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Title: The World Does Move
Author: Tarkington, Booth [Newton Booth] (1869-1946)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929
Date first posted: 16 March 2019
Date last updated: 16 March 2019
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1600

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






THE WORLD DOES MOVE

by Booth Tarkington




    To Cleeve Gate




CHAPTER I


The thin young man who had come East to seek his fortune stood upon the
steamer's forward deck with the sea breeze blowing upon his eager face
and hastening the combustion of the Sweet Caporal cigarette he had just
lighted at the spark of its predecessor. Before him the immense
castellated skyline that amazed the world swam to meet him as the
steamer rushed toward it over the flat water; and, stirred by the wonder
of this great sight, he exultantly whispered to himself, "New York! New
York! New York!"

There was nothing else like it in the universe; and that startling
invention, the skyscraper, gave it the air of being not real, but a
prophetic vision of what cities might strangely come to be in the
Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. Yet there the new Cosmopolis was
actually before him; and already he knew something of its miracles,
learned in holiday visits during his New England school days and in
week-ends away from Princeton. These week-ends were not of the long ago,
having concluded only a year or so earlier; but at his age a year or so
appeared to be a tremendous amount of time; he was returning to the
glamorous city after what he felt had been a vast absence.

To him, as to most Westerners, New York meant Fifth Avenue and the Park,
with long processions of romantically elegant ladies driving behind
noble, sleek horses glitteringly harnessed; it meant an endless choice
of theatres, with brilliant new plays done by superb actors; it meant a
splendour of restaurants, with oysters and partridge and Burgundy
unknown to the "cafs" of the great flat land behind the Alleghanies. It
meant the Metropolitan Museum, the opera, the new Waldorf, the Holland
House, Delmonico's, Wall Street, Richard Harding Davis, John Drew, Weber
and Fields, Tiffany's, the Sun editorials and the New York World
Building. For that supreme skyscraper floated its dome upon the very
clouds; high over all it was the ever-exhilarating, ever-dumbfounding
symbolic monument that loomed before the passengers from the West as the
Cortlandt Street Ferry carried them across the Hudson from the great
terminal station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City; and if
there were only seven wonders in all the tumultuous great modern world
of the _fin de sicle_, here was surely one of them.

But to the thin young man upon the ferryboat's forward deck, New York
now meant something special that had not concerned him during his school
and college adventurings there. Somewhere in the great hazy buildings
north of Cortlandt Street there were fateful thresholds inaccessible to
him; yet he must try to cross them, for they led to formidable desks
where sat men of unlimited power dealing out destiny as coolly as a
whist player deals cards. The thin young man's future was somewhere
obscurely shuffled into the pile of destinies at the disposal of these
potentates--they were managers who produced plays, editors who produced
magazines, and publishers who produced books; and in the young man's
trunk there were the manuscripts of two plays, of an unfinished novel,
and of a now-forgotten number of short stories. The arrival in New York
of that Cortlandt Street ferryboat, moreover, took place upon the bright
morning of an autumn day a little more than thirty years ago; and the
thin young man's name coincided with my own.

I go back to that day now not because I am engaging in an
autobiographical writing--for this is not a personal memoir--but because
the end of the last century was the beginning of the end of an epoch not
coinciding precisely with the calendar years of the Nineteenth Century;
it is of the change into the present new epoch that I am writing, and I
can but picture the change as it has been visible to the person most
familiar to me. That day of his landing at Cortlandt Street with a
luggage of hopes and manuscripts was well back into the older age, with
its life and thought so different from our lives and thoughts now; and I
choose--as they sometimes say in Vermont--to begin there.

We did not know, in those days, that we were approaching a new epoch; we
could not possibly have imagined then the change that has come in what
is relatively so short a time. In fact, we who have lived in both
periods--that of the _fin de sicle_ and that of the Twentieth
Century--do not ourselves yet fully realize how profound is the
alteration that has taken place. It has been going on from day to day,
even from hour to hour, like the growth of a child to manhood; those who
live with the child thus growing do not find him startling when, at
thirty, he weighs one hundred and sixty pounds instead of the seven that
was his weight at their first acquaintance with him. But the
Massachusetts life convict who went to prison in 1896 and was pardoned
in 1927 came back babbling to the penitentiary gates, clamouring
piteously for readmission after a week of freedom, dumbfounded and
panic-stricken. From the very moment of his release he might as well
have been thrown out upon the surface of another planet.

Not one person alive in the world when that convict was sentenced, or
when the thin young man reached New York with his scratchy manuscripts,
could possibly have prophesied what America would be like to-day. There
were a few fanatics who believed that horseless carriages were coming;
there were even some ridiculous star-gazers who thought men would be
seen flying overhead within the next five hundred years--perhaps within
a hundred; there were devotees of teetotalism who predicted, in the face
of general jocose scoffing, that "temperance legislation" would some day
be enacted in Washington itself; other devotees predicted something of
the kind for "female suffrage"; here and there were persons who foresaw
individual advances in science or a coming change in a certain custom or
in a certain type of established morality; but there was not on earth a
mind that could have foreseen the whole vast change as we are living
with it now.

The absence of such a prophet was not a misfortune. A complete view of
this future now existing as the present would have staggered the _fin de
sicle_ mind, possibly to its unseating. If by some miracle of prevision
the world of to-day, completely as it is, could have been seen by the
people of that day, there were those among them, particularly among the
older clergymen, who, like the friar Captain Brazenhead confessed to,
would have "died that same night howling like a wolf".




CHAPTER II


Yet never did an epoch more placidly believe itself the last word than
did the _fin de sicle_--and every country newspaper glibly used that
phrase, so sophisticated was our whole nation in those days. The _fin de
sicle_ was the last word in scientific achievement, in modern
inventions, in literature and the fine arts, in good taste, in luxury,
in elegance, in extravagance, in dress, in cleverness and in the art of
being blas. Civilization had gone about as far as possible; we had
reached the summit of the peak and after us must come the decadence,
which was, indeed, already setting in with Oscar Wilde's writings and
the strange drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Thus the _fin de sicle_
thought of itself when the thin young Midlander walked ashore from the
Cortlandt Street ferryboat and went to live on the top floor of a
brownstone-front boarding house with three friends who, like himself,
were only a year or so out of college.

Of course, that brownstone-front, which had previously been the ample
and pleasant residence of New Yorkers of some quality, no longer exists.
Even now the neighbourhood is not wholly unfashionable, and a handsome,
tall apartment house of inhospitable appearance stands upon the
site--stands there temporarily, of course, for it will naturally be
replaced before long by another one, taller, handsomer, and even more
inhospitable. To live in an apartment in that street costs many
thousands of dollars a year nowadays; but in those other days money was
scarcer and more valuable. The "first-floor front" of our boarding house
was occupied by a lady who paid forty dollars a week for her pleasant
lodging and three excellent meals a day. Startled when we discovered
this, we of the top floor thenceforth spoke of her as the Baroness
Rothschild. We lived opulently ourselves, upon fifteen dollars a week,
and had college friends in New York who made themselves comfortable
enough, in agreeable neighbourhoods, for half as much.

When we went to the theatre we paid a dollar and a half for an orchestra
seat; though when Sarah Bernhardt came over that winter the impressive
charge for such a seat was three dollars. A silk hat cost seven dollars,
and of course we all had silk hats and skirted coats for Sundays,
"teas", and afternoon calls. The best derby hats cost three, four, and
even five dollars; soft hats were rare east of Kansas, except on farmers
and politicians. There were table d'hte dinners with wine for
thirty-five cents at Italian restaurants; a dollar and a half paid for a
Sunday evening table d'hte, with music, under the great gas chandeliers
of the best hotels in the town.

For it was still the age of gaslight, and how dark an American city of
that period would appear to us if we could see it now as it was then
after nightfall! Paris was the only _Ville Lumire_; but city of light
as it was, its famous illumination of the 'Nineties did not light the
clouds above it with half the glow of any lively American county seat
after dark in 1928. Electric light was on the way; already sputtering
white globes hung from long arms at the crossings of many American
streets; but the lamplighter with his ladder would still be seen
hurrying through the dusk for years to come. Theatres had begun to use
electric lighting. Until then they had always smelled faintly and not
unpleasantly of gas, for the footlights released a little before
catching the flame, one from the other, and so did the upper lights over
the stage and the invariable huge chandelier at the top of the house.
The mildness of that light did not increase the eye repairing of
oculists; and, moreover, the very craft of the actor did not suffer from
it. Electric light made a lamentable change in that.

Of all our excursions from the boarding house top floor to the theatre,
none was merrier than that to see Joseph Jefferson in _The Rivals_.
Jefferson was an elderly man, but there was no elderliness in his "Bob
Acres". A fresh-coloured country youth came before us, inimitably the
funniest young coward ever seen on the stage, and not until he played
that part with increasingly fierce electric light glaring upon him was
the illusion of youth dispelled. Maggie Mitchell, at sixty, played
"Fanchon" in _The Cricket_, and what we saw was an elfish young girl;
old men played "young parts"; there were youthful actors, who were
specialists, playing "old parts".

But nowadays the manager stares at an actor in the light of an office
window and puts him on the stage to look--and usually to act--much as he
does in that same illumination. Painters would feel that something had
gone badly with art if old men's portraits could be painted by old
painters only and young painters were limited to the portraits of young
sitters. And if the thing went further, limiting painters to portraits
of themselves--which is not so far from what electric light and
"realism" have done to the art of acting--portrait painting might seem
to be on the way to become not an art at all.

But the passing of gaslight changed many things besides acting and
lighting fixtures. The gas fixtures were not beautiful--heavy
chandeliers of bronzed metal, "drop lights" with long green snakes of
flexible tubing feeding gas to them, side lights that were merely iron
pipes protruding from the walls--and usually the more ornamental these
strove to be the uglier they were. Their passing made matches less a
necessity, did away with the vases of spiral paper tapers rolled by
frugal housewives, altered the plans of suicides and destroyed the most
useful stock joke of the humorous weeklies and newspaper comedians.

This destroyed national joke was founded upon fact. It is not so easy to
lay a gas pipe through the ground as to run a wire through the air, so
there wasn't much light on the farms and in the villages; all over the
country the farmers and villagers used oil lamps and candles. Some
collector of antiques may already possess an oblong of cardboard
whereon, in heavy black letters, is printed, "Don't Blow Out the Gas";
and it is curious to remember now that hotel-keepers usually displayed
such a warning in every bedroom. For years the weekly and daily press
humorists and draftsmen profited by a vast, continuous burlesquing of
bucolic mishaps with city gas; and asphyxiation made into comedy was
staple ware, too, for the vaudeville joker.

For the rustic sufferer himself, asphyxiation was as truly tragedy as
was a fractured skull to the victim of a bicycle speeder; but the farmer
had become too fixedly a stencil of urban humour to receive much
sympathy. He was a bewhiskered backwoodsman and cheered another Roman
holiday when all his savings were exchanged for a satchel confided to
him by a well-dressed city stranger; our _fin de sicle_ sophistication
had only derision for him. It was otherwise with the unfortunates run
down by the ruthless bicyclists; we became indignant for their sakes and
sympathized with the constant editorials in the newspapers denouncing
the speeders. For among other madnesses of the _fin de sicle_ was the
new speed mania.

But the bicycle craze was not quite yet at its maniacal maddest; all the
world was not yet awheel, though most of the cities were passing
ordinances forbidding the sidewalks to the wheelmen. School children
were warned not to cross the streets without first looking carefully to
see if bicycles were approaching from either direction; and out in the
country the farmers were indignant because their chickens were in
frequent danger on the roads, and because horses became hysterical and
ran away at sight of the miraculous new vehicles.

What was most _fin de sicle_ of all, however, scandalizing some
communities, sending some into furies of argument and others into
uproarious public laughter, was a sporadic revolutionary daring in
bicycle costume. Here and there a violently modern woman or girl wore
divided skirts for the new sport; these were to the ankles, though
brazen enough, at that; but this was not the peak defiance of all the
old conventionalities. In one or two cities women riders had been seen
wearing no skirts at all. Instead, they wore heavy bloomers and gaiters;
but of course they did not dare to appear in the more populous streets,
and they rode rapidly. When such a rider whizzed by little children they
were sometimes so dazed that she would be almost out of hearing before
they began to yell.

Our boarding house in New York discussed these outbreaks of the New
Woman as it discussed everything, and on the top floor our decision was
that we were glad our sisters and the "girls we knew" felt as little
sympathy as we did with such immodesties. We held long and vehement
debates upon the question of Ruskin's value to Art; but we had no
argument over the wearers of bloomers and gaiters, for there we were
unanimous.

It was the only subject upon which we were unanimous, I think;
especially as the youngest of us was a law student and a willing
debater, precociously adroit. The medical student and the young
engineer, the other inhabitants of our heights, suffered themselves to
be made into a plaintive and sometimes profane audience, while the law
student for hour after hour used me roughly as a feebly opposing
counsel. We fought over free trade, of course, and could not have
imagined a time when that and "free silver" would not be the most vital
of public questions; we fought interminably the battle between "realism"
and "romanticism"; we wrangled long over young Stephen Crane's
indebtedness to Zola's _Dbcle_ for analysis of a soldier's perceptions
and feelings during battle, and we were increasingly in opposition
concerning the beauty and value of classical music. But here the law
student always became intolerantly authoritative; he was a patron of the
opera, never missed a concert of the new Polish genius, Paderewski, and
was so ardently and openly in love with Madame Melba, though he had not
the pleasure of her acquaintance, that he caught a dangerous cold by
standing for an hour in a blizzard to see her descend from her carriage
at the door of her hotel. After that, the rest of us never dared
challenge his opinion upon anything musical.




CHAPTER III


One evening we had our own gaslight accident on the top floor. An Irish
housemaid used a spiral paper taper to light the gas in the hall
bedroom; then she dropped it to the floor and put her foot over it to
extinguish it. But there was still a flame from the taper, and the
girl's skirt and petticoats, which of course were so long that they
touched the floor, caught fire, and instantly she blazed from foot to
head. The medical student and I heard her making strange moans of
protest; but she was already in flight, a wild torch with her long thick
hair aflame high over her head. We chased her down two flights of stairs
before we caught her, and the medical student wrapped her tightly in a
heavy curtain he had torn from a doorway as we ran.

She recovered, after a painful siege in the hospital; but the kind of
accident she suffered was not infrequent and sometimes was fatal.
Nowadays she would not use a taper to light the gas; she would not light
the gas. She would not light the gas and drop the taper on the floor;
but, if she did, her skirt would not catch fire. And, if her skirt did
catch fire, her petticoats wouldn't, because she wouldn't have any; but
if she did wear them, and if her skirt and petticoats did catch fire,
her hair wouldn't. No matter how they may look, girls are at least safer
from fire to-day than they were then.

On the other hand, we all have diseases now that we didn't have then; or
at least we didn't know the right names for them in those days, and that
was half the battle, giving us a much better chance to get well. But the
right names were being developed, and almost every evening the medical
student told us a new one. Appendicitis had not really arrived; but the
medical student gave us advance information about it, and so thoroughly
made us understand the symptoms that we were uncomfortable all the rest
of that winter. Nevertheless, his lessons were of the greatest use to me
when I had a series of violent and unmistakable attacks. During the last
one a physician was summoned to examine me and he dug his thumb into me
precisely upon the point at which the medical student had taught us the
appendix had its unpleasant situation.

"Does that hurt?" the doctor inquired.

It did. It hurt so unbearably that only the complete horror of
operations I had developed by listening to the medical student enabled
me not to shriek.

"No," I said. "The trouble seems to be more on the other side and higher
up. It seems to be more in the left upper chest, as it were, doctor."

So he prescribed calomel and poultices, and I got well and began to be
grateful to the medical student; and yet he had been enthusiastic about
the new operation and maintained that under the best surgery a patient
had almost an even chance for recovery.

For the medical student told us of all the new and strange doings in his
branch of science, and one evening he arrived upon the top floor with a
startling bit of scientific news.

"There's been a machine invented," he said--"a machine that will let
people see spang through solid matter. They can use it to look right
through a wall, or a door, or a person's clothes, or whatever's in the
way."

We couldn't believe anything so fantastic as this, but he insisted that
he was serious.

"It's the absolute truth. What's more, they can look through your skin
with it. They can see all around in your insides with it as much as they
please."

"Not in mine!" the law student said sharply. "Not in mine!"

"Why not?"

"In the first place, because I got anyhow enough out of the physics
course I took in college to know that such a thing isn't possible; and,
in the second place, because I wouldn't let anybody look at me through
an instrument like that, even if he had one. Why, there'd be laws
against manufacturing those things! Nobody's got a right to be looking
through the walls of other people's houses, or through their clothes, or
into their insides. What'd be the good of such an instrument anyway?"

"Well, suppose you'd been playing marbles and swallowed one and----"

"Who?" the law student asked quickly. He had been graduated from college
the preceding June, the youngest of his class, and since he had fallen
in love with Madame Melba he had become sensitive about his age and
suspicious of insult. "Suppose who'd been playing marbles?"

"I don't mean you personally; I mean anybody--a little boy, for
instance. If he'd swallowed a marble, or a dime, maybe, or a collar
button, or tacks, they could turn this X-ray on him and find out just
where to operate. Why, this invention is going to lead to more
operations"--the medical student's eyes brightened with his
enthusiasm--"it's going to lead to more operations than all the
accidents and diseases people have ever had in the whole history of the
world! Because now, with this X-ray, a surgeon can show his patient an
actual photograph of what's the matter with him.

"'Look here!' he'll say. 'Here's a picture of what you look like inside.
Heavens and earth! You don't want to go on looking like that, do you?'"

But we thought that his eagerness had made him credulous, that he had
been gulled by a fairy tale; and we refused to believe in the magic ray
until he produced an article clipped from a scientific journal and
overwhelmed our skepticism by the power of print. We were awed by this
culminating wonder of the day of necromancy we were living in, and we
felt that the human mind had reached the limit of its powers. Within the
lifetime of an elderly man, the age of invention had touched the
ultimate, so fast had been its development!

For it had begun, really, with the railroad and the telegraph. My
grandfather, who lived under every President until McKinley, beginning
with Washington, had told me of his first railway journey. The train
worked up to a speed of sixteen miles an hour, and he got off at the
first stop and hired a horse; he was appalled, unable to endure such a
hurtling through space. And my father had told me how Governor Ray, of
Indiana, was defeated for a relection to Congress because he had voted
for a reckless governmental appropriation of several thousand dollars to
stretch an experimental wire between Washington and Baltimore for the
purpose of making little clicking sounds at each end of it. The voters
were indignant that their representative could believe in such nonsense
and waste public money upon it.

Since then the world had become a New World, indeed. We of the top floor
were in our early twenties, yet we had seen the first electric lights,
the first telephones, the first phonographs, the first cable cars, the
first trolley-cars, the first rubber tires, the passing of the universal
household bootjack and winter high boots, with the better paving of city
streets; we had read the first cabled news of Pasteur. Telephones and
electric light were not yet in common household use, but were coming
more and more to be so; rubber tires were still a luxury, though all
bicycles were now made with them; but, as for the phonograph, many
people felt that Edison had rather wasted his time. The machine was too
squeaky to be long endured, and the waxy records were too perishable.
Children played with the thing for half an hour, when it was given to
them at Christmas, and then broke it.

Nevertheless, the phonograph, like everything else, was being improved
and could take its place as one of the miracles of the triumphant _fin
de sicle_. And now that the X-ray, performing the incredible,
penetrated to the mysterious heart of solids and brought human vision to
bear upon what had been immemorially secret, so that a living man might
see his own skeleton, what more was left to be done? No wonder we
thought that after us must indeed and inevitably come the decadence!

And yet, within gunshot of our comfortable boarding house, there were
slums more tragic than any to be found in New York now; and the
"Tenderloin", like the "Red Light" of all American cities, renewed a
vivid, septic life with every nightfall. The top floor had little
curiosity about the "Tenderloin" and never entered it; but we knew
something of one miserable tenement quarter, for we had a Reverend
comrade who was in charge of a mission there. So we learned something of
mission work--so much more desultory then than now, but no less
devoted--and even tried to help the missionary in small and easy ways.
And after all these years it is still not difficult to remember the
smell of that district; it was a smell to be rivalled now only by the
smell of some quarters of the cities of Araby. American cities no longer
contain such smells; municipal health officers are providentially more
effective than they were in the 'Nineties.

The top floor had other comrades, some of them highly plutocratic, and
these asked us to dinners and dances, congenial gaieties, but not
directly helpful to surgery, law, engineering, literature and the drama.
These last two advanced most slowly of all; for the thresholds of
managers, editors and publishers remained cold and uncrossed by the top
floor aspirant. The medical student, the law student and the engineer
made visible progress; they followed straight roads symmetrically set
out with milestones; their destinations were fixed, and they knew always
just how far they had come on the way. But the young man who was trying
to write groped in a thick mist, not knowing whether his feet were upon
a road or walking circles in a desert.

His stories all came back promptly from the magazine offices; he rewrote
them and they came back again with the same printed rejection slips. His
plays never reached a manager; they were returned by the dramatists'
agents to be rewritten; and, rewritten, were returned again. The top
floor was sympathetic, and a non-resident comrade, who had already
become an actual newspaper man on the advertising end of a journal down
in Park Row, tried to bring the aspirant into contact with people who
could advise him to his profit. The undergraduate nickname of this
friendly helper was "Big", which applied both to his heart and his body;
and he was so long that when he spent the night with us on the top
floor, as he did sometimes, a chair had to be placed, for his feet, at
the lower end of the adjustable bed where he slept.

