Chapter 7

Helen complied. "May it please your Honour, Mamie O'Farrell wants me to say that she represents the Amalgamated Union of Cash Girls and Juvenile Cotton Mill and Glass Factory Operatives. Mamie is fifteen. She works eleven hours a day and receives three and a half dollars a week. She passes two hours every day clinging to a strap in a crowded surface car. She carries her lunch in a paper bundle together with a copy of Laura M. Clay's novel entitled 'Irma's Ducal Lover.' Saturday nights, if her father has been strong enough to pass Murphy's saloon without opening his pay envelope, she goes to the theatre where the play is 'The Queen of the Opium Fiends.' Sometimes she attends a dance of the Friendship Circle, but as a rule she spends her nights at home reading the _Evening Yell_, which tells her that beauty is often a fatal gift and that there is danger in the first glass of champagne a young girl drinks. Am I telling your story in the right way, Mamie?" asked Helen.

"Goodness, yes. You're awful kind, Helen," said Mamie.

"Thus far, Mamie has nothing to complain of," continued Helen. "But she has read somewhere that the slaughter of the poor negroes in the Congo and of the Chinese in Manchuria, and of the Zulus in Natal, and of the Moros in the Philippines, arises from the necessity under which the civilised nations labour to find foreign markets for their increasing output of cotton goods, brass jewelry, and coloured beads. Now the members of Mamie's union are engaged in producing precisely those commodities, and they have come to feel in consequence, that they are directly responsible for the innocent blood that is being shed in various parts of the world. It cannot be their employers who are at fault, because the press and the clergy are unanimous in declaring that the heads of our great industries are the benefactors of humankind. That is why the girls protest. They are quite content with their own fate, but they cannot bear the entire responsibility for the march of civilisation. Mamie tells me that she cannot sleep of nights for thinking of the poor little Moorish babies whose mothers were killed by the French guns. That is the position taken by your union, isn't it, Mamie?"

Mamie giggled, went through a final contortion of ill-ease and returned to her place, in the half-circle. She was succeeded by a brown-haired little maiden, who for some minutes had been showing a strained anxiety to break into speech.

"Please, Helen," she entreated, "may I say something?"

"Of course, dear," said Helen.

The little maid bowed to the mayor. "Please, sir," she said, "my papa was thirty-eight years of age when he married mamma. He was an old bachelor. He was not anxious to be married, but they put a tax on him because they were afraid of depopulation. And he loves me very dearly. But sometimes when he thinks of his old freedom he looks so sadly at me. I feel very sorry for him then. I don't want him to be unhappy on my account----"

She withdrew and Helen stepped forward to sum up the case. "You must not think, your Honour, that it is our desire to embarrass your administration. Bad as conditions are, we would have continued to suffer in silence, because, you see, there are still little flashes of freedom left to us children. But we have learned that there is now on foot in England a movement which threatens to reduce us to unmitigated slavery. We understand that Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl Pearson, and Mr. Bernard Shaw are advocating a scheme of state endowment for motherhood. Now you can see for yourself what that would mean. In politics it would mean the establishment of a motherhood suffrage with plural voting based on the size of the family. In the economic sphere it would mean that we shall be supporting our papas and mammas. In art, which must reflect the actualities of life, it would mean almost the elimination of the element of love, since the world is to be a children's world. In other words, as I have already said, the entire social fabric will come to press on our shoulders alone. It is against the mere possibility of such an unnatural state of affairs that we are here to protest."

"But what is it you want?" asked the mayor, somewhat nettled because O'Brien, instead of backing him up, was busy piling three million golden dollars on the floor in stacks two and a half feet high.

"We want to be left alone!" The reply came in a chorus of trebles, pipings, quavers, and adolescent falsettos that caused the mayor to lift his hands to his forehead entreating silence. "We want our old privileges again. We want to be allowed just to grow up."

"Yassir," shrilled one voice above the others, "jist to grow up."

The mayor raised himself in his chair and his eyes lit up with surprise at the sight of a well-known black little face at the very end of the second row.

"What, Topsy, you here?" he called out. "Haven't you done growing all these sixty years, nearly?"

"Yassir," answered Topsy, inserting an index finger into her mouth. "Ah was shure growin' fas'; but Massa Booker Washin'ton he says that ah and the likes of me was charged with th' future of the negro race. An' that skyeered me so ah made up mah mind ah wouldn' grow no further."

The mayor turned to Helen. "You understand of course, my dear, that I cannot lay a proposition of so vague a nature before the Board of Aldermen. They are a rather unimaginative set of men."

"We have drawn up a list of demands, your Honour, in terms precise enough to make it a sufficient basis for practical legislation. May I read the list to you, papa?"

"Yes, my dear," he replied, and rising from his chair he put his arms about her and kissed her. Her forehead was cool to his burning lips. "Pray proceed, Miss Chairman."

