 'Dearest, how tame are our lives.'"

"I think I begin to understand," said I. "What happened was simply that you had walked right out of the Advertising Supplement into the Fiction pages; and that was Jack London. Had you other experiences of the kind?"