"You've got to meet some of these people and ask 'em what's the matter
with you," he said. "You'll never find out by just sending manuscripts
around. You've got to talk to 'em face to face and then they can tell
you."

"Yes, but how do I----"

"I'm going to take you to a dinner at the Lantern Club," he said.
"Irving Bacheller's the toastmaster; Steve Crane's a member and he knows
Harold Frederic. Has anybody ever written a better novel than Frederic's
_Damnation of Theron Ware_?"

"No, it isn't possible to write a finer novel; but----"

"Well, Crane could probably help tell you what's the matter with
you--he's been having a fairly rough time himself, though it's true
people are beginning to talk a lot about his writing. But if he
couldn't, Frederic could. But that's not all. Edward Eggleston is coming
to this dinner and they have hopes of getting William Dean Howells
himself. I guess he could tell you what's the matter with you, couldn't
he?"

"Good heavens, yes! But----"

"Begin asking at the top," Big said. "If Howells comes to that dinner,
go right up to him and tell him all about it and ask him what's the
matter with you."

Mr. Howells did come to the dinner, though Stephen Crane didn't, having
gone away from New York just then in search of a cheaper place to live;
but the literary young man from the boarding house failed to make any
inquiries of the chief practitioner of his adopted vocation. The
apprentice was reverentially in a state of nerves to find himself at the
foot of the long table at the head of which sat that gentle and most
unleonine of lions. The aspirant could not possibly have asked him any
question whatever; it was too frightening merely to be in his presence,
remembering what he knew about writing; and, besides, there befell a
disaster.

With coffee, the toastmaster, who was the president of the club, rose
urbanely. "Before we proceed to the speechmaking," he said, "I will
announce that we have with us to-night a young man, lately out of
college, who sings."

Then, to his utmost horror, the nervous guest perceived that Mr.
Bacheller was looking down the table at him. Stricken instantly with
stage-fright, he heard Mr. Bacheller request him to rise to his feet and
burst forth in song.

It wasn't possible to offer any excuse or to decline; there was nothing
on earth for it but to get up and make sounds. Without accompaniment
then, the dazed and shaking young man lately out of college put forth a
quavering voice upon the air. He was irrecoverably off key; he squeaked
and blatted on misplaced octaves and knew that although upon occasion he
had sung villainously before, he had never equalled this. Somehow,
though it is still an unexplained mystery, he lived through his own
performance and sat down, praying for unending oblivion thenceforth.

"Well, did you get a chance to ask Howells what's the matter with you?"
Big inquired as we walked home after the dinner.

"Good heavens, no! I didn't go near him! He'd have thought I meant my
singing!"




CHAPTER IV


In the fine arts and literature American apprentices knew then that
names of true masters shone high above them. In literature we had
Howells, James and Mark Twain, fixed stars no matter what later
ephemeral fashions in reading and criticism might temporarily make of
them. We had Joel Chandler Harris, Stockton, Cable, James Lane Allen,
Miss Wilkins, the exquisite Bunner, Thomas Nelson Page; we had a
people's great poet, Riley; Bret Harte, outliving his vogue but not his
enormous influence upon the short story, was a consul in Britain. Over
the water, two surpassing novelists were writing, Meredith and Hardy,
and in the South Seas the master craftsman of writing, Stevenson, was
dying. Kipling had emerged over the Far Eastern horizon; and a lively
Irishman named Shaw was beginning to puzzle London with its own
laughter, though he had yet to wait for an American actor, Mansfield, to
awaken general audiences to a first comprehension of his plays.

"There were giants in those days". It is a fashion among the vulgar now
to fall upon the body of the giant and rend it the moment he is dead;
and in Paris the young vultures, screeching to be talked about for their
daring and their originality in following the fashion, feared to wait
until Anatole France was buried; eagerer vultures might have flown in
ahead of them and stolen the advertising.

What aids the vultures is Nature's technique in the production of
progress. We are carefully so constituted that the generation just
passed must ever appear ridiculous to us, its thought both pretentious
and primitive, its taste abhorrent, its manners absurd and its fashions
ludicrous. Our own generation, we feel, is the only one truly
sophisticated; that of our parents must be picked to pieces, though that
of our grandfathers, dimmed and prettily remote, cannot threaten our new
ideas or our revolt against everything from which we are struggling to
emerge; and so we look upon it more leniently, investing it with a
captivating air of quaintness and buying what remains of its furniture
and ornaments. And in its art and literature the rediscovery of beauty
begins.

This present new generation, obedient to that ancient mechanism of
progress, has found a word to express its hatred of the musty
absurdities preceding its own enlightenment--a word curiously sprung out
of Anglomania and inappropriate in the Western Hemisphere--"Victorian".
Our "young intellectuals" have a habit of using it as an eraser; and
with a lively historical and geographical recklessness they will tell
you that the United States of America, during the reign of Edward VII in
Britain, was Mid-Victorian. Almost the wickedest of their printable
words is "Mid-Victorian"; and what they mean, usually, is something
their fathers and mothers believed in or liked.

Thus those giants we revered are now "Victorians" and "Mid-Victorians",
obsolete to the young, along with the mansard roof, the tandem bicycle
and the two-step. The new generation lumps together the great men, the
songs, the dances, the manners and the clothes of the _fin de sicle_,
and, with the derision of established superiority, laughs at all. The
_fin de sicle_ was less sweeping and more courteous; we did not scorn
great men lately dead; though we did laugh--among ourselves--at the
songs and the dancing of our elders; we laughed at their photograph
albums, at the clothes and whiskers there portrayed; we laughed at their
sports; we were beginning to laugh at croquet.

When the young gentlemen of the top floor went down to the mission to
sing for the entertainment of the missionary's protgs, they did not
sing "To-night You Belong to Me"; they sang "Workin' on the Railroad",
medleys from _Robin Hood_ and college nonsense jingles. When we went
forth to dance we dressed almost precisely as youths lately graduated
would dress to-day, except that our collars were circular walls of linen
three inches high. We kept a distance between us and our partners (it
was the fashion just then to make the distance as great as possible) and
we danced--glidingly, not wriggling or hopping--only waltzes and
two-steps. Square dances had disappeared except from pastoral and
proletarian ftes where the lancers and quadrilles might still sometimes
be capered through for the benefit of middle-aged or old-fashioned
people. The polka and the schottische were dropped early in the decade.

The girls with whom we danced had hourglass figures. Tiny feet and hands
were adjuncts to beauty, but the small waist was a necessity.
School-girls, not yet allowed to wear stays, sometimes secretly strapped
torturing belts night and day about their middles to prepare for the
hourglass fashion they would follow when they "came out". Physicians
attacked the hourglass bitterly and persistently, with complete
futility. The race was being ruined by this abominable harnessing, they
said; and they had no more effect than did the moralists who scolded
when the girls, long after, left off the rigid harness entirely and made
themselves into slim sacks with no waists at all.

The hourglass girls danced gracefully in spite of their harness; indeed,
they danced more gracefully than do their sack-shaped daughters and
granddaughters; for dignity, which may still be maintained in consonance
with the airiest lightness, is ever a part of grace; and dignity
vanished when the tight clasp and the negroid and Oriental dancing began
with the incredible turkey trot. Moreover, the hourglass girls,
apparently not incommoded, played tennis; they rode horses and bicycles;
they were known to sail catboats and paddle canoes; and even the ladies
of the ballet and those of the circus were hourglasses. But of course
the girl with stiffly armoured body, balloon sleeves upon her upper
arms, and her sacred and mysterious legs lost in petticoats and skirts
that touched the ground, was not easily an outdoor girl. To be, even
moderately, an athlete was not part of her destiny.

She was still, even that little time ago, the sheltered dependent--and
therefore the diplomat--that she had been through all the Christian
centuries. We of the top floor were well-brought-up young men; which
means that we revered her and had no idea she was a human being. For us
she was a lady, and that was something higher, finer and more ethereal
than no matter how good a gentleman. Bodily, she consisted for us of a
head of hair, a face, an hourglass of silk or satin or cloth, gloved
hands and multiplex bells of stuffs that hung from the squeezed middle
of the hourglass to the ground. Within these her locomotion was somehow
mysteriously accomplished; it was not permissible to imagine how, and
the nearest we came to that was in our verses about the "rustle of her
skirts upon the stair". She had no feet--that is to say, she had
slippers and at the most an instep. At a dance she had actual arms and
shoulders and coquettish hints of bosom. Spiritually, she consisted of
perfection--that was a matter of course--and mentally she consisted of
mystery, which we had no great concern to solve.

Ourselves being of clay, we could only try to atone to her by the utter
respect we paid her. No one except a "mucker" had any other view of her;
and yet, as we knew that there were "muckers" here and there among our
own sex, so we knew that there were members of hers who had forfeited
public respect, exchanging it for contempt from some and compassion from
others. That is to say, there distinctly appeared to be two classes, or
castes, of girls. There were the "girls we knew"--the sheltered, perfect
and revered girls, whom we and our comrades would one day marry--this
was one class; and the other consisted of all the other kinds of girls.

Sometimes a girl of the upper caste was forced by family misfortunes to
go to work; and there were a few kinds of genteel
employment--governessing and teaching principally--that she could accept
without descending substantially out of her caste; but work that brought
her much into contact with men was thought roughening, at the best; it
was not advisable. Something was pardoned to a girl of special talent;
she might be admired and fted, but even in such case the word
"Bohemian" threatened her if her gift made her professional. Her talents
were best confined to the amateur field, it was felt; and, if she must
have ambitions at all, the single correct and useful one was to fit
herself to be the inspiration and helpmeet of the man she would wed. Her
true business, of course, was to get herself satisfactorily married,
though that was the last thing in all the world she must permit to
become visible.

Sometimes, when we went to dinners given by the mothers and fathers of
the hourglass girls, sherry and claret were served, though sparingly;
sometimes, at the more plutocratic dances, there was champagne with the
supper; but usually both dinners and dances were "dry". There was a
general prejudice against offering even the milder intoxicants to young
men, and it was thought better not to put temptation in their way. There
was no feeling about the girls in this matter; they were out of the
question entirely; for they were not conceivably affected by temptations
of any kind whatever. Cocktails and potent distillations were unknown at
the dinner for young people, except among hosts willing to be called
"fast", or here and there in the South, where Eighteenth Century
hospitality still lingered in the mint julep. In general, when a young
man appeared among ladies, his breath could not be aromatic of alcohol
without damage to his reputation.

Our boarding house top floor had no concern in such a matter. At remote
intervals we spent a temperate evening in a respectable big German beer
hall where there was a good orchestra; but most of our evenings, like
our days, meant work; and the literary aspirant, who was arriving
nowhere in spite of his struggles, burned gas latest of all. This was
hard on the law student, who roomed with him; for the writing frequently
went on until three in the morning and sometimes even later. The law
student didn't mind the cigarette smoke that accompanied the writing;
but he couldn't sleep with the gaslight full on his eyes, and he was too
chivalrous to insist upon its being extinguished; so he developed a
technique to meet the difficulty successfully. At eleven, his customary
hour, he amicably opened two large black umbrellas, placed them upon his
couch and retired to sleep in peace within their shadow. Quiet would
settle down upon the boarding house and upon the street outside; and
except for the far-away rumble of Elevated owl trains and the spasmodic
tootings of distant ferryboats in the river, there would be silence.
There was no Subway, there were no taxicabs; building went on in
daytime; New York had only a million people then, and nearly all of them
went to bed at night. The great modern night roar of the metropolis had
not developed; strangers could sleep in quiet in almost any part of the
city not too close to the "L"; and for hours the scratching of the thin
aspirant's pen would be, barring expressions of feeling from an
occasional cat in a brownstone are away, the noisiest sound on our whole
street. So the gaslit windows of our top floor front were the only
windows bright after midnight on that street, while the unfortunate thin
young man went on writing and rewriting and rewriting and getting
thinner and thinner.

At last, when there were hints of coming summer upon the winds of the
city and evening sunshine began to linger upon the roof of the church
opposite the top floor windows, he perceived that instead of approaching
the thresholds he had come to cross--those forbidden entrances to
editors and managers and publishers--he had slid even backward from
them; and he was now so thin he feared that if he lost any more weight
he would alarm his relatives when he went home. Therefore, ere this
might happen, he thoughtfully packed his new rejected manuscripts in a
parcel with the old, and one rainy morning went down on the Ninth Avenue
"L" to recross the Cortlandt Street Ferry, going West.

Thus the top floor had a vacancy, but the companions did their best to
provide a substitute. The medical student had long desired an
articulated skeleton; when I left he bought one, and the law student and
the engineer went with him on a drizzly evening to bring it home. They
put a raincoat upon it and carried it through the streets, not without
arousing comment and being somewhat earnestly questioned; but they
brought it successfully to the top floor.

They attached it to the wall, supplied it with a cigarette, and gave it
my college nickname. It had only one defect, the engineer wrote me--the
law student couldn't argue with it.




CHAPTER V


Here then was a young man rather emaciated by his siege of New York, and
returned to write until dawn, most nights, at home in a placid town
among the green, far inland flat lands. No great discontent was
involved, however. On the contrary, it was a luxury to live pamperedly
again in the pleasant house in the friendly neighbourhood where he'd
been born and had grown up. The whole town, except for the business
district, was made of friendly neighbourhoods, in fact; and so was like
a hundred other just such towns of the Midlands and of East and West.

The great change had not shown its first beginnings; though now, looking
back upon those peaceful days and those quiet, seemingly settled and
completed American towns, we can see that it impended imminently. We see
that the shadow of the change loomed close over them, like the ceiling
shadow of a lifted war club over one of the pioneer settlers reading his
Bible by candlelight in the log cabin out of which the cities grew. For
no catastrophe of earthquake, of war, or fire, or flood, or tornado, or
all combined, could have done more to those towns than the change has
done. Of the pleasant smallish city I lived in when I came from New York
in that year of the _fin de sicle_, there remains about as much as the
Roman left of Punic Carthage when he drove his ploughs over its site
before building his own city there.

No one could have dreamed that our town was to be utterly destroyed;
such a thing was as unbelievable as that the pioneer's Bible would be
dismembered along with the town. At the centre, we had finished the
building of our great monument to the men of our state who had fought in
the Civil War, the War with Mexico and the War of 1812. The shaft rose
two hundred feet and more in the air, a mark to be seen all over the
countryside, far and wide. Forever it was to dominate; forever it was to
stand high above the tallest buildings of the city; for it was higher,
even, than the noble green dome of the State House. Straight northward
from the monument ran the "principal residence street", paralleled by
four other "principal residence streets" of rival merit. These avenues
were amply broad for the family carriages, bicycles, phatons, buggies
and light delivery wagons that formed the traffic; and they were shaded
by maples, by sycamores where lazy bayous from the creek had been, and
by old elms, hickory and black walnut trees, relics of the original
forest. By mid-Maytime, on many of the streets, leafy branches had
crossed and mingled above the roadway, so that the movement below was
through cool green tunnels and emerged into sharp sunlight only at the
crossings.

Most of the houses facing upon the "principal residence streets" were
built solidly of brick and trimmed with white stone; the windows were
all plate-glass; the ceilings were high--eleven to fifteen and even
sixteen feet; the staircases were walnut and the verandas were of stone
or painted wood. The lawns were broad, often generously without fences
to mark dividing lines; there were shade and orchard trees in every
yard; some yards had fountains, and one or two cast-iron deer were left,
though these were disappearing.

From some of the verandas, after dark, there came on summer evenings the
tinkle of mandolins and guitars, or the twanging of a banjo; young
voices might be heard softly singing "Answer, Bid Me Good-bye" and "Go,
Love's Sorrow", or the livelier measures of "Mandalay" or of a new "coon
song"; for in the milder seasons the verandas were the foregathering
places of youth and courtship. The elder folk were usually indoors after
nightfall, but with open windows; though on hot evenings they would sit
out upon the lawn in wicker chairs, fanning themselves and murmuring
against the heat. There was not obviously an official chaperonage, but,
by the very custom of that simple way of living, the older people were
usually within earshot of the young.

Bicycling had begun to give the latter more range; though not beyond the
lamplight of the streets after dark, for the roads were too rough.
Phatons and dogcarts and runabouts permitted tte--tte driving by
daylight; but not to great distances, nor with roadside parking in the
dusk--an idea completely unknown to the hourglass girl of the higher
caste. She lived within strict boundaries both of conduct and of manner,
and she was sufficiently her own chaperone. To have offered her a
cigarette, except as a rather feeble attempt at humour, would have
disturbed her as with something near an insult; and a rumour that she
slyly used a little rouge, or artificially coloured her lips or eyebrows
or lashes, would have frightened her as a threatening of intolerable
slander. And if such a thing as that she sometimes liked a drink of gin
could have been imagined and actually told of her, she might as well
have cut the throat of her baby brother in his cradle.

Yet who shall say she was less care-free and less buoyantly happy in her
youth in that pleasant town than are the liberated maidens of the place
to-day? Pleasures were simpler then; but that has never meant less
pleasure. Life was slower; but that means there was time to enjoy it a
little copiously. When the first country club was built, far, far out
among the woods and farms, it took us almost an hour to drive there from
downtown, unless we had a light vehicle and a fast horse. Even upon a
bicycle the going was slow; there were ruts to ride, and bumpy, dusty
country roads; and, after all, when the club was reached there was
nothing to do except to sit upon a veranda and look down upon the river
below the bluff. Yet the young people did it, and so did their elders,
and believed themselves delighted. A lovely landscape was there,
something to dwell with a little in those leisurely days when there was
time to talk and even time to think.

But that same summer the landscape at the country club was artificially
altered. The alteration was so slight that it was almost imperceptible
from the veranda; nevertheless it was a forerunner of the change into
the coming age, the first to touch the countryside. It was the feeble
beginning of a prodigious thing, yet we who watched the making of that
little alteration at the country club thought no more of it than if it
had been the laying out of a bowling green. At best it meant the
appearance of a slight imported fad, we supposed; a curious game that
the followers of fads in games might play for a season or so and then
forget, since it was too bothersome ever to get a grip of people and
attain the stability of tennis or croquet, or even quoits.

Two young men, members of the club, returned from a journey abroad, and,
hiring a few puzzled farm labourers from the neighbourhood, constructed
something they called a links. But if ever that word may be used in the
singular, what these two travellers made should be spoken of as a link.
It consisted of a square deposit of lumpy sod, imaginably a green, and,
at the distance of a hundred yards, a clay platform. That was all, but
the place soon resounded with conscientious cries of "Fore!" And when
these first golfers were ardent in sport upon their stretch of ground,
members of the club and visitors, glancing that way, would be stricken
into attitudes of still amazement. All summer and autumn there was one
question that had to be answered, or else given up, continuously:

"Are those people crazy?"




CHAPTER VI


Thus an unsuccessful young man, painfully engaged in the pursuit of
letters, had one of the earliest opportunities afforded in this country
to become a golfer instead of a writer. This might well have been a
temptation, because having no career at all, nor any visible business,
profession, or employment, was never a way to popular esteem among the
descendants of the hardy Western pioneers. In the remote, decadent East,
where the Anglomania of the later 'Eighties still had sway, there were
known to be, here and there, gentlemen of leisure; but west of the
Alleghanies only tramps were fully comprehended as representatives of
such a class.

Moreover, the parents and relatives of a persistently rejected writer
have the constant embarrassment of trying to explain his occupation to
inquirers; nothing could be more difficult, nor, when the inquirer is of
an especially practical turn of mind, more mortifying. Therefore, as
time passed and passed--and continued to pass--an effort to display
something more plausible than an exhaustive collection of printed
rejection slips from magazine offices, as proof of actual labour, seemed
more and more advisable. Unfortunately, this young man had now so
thoroughly acquired the habit of collecting these slips that he seemed
to have become unfitted for anything else.

In this strait an old family friend favoured him with an encouraging
talk. This was an elderly gentleman, professionally a lawyer, but one of
a varied career. He had done extraordinary writing and important
soldiering, though he had interrupted his writing, for a time, to become
our ambassador to a European power. As a soldier, he had fought his way
in war to a Major General's epaulets; and as a writer he had published a
novel that found as near a universal reading as any print may well
attain.

"What are you doing?" he asked one day. "You seem to spend most of your
time driving a pair of trotters to a red-wheeled runabout."

"That's only in the afternoons. I work at night."

"What for?" the General asked.

"Well, it's quieter and it draws less attention to the fact that I'm
trying to learn to write. I--I don't get on very well, General."

"So," he said, "I suppose you think you'd get on better if you got
something printed?"

"Well, yes," I answered. "At least it would be a sign that I was getting
somewhere. It would be a sort of justification for the embarrassment I'm
causing my relatives and friends when they try to explain me, wouldn't
it?"

"I'm not so sure of that," he said. "In fact, I somewhat doubt it. We
are a very practical people, and, though it's considered pretty
disgraceful not to do anything, every community has a few loafers and is
accustomed to see them hanging around the saloons or pool rooms,
borrowing tobacco and drifting down to the station to sit languidly on
packing-boxes when the trains go by. Our people look down on them, of
course, but understand them, because laziness and drink easily account
for them. It's a type that developed even among the early settlers, and
we've always had it among us. But the fact is that although for some
reason we are a reading people and comprehend the reading of books, we
don't understand anybody's writing 'em except peculiar strangers from
far away. We can't imagine one of ourselves writing a book unless
there's something idiotic or ridiculous about him."