And Helen read in her high-pitched, petulantly graceful soprano: "Resolutions adopted at a special meeting of the Central Bureau of the Federated Children's Organisations of the United States:

"1. Henceforth the proportion of child fiction in any magazine shall be restricted to ten per cent. of the total contents of such publication; and no magazine fiction child under the age of twelve shall be represented as possessing an amount of intelligence greater than the combined wisdom of its parents.

"2. The married heroine of a society drama who has consistently preferred yachting trips, bridge, and the opera to the company of her children shall be precluded from calling upon them for aid to save herself from the dangers of a mad infatuation.

"3. Children under the age of eighteen shall be employed in no form of industry whatsoever. If there are not enough hands to produce piece goods for the Congo and the Philippines, let them draft all adult motor-car chauffeurs, diamond polishers, wine agents, amateur coach drivers, settlement workers, preachers of the simple life, and writers of musical comedy.

"4. In the public schools there shall be no talks or lessons dealing with the duties of citizenship. The time now given to that subject shall be devoted to the reading of dime novels and fairy tales, so that on graduating, children shall not be confronted with so startling a contrast between the realities of life and what they have learned at school.

"5. Cooking and other branches of domestic science shall no longer be taught in the schools. One-half of us expect to live in family hotels and the other half will probably be in no position to afford the expensive ingredients employed in scientific cookery.

"6. Mr. Francis Galton, who invented Eugenics, and Messrs. Karl Pearson and Sidney Webb, who helped to popularise it, shall be executed. Mr. Bernard Shaw shall be banished to a desert island."

And the mayor all the while kept thinking how like her mother Helen was: her voice, her hair, her eyes, but especially her voice. It filled the room with many-coloured vibrations of the consistency of building concrete and hid completely from the mayor's sight the crowd of young faces, O'Brien, the Board of Aldermen, and the three million presidents of the Board of Education. Only Helen remained and she came close to him and laid her cool fingers on his aching head.

The mayor started up to find his wife bending over him.

"Edward," she was saying, "you promised me you would go to bed early."

"My dear," he replied, "I would have if I had not fallen asleep in my chair. Have you had a pleasant evening at the theatre?"

"It is dreadful weather," she said, "and I have a bit of cold. I suppose I shouldn't have gone out to-night, but it was the last chance, and you know the children _would_ see 'Peter Pan.'"

XVIII

THE MARTIANS

The saddest thing about the recent announcement that there are no canals on Mars is that Robert and I will now have so little to talk about. Robert is my favourite waiter, and when he found out that I am what the newspapers call a literary worker, he made up his mind that the ordinary topics of light conversation would not do at all for me. After prolonged resistance on my part he has succeeded in reducing our common interests to two: the canals on Mars and French depopulation. Now and then I venture to bring up the weather or the higher cost of living. Once I asked him what he thought about the need of football reform. Once I tried to drag in Mme. Steinheil. But Robert listens patiently, and when I have concluded he calls my attention to the fact that in 1908 the number of deaths in France exceeded the number of births by 12,000. When the French population fails to stir me, he wonders whether the inhabitants of Mars are really as intelligent as they are supposed to be.

And yet it must have been I that first suggested Mars to him. Let me confess. I do not love the Martian canals with the devouring passion they have aroused in susceptible souls like Robert. But in a quieter way the canals have been very dear to me. Their threatened loss comes like the loss of an old friend; a distant friend whose face one has almost forgotten and never hopes to see again, from whom one never hopes to borrow, and to whom one never expects to lend, but who all the more lives in the mind a remote, impersonal, and gentle influence. I am not ashamed to admit that I have learned to care more for the Martian canals than for any canals much closer to us. The Panama Canal will probably cut in two the distance to China, and give us a monopoly of the cotton goods trade in the Pacific; but I think cotton goods are unhealthful, and I don't want to go to China. The Suez Canal may be the mainstay of the British Empire, but I have no doubt that it would make just as satisfactory a mainstay for some other empire. My interest in the Erie Canal is connected entirely with the fact that when it was opened somebody said, "What hath God wrought!" or "There is no more North and no more South"--I have forgotten which.

I have always had a softer spot in my heart for the inhabitants of Mars than for any other alien people. They have always impressed me as more unassuming than the English, fonder of outdoor exercise than the Germans, and less addicted to garrulity than the French. They lead simple, laborious lives, digging away at their canals every morning, and filling them up every night, for reasons best known to themselves and certain professors at Harvard. I am attracted by their quaint appearance. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, has depicted them with cylindrical bodies of sheet iron, long legs like a tripod, heads like an enormous diver's helmet, and arms like the tentacles of an octopus--as odd a sight in their way as the latest woman's fashions from Paris. Others have described the Martians as pot-bellied and hairless, with goggle eyes, powerful arms, and curly, gelatinous legs, the result of millions of years of universal culture and Subway congestion. A race so unattractive could not but be virtuous. One feels instinctively that there is no graft bound up with the digging of the Martian canals.