"But, General, there's Mr. Riley. Surely he----"

"Yes," the General admitted. "The whole state has a great tenderness for
James Whitcomb Riley, that's true; it even brags of him, but always with
a note of indulgence, the sort of chuckle with which one mentions a
whimsical character whose drolleries make one laugh. Listen to any
public orator extolling the great men of the state. You'll hear our
ex-President's name bellowed, and the names of a dozen senators,
governors and industrial magnates; but you won't hear Riley's--not if
the orator considers himself a serious man speaking seriously. You'll
find the same thing in the newspaper editorials. As for myself, the
publication of my first novel was almost enough to ruin my law practice.
Whenever I took a case into court for a jury trial, the opposing lawyer
knew that all he had to do was to mention my authorship and I was
demolished. He would rise with an air of solemn waggery and address the
jury: 'I trust that I may be permitted to lay tribute at the feet of
literary ambition,' he would say. 'I trust I may bring my wreath of
laurel to be placed upon the poetic brow it should rightfully adorn. You
may not know this, but it is a fact, gentlemen, that the learned counsel
upon the other side has become an author. Yes, gentlemen, you are in the
presence of an author! Yes, gentlemen, my learned brother has written a
novel----' But that was about all he needed to say. As soon as the jury
of farmers and village merchants heard the word 'novel' they uttered
hearty guffaws, and after that I had no weight with them whatever. When
I addressed them their eyes bulged with derisive merriment, no matter
what I said. Merely to look at me roused an inward hilarity that flushed
their cheeks and bedewed their foreheads. I might as well have appeared
in court dressed as a circus clown."

"But after you had written _Ben Hur_, General----"

"Oh, yes," he said. "The church people approved of that, and I'm taken
seriously on other accounts, no doubt. Also, our fellow citizens are
more liberal than they were at the time when I wrote _The Fair God_.
Nevertheless, they are not wholly changed in their feeling that an
author, to be highly respectable and of some importance, ought to spring
from a distant community. If he is an American, he should come from New
England; but if he is English, he will impress us more. If he is French,
we will be almost ready to believe him a great man; while if he is
Russian, we will be sure that he is. Russia is so very, very far away;
but an author here at home---- No, don't be discouraged because you
can't prove by print that you are one. And, as for the embarrassment of
your relatives about you, don't be unduly troubled; their difficulty
might be worse. Remember, a great many of our fellow citizens would
rather have a loafer in the family than a writer."

Undoubtedly this talk with General Wallace helped, and so did the light,
red-wheeled rubber-tired runabout and the pair of lively young trotting
horses. Being young helped, too--though the young seldom know how much
their youth helps them--and it was a pleasant and easy time,
historically, to be young. There was a cheerful placidity in American
life then. The "free-silver scare" had passed and the issue was dead;
Europe was so far away that it still seemed an adventure to voyage
there; Asia was infinitely remote; all the world that we knew was at
peace, and a great many enlightened people were sure there would never
be another war of any consequence. It was a quiet world, a respectable
world, completed, unhurried, unpuzzled, unrebellious.




CHAPTER VII


In the Midland town, as elsewhere over the country, almost
everybody--among the native born--went to church either regularly or at
intervals. True, there were atheists and materialists here and there;
and there were scattered agnostics, followers of Ingersoll; but the
church governed the customs and prevailed in the established
conventionalities of the people. Moreover, the universal rule of the
church, and these customs and conventionalities, were not even slightly
disregarded except by daring people willing to risk interdiction. There
was a terrible and excluding word that excommunicated them--"fast". In
the age of bicycles and family surreys and "livery-stable rigs", this
word, with its implication of rapid movement, was almost the worst that
could be said.

Divorce and rouge were "fast" and as rare as a game of whist on Sunday;
late hours were "fast"; French novels were "fast"; a girl was "fast" if
she mentioned her stockings; a young man was "fast" if he mentioned
them; a married woman who went to a concert with a man not her husband
was "fast", and so was the man; Welsh rarebit cooked with beer was
"fast"; people who went to evening concerts in German beer gardens were
"fast"; people who played games of cards, or any other games, for
stakes, were "fast"; a woman who wore a low corsage was "fast"; it was
"fast" to be interested in the ballet, to read Ouida, or to have read
Byron's _Don Juan_; it was "fast" to give lively dinner parties on
Sunday. On Sunday, indeed, even fast horses were supposed to repose; it
was no seemly day for the red-wheeled runabout.

The churchly rule of the elders prevailed unchallenged by any "young
intellectual". Everywhere, even among those who were not churchgoers,
there was an abiding and accepting, not a questioning. One night a
milkman expressed his sense of this acceptance to me and spoke
reverently in the very spirit of the times. A friend of mine died; I had
been spending the night beside his coffin, and just before dawn had gone
out to walk up and down upon the lawn in the moist spring air. The
milkman, coming into the yard, observed me, and having filled the
household can upon the back steps approached for a hushed conversation.

"Is this where the fine young man's dead that I read about in the papers
last night?"

"Yes."

He sighed thoughtfully. "Well," he said, "I ain't a churchgoing man
myself, I'm sorry to say; but I'm an abiding man. My wife's a church
member and all, but I can't claim to be. I don't know whether it's going
to keep me out of heaven or not, because that's something nobody can
tell beforehand, not even church members themselves; but, on the other
hand, I reckon being an abiding man's pretty safe to keep me out of
hell. I like to read James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye, and I can't
claim I read the Bible anywhere like as much as I do them two; but yet I
never did claim there's any comparison in a religious way between James
Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye and them old prophets like David and Goliath
and Elisha and Job and Jeremiah, and all them. No, sir; I read James
Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye for pleasure; I can't deny it; but when it
comes to abiding, I abide by them old Bible prophets. Don't you believe
us abiding people got a pretty good chance to get in?"

"In? You mean into heaven?"

"Yes. That's my opinion, anyhow. We can't all be church members--got too
much to do that prevents it. Me, for instance, when I get back to the
dairy farm after my route on Sunday morning, why, it couldn't hardly be
expected I'd clean up and get on my Sunday suit and go to church. Night
watchmen, they can't get to church, either; but they're just as likely
to be abiding men as any. Pretty much everybody is either a church
member or at least abiding, when you get right down to the facts. Ain't
that your experience?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Yes, sir," he went on, "that's pretty much the way of it. It's just the
same all over the country, too. I've done considerable travelling; I've
travelled on every railroad in this state, and I've been on excursions
to Niagara Falls and Washington and Asbury Park; I've been in Cincinnati
time and again--I got kin living there--I've been to Keokuk, and I've
been twice to Chicago. Well, you naturally always get to talking to
passengers on trains, and, after you find out where they're from, and
all about their family, and how the crops look in their part of the
country, and what business conditions seem to be out there, why, nine
times out of ten you and them get to talking about religion. Well, sir,
I never come across but one infidel yet, in all my experience; and even
he wasn't so much of one--said a good many parts of the Old Testament
was too much for him. Except for that, he was as abiding a man as
anybody. But I expect he might go to hell on account of them parts he
said he didn't believe in. He's the only one I've run across, myself,
though of course I know there's some others here and there that don't
believe in the Bible at all; but there ain't many willing to take such a
risk. No, sir, not many. Of course I know there's plenty that'll take a
chance sliding off to one side now and then, like pitching horseshoes
out behind the barn on Sunday, or getting drunk Saturday nights, or
cussing around up an alley, maybe; but they know they can get back into
line by repenting and abiding again before it's too late. Yes, sir; if
you leave out saloon keepers and gamblers, and such like, the United
States is a pretty good pious sort of country, by and large. The
children respect and honour and obey the laws, and where there's a few
like me that can't hardly make it to get to church, why, anyhow, they're
abiding. Ain't that the way it seems to you?"

In general, though there were exceptions, that was the way it seemed to
anybody. There was a tremendous universal respect for respectability.
People who did not abide by the rule of the church and the law of the
land were not within that respect, and, unless they were very powerful
and adroit, they were outcasts if their disobedience became known. And
almost universally children honoured their parents, believing them to be
perfect in goodness, perfect in dignity; and the parents of that day
took infinite pains to present only this aspect of themselves to their
children. Less strict with the young than their own parents had been,
and much more liberal in everything, they nevertheless retained
authority and knew that they must never weaken it by endangering the
complete respect their children had for them.

The churches ruled over all the outward part of life, and, although
there were depths within the social body where they did not rule, even
in the depths they were feared and the infractions were stealthy, like
night poachings in the king's preserve. Even the legalized saloons dared
not be open enemies of the churches, and groped obscurely, under cover,
for a little local power in dirty small politics. But the rule of the
churches was not the rule of the Inquisition; it was neither early
Puritanism nor early Wesleyanism; it was not militant, except when the
corruption of brewery politics became too brazen. The children did not
challenge the church or the faith of their parents; usually they
accepted that faith themselves as a matter of course. Moreover,
respectability did not make the town gloomy; and, looking back upon it
now, it seems to have been not only a contented and peaceful place but a
fairly happy one.

Beauty was there, outdoors, and in the tranquil, friendly life of the
people. By June, if you ascended to the top of the monument and looked
forth from that high vantage in the air, you seemed to be upon a tower
rising from an island of stone surrounded not by water but by verdure.
There were just glimpses of roofs and windows among green leaves, for
the shade trees marched down the streets all the way to the State House,
the Courthouse, and the Circle, where stood the monument. Beyond the
town, a lazy silken creek wandered among great sycamores; and there were
other waters--a crystal river below high bluffs and a canal that was
like a long straight strip of green looking-glass. And all the air was
pure; only the clean white dust of the country roads blew a little in
the sunshine, and the sky over the town was unflawed blue in winter and
in summer.

Upon a summer evening, if you walked abroad, there was the multitudinous
rustle of leaves as if you walked in a woodland--as indeed you did;
there was the quiet murmur of voices from the verandas, or from where
the people sat out upon the lawns; there was the plod-plod of horses
passing with surreys for the evening family drive; there was the
tinkling of the little bicycle bells and the gliding passage of the
wheelmen's lamps, whiter small lights than the gold pencillings of the
fireflies among the shrubberies on the lawns. Sometimes the surrey
drivers would draw rein and pause, and the foot passengers upon the
sidewalk would stop; a quiet audience thus would gather outside an open
window where a girl with a lovely voice sang to her piano. It is true
that the song was likely to be sentimental, even sentimentally pathetic,
and the theme was nearly always a variation upon the topic of constancy.

    _Oh, love for a year, a week, a day!_
    _But alas for the love that loves alway!_

Or it might be the audience gathered on the sidewalk and in the street
beyond a picket fence about a lawn where young people danced upon a
waxed platform and an orchestra played by the light of Japanese lanterns
strung among the trees. The young people danced happily, and, although
they sometimes danced as late into the next morning as two o'clock, they
began--even when they were under seventeen--at about eight. They danced
for sheer gaiety and without other stimulation, though liquor was
obtainable openly at any bar. When the young men drank they kept away
from the "girls they knew"; and, if they were known to drink often, the
"girls they knew" kept away from them--permanently.

The music to which they danced was made by violins, 'cellos, flutes,
harps, triangles and bass viols; sometimes there was a clarinet and
sometimes mild drums and cymbals were heard; and again no one can deny
that most of the sound these instruments made was sentimental. What
seems incredible now, it is a fact that in those days old people could
bear to listen to the dance music that was modern then. Not only could
they bear to listen--they loved to listen; they could listen all evening
long without bleeding at the ears. For one reason, saxophones had not
yet been ejected by the volcanic insides of hyenas in eruption.

There were even midnight serenades, in those days, of a summer night;
that dashing custom had not quite disappeared. Young men would hire an
orchestra and an "express wagon", as the horsedrawn truck with a big
canvas top was called; musicians and gallants would drive to the house
of a pretty girl, encamp themselves noiselessly upon the lawn, and
presently, after a faint and covert tuning of instruments, dulcet melody
would ascend to her window. When she was sweetly thus awakened, she
would slide out of bed, crawl on hands and knees to the window and lower
the shade, raised for the passage of air. Then she would light the gas,
and the bright window in the dark night was the serenaders' reward, the
assurance that their music was heard and accepted. After a while they
would move silently back to the "express wagon", the wagon would creak
away, and the window would go dark again; yet for a time a breath of
romance would linger within it and upon the air.

No serenaded lady could have thought to say she "got a kick" out of such
a thing. Beyond question, it was a sentimental age! It was the age of
sentiment, of faith, of leisurely days and quiet nights, of reverent
children, of dignified parents, of placid newspapers and of settled and
contented living at home.

There the town lay, then, peaceful and completed, warm and green and a
little drowsy, upon a September afternoon, when the strangest sight of
all the _fin de sicle_--a sight even stranger than the photograph of a
living man's skeleton--came rolling forth from within the cavern of
forge and fire where it had been conceived.

The languid town awoke. Children, playing in back yards, ran shrieking
into the street; coloured servants, glancing from front windows, yelled
with surprise and bellowed for those in the kitchen to come and look;
old ladies were roused from naps and fluttered to the windows. Horses
snorted, reared and could not be soothed; dogs barked themselves insane,
and well they might.

Well, indeed, might those jolly old dogs bark; well might those kindly
old horses prance and run away! For what they beheld that day was their
Juggernaut; they might as well have cast themselves beneath its wheels
then and there. But for more than horses and dogs the monster rolling
through the street was to be the destroyer. Yet a little time and it
would have down those sturdy, strong-built, big old brick houses with
their broad plate-glass windows where faces stared, half startled, half
derisive, at the monster's first passing. A little time and the monster
would have them all down, every one of them; it would have them down and
their trees down and their green lawns devoured. It would have the whole
town down, and more; it would have the _fin de sicle_ down and extinct,
only the memory of it surviving in belittling laughter.

More, the monster and its adjutants would have the very spirit of that
age down. The old faiths were to be put at bay; the old abiding was to
vanish; the universal rule of the churches was to vanish; the old
content was to vanish; the old romantic sentiment was to vanish; leisure
was to vanish; the old reverences and dignities were to vanish; the old
authority of parents was to vanish; even dance music was to vanish and
be music no more. From the moment of that first apparition upon the
streets of the placid town, Death waited for the God of Things as They
Are.

And yet the monster that was to erase the world was no great shakes to
look at when we goggled at it that September day. It was only a topless
surrey with a whirling belt and other inexplicable machinery beneath it,
emitting vapour and hideous noises. But there were no shafts for a
horse--there was no horse--yet the wheels turned and the ridiculous
miracle moved.

In the front seat a jarred and vibrated man, reddened in the face by his
dreadful conspicuousness, held a crooked rod that seemed somewhat
uncertainly to guide the forward wheels. And along the sidewalks and
even at the tail of the monster, raced crowds of vociferous, mocking
boys and girls.

"Git a hoss!" they shrieked continuously. "Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a
hoss!"




CHAPTER VIII


Driving that pair of light trotters, one beautiful bright afternoon,
far, far out in the wooded country, almost as far as the city now
extends, I heard an inexplicable sound of thunder and a few minutes
later encountered a farm hand who was in a state of nervous upset.
Electrified, himself, by the unusual manifestation, he had left his
plough in a furrow, vaulted a snake fence and was standing all of a
tremble between the ruts of the dirt road when the runabout approached.
He made gestures of amazement and seemed wishful to communicate.

"Out of an empty sky!" he said hoarsely, and he pointed to a shattered
tree, solitary in the centre of the wide field he had been ploughing.
"Lightning! Right out of as bright and sunny a sky as ever I see! Not a
cloud in it--not a single cloud! Dog-gone if it don't look kind o' like
it was reachin' fer me and mighty near got me! Lightning out of an empty
sky! Who'd ever dream such a thing could happen?"

It may have been an omen. More than lightning can come out of an empty
sky when nobody dreams such a thing could happen. Thus, quite as
dumbfounding as the strange flash that shattered the solitary tree and
the ploughman's composure, there arrived with no forewarning a letter
from the most interesting and adventurous editor and publisher of that
day.

"We have read the MS. of your novel and shall be glad to publish it in
book form," this startling letter said. "Also, if you will come to New
York we should like to talk with you about using it as a serial in the
magazine."

In those first moments of mystification it was not easy to believe that
the words were actual. Five years of printed rejection slips had not
prepared one to receive even an encouraging handmade letter of rejection
from an editor, much less a letter of acceptance. Such a letter must be
read several times to make certain that the reader's eye is not
deceived, and then at intervals to be sure that his memory has not been
tricky. But no; all these readings having confirmed the accuracy of the
first, it became clear that the thin young man, however embarrassing he
might be in his new capacity, was definitely no longer a loafer.

"And so they were married" used to end all the troubles of the
fictitious lovers; and similarly, "So his manuscript was accepted by the
great publisher" might be thought to signify that the literary aspirant
lived happily ever afterward.

On my arrival in New York the great publisher said, "Just condense your
novel to one half its present length then we'll have space for it as a
serial in the magazine."

It seemed to me that he might as well have asked me to condense the
Brooklyn Bridge to half its length; yet Mr. McClure had every appearance
of believing that such things could be done; that they were done every
day, in fact; and that, as a matter of course, I knew how to do them.

I didn't. I hadn't the remotest idea of what should be done to that
ponderous bundle of manuscript to reduce it to half its weight.
Nevertheless, I carried it to a lodging on Madison Avenue--for the
comrades of the brownstone-front top floor were now dispersed to follow
their achieved professions--and there I nervously began the amputations.
At first they were a little dismaying, but before long the surgery
became interestingly vindictive. "Out you come!" seemed to be the very
pleasantest thing one could say to a chapter; and so emaciated grew what
remained of the manuscript that the new serial began to be known in the
magazine office as The Cablegram.

Several of the installments had been published before I finished the
work and came timidly home in the late spring--I had reason to return
timidly, even blushingly. In the story appearing monthly in unalterable
print, I had dealt with a pastoral aspect of my native state. I had been
romantic, sentimental and enthusiastic about the beauty of this aspect;
I fear I had appointed myself its champion. Moreover, I had expressed a
great deal of feeling for the populace; and, of course, it is an
embarrassing thing to meet people face to face when you have just been
making known--without their solicitation--your admiration and affection
for them. I feared they might think I had overpraised them; that I had
said too much, putting their modesty to trial. So, as I walked homeward
from the station, I was not surprised but a little abashed when I
encountered a middle-aged friend whose expression first showed that he
was somewhat startled to see me and then became one of grave reproach.

"I almost wonder," he said slowly--"I do actually wonder, in fact, that
you've had the courage to come back here."

"You--you mean my serial?"

"I certainly do! How could you have written such a thing?"

"I--I don't know exactly. I suppose it isn't very good writing, but
perhaps some day I can----"

"Perhaps nothing!" he interrupted. "You'll never wipe it out--not if you
live a thousand years!"

"I--I can't?"

"No, you can't!" he said. "There are some things that are not
forgivable. When you strike at the sacred altars of a people----"

"When I what?" I asked, for I began to be mystified. "When I----"

"When you throw mud upon the altars of a great people," he said. "As a
friend of your family, I'm sorry you have chosen to begin your career in
such a manner. Good-bye!"

He walked on, and so, not a little enfeebled and disconcerted, did I.
Then I met another friend, a person of my own age with whom I had some
intimacy. He was still willing to shake hands with me, I discovered,
though his expression was partly inimical, partly compassionate. I
mentioned that I had just got off the train, after my long absence, and
he made a rather disturbing inquiry.

"Has anybody seen you?" he said.

"Yes, I met Judge Martin a moment ago, not far from the station. He
didn't appear to be very pleased with me. He said something confusing
about my serial's having attacked the sacred altars and----"

"You look as if you didn't understand what he meant."

"No, I didn't--not exactly. I know, of course, that some people would
think I've been too enthusiastic--perhaps even rather gushing----"

"Gushing!" he interrupted. "Do you mean to say you don't know what
effect your serial has been having?"

"No. It didn't seem to be having any at all in New York, you see. I
supposed that out here more people naturally might read it, and----"

"I think you'll find that enough of us have been reading it," he said
grimly. "Didn't you really know that every paper in the state is
broiling you alive?"

"Why, no. I haven't seen any reviews."

"Then it's because your family have been too considerate to write you
about it. But these aren't reviews; most of 'em are editorials."

"I was afraid of it," I said. "I do wish I hadn't been quite so
gushing!"

But at that he shook his head. "I see you don't understand," he said.
"You'd better go on home. It would be best to have a member of your
family explain what's happened to you. Go find somebody that'll stick to
you no matter what you do, and ask 'em to break the news to you."

His advice was excellent; nevertheless a considerable time elapsed
before I understood what had happened to me. What had happened to me
was, indeed, a thing so significant of the times we lived in then that
the perspective of years and change was needed in order to comprehend it
fully. For it is true--and possibly, in the long run, fortunately
true--that we are almost never able to comprehend during the actual
moment of any happening the meaning of what is happening. The meaning of
"what had happened to me", the rain of denunciation that fell upon a
dazed but well-meaning young head, is clear enough to-day and marks how
sharply changed are the times we live in now.

In that final period of the Nineteenth Century, the country at a little
distance outside the cities was rustic. So were the small market towns
characteristically rustic; so were the villages and many of the smaller
county seats. The interurban trolley lines had not formed their enormous
network; and, except by rail, ten miles was a long distance. It was long
even for good horses because it had to be travelled over roads that were
a continuing dust heap in dry weather and sloughs of mud in wet; only at
intervals were there stretches of well-kept turnpike between toll gates.
People still believed that "a straight line is the shortest distance
between two points", and were to wait many years to discover that
between two points the best made and best kept road is the shortest
distance.

More, the metropolitan newspapers had almost nothing of their modern
circulation among outlying townlets and villages; there was no Rural
Free Delivery; great weeklies and the monthly magazines were almost
unknown to farm and village. Small local newspapers gave the people of
the farms and little towns some news of the world from which they seemed
almost infinitely remote; the Bible and the Almanac made the staple of
reading, crops and politics the staple of discussion. When the day's
work was over there was nothing to do except to sleep; and, when the
week's work was over and the farmers drove to town on Saturday and
hitched their teams to the courthouse fence in the Square, there was
nothing to do, after their trading, except in the saloons. The farmers'
wives were predominant in the hospitals for the insane.

Naturally, the remoteness and comparative isolation of the country
people sharply distinguished them from city people, who, of course, tend
to become much of a pattern. The manners, the dress, the habit of
thought, and the speech of a small and sequestered county seat were
something of a pattern, too, but the pattern was rustic; and it was with
life in such a county seat that the berated serial principally dealt.
The berating, however, came from the people and editors in the cities
and larger towns and thus proved as mystifying as it was painful to the
serial's author. It was not until one of its assailants used a personal
pronoun that the resentment it had roused began to be comprehensible.

"You've maligned the people of your native state," this critic said.

"I only wrote about a few of 'em, and I did that as truthfully as I
could. I praised them; I didn't malign them."

"But look at what your serial is making the East think of this part of
the country!"

"I haven't heard of its making the East think anything at all. I haven't
heard of anybody's reading it except the people hereabouts who read it
in order to make themselves more and more indignant with me."

"We've got a right to be indignant," he said. "You're making the East
think of us as an absolutely uncultivated backwoods people. They think
that of us too much already, and here you go, adding to the slander!"

It was his using the pronoun "us" that gave me the clew I needed. "What
had happened to me" was what had happened to Edward Eggleston after his
publication of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, and it had happened
sometimes, though more mildly, to Mr. Riley because of his poetic
studies of the Hoosier dialect. "We" were afraid that such writings
would encourage the East in its belief that we were unsophisticated and
unmodish and uncultured. The East wouldn't know how to distinguish
between our obscure, bucolic communities and our brilliant and forward
cities.

There was some ground for this fear, moreover. Just as Europeans seemed
to believe that bison, Indians and Bret Harte's gamblers might be found
anywhere inland from the Atlantic Coast, so did New Yorkers, Bostonians
and Philadelphians appear to be under the impression that the axe of the
pioneer still rang in our flatland clearings. We were sensitive; we
could ill bear the sting of Eastern impressions; and in like manner the
East, too, was sensitive to oversea impressions; in particular to
British. And here we come to a significant matter--our whole country was
sensitive to foreign impressions of us.

We were more than sensitive; we were thin-skinned enough to be jumpy.
Criticism from abroad sent us into furies of vindictive denunciation of
the critic, as Charles Dickens had long before discovered. When a
travelling Englishman reported in print that not only a large proportion
of our male populace but many of our statesmen and jurists chewed
tobacco, and that spittoons were prevalent in our hotels and public
buildings and were not unknown in private houses, we said he had dried
egg on his coat. We entreated him to tell us what he thought of us; but
if he uttered anything except platitudes of praise, we showed our hurt
by jeering at him.

We wanted praise, unlimited praise; we could endure nothing else. We
begged praise from the traveller before he landed. "What do you think of
America?" we asked him eagerly, and our eagerness was our hunger for
flattery.

We still ask him that, but there is a difference. The country had no
confidence in itself in those days when it raged if it wasn't flattered.
It had not become self-sufficient; it had not discovered its place in
the world; and it bragged of power that it was not sure it possessed. We
had not become complacent enough to endure criticism.

Our orators understood perfectly that we could endure nothing but
flattery. The orator went to the people then, not with a microphone, but
directly, with larynx, lungs, a "Prince Albert" coat, and with a white
pitcher and thick glass goblet on a deal table. First, he flattered the
audience before him; then he praised the community they lived in; then
he offered tribute to the state of which that community was a part; then
he paid his compliments to the country; and often his peroration was
addressed to the national banner.

Of course, if his oration was political, his flattery was addressed only
to that portion of the community, state and nation constituting his own
party; all members of other parties, especially the Presidents, senators
and governors they had elected, were treated as worthless. Thus an
observer might have thought that criticism of the country was, indeed,
permissible, since certain millions of the populace, the Democrats,
cheered loudest when aspersions cast upon certain other millions, the
Republicans, were most poisonous; but the observer who came to such a
conclusion would have been deceived. Party criticism has ever been
understood as sometimes half-humorous buncombe, as sometimes yearning
for power, money and office, as sometimes genuine desire to "save the
country". And always it has interpreted itself not as criticism of the
country but, on the contrary, as the highest and most enthusiastic
patriotism.

"Our native land and its people are noble, magnificent, grand,
incomparable on the face of the globe," it says. "But those
feeble-minded, self-seeking and largely corrupt creatures of the
opposition will damage all this perfection if they are put into office.
Do not trust them with so priceless a charge."

Emigrants from other countries came in millions to seek better fortune
among us. We nodded benevolently, and, when they became citizens,
congratulated ourselves on their appreciation of us; but when an
American went abroad to live and changed his citizenship we damned him
on every street corner.

"What? We aren't _good_ enough for him, the green-spined descendant of a
magenta-whiskered tom-cat?" we said. "We aren't good enough for _him_?"
And when his friends explained that he had moved to foreign parts for
the sake of the climate we felt the insult no less unendurable. Love me,
love my dog! Find fault with my climate? Jackass!

                 *        *        *        *        *

The unfortunate young serial had innocently wandered into the jumpiest
area of Midland sensitiveness; and, although before the issue of the
final instalment the truth had appeared that the author's intentions
were anything but critical and the denunciations somewhat abated, he
still had much the general sensation of a person ridden out of town on a
fence rail for saying the wrong thing. Tar and feathers had, indeed,
been among the practical suggestions of reviewers from the larger county
seats; and so, a little later, when another and much shorter serial was
printed in the magazine and then as a book, there appeared to be, not in
the flatlands but beyond the Atlantic, an area of probable sensitiveness
where this story, too, might lead to similar practical suggestions.
Wisdom gathered from bruises advised against its being printed there.

It was a romance in miniature, no longer than a long short story,
written a few years before the novel that had just appeared, and even
more in the fashion of its time; for the younger a writer is the more
likely he is to write in the fashion of the time, even when he does not
know he is doing it and believes that his writing is actually a revolt
against the fashion. Romanticism was the fashion then; a romanticism
somewhat sentimental, but more concerned with the continuous movement of
incredible "characters" than with sentiment. What the action of my own
small outright romance in the fashion required was that nearly all the
secondary characters should be inimical to the principal figure; and I
had happened to conceive this principal figure as a sympathetic French
gentleman sojourning in England. Therefore the inimical characters were
all English, and, as the action was based upon snobbery, all the English
depicted were shown to be virulent and ruthless snobs except one. And
for consistency's sake it was explained that this exceptional gentleman
had been improved by a French strain in his ancestry.

Altogether, here was a yarn to make any patriot British heart
murderous--a Frenchman, symbolically beautiful in all respects,
exploited at the expense of caitiff Englishmen. Even the English heroine
was a snob; great English nobles were represented as worse than snobs;
they were brutal, cowardly, fawning, treacherous, clumsy and
impenetrably stupid. It was impossible to imagine allowing such a thing
to be printed in England, or the play that had been made out of it for
the American theatre to be presented there. I wanted to go to England
some day without simultaneously taking my departure therefrom upon a
fence rail.

An English friend wrote me that I was mistaken to be apprehensive; and
deciding that I could, after all, keep to the Continent when I went
abroad, I nervously consented to make the experiment. The British
reviews of the book were sent to me. They were blandly benevolent. Some
of them mentioned the fact that all the English characters were
extremely horrid; but went on to say that English memoirs of the period
of the story easily justified the author in this usage, and for that
matter there was undoubtedly still a great deal of snobbery in Britain.

When the play was produced it received a flawlessly cheerful approval;
it had a thoroughly undeserved and inexplicable run of several years,
and afterward was frequently revived. The King had a command performance
of it at Windsor; nobody ever resented anything about it, not even its
absurdity, and nobody ever inquired whether it was written by a
foreigner or by somebody from home.

Thus it seemed to be astonishingly revealed by this small episode that
the British wholly lacked our kind of sensitiveness, and, as a matter of
fact, they did lack it. They had good reason to lack sensitiveness. They
knew their predominant place in the world; their confidence was perfect;
they were sure of the power Britain possessed, and therefore, instead of
bragging of it, they almost never mentioned it. This confidence, this
warranted, easy assurance on the national scale seemed admirable; but
here, on this side of the world, we were often irritated by it. We were
irritated because we hadn't anything like it within ourselves--and that
was so short a time ago that already we were in the Twentieth Century.




CHAPTER IX


The old outright antipathy between Republicans and Democrats, heritage
of the Civil War, still lingered in elderly hearts, and was not wholly
extinct elsewhere, though the newspapers no longer talked of the _fin de
sicle_ and the Twentieth Century had arrived. Moreover, with this
feeling there still existed among the best citizenry the habit of
political activity. Most of the elderly men whom I knew had been
soldiers during the War for the Union; and most of them were, or had
been, in politics. Having fought for their country and saved it from
dismemberment, they naturally felt that they were the people to "run"
it, or at least to see that it was "run right". Their children, the
youth of the next generation, had politics with every meal; a United
States senator was a great man; and every little boy was told on his
birthday that he might live to be President. By the time he reached
college--if he went to college--he had usually given up that ambition as
beyond him; but, if he won some distinction in undergraduate oratory, it
was still predicted for him that he might one day become a senator.
Politics was the field for greatness.

During the _fin de sicle_, however, this feeling had begun to alter,
and, with the Twentieth Century, the change was more decisively
apparent. Nevertheless, in the Midland country, at least, it was still
true that to some extent everybody was in politics and, for my own part,
I found myself quite naturally, though not ambitiously, a member of the
State Legislature. The experience was lively, enlightening, and in one
or two particulars infuriating--for there were operations that could not
be viewed with humour--and when it was over I published as short stories
some studies founded upon observation. Straightway I was in trouble
again, this time with a powerful and authoritative critic. He was at
that time the President of the United States, and he sent for me to come
to Washington.

"Do you understand what you're doing to politics?" he inquired.

"Why--why, no, sir. I haven't noticed anything. I've only been in the
State Legislature and nobody seemed to----"

"I'm not referring to your membership in that assembly," he interrupted
with some sharpness. "I'm speaking of the stories you're writing about
politics and politicians. Do you understand their effect?"

"Well, I--I hadn't heard of any. One of my aunts told me she'd been
reading them, but that's all I----"

"Never mind," he said. "Everything published in that magazine has some
effect, and what you're publishing in it now is the darker side of
politics. Do you deny it?"

"No, I----"

"Certainly you don't. What's your object?"

"Well, I thought that perhaps if people could be made to realize some of
the worst things that do go on they'd want to remedy them. I thought
they'd----"

"You're absolutely wrong!" he said with his well-known decisiveness.
"It's precisely what they don't do. They say to themselves, 'Ah, I
thought so! Politics is too dirty a business for any decent person to
mix with; I'll keep out of it.' That's precisely what they say and
that's what you're helping them to say. Too many people feel that way
already. Too many fine gentlemen have begun to say they won't soil their
white hands in muddy waters. They wouldn't mind accepting
ambassadorships, but they despise knowing how to swing their own wards,
and they wouldn't shake hands with a precinct committeeman to save the
Union! You're feeding the satisfied conviction of such people that
superiority to politics and politicians is the correct posture. You're
helping to crystallize the feeling that politics is no 'business for a
gentleman'. You believe that's a dangerous and damaging feeling, don't
you?"

"Yes; but I'd hoped to----"

"It's infinitely worse than dangerous and damaging!" he went on with his
accustomed vigour. "It's absolutely destructive and what it may destroy
is incalculable. Not only have people begun to say that politics is no
'business for a gentleman', they've begun to believe that politics is no
business for a business man--except as his business may sometimes make
it necessary and therefore excusable for him to be a dictator and
corruptionist. The old ambitions of able young men are disappearing; the
enormous fees awaiting adroitness in the professions and the
disproportionally vast rewards obtainable in big business are changing
all that. The best talents, the best minds are abandoning politics to
the smaller professional politicians, and, unless that is checked, the
country will some day see precisely that kind of politician prevalent in
the United States Senate itself. There are actually hundreds and even
thousands of men in the country to-day who won't even take the trouble
to vote! What you're writing now helps to make them say, 'Well, why
should I vote? What difference will my vote make in all this
boss-controlled turmoil?' Well, between the boss and the gentleman in
the club window who won't even soil his gloves with a ballot, give me
the boss every time! And if I have to choose between the reformer too
dainty to know his own subject by experience--between the man who stands
aside and yet criticizes and the man who takes his coat off and goes in
to swing his ward, I'll take the one that sweats in his shirt sleeves!
You're giving countenance to the gentleman in the club window; you're
helping the stand-aside reformer to shout 'Dirty! Dirty!' at the best
men in politics as well as at the worst, because the stand-aside
reformer never knows the best from the worst. You're giving all the
stand-aside people more chance to feel that they're right in holding
aloof and feeling superior! Anything that encourages asses in their
asininity is harmful; but it's infinitely more damaging to give able
young men reason to say, 'Politics is too dirty; I'll go into the law or
into business, and leave it to the swine to run my country!' That's
precisely what your gloomy pictures of politics are doing--making people
say, 'Leave it to the swine!' Excellent! If it's left to the swine, how
long do you think it will be before only swine come to the meal?"

He had a way of saying "swine" that gave the simple Jacobean word a
damning powerfulness: the swine he had in mind seemed to be incomparably
more swinish than the ordinary swine other people sometimes had in mind;
and he was so severe with me that even though he was giving me an
excellent luncheon while he scolded me, I had a fear that he might
possibly suspect the presence of at least a few porcine bristles
somewhere upon my person. On the contrary, he was entirely benevolent,
and the scolding was only a manifestation of the Colonel's great
kindness to young people who were "trying to write". Moreover, he had
said some things to be remembered; it is possible to look back upon them
now and believe that they were at least a little prophetic.




CHAPTER X


There were people at that time who thought the automobile might be
developed until some day it would become a vehicle of common use. A
friend of mine even thought it would displace horses altogether.

"You'll live to see the day when there won't be any horses in the street
and the horseless carriages are as ordinary as surreys are now," he
said.

But his prediction seemed to be fanciful. The machines were unreliable
and the early enthusiasts who owned them led laborious and exasperated
lives. They spent hours lying upon their backs in the street, or in the
mud or dust of country roads, striving with the inwards of perverse
metals above them; they were never sure of arriving anywhere, or even of
starting for anywhere. They often found themselves helpless at critical
moments, and all moments were critical. They were mired in mud and had
to hire horses; they hired horses on gentle hill slopes; they hired
horses ignominiously in crowded streets; they bore conspicuous derision
and sometimes leaped for their lives from explosions, or from flames
that encompassed them without warning.

The strange-shaped horseless grotesques were propelled by the action of
steam or electricity or explosive gas; there was conflict and argument
over which served best, and there was further argument over what name
the things should bear--"horseless carriages", or the French term
"automobiles", or "cars", or just "machines". And, when an attendant
mechanic was hired, there was other debate upon a title for him. Should
he be called "mechanic", or "mechanician", or "driver", or "chauffeur"?
Mark Twain, with the many horse-power of the elephant in mind, suggested
"mahout".

When the gas machines moved they did it with outrageous uproar, and the
vibration of them shocked the spines of the hardy experimentalists who
rode in them. In 1903, in the early spring, I was stricken with typhoid
fever which harried me until the summer; and, to soften the noises that
came into the open windows of the sick-room, the street was covered with
fine sand to the depth of two or three inches for the distance of half a
block. In the daytime no automobile would enter the sanded area; but
sometimes, after dark, one that had not wandered into that shrouded
street before would come chugging and snorting into the sand and be
caught there like a fly in soft glue. Then there would be blasphemous
metallic roarings, accompanied by simple human cursings, for half an
hour perhaps.

But the new locomotion improved from month to month; engineers in
creative frenzy designed and experimented; stranger and stranger new
shapes clattered, banged and spat fire upon our streets; more horses ran
away every day; and the upset citizens wrote fiercely to the papers
demanding ordinances excluding motor-driven vehicles from the public
highways. Nevertheless, the improvements went on, and, in that same
year, having added a sea voyage to convalescence, I drove from Brussels
to Waterloo and back in a device called--by the attendant Italian
mechanic--an "automobilly", and was only slightly prostrated by the
journey.

This automobilly was very high and shaped like an English brake; the
engine howled in a ponderous box at the rear, and the front seat was
protected by a tremulous leather dashboard from which one missed the
whip socket. The driver steered with a bent rod, and the brave
passengers mounted to their seats by means of a little stepladder which
was afterward stowed away under the rear seat. The large wooden wheels
had solid rubber tires, and their passage over an ancient stone-paved
road would have been stimulating to the spinal ganglia if the
performance by the engine's two large cylinders had not already attended
to that. The return to Brussels was safely accomplished by four in the
afternoon; the passengers walked into the hotel unaided; but having
reached their rooms retired instantly to bed and did not rise again
until noon of the next day.

Thereafter, for a time, we forswore horseless vehicles, let use them who
would; they were intended evidently for people with rubber backbones and
no fretful imaginations. When you were driving a horse and ran into
anything, the impact of collision was with the force of a single steed,
not thirty or forty; if you ran over a pedestrian, he endured the
passing weight of some hundreds of pounds, not of several tons; if you
ran over a dog, he got up and went home, terrified but usually not
ruined. Moreover, if things went wrong when you were driving a horse,
you had somebody to blame; a horse could hear what you said to him and
be brought to repentance. You could never reform an automobilly or get
any relief by abusing it.

Europe was beginning to use the machines nevertheless, and more of them
were seen there than in America; they were improving more rapidly there
than in America, too; and in France we found that everybody talked about
them excitedly.

"It's going to be a craze--and more," an elderly American who lived in
Paris predicted one night at dinner. "It's going to be a craze on this
side of the water first and then in America. It will be a craze in
Europe first because of the splendid military highways and the improved
roads generally. No sane person would attempt to do any touring in such
machines on the horrible American roads; but when the craze becomes
furious over there it may do a good thing; it may improve the roads so
that one can drive about the country with horses in some comfort.
Outside of that, I regard the self-moving vehicle as one of the most
terrific visitations our old earth will ever endure."

"You're sure that a craze for it is coming?"

"It's in the air," he said. "Just now, to operate one of those outrages
is the distinguished thing to do. Every few days one or another of my
friends informs me that he has made the great investment. 'Well, I'm in
for it!' he says, and his eyes glisten with pride and adventurous
excitement. 'I have bought one!' Then he proceeds to boast of its
horse-power and swears that he has already driven it from Versailles to
the Louvre in twenty-eight minutes. He has one hand in a bandage, a torn
ear and a bruise over his eye, and he is delighted with these injuries.
The women will help make it a craze because of the special costumes the
sport requires--the wonderful hats, the veils, the pongee coats and the
gauntlets. And for the vanity of men, already it is a greater
distinction to show automobile goggles sticking out of your breast
pocket than a ribbon on your lapel. With these symptoms evident, the
diagnosis is simple--within a very few years nobody's life will be safe
the moment he steps out of doors."

"You aren't serious?"

"Try to cross the Champs lyses when the crowd is returning from the
Grand Prix," he said. "You will find that little task sufficiently
preoccupying now, when all but a few of the vehicles are drawn by
horses. Imagine the horse traffic complicated by great numbers of these
roaring, darting machines. Of course I'm serious! _Les autos_ are man's
most dangerous invention, and I am not forgetting that his inventions
have brought him the blessing of gunpowder and nitroglycerin. So far,
the automobilists have contrived principally to get only themselves
killed, and usually when they have been racing their dreadful
contraptions; but as the craze spreads there will be massacres of
innocents on every city boulevard and country highway. The new machine
is simply a locomotive; but remember this mortal difference: a
locomotive runs only upon the rails provided for it. Send not a few but
thousands of locomotives wandering irresponsibly over the face of Europe
and America at a hundred kilometres an hour and you will have an idea of
what this certainly coming contagion is going to do. And yet all the
slaughter and destruction will be only a part of the curse that is to
come upon the world."

The others at the table were amused by this prophesying, as preposterous
as it was gloomy, and one of them asked, "What worse can a craze for
horseless transport do than to massacre the innocents?"

"It can make a change in the life of the people," the prophet said, not
relaxing his gravity. "It will do more than mock the speed craze of the
bicyclists; it will obliterate the accepted distances that are part of
our daily lives. It will alter our daily relations to time, and that is
to say it will alter our lives. Perhaps everybody doesn't comprehend how
profoundly we are affected by such a change; but what alters our lives
alters our thoughts; what alters our thoughts alters our characters;
what alters our characters alters our ideals; and what alters our ideals
alters our morals. When the horseless craze becomes universal it is not
too much to say that the world will be inhabited by a new kind of
people--and again I am serious."

"What kind of people will they be?"