No, anything but graft. One of the principal reasons why I am so fond of the canals on Mars is that they are the most cheaply built system of public works on record. A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways. Am I wrong in thinking of the Martian canals as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind? An African savage might find an elephant's skeleton and from that reconstruct the animal in life. Only science can reconstruct an elephant from a half-inch fragment of the bone of his hind leg. Only a scientist could have reconstructed the Martian canals from a few photographic scratches. Of such reconstructions our civilisation is largely made up. We build up a statesman out of a bit of buncombe and a frock coat; a genius out of two sonnets and half a dozen cocktails; a dramatic "star" out of a lisp and a giggle; a two-column news story out of the fragment of a fact; a multitude out of three men and a band; a crusade out of one man and a press agent; a novel out of the trimmings of earlier novels; a reputation out of an accident; a captain of industry out of an itching palm; a philanthropist out of a beneficent smile and a platitude; a critic out of a wise look and a fountain pen; and a social prophet out of pretty small potatoes. I need not allude here to the process of making mountains out of molehills, beams out of motes, and entire summers out of single swallows.

But mind, I do not mean that I was ever sceptical about the canals. Indeed, I have always admired the way in which their existence was demonstrated. There have always been two ways of proving that something is true. One way is to bring forward sixteen reasons why, let us say, the moon is made of green cheese. The other way is to assume that the moon is made of green cheese and to answer sixteen objections brought forward against the theory. I have always preferred the second method, because it throws the burden of proof on your opponent. There is no argument under the sun that cannot be refuted. Obviously, then, it is an advantage to let your opponents supply the argument while you supply the refutation.

Neglect this precaution, and you are in difficulties from the start. You contend, for instance, that the moon must be made of cheese because the moon and cheese are both round, as a rule. True, says your opponent, but so are doughnuts, women's arguments, and, occasionally, the wheels on a trolley car. The moon and cheese, you go on, both come after dinner. Yes, says your opponent, but so do unwelcome visitors, musical comedies, and indigestion. Then, you say, there is the cow who jumped over the moon. Would she have resorted to such extraordinary procedure if she had not perceived that the moon was made of cheese from her own milk? Well (says your opponent), the cow might merely have been trying to gain a broader outlook upon life. And here you are thirteen reasons from the end, and your hands hopelessly full.

Now compare the advantages of the other method. You adopt a resolute bearing and declare: "The moon is made of green cheese." It is now for your opponent to speak. He argues: "But that would make the moon's ingredients different from those of the earth and other celestial bodies." "Not at all," you say; "the earth is made up largely of chalk, and what is the difference between chalk and cheese, except in the price?" "But, if it's green cheese the moon is made of," asks your opponent, "why does it look yellow?" "Only the natural effect of atmospheric refraction," you reply calmly; "remember how a politician's badly soiled reputation will shine out a brilliant white, through the favourable atmosphere that surrounds a Congressional investigating committee. Recall how a lady who is green with envy at her neighbour's new hat will turn pink with delight when the two meet in the street and kiss. Recall how the same lady's complexion of roses and milk will assume its natural yellow under the candid dissection of her dearest friends." Your opponent might go on marshalling his objections forever, and you would have no difficulty in knocking them on the head.

So I used to believe. But if the method breaks down in the case of Mars and its canals, it breaks down everywhere else. If there are no canals on Mars, what about the blessings of the tariff, which are based on exactly the same kind of reasoning? What about the efficacy of mental healing? What about the advantages of giving up coffee? What about the impending invasion of California by the Japanese? What about the Kaiser's qualifications as an art critic? What about the restraining influence of publicity on corporations? What about the connection between easy divorce and the higher life? What about the divine right of railroad presidents? What about the theatrical manager's passion for a purified stage? What about the value of all anti-fat medicines? All of these things have been shown to be true by assuming that they are true. If the canals on Mars go, all these have to go. And that makes me almost as sad as the fact that I shall have nothing to talk about with my favourite waiter.

XIX

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--II

"The idea of this exquisite little collection of frauds and forgeries," said Cooper, "--and I don't believe I am boasting when I speak of my few treasures as exquisite--came to me in a natural enough way. One of the bitterest trials the connoisseur has to contend with, is the consciousness that no amount of care and expense can guarantee him an absolutely flawless collection. The suspicion of the experts has fallen upon not a single picture, brass, marble or iron in his galleries; and yet as he walks those galleries the unhappy owner groans under the moral conviction that there are spurious pictures on his walls, spurious marbles in his halls, spurious carvings and coins under his glass cases, and that there they must stay until discovered and exposed.