"To themselves, they will of course represent an advance," he said.
"They will look back upon us with a pitying contempt; but to us, as we
are now, I think they would seem almost grotesque; they would appear to
be machinery mad and strangely metallic. They will be unbelievably
daring; they will be reckless of life--fast, materialistic, and yet
incredibly prompt and efficient; therefore they will be richer than we
are. Everything will be changed, because when a man accepts a new idea
that revolutionizes his daily life, his mind becomes hospitable to every
other new revolutionary idea. We are just entering the period when most
of what we have regarded as permanently crystalline will become
shockingly fluid--that is to say, we are already in the transition
period between two epochs. We have seen the one and most of you here
to-night will see something of the other. Your point of view will shift
with the universal change; and, if you live, you will yourselves become
strange inhabitants of the new world. A quarter of a century from
to-night you will be taking as an accepted matter of course, and without
a shiver, things that are simply unthinkable to you now. I cannot tell
you what those things will be. I am only a reasoner and not an
inspirational prophet, but I am sure that if you could have a vision of
yourselves twenty-five years older you would be startled and
incredulous. And in the meantime, within only two or three years, every
one of you will have yielded to the horseless craze and be the boastful
owner of a metal demon; you will talk nothing but machines, and as you
are being removed to the hospital you will babble to the
stretcher-bearers of horse-power and kilometres per hour. Restfulness
will have entirely disappeared from your lives; the quiet of the world
is ending forever."

The pessimist gave us two or three years to begin our transfiguration
into strange inhabitants of the new epoch but for my own part I did not
need quite so long. The fair golden sunshine upon the boulevards became
more and more shot with the blue vapours; the smell of burnt oil and gas
grew tolerable to the nostrils and then actually enticing.
Simultaneously, the trains to Paris from the country suburb where I had
gone to live appeared to become more and more inconvenient until at last
the day came when I perceived that the contagion was irretrievably upon
me. Excited by the discovery of my condition, I lost no time but hurried
to the office of an automobile agent on the Champs lyses and asked him
to be my friend. He had various kinds of automobiles to sell, on
commission; I left it to him to choose which one was best suited to my
circumstances and my ambitions.

When most of us who are elderly or middle-aged recall the purchase of
our first automobile, in those early days of motoring, we feel the
forget-me-not breath of an ancient pathos upon our hardened cheeks.
There seems to have once been something touching about us.




CHAPTER XI


The agent appeared to be a little puzzled by my request for his
friendship; but, after looking at me thoughtfully for some moments, he
said that nothing would give him greater pleasure. And when I explained
that Providence had entirely denied me any talent for comprehending
machinery, and that all I could ever hope to know about an automobile,
through my own study and observation, was what colour it had been
painted, he became enthusiastic.

"You ask for my friendship," he said. "You shall have it; already I feel
myself drawn to you. You need disinterested advice. Excellent! I am your
friend and I will advise you. I have precisely what you want. I have a
superb automobile for you. It is not entirely new; but that makes it all
the better, because a little usage imparts elasticity to the operating
devices. It has been owned by a friend of mine who feels himself
compelled to part with it, though he has grown so fond of it that he
will not give it up except to a person able to appreciate it. You will
obtain a great deal of happiness from this superb vehicle. It is as fast
as your heart could desire, and the joy you will experience as you drive
it at ninety or a hundred kilometres the hour----"

I interrupted him, though I liked what he was saying: "No; I--I don't
think I'd better try to drive it myself. I have tried patiently to learn
what makes these machines move, and I believe that I have succeeded in
mastering the fundamental principle. My understanding is that an
explosion of gas within a rigid compartment makes a pressure on
something that is obliged to go up or down, or both, and this motion is
somehow converted into a turning of wheels. Friends have tried to teach
me how the motion is converted; they have drawn diagrams for me and I
have faithfully studied them, but without any result whatever. To every
mind there are certain things that cannot be conveyed, and this is one
of the things that cannot be conveyed to mine. And as it seems to be
established that unless one knows what takes place beneath one when one
pushes a lever operating certain machinery over which one is sitting,
one isn't justified in pushing such a lever, I have concluded that it
will be safer for myself, and for people generally, so to speak, if I
refrain from pushing the levers of this superb vehicle you have been so
kind as to select for me. I think I should employ a chauffeur."

"Excellent!" the agent said. "But let me advise you, as your
friend--first complete the purchase of the automobile we have selected.
If you engage the chauffeur before you own the automobile, you will be
embarrassed, because he would immediately ask you, 'What species of
automobile am I expected to drive?' You would be confused and perhaps
mortified to reply that you have no automobile. A certain amount of
pretentiousness may attach to a person, who, lacking an automobile,
possesses a chauffeur."

"I hadn't thought of such a thing," I said hurriedly. "Could I see the
automobile this morning?"

"Perfectly! Naturally, you should see the automobile before you purchase
it; but I tell you confidently you are going to be delighted. We will go
at once." He took me to a garage and there displayed to me a red car
which he patted proudly and affectionately. "Behold it! This is what I
have promised you. Have you ever seen anything more perfectly fitted to
your special requirements? Think how you will look in it in the Bois de
Boulogne! And observe, you will not need to buy any equipment or
accessories except some tools. It already has a covering, which can be
elevated in case of rain, and two splendid oil lamps with reflectors;
you will not be annoyed by having to purchase a top and lamps, nor by
the delay of getting them fitted to the machine; they are included in
the price. Did I not tell you it is superb?"

Some workmen had joined us and I wished to appear intelligent. "What
horse-power has it?" I asked.

"Forty--forty horses would be needed to do what it will do."

"Ah--what kind of a car is it?"

"What kind? It is a touring car."

"I mean what make."

"It is Italian, a magnificent Lux."

"Is it, indeed?" I said, impressed. "A genuine Lux?"

"Genuine? It could not be more so. Observe it!"

I did. I went to it and looked at it carefully. There was a narrow door
in the middle of the rear wall for the entrance of passengers, and when
this door was closed a little seat could be swung down from it, thus
allowing three people to sit in the tonneau. Moreover, a long wicker
hamper was strapped to each side of the car, above the rear wheels, and
these arrangements pleased me.

"It is very convenient," I said. "People can get in by the little door
and these hampers seem to me a great improvement. Luncheon could be
carried in them, or almost anything."

"Yes," the agent agreed, "luncheon, maps, an umbrella, a cane--anything
you wish. I was sure you would be delighted with the baskets. Are they
not charming? As you say, they are a great improvement, and only a few
of the very finest automobiles are equipped with them. Every convenience
you can imagine accompanies this superb Lux. Have I been correct? This
is perfectly the car you wish to buy?"

"I--I think so. I believe----"

One of the mechanics who stood by interrupted. "Don't you care to look
at the engine?"

"Indeed, I do," I said. "Where is it?"

"It is in front," the agent explained. "All the most modern automobiles
have the engine in front under a protecting hood nowadays." He opened
the hood. "Observe it! Have you ever beheld a more perfect mechanism?
Isn't it a masterpiece?"

"I'm sure it must be," I said. "Could we take a little drive?"

"A drive?" he repeated thoughtfully. "A drive? You would prefer to drive
in it before completing the purchase? I will see if that can be
arranged."

He spoke to two of the workmen and withdrew them to a corner of the
garage, where the three engaged in a long conversation, gesticulating
earnestly, while I again examined the baskets and the little door,
becoming more and more pleased with them. Finally the agent returned to
me.

"You shall have your drive," he said benevolently. "First, we shall go
to lunch; after that we shall come back and then you shall have your
drive."

When we came back, we climbed into the car through the fascinating
little door and sat in the tonneau, while a serious-looking mechanic
occupied the driver's seat and another went to the crank in front of the
car, to start the engine. The agent chatted gaily, speaking often of the
charming wicker hampers; but the seriousness of the workman who was to
drive appeared to increase, and so did that of his companion, who was
for some time violently engaged with the crank.

"Do not be discouraged," the agent said. "Often the best of
automobiles--even a Lux--will require several turns of the crank before
the engine----"

He was interrupted by a shattering roar; the engine had gone into action
and the mechanic leaped back from the crank, then climbed into the seat
beside the driver.

"Do not be disturbed," the agent shouted in my ear. "The noise is rather
loud because we are in an enclosure. In the open, you will almost not
notice it at all. Also, there will be much less vibration as soon as we
are in motion."

When we were out of doors I persuaded myself that he was correct. We
sounded like an itinerant battle and we undeniably vibrated; but we
moved with startling rapidity, the wind hard in our faces; and I found
the experience so exciting, even so exhilarating, that when we returned
I decided that this superb Lux must be mine. I had a final moment of
hesitation.

"You remember," I said to the agent, "you said you would act as my
friend, my trusted adviser. I appeal to you now as you stand in that
capacity. Do you sincerely advise me to buy this automobile from you?"

He looked me in the eye. "I will reassure you," he said earnestly and
gently. "Listen well to what I am going to tell you. It is simply this:
I give you my word of honour that I would sell this automobile to my own
brother."

That settled it. I signed the purchase papers on the spot; but, when I
engaged a chauffeur and we attempted to take the superb Lux home, I
began to comprehend that the agent's brother at some time in their lives
had done him a horrible injury.

The chauffeur and I, seated in the superb Lux, left the garage
thunderously at three o'clock of a bright May afternoon and covered a
dozen blocks before we had our first breakdown. Fortunately, we were
near a repair shop and were delayed only an hour. The subsequent
breakdowns were more serious and the last one happened long after dark
in a deserted portion of the Bois de Vincennes. There were sounds of
breakage, of things hurtling through the air, and the machine stopped
violently. This abruptness no longer disconcerted me, as already I had
learned that the superb Lux knew no other manner of stopping; but the
chauffeur's mutterings had what young people sometimes like to speak of
as an air of finality. He went forward, groped laboriously in the dust
of the road and returned with what seemed to me, as he held them up for
inspection, some fragments of a heavy chain.

He confirmed my impression--a chain, apparently needful for locomotion,
had been broken and dispersed; now it lay sprinkled upon the surrounding
terrain in the darkness.

"But even if I could find it all," Victor said, "how could I reunite
it?"

Victor was an Alsatian; he spoke French in a manner all his own; and in
this he was no more individual than I. We had need of a great deal of
conversation between us to arrive at small communication, but we finally
came to an understanding. It would not be sensible to remain throughout
the night as we were, Victor said; the locality was favoured by _les
apaches_. He proposed to sit in a clump of bushes near the road and
watch the car. If _apaches_ arrived and stole it he would remain quietly
in the underbrush, and I agreed that the superb Lux would be what the
scoundrels deserved. If they did not appear, Victor would await a relief
expedition, and I went forward to arrange it. After walking two miles, I
found a pair of horses and a truckman willing to accept the commission;
but I did not return with them; I drove the rest of the way in a hired
carriage. The superb Lux, Victor, the truckman and the two horses
reached home at two in the morning. They had passed wine shops in
several villages, but the two horses were still sober.




CHAPTER XII


Pedestrians had not developed then a precautionary sense that they
possess now almost as if it were an instinct; they had not learned to
time the approach of an automobile. People walking along country roads
and crowds on the crossings of city streets were alike in this respect;
despite an occasional reckless bicyclist, they were accustomed to
vehicles moving at speeds of from three or four to seven or eight miles
an hour; and, even if a fast horse came tearing down on them at nine or
ten miles an hour, the sound of his hoof beats was the well-known signal
to hurry a little, but not unduly. It was difficult to understand, when
we were on foot, that we must begin to calculate upon less time to get
out of the way, since throughout the centuries a fast horse had been the
fastest thing upon any highway; and we would need years of indignant
experience to teach us that the combination of old human nature with the
new power for speed made inevitable a basic change in the mental
attitude and bodily action of all pedestrians. When automobiles formed a
slight proportion of the traffic and there were hundreds of horse
vehicles where there was one automobile, the one automobile often
appeared from among them like a charging demon, horrifying and
unexpected. The demon was noisy; but the noise was so unfamiliar and so
startling that foot passengers lost their heads in the crisis of his
approach.

When the superb Lux was not in a repair shop, we drove either about the
countryside or into Paris; and at night, after these excursions, when I
went to bed, that half-awake interval preceding sleep would be crowded
with pictures reproduced out of the events of the day just
passed--pictures of terrified peasants escaping dimly into clouds of
dust beside the road and crossing themselves; pictures of open-mouthed
children screaming as they ran from our path at the last possible
moment; pictures of enraged people who cursed us as they became
unwillingly active on city crossings; pictures of scared women with baby
carriages trying to go both ways at once; pictures of aged men and women
in every attitude of sudden undesired haste and futile defence; pictures
of pompous fat men outraged by the necessity to leap backward; pictures
of faces in every distortion of fear and fear's close companion, hatred.

Often I remonstrated with Victor, and when I did he looked at me
pityingly. "You think this Lux knows how to move sweetly?" he inquired.
"It is impossible to its nature. Either this Lux is in complete repose
or in complete action; there is no middle ground. By supposition only
there are two speeds; but after he is cranked--on such days as he
consents to be cranked at all--and I have mounted to my seat and thrown
in his clutch to the lower speed, there is always a period when I must
wait to ascertain if it is one of the days when he consents to allow his
clutch to operate. If he consents, it will always be at a moment when I
have concluded that it is not to be one of the days. He decides
abruptly, gives a great leap and within the instant he is forcing
himself through a pile of stones half a kilometre down the road. If
people do not get out of our way the Lux must stop, and when he stops
you are well aware there arises always a great question: Will he ever
move again? If he will, then when will he? To-morrow, perhaps."

When I engaged Victor he did not appear to be a drinking man; but his
close companionship with the superb Lux had an evil influence upon him,
and they formed the habit of becoming incapacitated together; though it
must be said to the chauffeur's credit that the Lux always set the
example. Victor was a handsome, tall, soldierly person of commanding
presence. When we were travelling and stopped for luncheon or for the
night, the innkeepers always first addressed themselves deferentially to
him, bowing before him; and he would have to explain that I was his
patron, not an attendant. However, when he was slightly in wine he
sometimes seemed to forget this relation.

"I have discovered a thing," I shouted to him as I sat beside him one
day in hilly country. "I have discovered that although it is difficult
to make the Lux move slowly, there are nevertheless some moderations of
speed that can be accomplished with care, when you choose. Why do you
descend this hill on gas?"

"In order to get up the next one," he replied. "Great speed is necessary
to surmount this next hill."

"But rather than go so fast I would prefer not to surmount it. This
speed has made me so nervous that my feet are cramped from pushing an
imaginary brake and my fingers from clutching an imaginary wheel. Now I
have bitten a filling out of a tooth and we shall have to find a town
that contains a dentist. He will be the second to repair me on this one
excursion."

"Disregard all that," Victor said airily. "You are acquiring new
sensations."

"I have no desire for them," I shouted, and with as much severity as I
could command in the French language I gave him the positive order to
slacken speed. "Sweetly! I wish to travel more sweetly! Compel this Lux
to a sweeter movement. The wind does not permit me to breathe and I wish
to remain alive."

Through his goggles he gave me a benevolent glance. "The ozone will do
you good," he said calmly. "The most distinguished scientists recommend
it."

That was one virtue of the superb Lux, certainly--it copiously provided
ozone to its occupants; for this was long before the day of windshields.
Goggles and "automobile costumes" were almost necessities, but many of
the automobilists wore the costumes with a little of the consciousness
that sometimes attaches to a yachtsman dressed expressively for the
deck. Ear muffs and pneumatic clothes would have added to the pleasure
of travel in the Lux, it may be said; for the roar of the engine, the
machine-gun explosion of the exhaust, and the vibration of the whole
fabric of the car were such as would be intolerable and incredible
to-day.

But the superb Lux was not immortal; its own imperfections and the
destined progress of mankind were in operation to supplant it. That
mischievously inspired machine, which had destroyed all the temperate
inclinations of one human being and brought upon other human beings so
many tedious and unexpected miles of walking and so many mortifying
tardinesses, had at last one inspiration too many. In a valley of
Touraine, at the foot of a long hill down which it had charged, swaying,
bounding, crashing, roaring gloriously and deafening the very birds of
the air with the artillery of its exhaust, it uttered a peculiar shriek
and a moment later sullenly came to rest, oblique in the road. This was
familiar--all except the peculiar shriek--and we descended as usual.

"The town of Chinon is only about six kilometres from here," I said. "I
will walk to Chinon and send back mechanics."

But Victor, examining the engine, shook his head. "This time," he said,
"send horses."

The next morning I left Chinon by rail, Victor and the Lux remaining
there in a repair shop. Then, having returned home, I waited, sending
remittances at intervals; but after two months I had a letter from a
friend who had gone to Chinon:

    I have seen your chauffeur, but he did not seem to comprehend
    what I said to him. The innkeeper here explained that the
    unfortunate man has been intoxicated continuously for the last
    six weeks, and, after talking to the mechanics who are working
    on your automobile, I cannot say that I blame him very much.

I decided that neither should I blame Victor; there was no cinema in
Chinon in those days, and the pleasures of that interesting town were
for the archologist and historian rather than for the chauffeur. I sent
him another remittance; but by the time he did finally arrive with the
restored and still vociferous Lux, I had a new machine and a new
chauffeur.

The new chauffeur was a teetotaler and meek; and the new machine was a
glittering, smooth-spoken French thing of the very moment, just from the
factory and unbelievably obedient. The new day had begun; people could
travel all over Europe by motor without stopping at a single dentist's.

I sold the superb Lux to a training school for chauffeurs--and when the
pupils could drive it, they were graduated.




CHAPTER XIII


The motoring craze had spread over the civilized parts of the world by
this time. Everywhere there was what might have been called--if we had
known the word--"stunt" motoring; there were races on oval tracks and
country roads; races from one capital to another, races across Europe,
races across Asia, races round the world. Everybody talked of speed,
horse-power, cylinders and models; and the names most upon the tongue of
the populace were those, not of statesmen, but of manufacturers. Ardent
debate upon the comparative speed, power and durability of the
automobiles that bore these names was heard at the little open-air
tables of Paris; it was heard in Neapolitan restaurants, in Bavarian
beer gardens, in London clubs, in Vienna cafs and in the lobby of the
Garfield Hotel at Kamchatka, Michigan. Most of the talkers did not own
automobiles, and their talk was only a by-product of the craze; motoring
was still a sport for those prosperous--or reckless--enough to afford
it. But more and more people did somehow afford it every day; and even
then there were scandalized rumours of houses mortgaged for money to buy
cars.

People were stimulated by the mere talk of high speeds to which they had
not become accustomed; and to all this exhilaration and excitement over
the automobile there was coming to be added a general divination that a
greater marvel was at hand. The thoughts of many men were longingly in
the air; and, out in the open country, east of Paris, every summer
afternoon we could see what appeared to be great pale bubbles rising
slowly, one at a time, from the distant profile of the city outlined by
the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the hill of Montmartre with its
cathedral coronet. The bubbles floated dreamily toward us and passed
overhead, silent and peaceful in the evening sky; we envied those people
up there, so high and cool and quiet in their drifting balloons.

Balloons not so placid had been constructed and were discussed at the
sidewalk tables of the boulevards; balloons shaped like fat cigars and
driven by engines and propellers--things that could be steered, though
clumsily. Men had actually navigated the air a little in one or two of
these absurdities. This was wonderful, but it was not flying, and now,
at last, after all the ages of skeptical ridicule, the automobile had
brought with its own coming a portent: the ancient wild prophecies were
to be fulfilled. Mother Shipton had not been so crazy, after all;
Langley and Lilienthal had not lived in vain; for somehow everybody
knew--it was in the air--that men were about to fly.

Then, one evening, the Parisian papers hurried excited extras to the
streets and the cables sped to the four quarters of the earth.
Santos-Dumont had lifted himself from the ground that afternoon in a
machine that was heavier than air. It was a kite with an engine and a
propeller; it had lifted him for only a moment, in a little skip of a
few feet; nevertheless, the thing was done and he had been in the air,
the first man of all the earthborn to rise from the ground in a flying
machine--unless that fantastic American rumour of men in the air near
Dayton, Ohio, could be true. But, of course, no serious person believed
that story: the Americans were great projectors of the fantastic; they
were given to that boastful sort of practical joking. It was said that
the men up in the air of Ohio were brothers named Wright; probably their
machine was lifted by wires, or, what seemed more likely to be the fact,
by their imaginations.

Little more was heard of the Wrights just then; Santos-Dumont got
himself off the ground again before long, in what the papers began to
call a hop; other air adventurers hopped, too; and one exultant day
there came a hop of an eighth of a mile. Meanwhile that humorous story
about Dayton, Ohio, was generally forgotten; and probably the most
curious manifestation concerned with the first flight of men was the
apathy of the first flyers' neighbours. For, before Santos-Dumont
hopped, the Wrights had done more than hop--they had flown--and the last
place in the world where you would find anybody in a state of excitement
over that miracle was precisely Dayton, Ohio.

As it happened, in the autumn of 1907, the necessities of a comedy in
rehearsal in New York brought me back from Paris for a while, and the
subsequent nursing of this play, during its earlier presentations on the
road, took me to Dayton for a night. I had little time to spare from the
theatre, but found opportunity to ask a number of people what they knew
about the Wrights and the rumour that had reached Europe about them and
then had been discredited there. Everyone answered my inquiries in the
same way, with a laugh first, and then: "Oh, yes; there've been a lot of
wild stories going around town." No one that I saw believed the stories;
but what surprised me was that no one seemed to have taken the trouble
to investigate them. Every heart in Paris had leaped with the hop of
Santos-Dumont.

A lady who lived in Dayton at that time explained to me, long afterward,
why the city that was the home of the Wrights showed this curious
flaccidity when a stupendous event had taken place in its environs.

"The feeling wasn't peculiar to Dayton," she said. "It would have been
just the same in other American cities, especially in other Middle and
Western cities. You know the strange mixture of championship and
self-doubtful humility we all felt about our own part of the country; we
reverenced our great dead, like Lincoln, but we couldn't easily believe
that anything really epochal could come from living people among us.
With all the world dreaming of flying, and all the centuries behind us
believing it could never be done, you don't suppose that anybody in Ohio
could have imagined that down in Montgomery County two sons of a Middle
West minister were really flying! Such things were done by people called
Christopher Columbus or Fernando Cortez or Galileo, names rare in Ohio
and strikingly unlike Wilbur and Orville. Don't you see why we paid so
little attention?"

"Yes, in part. But nevertheless----"

"Nevertheless," she said firmly, "most people over the country would
have been just as unmoved as we were. It was our incredulity that made
us seem apathetic. For my part, I actually saw a secret photograph of
the Wright machine in flight and did not believe it. The photograph was
made by someone who did investigate, you see--a man I happened to know
who had his own reasons for investigating. He was a queer fellow, an
anarchist who was himself trying to build a flying machine, and a farmer
had told him that strange things were happening at dawn out in the
country where there were some wide fields called the Prairies. The man
went out there one morning and hid himself with a camera. He showed me
confidentially the picture he had taken and in great excitement pointed
out something I at first mistook for a butterfly, thirty or forty feet
above the ground. He said no, it wasn't a butterfly; it was a machine
and there was a man in it! Then, indistinctly, I saw the little figure
of the man myself, but I didn't really believe it was a man in a flying
machine. I couldn't believe that any more than we could believe now in
ghosts, if we saw a photograph of a ghost. I thought the thing
queer--that's all, and pretty soon almost forgot about it. The anarchist
didn't talk; he was anxious to make his own machine fly before the
Wrights let their secret be known. His machine did fly, too, eventually,
and killed him in a fall, poor man; but by that time Dayton was
organizing a great testimonial reception for the Wrights because the
world was acclaiming them."

I had seen Santos-Dumont in one of his dirigible balloons and I had seen
his machine that hopped; but it was a long time after the Wrights' first
flights before most of us saw airplanes. We began presently to know them
from reproduced photographs in the illustrated journals and magazines,
and to gasp at the daring of the men who sat on flimsy strips of metal
or wood in the opening between the wings and manoeuvred the machines in
the air. It was impossible to believe that we should ever grow
accustomed to seeing such things, or that some day human beings indoors
would hear them overhead and not rush out to stare at them. For my part,
I had no opportunity to see men flying until 1910; and even then I went
many miles, to be still incredulous while I looked and looked and looked
at that strange and exalting sight.

This was an excursion far outside the theatrical boundaries that had
then become my customary limits of peregrination. The life of the
theatre is an enclosure for those who lead it, like the walls of a
medival town. They are so encircled that the movement of the world
outside seems relatively vague and unimportant; and for me the theatre
was an encirclement whether I was engaged abroad in writing manuscripts
to offer it, or, in the manner of a playwright, disturbing the stage
directors in New York when they were trying to translate the manuscripts
into acting and painted scenery.

At last, however, feeling too much pressure from the enclosing walls,
though I was far from ungrateful to the theatre, I decided to stop
writing plays and also to break off a habit that had become too
clutching. This was the habit of thinking of Paris as my fixed
habitation, though I knew all the time that only in the flat lands of
the Ohio Valley was there a spot that could ever wholly mean "home" to
me. The American, settled abroad, comes upon pathetic moments sometimes;
no matter how charmed he is with European life, no matter how suavely he
fits himself into it, and no matter how thoroughly weaned away he may
be, he always has these moments when he feels that he is neither fish,
flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.

I had been on an island in the Mediterranean where an old American
painter, who had lived there thirty years, was finishing the building of
a villa for himself and his family. He took me to see it.

"Yes, it's beautiful," he said. "But I've always lived in rented houses,
thinking that next year I'd go home to stay. Now I've built this place I
realize that I never will. I know now that my old bones will be laid
away over here, under a foreign flag. My bones won't mind that, but I
do. I can joke about it, I suppose; but if you'll lift the flap of the
joke from my breast you'll see a pretty deep scratch."

I remembered what he had said and I decided to go home to the Midland
country to live. But first I went with some friends for a final summer
of motoring over the Alpine passes. We came down out of the mountains
into Germany at the end of August, and one morning we rolled out of
Strassburg, which was German then, to cross over into France on our way
back to Paris. We rolled not alone, however; batteries of light
artillery rolled beside us; uhlans were seen riding on all the roads;
and infantry regiments moved in the direction--toward Nancy--that we
were taking.

Of course this was no extraordinary sight in Germany; but, for the
preceding two or three days, as we approached the frontier, we had been
increasingly aware of troops and troops and more troops going our way,
horse and foot and guns. "Army manoeuvres," we said wisely, and thought
little more about it. But when we came to the barrier at the frontier
itself--a gate across the road at the edge of a small town--we could see
cavalry and artillery and infantry uniforms everywhere; they lined the
frontier for miles in each direction apparently; and, as we sat, waiting
for the gate to be opened, uhlans were all about us, expressionless men
on splendid horses. It was odd to see an army so close against the
frontier that separated Germany from France; and, indeed, these
manoeuvres seemed to be so peculiar that we asked questions of the man
who opened the gate for us, an amiable German in uniform.

"What's it all about?" we inquired. "Do the frontier gates need all this
protection against smugglers?"

"Smugglers!" he exclaimed. "Don't you know? Haven't you read the
papers?"

"No, we haven't. We've been travelling for pleasure. What's going on?"

"A crisis!" he said. "There is a great diplomatic crisis. There may be
war."

"What?" We laughed heartily. "A war? We must cross between the lines,
must we?"

"Yes, truly," he said, and, to show his friendliness, he laughed, too.
"You will see the French just on the other side of the neutral ground,
like us here. You will see them in a few moments--the French regiments
called to face us in the crisis. They are very near us, the French."

But when we had crossed the strip of neutral ground between the two
countries and came to the French frontier, there were only two men in
sight in all the expanse of fields and woods before us. The two were
customs officers, and we asked them where their army was.

"It is ten kilometres from the frontier. We are careful not to risk
provocation or irritation in a crisis by bringing our men too close to
the German soldiers. You will see no uniforms for ten kilometres more."

It was as he said; but when we had passed the ten kilometres we began to
meet French infantry in numbers; and they looked serious, even anxious,
we thought; but again we laughed. What if there was a crisis? We knew
there would be no war. We were Americans, and we knew that the business
of the world would never permit another war on the grand scale such as a
war between France and Germany must be. Besides, neither of those
countries would dare thus to shatter its prosperity; and I recalled what
a young French engineer had said earlier that summer.

"The _Revanche_?" he said. "For Alsace-Lorraine? No, we do not want it.
Yes, I know that one or two patriotic societies and some old people who
remember 1870 now and then put mourning wreaths on the Strassburg
statue; but those people are only a few, and all that feeling is really
old-fashioned. For the great multitude of us, for the French nation,
there is no longer a thought of the _Revanche_; we are too busy; we ask
only to be let alone so that we can work and attend to our affairs. It
is the same with most of the German people; they are busy and
prospering; they are not so insane as to wish to ruin themselves and us
with a war."

So we rolled merrily on, continuing our way to Paris and amused by the
"crisis". That was 1911 and we knew there would be no war between France
and Germany then or at any other time. To imagine such a thing was as
absurd as to imagine that airplanes would be mad enough to fight one
another in the sky.




CHAPTER XIV


"Coming back home to stay, are you?" a fellow traveller said, the night
before we landed. "That isn't like the casual little runs 'back home'
you make when you're living abroad. When you're settled down in London
or Paris, or somewhere in Italy, and just slide over to 'the States' on
business, or perhaps because of the illness of one of your relatives,
your life is centred elsewhere; you're really a visitor and you get only
a visitor's slight and preoccupied impressions of our native land; your
observation of the changes that are going on is as casual as your visit,
so you don't feel them deeply, because you know they aren't going to
affect you for any length of time. But you'll feel the changes now.
'Coming back home to stay'--ah, that's different!"

"What change will I feel most sharply?" I asked.

"We've been growing," he said. "We've been growing and growing and
growing, and I think you'll hear the sound of it. Yet, after a little
while, probably you'll perceive that with all the growing and growing
and growing we've done, we've just barely begun to grow!"

He was right about my hearing the sound of it. The sound of it was in
our ears that September morning in 1911, as we sat in the hansom cab we
had hired at the Hoboken dock and waited for our ferryboat to be made
fast in its Manhattan slip. And although the noise of New York's growing
had always been in ears not wholly deaf upon that island, since the
Indians sold it to the first Knickerbockers, the sound did strike more
significantly than ever before, as the man in the smoking-room had said,
upon ears that had "come back home to stay".

It seemed to be the sound of metal driven upon metal, of steel rattled
violently and of metallic explosions muffled under concrete. The
conglomerate street sound of Latin cities was softer and incomparably
more agreeably easy-going, being characteristically the sound of voices,
the talking and calling--even the singing, while at work or play--of a
vocal people. But here in New York, where growth was prodigiously in
action and nothing ever was finished, and the continuous building up
always as continuously tore down, where the paving of a street was
scarce laid before it became tremulous and cracked with undermining, and
where the walls of vast and high buildings were crashed down to make
room for walls even vaster and higher, there was no sound of voices. If
a truck driver enraged himself with injustice done him at a crossing,
his cursing was inaudible, smothered under the metallic uproar. His lips
and jaw could be seen to move, his expression to contort, his neck to
swell and inflame, his eyes to bulge with the love of murder; yet all
his rage became a futile pantomime; and, if he could not endure life
without making his curses heard by him he cursed, he must wreck his
throat with hoarseness. In effect, the people were silent in the
streets.

The uproarious discordance was racking to a traveller returned from long
sojourning in less vehement parts of the world; and not much less
disturbing were the discords in the proportions and in the architectural
modes of buildings that neighboured one another. Up and down the great
streets architects seemed to have fought and still to be fighting an
immense and insane battle, every man madly for himself, and, without
thought to his own horrible wounds, rearing up immeasurable weapons to
destroy whatever was near him. And there was no arboreal palliation, as
in the most intelligent foreign cities; the softening rows of trees
along the boulevards, the verdurous charm of Paris, had no place in the
hard and stark avenues of New York. And yet to an eye returned from
foreign parts to stay, there was a solace in these streets, a sight to
warm and inspire a patriotic heart. The old friend who travelled with
me, a man seldom enthusiastic and never sentimental, spoke of it.

"You have to be away a long time to appreciate them," he said. "Coming
back, you only need to see them moving briskly along these sidewalks to
be glad you're a compatriot. I'm speaking of the American women, those
alert, bright-eyed matrons and cheerful
know-how-to-take-care-of-themselves girls we're seeing all about us now.
After living awhile on the Continent, how grateful one is to look at
such enheartening creatures as these! The Continental women have charm
enough and their own kind of good looks, of course; and anyone admits
that they're 'talented as women'. But these Americans--they aren't
content to be 'talented as women'; they insist upon being intelligences
without regard to their sex; they're intelligent persons, not merely
intelligent women. And how delightful it is to see whole street-fuls of
women all wearing their own good complexions, with not a trace of
artificial colour on cheek or lip or eyelid! They're briskly going about
their own affairs, not preoccupied in the slightest with the fact of
their being women and our being men; you can see they know how to think
without thinking of that; it's visible in their faces. Here in New York
we see not only New York women--they're from all over the country, and
how keen and fine and how independent they look! In fact they're
splendid and they make a man prouder to be an American than anything
else does."

No one could have failed to share his enthusiasm, which contained
nothing detrimental to the ladies of Europe, but only a sparklingly
deserved appreciation of those native to his own country. They wore
skirts almost to the ground, long and narrow, those
"know-how-to-take-care-of-themselves" girls who kindled his eyes with
delight in their intelligence and their superiority to cosmetics and
conscious allure. Invariably they had long hair--all the hair Nature had
given them--and plainly they cherished it; but they seemed much less
emphatically hourglasses than they had been of yore; and something about
them--especially that look of independence my friend had
mentioned--appeared to mean that they had more freedom than ever before.
They had the air of having made this freedom for themselves, and of
intending to make it complete, no matter who didn't happen to like their
having it.




CHAPTER XV


New York, however, was not my destination, being but a way station on
this decisive journey to the verdant plain that had for me the
persistent claim of native soil calling always, however faintly, to its
wandering sons, "Come home!" A stranger, looking forth from his
sleeping-car after a night of curving among the hills, might wonder why
anybody should come home to this level monotony of landscape and the
reiterating shabby back ends of wood and brick country towns, all alike.
Moreover, a native son might himself feel a qualm or two of that same
wonder, especially if he had been living in Paris. The flat lands were
bleaker than they had been aforetime; the ground was dark and fertile,
but great stretches of forest were gone, leaving only clumps of woodland
here and there. The old bosky "snake fences" had disappeared, replaced
by unamiable wire; and sometimes there would be a glimpse of a country
road whereon an efficient, ugly little automobile bounced viciously into
sudden distance, leaving the farmers' buggies and wagons, as it passed,
enveiled and strangled in its long thick tail of dust. And sometimes,
too, racing with the train, a demon of an interurban trolley-car would
tear shrieking across the landscape.

Something of what had been the wistful charm of the long and wide
flatness seemed to have disappeared; something of its old-time sleepy
peacefulness seemed to be gone with the deep woods and rail fences.
Nevertheless, it still had a voice and still could seem to murmur in its
old-fashioned way, "Yes, this is home. It always will be home for those
who were born in it. You have come home." And when I actually had
reached home again, "old Charlie", the trolley-car conductor, who always
remembered anybody that had ever lived on his "line", was warm in his
congratulations. To him it seemed that any absence from his town must be
unwilling, a hardship enforced. "You are certainly mighty lucky to get
back to God's country again!" he said.

At first it did not appear to me that the Midland city had changed a
great deal. It had grown, of course, because it was alive; and it was
obviously not so clean as it had been. Almost into the Twentieth
Century, natural gas had made it speckless, except for the ordinary
dustiness of summer; and when the gas failed, anthracite helped to keep
the air clear. There were not many factories in what was essentially a
market town, the capital of an agricultural state, and what smoke there
had been came principally from the railroad engines. Now, however, one
was conscious sometimes of soft-coal smoke in the air, particularly at
nightfall; but the traces were comparatively faint, far from
unendurable.

The same pleasant old "principal residence streets" stretched serenely
northward; the same green arches of joining branches shaded them; and
the same solid, big old houses stood among the sun-and-shade-flecked
green lawns; the same people lived in those houses. Two or three new
buildings downtown had replaced old ones for offices and business; but
the new ones were not veritable skyscrapers--the tallest building in
town was of twelve stories--and although the first apartment house was
now more than ten years old, not more than half a dozen others had been
built. One could stroll everywhere about the town, and, except for the
automobiles, find only here and there a noticeable change.

Nearly all the old landmarks were still as they had been in the
Nineteenth Century; everything was familiar. The same old liquor smell
floated out over the sidewalks from the swinging doors of the saloons,
and those doors themselves--now extinct, unless the antiquarians collect
them--were the same. They swung easily, inviting but the slightest
pressure, and their bases, being knee-high, revealed to the passer-by
the feet and lower trousers legs of the convivial who dallied at the bar
within. Quavering snatches of song, "barber shop" chords, uncertain bits
of ballad, often floated out with the liquorish fumes, adding zest to
the sidewalk games of children; and not infrequently, too, hoarse strong
language issued, increasing the information, in such matters, of the
young.

Like the body of a man infected from scalp to toe, the body politic had
the saloon running visibly and dangerously in every part; and, although
many years were needed to prepare for the final operation of removal, it
is hard to believe now that the infection could have been dissected out
so quickly, leaving but such surreptitious and sporadic traces as the
"speak-easy". For the saloon had a part in everybody's consciousness
every day. The huge beer wagons, piled with symmetrical vastnesses of
cold kegs, and drawn by grand Percherons or massive Flemish or Norman
horses, sometimes three abreast, sometimes as a splendid four-in-hand,
were a constant pageant, provocative to the thirsty. They were driven by
mountainous barbarians, huge-girthed men with great fiery faces and
huskily roaring voices. No one could have believed that all this Gothic
powerfulness could be whisked away, made utterly to disappear, by a
flutter of mere paper ballots. The brewers to whom the great wagons
belonged seemed as potent as these symbols of their power. Breweries and
distilleries infiltrated politics and business; every saloon keeper was
a politician--indeed, he had to be one for his own protection--and the
saloons copiously sent forth that now-forgotten aroma of theirs in every
quarter of the town.

There were no public bars upon the upper reaches of the "principal
residence streets", nor within a short fixed distance from a church or a
schoolhouse; yet nowhere, in all the broad area the city covered, did a
thirsting citizen need to walk more than a block or so to solace a dry
throat. Downtown, in clean alleys and convenient among the business
houses and offices, there were quiet, well-behaved bars where the solid
and prominent, even bankers, might refresh themselves under only a
discreet observation; but in the poorest neighbourhoods the saloons and
"barrel houses" were thickest. Indeed, their numbers increased in
perfect proportion to the decrease in affluence of the quarter--a fact
of somewhat too uncomfortably apparent significance. For the saloon, of
course, was the "poor man's club".

Sunday was his holiday; he could not afford to keep a horse and drive
out to the country with his family; the "church influence" did not allow
him baseball or even a "nickel theatre" on that day, and the brewery in
power with the police authorities had the profit: saloons buying beer of
that brewery could sell liquor illegally but lavishly after eleven
o'clock Saturday night and on Sunday--other saloons would be raided--and
so the weekly wages were likely to evaporate into the purple mist of
alcoholic gaiety.

This Sabbatical gaiety--painfully followed by "Blue Monday"--seemed to
be the only alleviation in the lives of a great many working-people, and
there were theorists who said that if the "workingman's Saturday Night"
and his illegal Sunday beer were taken from him, he would become a
revolutionist out of sheer boredom. Perhaps these theorists were not
wholly fantastic; perhaps they were not so far off what might have been
the fact; the abolishing of the convenient saloon with its ready liquor
might have made the one holiday, in conjunction with six days of
drudgery, unendurably dull for a great many people. But sometimes the
larger processes of life appear to give us glimpses of a certain
orderliness behind them, a symmetry that hints of undiscovered laws of
progress and in the apparent coincidence of the annihilation of the
saloon almost simultaneously with the arrival of the automobile of small
price there seems to be something more than mere haphazard luck.
Already, in 1911, there were workingmen who had bought "used flivvers"
and were spending their Sundays with their families in adventurous
scourings of the countryside.

For, although most things "looked about the same" to the returned
native, and the same old people and houses and trees and lawns and
saloons appeared to be but slightly altered, principally by seeming a
little older, there were tokens of a stirring, of something moving
underneath, of unknown powers at work to produce a new kind of growing;
but at first these hints were faint and not insistent. One felt that the
town had somehow become more "citified"; it had become not only larger,
that is to say, but more formal. Downtown there were traffic officers at
several corners, and you couldn't drive just where and how you pleased,
as in the easy-going old days of a little while before. In fact, one
felt that the easy-going old days were gone forever. In this larger town
young people wouldn't dance on a platform in somebody's yard by the
light of paper lanterns; romantic gentlemen wouldn't pile an orchestra
into "express wagons" and go midnight serenading; never again would a
pretty young lady light the gas to show a bright window for the young
Dons with fiddles, flutes and a harp upon the lawn below.

There was a great deal more asphalt and there were a great many more
automobiles. A few "family carriages" were still to be seen on the
streets, with a victoria or two and one or two broughams and coups;
"hired hacks" were still to be had at livery stables and horse cabs at
the station; but the red-wheeled runabout had disappeared forever; the
town's _jeunesse dore_ (in the phrasing loved by the _fin de sicle_)
now shot itself out to the country club with gas; the "fast trotter",
that willing and faithful friend of youth, was gone with the red wheels,
and so was the bicycle as the friend of pleasure. The little bells
chimed no more above the darting lamps along the highways of a summer
evening: there were too many automobiles.

Some of the streets had lengthened surprisingly and appeared to
contemplate even more surprising extensions; asphalt and cement were
stretching far into suburban territory, through what had been "picnic
woods", not so very long before. In the boyhood days of my own
generation, Tinker Street had been the northern border of the compact
town; beyond it the houses were a scattering fringe and country roads
led northward to the creek, a mile away, where we went to swim in the
waters of "Sycamore Hole". No joyous bathers dived from the bank there
now; Tinker Street had become Sixteenth Street; the old dirt roads that
had wandered out from it were compact--much too compact with crowding
houses--to the creek; and there had been a migration across the stream.
A dozen new millionairish mansions, with lawns and gardens about them,
prophesied a new quarter of fashion beyond it, and a concrete bridge
replaced the old rumbling planks we had pattered over so blithely on our
way to "Sycamore Hole". The millionairish houses were not alone; all up
and down the creek, and deep into the meadows and woods beyond, the
"bungalows" and "two-story frames" were built and building. East and
west, too, ran the new boulevard-and-park system with a widening fringe
of new houses on all its borders.

Downtown, there were obviously many more people than aforetime upon the
streets, especially on Saturdays, when it seemed that the long
interurban cars must fairly have drained a great countryside of life to
pour it into the city. Moreover, the crowds of country folk were not
easily distinguishable, as they once had been, from the city people.
They had become of the urban pattern in clothes and manner; they spoke
the same slang the city used and rusticity appeared to have vanished
like the farmer's whiskers--for of hairy faces, old "Family Albums" and
Civil War photographs offered now the only apparent supply. And there
was a change, too, in the characteristic face--the composite face, so to
speak--of the thronged streets downtown. There was something new and
puzzling to me in that face. I could not be sure what the change was,
but I felt it there, and one day I spoke of it to an old citizen and
asked him if he shared my impression.