"A perfect collection, therefore, in the sense of a collection in which every object can be traced back with absolute certainty to its author and its place of origin, is impossible. Unless, and that is how the inspiration came," said Cooper, "unless one set to collecting objects of art which have been proved to be fraudulent. Then and only then, could one be sure that one's treasures were just what one believed them to be. And that is just what I set out to do. I began buying objects of art, which, after masquerading under a great name, had been exposed and given up to scorn. I have kept at it for twenty years, and I can now point to what no American multi-millionaire can ever boast of, a collection made up _entirely_ of 'fakes.' When I stroll through _my_ little museum I am obsessed by no doubts. I am as certain as I am of being alive that no genuine Leonardo or Holbein or Manet or Cellini has found its way under my roof.

"I must admit," Cooper went on, "that the question of economy has been an important factor in the case. When we first set up housekeeping, a year after our marriage, our means were not unlimited and our tastes were of the very highest. Buying the best work or even the second-best work of the best painters was out of the question. But buying cheap copies of the masters, replicas, casts, photogravures, was equally impossible. The idea of owning anything that some one else may own at the same time is abhorrent to the true collector. On the other hand, if we went in for spurious masterpieces, we were sure of securing unique specimens at very small expense. And I will not deny that the bargain element appealed very strongly to Mrs. Cooper. Most of our things we got at really fabulous reductions. There was the crown of an Assyrian princess of the twenty-fourth century B.C., for which one of the leading European museums paid $75,000, and which, after it was shown that it had been made by a Copenhagen jeweller in 1907, I purchased from the museum for something like fifty-five dollars, plus the freight. This charming little landscape with sheep and a shepherd boy brought $23,000 in a Fifth Avenue auction room two years ago. Three months after it was sold, a certain Mrs. Smith on Staten Island sued her husband for desertion and non-support, and in the course of the proceedings it was brought out that Smith made $10,000 a year painting Corots and Daubignys, and that the $23,000 picture was one of his latest achievements. I got it for a little over one hundred dollars. I am really proud of the picture, because Smith has put into it enough of the Corot quality to deceive many an expert observer. If I were not in possession of the documentary proof that Smith painted the picture in 1908, I should myself be tempted at times to believe that Smith and his wife lied in court and that the picture is really a Corot.

"But these are the chances," said Cooper, "that every art-lover must take. I have said that at present I feel perfectly sure that not a single genuine work has crept in to vitiate my collection. And that is true. But only a few weeks ago I had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed over this spurious Tanagra figurine. It had been bought for a museum not one hundred miles from here by a patron who was a good friend of mine, and who had paid several thousand dollars for the statuette. I was in the room with Hawley when Stimson, our very greatest Greek archæologist and art-expert, entered, and, catching sight of the little figure, picked it up, studied it for a few moments, smelt it, licked it with his tongue, pressed it to his cheek, and handed it back to my friend with a single, blasting comment--'fake.' We two were incredulous, but within fifteen minutes Stimson had convinced us that the thing was a palpable fraud. Quite beside himself with vexation, Hawley lifted up the statuette and was about to dash it into fragments on the ground, when I caught his arm. 'Let me have it,' I said; and I carried it home in great glee.

"Well, a few weeks later I was showing my collection to Dr. Friedheimer of Berlin, who is a much greater man even than Stimson. The German savant stopped in fascination before the Tanagra figurine. 'A pretty good imitation,' I said. He seized the statuette with trembling fingers. 'Imidation!' he shouted. 'Chenuine, chenuine as de hairs on your het. Himmel, wat a find!' And he proceeded to do what Stimson had done, and he smelt it and licked it, and rubbed it against his beard, and I am not sure but that he knocked it against his forehead to test its texture. And then in his agitation he let the figure fall, and it broke in two on the floor, and inside we found a bit of newspaper dated Naples, January 27, 1903. Dr. Friedheimer could only say, 'Unerhört!' but I was nearly frantic with delight. I repaired the statuette, and it now holds, as you see, the place of honour in my collection."

As we sat over our coffee and cigars, Cooper grew reflective. "After all," he said, "is not the fabricator of frauds fully as great an artist as the man whose work he imitates? Take the famous marble Aphrodite of a few years ago, which was attributed by some critics to Praxiteles, and by some critics to Scopas, until proof came that it had been made in Hoboken. Consider the labour that went into the fraud. For years, probably, the dishonest sculptor was engaged in preliminary studies for the work. He spent months in libraries, museums, and the lecture-rooms of learned professors. He impregnated himself with the spirit of Greek art. He devoted months to searching for a suitable piece of antique marble. How long he was in carving it, I can only guess. When it was completed, he boiled it in oil; then he boiled it in milk; then he boiled it in soap; then he boiled it in a concoction of molasses and wine; then he buried it in moist soil, and let it age for three years.