"Why, yes," he said. "You'd notice it more than I would, I suppose,
because you've been away so long. This composite face you're talking
about, that you see downtown--it isn't the face you see on the uptown
streets, is it?"

"No. The uptown face seems to be the same as ever."

"Yes; but if the face downtown has changed, the change will reach uptown
in time. Your composite face, made of blending all the faces into one,
is swarthier than it used to be, isn't it?--swarthier and what you'd
call more foreign-looking?"

"I think so--a little."

"Yes," he said, "it's just a shade mongrel. It's not so mongrel as the
New York composite face, though, nor the Boston composite face, nor the
Chicago one, for that matter. Compared to those places, this is still an
'all-pure American' town. You go to the theatre in New York and then
come back and go to the theatre here; the difference'll make you gasp!
In a New York theatre, between the acts, you'll hear everybody speaking
our language, but you wonder why they do. Between the acts in a theatre
here you aren't surprised when they talk American, because they still
generally look that way. But you're right; they don't look that way as
much as they used to. There's just enough difference for a person to be
able to see it."

"It's immigration that's making the difference?"

"It's immigration that already has made it. These darker foreign-looking
people among us talk just the same as anybody else and dress just the
same as anybody else--maybe a little showier. They aren't hunting for
hard jobs at low wages or a patch of land to raise market truck on. The
bulk of 'em are second generation, born in this country, though a good
many came when they were little, with their families. They're prospering
more and more; they're in every profession and every line of business.
They'll be uptown, too, in a little while--more of 'em already are
uptown than you've noticed, and they have good houses. They're nice
people, most of 'em, too; and their young folks go to school and college
and are around with our own young folks. They've been raised with
different ideas from ours, but they have a good deal the same manners.
The smartest of the immigrant stock are 'thoroughly
Americanized'--'snappy modern business men' and all that; but--well,
you've had an ice cream freezer get a little salt inside the can,
haven't you? It's never quite the same ice cream again."

"But perhaps we old-stock Americans shouldn't set up to be the pure ice
cream, Judge."

"No, maybe we shouldn't; but we're bound to seem like it to ourselves,
at least; and anyhow we're getting salted. The immigrant has
Americanized himself, but in the process he foreignizes us a little; he
takes on our ideas, but he can't help spreading among us some of his. A
few years ago the 'typical American'--or maybe what we called the
'average American'--was a lot more old-stock Anglo-Saxon, with German
and Irish traces, than he is to-day. I expect the cartoonists ought to
begin to draw Uncle Sam a little differently from the way they used to.
Uncle Sam wouldn't talk with exactly his old twang, either, if you could
listen to him. There's a change in his vocabulary and he's got another
kind of twang. You'll hear just hints of it in the common speech of the
streets, because the touch of salt has got into that, too. It's not so
agreeable--at least not to the old native ear--as it used to be."

"Will my own old native ear detect any other differences, Judge?"

He frowned and sighed. "I think you'll find it will if you listen for
'em. You know the rest of the world was always accusing us, in the old
days, of being 'money mad'; we were supposed to worship the Almighty
Dollar more than other peoples did. Well, of course, that worshipped
dollar was just what the immigrant came here to pursue. Our old-time
spread-eagle orators used to brag about his coming here to enjoy the
Liberty we offered the world, and how the poor oppressed slaves of
foreign monarchies crossed the ocean in order to breathe the Air of
Freedom. But everybody knows that they left home for economic
reasons--that is, they came to make money. Well, they do make it--the
more industrious and the smarter ones do--they make more and more. And
since that was their great motive and what they were thinking about all
the time, why, naturally it goes on being their great motive and they go
on thinking about it all the time. All over the country you'll hear more
talk about making money than you ever did before. Money's a greater god
than it was."

"The ice cream's salted with gold dust?"

"With diamonds! That salt gets into our taste--especially into what we
thought of as our 'good taste'. There are a great many more prosperous
people than there used to be--a great many more who have 'come up from
nothing' than there used to be. And a lot of them still have
nothing--nothing but money. But money being the god, they become
'representative'. They infiltrate our social body. The salt in the ice
cream begins to mean a certain amount of change in some of our
representative ideals. That's dangerous to all our old fundamental
principles, because a change in ideals is always dangerous to the whole
body of what's been established. It may be just barely perceptible one
year and the next year you suddenly find it's the fashion. It's a sort
of snowball on a downhill grade; once it begins to roll, the faster it
rolls and the bigger it gets."

He looked gloomy, but I ventured to laugh and say that I hoped our
country wasn't going to the dogs. "A great many of the older people have
always felt that, you know, Judge. To those who like things to stand
still, progress nearly always seems to be a going to the dogs."

"No doubt," he said; but he shook his head. "I don't say we're going to
the dogs; I only notice that we're changing in a way that makes an
old-timer a little uncomfortable. I think that what we hoped was our
refinement and our 'good taste' isn't so good as it was, and I'm afraid
the salt in our ice cream is having its effect upon what we felt were
our moral standards. I don't deny that we're making progress immensely,
but I wonder where it's taking us except into materialism. For one
thing, we have begun to love giantism with passion; everybody wants to
have everything as big as possible. When any man mentions his city, the
first thing he does is to lie about its size: that's the most universal
lie in the United States. I suppose you've noticed that our own town is
growing dirtier as it grows bigger. You haven't run across any business
man who's worrying about that, have you?"

I had not. If the business men worried about the increasing smoke--for
there was visibly more of it almost from day to day--they worried for
fear some other city should have even more of it than we did. Two new
automobile factories had just been finished, and that made nine.




CHAPTER XVI


With winter, of course, the black grime in the air became even more
noticeable--noticeable enough to be annoying. It came from every
direction. The nine automobile factories were not the only new
industries; and, for that matter, a great part of the smoke did not come
from the industrial outskirts, but from the houses, the hotel, the
office buildings, from the governmental edifices and the big brick
schoolhouses. Indoors as well as out we often breathed a grimy air, and
our throats and lungs were the worse for it. The business men said that
"good clean smoke" wasn't really dirty; it meant money in the bank and
was wholesome for everybody, including the babies. The city's health was
excellent and the statisticians' tables proved it. "A little extra
coughing isn't going to hurt anybody," they said. "It exercises the
lungs and expands the chest. Besides, ours is good clean smoke; there
isn't half so much coughing here as there is in other places."

On the street one day, I met an old friend who thought the business men
were mistaken about this. He was an actor--a comedian in a "road
company" playing that week in one of our theatres. "I always used to
like making this town," he said. "It was a nice, appreciative place and
I looked forward to playing here. It's not the same nowadays."

"You mean the movies are----"

"I wasn't thinking of our business," he said. "Of course that isn't
quite what it used to be, either. The nickel theatres didn't affect it
much. But now that they've begun to charge a dime, and even a quarter
sometimes, and are fixing up their show houses and using orchestras,
they are eating into us--especially into our gallery business--quite a
little. But we can meet that, I guess, by raising our price downstairs.
What I was thinking of, the thing that makes me less enthusiastic about
coming here is the smoke."

"I see. Of course it's thicker downtown where the hotels are. I suppose
it must be pretty disagreeable to visitors in the city."

"Dear me!" he said. "I don't mind a little soot on my collar! I mean
what it does to my stuff in the theatre."

"But how----"

"It's the coughing," he explained. "A few years ago I could put over all
my lines here without any trouble at all--I was sure of every laugh in
the piece. But now, every night when the show's over, I'm shaking like a
leaf from exhaustion and nervousness. You know how a laugh works--every
laugh I've got in this show depends on a key word or phrase. If I don't
get the key word over right, or if anything blurs it and they don't hear
it all through the house, the laugh is killed. Well, nowadays I begin to
tremble with every laugh-line I come to, because I know that some
elephant out front is going to cough on the key word and kill me dead. I
hear the cough starting, so I pause and hold the word back till the
elephant gets through. But half the time it's no use, because just as I
do finally spring the word some other elephant out front lets go a
_blah-blocketty-brash_ that coughs me as dead as a stepped-on potato
bug. Every year I dread hitting this belt of soft-coal towns more than I
did the year before. If the coughing gets much worse, it's going to wipe
out the theatrical business entirely in this section, unless we can get
audiences trained to hold their coughs till the show's over. People'll
quit coming to shows where they can't hear the laughs; we'll have to
play the anthracite towns exclusively."

But the increasing smoke, not yet so voluminously soiling as to make
audible the long and futile outcry of the housewives, was not the only
token of the stirring and change that moved under the surface; other
prophetic signs were visible. Some of the houses nearest to downtown
business were abandoned by families long associated with them in the
memories of "old citizens"; two or three of them became boarding houses;
a real estate and insurance agent moved into one of them and the elderly
and friendly brick building had an air of pathetic mortification that it
should have come to wear a violent black-and-gilt sign across its
homelike front. Farther up the street, another of the old houses--a
pleasant one, built in the Fifties, with a shady yard about it--was torn
down the next spring and replaced by a huge oblong shell of concrete and
glass, rearing a great flat faade where a well-remembered picket fence
and gate had been. Some kindly big old trees, well-remembered, too, had
perished here to make room for this incredible "automobile sales
building".

That "sales building" was like the first fastening of the tentacle of an
octopus upon a victim. The old happily livable "principal residence
streets", with their solid houses, plate-glass windows, sunny lawns and
shady trees, were doomed; and the fashion of saying "I remember when"
could henceforth belong to the comparatively young, for the doom worked
swiftly. Moreover, the old houses had themselves done something to
advance it. The value of the land had increased since they had first sat
themselves down in the midst of their ample lawns, and many of them had
parted with their "side yards", selling ground room for cheaper and
narrower houses--neighbours that crowded closer and yet decreased the
old prevailing neighbourliness. The new houses became shabby quickly;
here and there one of them showed a placard with the word "Rooms" upon
it.

After that first "sales building", the second came quickly--and a third
and a fourth and a fifth, and then a great brick apartment house, and
then another--all on the same "principal residence street", the most
comfortable, the handsomest and richest and most spacious thoroughfare
in all the town. It suddenly began to look queer. We recognized it, of
course, but it began to have the unfamiliar-familiar look of a friend
who has an attack of poison ivy. Downtown, the change began to move even
faster; wreckers laid old office buildings flat and in their places we
saw steel cobwebs rising against the sky.

Underneath the growth, one began to feel a powerful unrest, a movement
of enterprise, of determined and adventurous optimism, a spirit
iconoclastic toward whatever was old or delicate or lacked size--a
spirit immensely set upon newness and bigness. "I will build a new city
here upon this old one," it seemed to say. "I will build a noisy city
upon this quiet one. I will build a dirty city upon this clean one. My
new city may be as ugly as sin, as black as coal, as noisy as ten
thousand boiler factories; but it will be beautiful to me, because it
will be big--big--big!"

For the passion for giantism, an immemorial mark of races growing toward
command of the world, or at least the struggle to command it, was now at
work over all the forward-moving parts of the country; and, although
some sleepy places in the South and in New England might for the time
avoid it and continue on in their antique civilized content and comfort,
yet it would move them too some day. And nowhere, not even in the
turmoil of New York or Chicago, was it more evident than where our
Midland town writhed in the throes of transformation, beginning to be
that scene of endless change we call a "modern city".

A returned native, more and more disturbed to see what had called him
home now thus engage itself in the act of disappearing forever, became
subject to personal misgivings. The very house I lived in--the house I'd
grown up in and had at last returned to, when I "came home to settle
down for good"--that house, too, must be swept away before long. And so,
by the time Europe was involving itself in the impossible war that never
could be, I was transcribing this impression of what I saw before me:

"The growth was now visibly upon the pleasant and substantial town,
where all had once appeared to be so settled and so finished; for, just
as with some of man's disorders that develop slowly, at first merely
hinting in mild prophetic symptoms, then becoming more sinister, and
attacking one member after another until the whole body writhes and
alters, so it is with this disorder that comes racking the Midland towns
through distortions and turmoil into the vaster likenesses of cities;
haphazard and insignificant destructions begin casually, but gradually
grow more sweeping and more violent until the victim town becomes aware
of great crashings--and then lies choking in a cloud of dust and smoke
wherein huge new excrescences appear.

"Cameras of the new age sometimes record upon strips of moving film the
slow life of a plant from the seed to the blossoming of its flower; and
then there is thrown upon the screen a picture in which time is so
quickened that the plant is seen in the very motions of its growth,
twisting itself out of the ground and stretching and swelling to its
maturity, all within a few minutes. So might a film record be made of
the new growth bringing to full life a quiet and elderly Midland town;
but the picture would be dumbfounding. Cyclone, earthquake and miracle
would seem to stalk hand in hand upon the screen; thunder and avalanche
should play in the orchestra pit.

"In such a picture, block after block of heavy old mansions would be
seen to topple; row on row of stout buildings would vanish almost
simultaneously; families would be shown in flight, carrying away their
goods with them from houses about to crumble; miles of tall trees would
be uprooted; the earth would gape, opening great holes and chasms; the
very streets would unskin themselves and twist in agony; every landmark
would fly dispersed in powder upon the wind and all old-established
things disappear.

"Such a picture would be but the truth with time condensed--that is to
say, the truth made like a man's recollection of events--and yet it
would not be like the truth as the truth appeared to the men who made
the growth, nor like their subsequent memories. For these men saw, not
the destruction, but only the city they were building; and they shouted
their worship of that vision and were exultant in the uproar. They
shouted as each new skyscraper rose swimming through the vast drifts of
smoke, and shouted again as the plain, clean, old business streets
collapsed and the magnificent and dirty new ones climbed above the
ruins. They shouted when business went sweeping outward from its centre,
tearing away the houses where people had lived contentedly for so long;
and they shouted again as the new factory suburbs marched upon the
countryside, far and wide, and the colossal black plumes of new chimneys
went undulating off into a perpetual smoke mist, so that the distant
level plain seemed to be a plain surrounding not a city, but an
ever-fuming volcano.

"Once again, in the interminably cycling repetition of the new
displacing of the old, then becoming the old and being displaced in
turn, an old order was perishing. The 'New Materialism' that had begun
to grow with the renewed growing of the country after the Civil War, and
staggered under the panic of '73, but recovered and went on, growing
egregiously, had become an old materialism now. It had done great things
and little things. Among the latter, it had furnished Europe with a
caricature type of the American--the successful American business man.
On the shelf, beside the figure of the loud-tweeded boxing Briton with
his 'side whiskers', Europe set the lank and drawling, chin-bearded,
palace-buying boaster of the Almighty Dollar, the 'Yankee' of the great
boom period.

"That had been a great railroad-making and railroad-breaking period; the
great steel period; the great oil period; the great electric-invention
period; the great Barnum-and-Bunkum period; the period of 'corrupt
senators', of reform and of the first skyscrapers. All this was old now,
routed by a newer and more gorgeous materialism. The old had still its
disciplines for the young and its general appearance of piety; bad
children were still whipped sometimes, and the people of best reputation
played no games on Sunday, but went to church and seemed to believe in
God and the Bible with almost the faith of their fathers. But many of
these people went down with their falling houses; a new society,
swarming upward above the old surfaces, became dominant. It began to
breed, among other things, a new critic who attacked every faith and
offered, instead of mysteries, full knowledge of all creation as merely
a bit of easily comprehended mechanics. And in addition to discovering
the universe, the new society discovered golf, communism and the movies;
it spread the great American cocktail over the whole world, abolished
horses and produced buildings fifty stories high.

"...In the din of all the tearing down and building up, most of the
old family names were not heard, or were heard but obscurely, or perhaps
in connection with misfortunes; for many of the old families were
vanishing. They and their fathers and grandfathers had slowly made the
town; they had always thought of it as their own, and they had expected
to sit looking out upon it complacently forever from the plate-glass of
their big houses. They had built thick walls round themselves, these
'old families', not only when they built the walls of their houses but
when they built the walls encircling their close association with one
another. The growth razed all these walls; the 'sets' had resisted the
'climbers', but the defences fell now; and those who had sheltered
behind them were dispersed, groping for one another in the smoke."

For, by the time Europe was horribly swamped in war, the growth had
overwhelmed the "old citizen", and so had the manifestations that
accompanied it and dumbfounded him. He was already sufficiently dazed:
"Votes for Women" and Prohibition were near at hand. "Everybody" was
beginning to own an automobile; "speed mania" spread massacre
everywhere, especially on Sunday, and nothing whatever abated it; and
then, in the midst of all the tearing down and building up, with all the
whirling of dollars in the air and of rubber wheels on every street and
road, when the turmoil seemed wildest and most deafening, all the
country fell to dancing. Jazz and the "turkey trot" had arrived.




CHAPTER XVII


Even the later hourglass girls had danced the Cake Walk in philanthropic
pageants. There had been "Kermesses" for charity, too, when girls over
fifteen danced in costume, with skirts that exposed their ankles; and in
the private dancing-schools gifted pupils were sometimes selected to
learn "fancy dances" supposedly expressive of festal but decorous
moments in exotic lives. The "Fishers' Hornpipe" and the "Highland
Fling" (with no flinging) were the most prevalent of these; though there
was a more flashing one, called with sweeping simplicity "Spanish
Dance", in which rhythmic coquetry unfurled and snapped shut a wicked
black fan. The Seorita sometimes went so far as to cover all of her
face, except the eyes, with her fan, and then look over it roguishly at
the audience, or even at her male partner in the dance, if she had one.
Her boldness was more applauded than criticized, though conservative
older people thought the Cake Walk not daring precisely, but perhaps a
little coarse, even if danced with the utmost refinement of gesture. It
depicted nothing worse than a supposedly negroid joviality; but some
audiences were a little disturbed to see "well brought up young people"
engaged in even that much depiction of low-lived emotional gaiety.

After the old "square" dances disappeared (except from a few bucolic
"town hall" fiestas where they still may be seen, upon lively occasion,
even to-day) the "two-step" and waltz prevailed monotonously until the
"Boston" was devised, the last new dance before the dbcle. Until after
the "Boston" our polite dancing expressed nothing more than gaiety and
rhythm; it was a part of youth, and a part of youthful courtship, too,
of course; but it was essentially the light heart moving the feet to
lightness in harmony with it. The older clergy of the more rigorous
sects had little approval of such harmonies; they put all dancing to the
ban as they did the theatre, the circus, cards, dice, "low corsages" and
Sunday fishing; they called it sensuous, and no doubt it was; but they
didn't call it sensual, for that would have been a patent exaggeration.
If it was sensuous it was no more so than is the love of flowers; and a
room full of young dancers was a pretty sight, charming to the elderly
onlooker who frequently became reminiscently sentimental upon beholding
it.

No one became sentimental either reminiscently or otherwise, looking on
at the Bal Bullier, in Paris, after the "machiche" began to prevail
there, in the latter part of the first decade of the Twentieth Century.
The "machiche" was said to have come from the Argentine and to have been
known to fetid midnights in many cities, including San Francisco, before
it ever dared to be danced publicly. It had been seen by tourist
peep-hole parties in Paris, under the conduct of sleek "guides"; it
became for a time one of the dreary obliquities of the old Jardin de
Paris; but finally it openly ravaged the Bal Bullier, where it displaced
the ancient can-can and was danced by hundreds of Boule' Miche' young
couples without a blush anywhere visible. American tourists went there
to see it as they had formerly gone there to see the can-can, and the
"machiche" more embarrassingly startled them (or enthused them,
according to their natures and alcoholic content) than ever the can-can
did. Yet it was a dance apparently not intricate, the steps were of the
simplest, for the dancers merely walked in time to the music, and
sometimes, at rhythmic intervals, they paused at almost a standstill, so
far as their feet were concerned. The dance appeared to be essentially
Oriental, consisting of wriggles and wagglings, and in order that these
gestures should be in concert the partners found it necessary to clasp
each other more closely than in any other kind of dancing. Shocked
travellers from our country, looking on at the "machiche", were heard to
exclaim, "Thank God, we live in America!" Nothing was less possibly
imaginable than that the "machiche" could ever be performed in open,
public dance halls in a land morally conducted in all outwards by the
New England conscience.

But the "machiche" dumbfoundingly came to America, where it had some
joggling negroid modifications, being danced principally with the
shoulders and hips, and became humorously known as the "turkey trot".
The extremely tight clasp--somewhat convulsive in appearance--was no
less necessary than with the original "machiche", and what the dancers
did with their feet was as relatively unimportant. The "steps" could be
learned by anyone in no time; they were merely a walking to music; no
agility whatever was required; but, what distributed the contagion,
youth itself, was not required.

This made the "turkey trot" revolutionary. Until then, dancing had been
for the young; by the time the children were old enough to dance their
fathers and mothers were too old; that field of diversion was abandoned
to the exclusive use of the young, with here and there a quaint
exception--an indomitably nimble old bachelor or a reviving widower. Of
the previous generations, married people over thirty were
supposedly--and nearly always really, for that matter--seriously engaged
in business and housewifery, in bringing up their children, in domestic
life generally and in church work or charity work or the intellectual
divertissements of literary clubs. They danced more and more rarely; and
by the time they were forty-five they had usually forgotten how even to
waltz, just as they had usually forgotten how to skate.

But domestic life was no longer what it had been. Greater and greater
numbers of parents were rich enough to leave their children to the care
of nurses and servants; while others, observing and emulating the
leisure thus afforded, gave children the opportunity to learn
self-reliance and other things by looking after themselves. Men and
women of any age could dance the "turkey trot", since anybody who could
walk and waggle a little could dance it; gray heads and white heads came
forth from easychairs and the evening lamp; more heads became dyed
heads; bald heads gleamed over all the dancing-floors, and the
dancing-floors were everywhere; the hotels set tables merely as a border
about waxed surfaces, for people could no longer bear to eat without
dancing. They had soup and danced; they ate fish and danced; they danced
from cocktails to coffee and went out to a movie and came back to dance.
They danced to syncopations that humorously and inspiringly synchronized
with the clasping and waggling and waddling. The syncopations employed,
as punctuation marks, drums, brasses, saxophones and whatever else could
rip and scarify the ear; and to this hell-born punctuation added
misplaced sliding wails of unbearable tinniness, incessant animal
screechings and hideous impendings of worse: jazz became triumphant.
People who had never danced began to dance; people who had forgotten how
to dance began to dance again; young and old danced; widowed
grandmothers danced and grandmothers not widowed; the rich danced; the
poor danced; invalids danced; even bankers danced. The "turkey trot"
swept over the country.

"I'd never have believed it," one of the older citizenry said, one
night, at the club. "I wouldn't have believed it if anyone had told me:
I had to go and see it with my own eyes--and I certainly did! At first I
could hardly believe I was seeing what I saw; but no, there it was--they
were all at it, wagging their backs and flopping from one hip to the
other, and clutched up to their partners in a way that would have got a
Knights of Labour ball closed by the police not so many years ago. But
there were our 'best people', old and young; I never thought I'd live to
see such a sight. Between the dances a crowd of the older ones, all of
'em middle-aged fathers and mothers, had highballs at a table and began
to sing 'When good fellows get together'--men and women just screeching
it out, something terrible! Then three or four of the girls were smoking
on the terrace without caring who saw 'em doing it. Yes, sir, right
young girls they were, daughters of friends of mine--smoking and not
blinking an eyelash when they saw me looking at 'em! I guess female
emancipation is pretty nearly here--these New Women are going to get the
ballot as sure as you're born! They're going to do everything the boys
do, I expect, and it looks as if it's too late to stop 'em. My heavens!
What's the next generation going to be like with this one behaving the
way it does? What's a child going to think of its parents when it sees
'em both drinking highballs and smoking and hears 'em singing and
whooping the way they do? And if any child saw its mother and father
wriggling around in this turkey trot dance, making themselves look as
low-life and ridiculous as that, how in the name of goodness could they
ever expect to have any authority over a child afterwards? What a queer
time we're living in! This town's being torn to pieces and rebuilt right
over our heads; our coloured laundress comes to work every Monday
morning in her son's automobile; he's a barber, I give you my word!
There isn't anything the way it used to be, and I tell you it's getting
to be a mighty confusing world: it makes an old-timer's head spin!"

Then the world of the old-timer became more confusing than merely with
the building up and tearing down of cities accompanied by Feminism,
automobiles for working-people, and the "turkey trot". We went to war.




CHAPTER XVIII


One day in my boyhood I looked out from a window and saw standing on the
shady corner, beyond our lawn, the broad-shouldered sturdy figure of a
neighbour who was waiting for a street-car. He had been a soldier in the
Civil War and had come home wearing a General's epaulettes; but he
didn't wear them long. He took off his uniform and went quietly back to
work in his law office. Now he was a Senator and would soon be going to
Washington with a higher rank than that, for he had been elected to the
Presidency of the United States. Looking out at him from the window and
seeing just the familiar figure of a neighbour, it seemed strange that
he wore no new and glamorous aspect; the only visible token of the
tremendous experience before him was that he seemed more
thoughtful-looking than usual.

So, in April, 1917, I happened again to look from that same window and
see another neighbour who approached a great experience. He was riding
slowly by upon a bay horse, and he, too, was more thoughtful-looking
than usual; his expression was that of a man who confronts a grave
problem but is not afraid of it; and it seemed to me just the look I
might most have wished him to wear. For, although he was not yet in
uniform he was a Colonel in our forming army and was to lead a regiment
of artillerymen across the sea and into battle in France. When one
thought of these soldiers as a "regiment of artillerymen" they seemed
warlike and suggested a destructive power like that of some great
bristling engine for the crushing and rolling under of a foe's
beleaguered walls; but really, of course, they were only Midland boys,
some of them the sons of my own friends and neighbours. They were just
kindly and cheerful young fellows who liked the exercise of drilling in
the National Guard; many of them had sweethearts they hoped to marry;
some of them were already married and bringing up young families; and
nearly all of them were heartily ambitious to succeed in businesses or
professions now so sharply interrupted.

They went away quietly--as quietly, it seemed, as their
thoughtful-looking Colonel had ridden by my window--for the romantic
glamour that in former wars made the departure of our troops a heroic
pageantry was nowhere to be found.

Almost sixty years had passed since our regiment of Zouaves, on the way
to war, marched down to the State House and knelt there, taking a solemn
oath "to avenge Buena Vista" and a great soprano sang "The Star Spangled
Banner" while their colours were presented to them, and the populace
wept and cheered. In 1917 and 1918, when war was not only "at the front"
but danger reached under the sea for the soldier, departure was made
silently and destinations were secret. Then training camps and schools
and the draft took the younger men away, as quietly, one by one and yet
in millions, while "war work" of one kind or another occupied other
millions. Our "war work" at home was necessary; many fine lives were
exhausted by it and given for it, and the work was done. We accomplished
prodigies, but, being inexperienced and anxious and excited, we wasted
prodigious energy and wealth. Also, we were officious; we got in one
another's way and ordered everybody about ridiculously; we were so jumpy
with strained nerves that now the memory of those two years is like the
memory of a nightmare. For that time was indeed a nightmare, haunted
every hour by the fear of what messages might reach us from a
battlefield or from a hospital or from the sea.

In one sense, no doubt, war is an expression of "herd instinct"; it
might even appear to be an expression of a herd mania. More
speculatively, it may be thought one of the adolescent disorders of
undeveloped mankind--mankind made up of herds not yet drawn into one
herd as they might be if more enlightened or if attacked from other
planets. Probably under compulsion of a law now obscurely glimpsed, the
hugely growing herds have been brought closer into an interdependence
that must ultimately make them one; but they are still ignorant of this
vast process, and every herd is naturally determined, not only to
maintain its own integrity but to increase its numbers and possess the
grazing-ground essential for these increased numbers--no matter what
other herd already grazes upon that ground. Thus they jostle and
irritate one another, become warrantably suspicious of aggression and
breed warrantable suspicion. And when, through crowding, or suspicion,
or the memory of wrongs, or ambition, or all four, adjacent herds set to
sharpening horns, then other herds beyond must necessarily sharpen
theirs or risk destruction. Formerly, when there were great spaces and
time was slow, two or more herds could fight while the others continued
a peaceful grazing in their distant roomy enclosures; but by 1914 the
herds were too large and some of them were too encroaching; the earth
was too small; distance had disappeared, and neither space of land nor
space of water was a separating partition.

There was no choice; we could not be either arrogantly or desperately
trampled under. It was hard for our young men; many of them wondered why
they had to give up all that they were hoping and planning to do for
themselves and go forth to fight in France; and there great numbers of
them suffered and died--and of these not a few were still tragically
puzzled even as they died. But the youthful sons of the Republic had
made themselves into soldiers; they valiantly ended the ruinous war that
had seemed endless; for it was visibly their fresh strength that brought
the victory. More, that strength and valour of theirs, and all the
limitless energy and resource of the immense war effort, made the nation
better aware of its own power. America was to be self-confident
henceforth with a firmer knowledge, and the long lines of our white
crosses in France helped us to bear criticism quietly.

Not many of the soldiers who came back to the welcome at home returned
wholly unchanged; but the prevalent change, after a first restlessness
had passed, seemed clearly defined in a sharp and sturdy patriotism:
what they have fought for men will not meekly allow to be tampered with,
and as the Grand Army of the Republic and the Loyal Legion became the
oaken heart of the nation's patriotism after the Civil War, so does this
newer Legion become that after the Great War. But in numbers of the
young men who had fought there were other changes; and for some of them
the shock to their lives had shaken all the old fundamentals they had
formerly accepted: they questioned everything and especially they
questioned whatever seemed to them dogmatic. They questioned the
historic conclusions upon which they had been brought up--particularly
historic ironclad conclusions that certain things were right and certain
other things were wrong and in this questioning and challenging they
were not alone. All youth, everywhere, had begun to question and
challenge; and many new prophets offered plausibly to lead them against
the old.

This was a disturbed and questioning world, indeed, at the end of the
Great War; it was like the sea covered with heaving wreckage and
seething after the hurricane; fierce winds blew sporadically where the
heaviest storm had passed and there were gulfs still in wild turmoil.
After the Russian Revolution had made that enormous country a republic,
the comparatively small but perfectly organic Bolshevik party had
adroitly and violently disposed of the revolutionary leaders and had
restored Absolutism with Lenin and themselves in place of the Czar.
Their method of "appeal to the people" was essentially the immemorial
appeal of any political party platform, or, for that matter, of any
dictator's pronunciamento: "We're doing this all for you". And the
Bolsheviks did promptly "pass a farmers' relief bill", vastly increasing
the number of property owners in "communist Russia." Naturally,
everywhere else, the poorest people, and those who were out of work or
who had a hard time to make both ends meet on low wages, the troubled
and discontented all over the world felt a great deal of sympathetic
excitement.

In the defeated countries this excitement became a contagion; there were
riots that became temporary revolutions, and even in America there was
uneasiness; many substantial citizens were disquieted, not trusting the
intelligence of the "masses". Agitators, orators and pamphleteers did
what they could to bring the populace to more or less radical socialist
ways of thinking, and for a time they seemed to be having a rather
dangerous amount of success. Most of them were foreign born or of
foreign parentage; they were theorists who had contracted abroad the
habit of being resentfully "against the government", or they had
inherited that habit from their parents; and in some instances the habit
had become actually a profession, the practitioners of which had no
other means of livelihood. But almost every one of them was passionately
sincere in the pathetic belief that his own socialistic prescription was
the universally healing medicine for ailing humanity--even if the
greater part of humanity had to die of the remedy.

They made converts, especially among the young of that disquieted and
questioning time. For it is true that if a person is a socialist at
twenty his heart is right and that if he is one at forty his head is
wrong, even though his heart may still be right. The academic kind of
socialism, of course, is but a laudable Christian sentiment for
universal brotherhood; it cannot be translated into a working system
however, until men universally are governed from within themselves by
brotherly feeling; it is a feeling that cannot be imposed from without,
either by legislation or revolution. Moreover, "state ownership", in
this country particularly, proves to be in reality control by
politicians, "smothering bureaucracy", not economical, and a loss of
that individual liberty congenial to "the land of the free". The
socialist's attack upon the "capitalistic system" is often only a
generous and confused mind's indignation with nature itself for not
making mankind angelic at the outset; though sometimes it hints of an
origin in what lately our youth are so fond of calling the
"biological"--an ancient urge still surviving many ages after bees and
ants branched off as communists; something still appears to survive in
man, sporadically exciting the wish to become only a cell in a single
organism of uniform cells. The urge is impotent; socialism is
communistic at its base, and communism as a reality actually attempted
is the most mocking of all delusions, being merely a change in the names
used to designate bosses. It does not really matter whether the man in
the limousine is called "millionaire" or "commissar" if he has the same
actual power under either title, and he necessarily has unless there is
chaos. The Russian collapse, before it was realized that the word
"capitalistic" really meant "human", approached chaos for a time and
produced one small but reasonable party--the extreme leftward feather of
the left wing, the party of chaos or Perpetual Revolution. Lenin
recognized it when he told the "very poorest" to attack those who were
somewhat less poor and seize their goods. After that, of course, there
would again be some who were the "very poorest", and they in turn must
attack and seize. Never could there be equilibrium, and the nearest
approach to actual communism must be reached only by incessant revolts.
And as the revolts would have to continue until everybody was killed,
this party did indeed offer a consistent, logical programme; they were
the only thoroughgoing realists among the whole body of communists.

Many of our American young people and others who were older in years,
having been agitated and troubled in thought by the war, caught at
socialistic straws for the world's salvation and turned hopeful faces
toward Russia. Socialism, usually of a benevolent, rather vague kind,
began to be a vehemence among groups not too humble minded to resist
being defined as "young intellectuals"--a type as well as a definition
seeming to spring in this country from that time. Not a few of them had
their own idea (seldom derived from the dictionary and frequently not
from Karl Marx) of what socialism meant, though they were nearly all
familiar with such phrases as "everything for use and nothing for
profit"; and they enjoyed a pleasant kind of superiority not unnatural
to youth. Particularly this superiority is congenial to youthful
socialism, which from a height characteristically pities the stupid and
uncomprehending world far below. The complexities of life seem simple to
the kind of thinking that perceives no great difficulty in the way of
altering instinct by statute; it is, however, somewhat disturbing to
imagine the size and necessary wisdom of a bureaucracy capable of
putting into practice by force an ideal thus expressed: "From every one
as much work as, by the decision of a government official, he ought to
do; and to everyone whatever the government official decides that
everyone needs". And yet to those who believe that it is possible to
eliminate nature by legislation no insurmountable obstacles appear to
stand in the way of "from everyone according to his strength; to
everyone according to his need". For this is the angelic
will-o'-the-wisp they follow and offer to capture and fix as the desk
light of millions of government clerks. Nevertheless, the youthful
socialism that followed the war was born of sympathy for the under dog
and of the effort to think how redemption could be brought to a troubled
world; and as an emotion it was genuine and generous.

As thought, it was a symptom of change; it was a part of the new
questioning, the new doubts of the value of all established things. The
characteristic questionings of every new generation as it begins to
think a little for itself were not quietly simmering as aforetime. The
minds of this generation of young people had been startled and shocked
by the most colossal and terrific war the world had known. No wonder
they began to question the old order since, so far as they could see, it
appeared to bear the responsibility for all that madness of destruction.




CHAPTER XIX


As our army disbanded and the tensity of the country relaxed, there
seemed to be a period of uneasy anticlimax; the saloon was gone;
Prohibition had come with the war; "equal suffrage" was certain, and
presently women would vote; there was a pause during which men seemed to
be asking in tired voices, yet anxiously, "Well--what now?" Then, slowly
at first and after a trying depression, business attempted to be
"resumed as usual"; the young soldiers, not often easily or with great
immediate satisfaction to themselves, began to get back into their
former occupations, or to find new ones, or to continue interrupted
educations. Most of them suffered from restlessness; changed themselves,
they came back into a changed world that was still confusedly changing.

Moreover, during service under arms military discipline had taken the
place of the former accepted guides to conduct, and as on furlough "all
rules were off" for the gayer or wilder spirits, so, when military
discipline was permanently removed, those former rules it had supplanted
were not immediately resumed in all their pristine force. That force,
indeed, was shaken by doubts, not only in the minds of many of the
returned young soldiers, but in those of the girls who had been kind to
them when they went away to war and now welcomed them home. For girls
were changed, too; thousands of them had crossed the dangerous seas and
made themselves part of the war; other thousands had prepared themselves
to follow; and all the rest had done "war work" of one kind or another.
Some of the work girls had done was rough as well as perilous; some of
it was heartbreaking; some of it was shocking. "Feminine delicacy" and
chaperonage had become almost extinct ideas--temporarily almost extinct
at least--and when revived later they were found to be greatly
enfeebled.

That uneasy pause of depression and confused readjusting was a long one;
it lasted longer than the time we had spent in war; but finally it began
to pass, and the country entered upon a period that was like what the
old spectacular drama programmes loved to call the "Grand Transformation
Scene". The blaze of glory, so to speak, in which this present epoch was
to culminate sent forth preliminary showers of sparks.

During the war, babies had been born as usual, and, after the Peace,
when ships were no longer needed for carrying soldiers and war supplies,
immigration once more began to be multitudinous. In the meantime there
had been no building; but all these new people needed housing, and the
government having finally decided to become economical after its vast
war spending, money lost its timidity. Building began again.

Once begun, it became almost overnight of a furious energy, and never
before was seen such building up and tearing down. Our Midland city,
after the pause in its heaving up and spreading out, now heaved and
spread incredibly, as did all other strongly living cities. It began to
pile itself higher and higher in the middle, and its boundaries moved
like the boundaries of a rising spring flood. It overran its suburbs,
leaving them compacted with the town, and then immediately reached out
far beyond them. A new house would appear upon a country road; the
country road would transform itself into an asphalt street with a brick
drug store at the corner of a meadow; bungalows and theatrical-looking
cottages would swiftly cover the open spaces of green; a farm would turn
itself hastily into a suburb and then at once join solidly to the city.
What was in spring a quiet lane through fields and woods was in autumn a
constantly lengthening street with trolley-cars gonging and new
house-owners hurriedly putting up wooden garages in their freshly sodded
"side yards".

Deeper in the city, more old houses came down, until those that were
left became pathetic and ridiculous among the buzzing automobile "sales
buildings" and tall apartment houses. They were begrimed, crowded,
deafened with city noises, and seemed to know that the day of demolition
was already set, yet they struggled to maintain some appearance of
dignity as they breathed their last among the fumes of the gasoline that
had doomed them. And in the sooty "back yards" of some of them there
still stood, as a final irony, the reproachful spacious shapes of brick
stables long since empty.

To the old citizen, passing by, these expiring mansions spoke wistfully
of ancient merry times within such solid walls as the frantic new and
costlier buildings could not afford. There had been music at night on
these cramped and dirty lawns, under trees that were gone long ago;
there had been laughter and good cheer and dancing on the other side of
those dingy, carved walnut front doors; white hands had waved, long ago,
from friendly windows that were gaunt and hollow windows now; sleek
young horses had trotted eagerly out of the white-painted iron
driveway-gates long dusty in the junk shops; and even the ghosts of the
happy little dogs that had barked so gaily at the horses must now be
choked in the city smoke.

Some of the people who had spent their youth in these houses still
survived and had part in the strong life of the new city; for now it was
indeed a city built upon the ruins of the old. What had happened to New
York and to Boston and to Chicago happened in its own way here. As Fifth
Avenue disappeared to rise again, all changed, so did Euclid Avenue and
so did Meridian Street; and as New York became "foreign", so did our own
"old-stock" become less typical. Of the grown people who called the
Midland city home, less than a third had been born in it. Most of the
newcomers were natives of smaller towns; but there was a German quarter;
there was an Italian quarter; there were many Irish neighbourhoods;
there were Jewish neighbourhoods; there were large groups of Poles, of
Hungarians, of Rumanians, of Servians; and there was a negro quarter
covering square miles. The old "typical Midlander" was visibly not what
he had been; a new one--in fact, a new American--could be obscurely seen
emerging.

"A new spirit of citizenship has sharply defined itself," I took note of
it then. "This spirit is idealistic and its ideals are expressed by the
new kind of business man downtown. They are optimists to the point of
belligerence, and on their marching banner they inscribe the words,
'Boost! Don't Knock!' They are boosters, out to 'sell' their city to the
world. They believe that boosting pays and their boosting advertisements
are of a new phrasing believed to be both vigorous and seductive. The
new type speaks, too, in a pretentious vocabulary apparently of the
noblest altruism. Nevertheless, these men are sincere and they believe
that honesty pays. The politicians dare not give them too much bad
government because the new type of business man will not endure bad
government when it is so bad that it depresses the value of 'real
estate'; the politicians understand that they cannot go to this length.
The idealists constantly shout that their city shall be a better city
and what they principally mean when they use the word 'better' is
'bigger and more prosperous'. They seem to have one supreme theory: that
the perfect happiness and beauty of cities and of human life are to be
brought about by more factories. There is nothing they will not do to
cajole a factory from another city and they are never more despondent
than when another city gets one away from them. As the city grows and
grows, it grows dirtier and dirtier. The idealists are putting up
enormous business buildings that are repulsively begrimed before they
are finished; but the idealists cannot see the dirt for the size, and
boast grandly. They boast of their monuments and rain soot on them.
Every year they boost a great 'Clean-Up-Week' when everybody is supposed
to get rid of the empty cans in his back yard. Of course this new
idealist, with his booming and boosting and hustling, with his
pretentious vocabulary, his flawless self-confidence and his perfect
unconsciousness of all the little sophistications, is drawing the satire
of the sophisticates. He can afford it; the Rotarian is the great man of
this time. He is strong and devoted; he loves his country and humanity,
and some day he will know more about beauty. Then he will make his city
not only big but beautiful, for his city is his passion."




CHAPTER XX


Now, with the new growth surpassing all former growing and such enormous
building of everything as never had been before, and more people than
ever before taking out money from every pocket to spend it, and with an
agonizing war to be forgotten and left to historians and the past, there
seemed to arrive, on wings of glittering gold and silver, a vast spirit
of diversion.

Nothing could have been more natural than that such a spirit should
prevail when an increasing prosperity began to succeed the wondering
pause that followed the war. And the means for diversion were now what
they had never been before, just as the people who diverted themselves
might have seemed to the eye of a Rip van Winkle, waking then, what they
had never been before. The outward change in people, indeed, had become
so marked that I took note of it in a book, published at about that
time; this note took the form of a slight allegory concerning such a Rip
van Winkle, and the allegory seems to be in point here as an expression
of that period; and of the change.

...The nurses at the sanitarium were all fond of the gentlest patient
in the place, and they spoke of him as "Uncle Charlie", though he was so
sweetly dignified that usually they addressed him as "Mr. Blake", even
when it was necessary to humour his delusion. The delusion was peculiar
and of apparently interminable persistence; he had but the one during
his sixteen years of incarceration--yet it was a misfortune painful only
to himself (painful through the excessive embarrassment it cost him) and
was never for an instant of the slightest distress to anyone else,
except as a stimulant of sympathy. For all that, it closed him in,
shutting out the moving world from him as completely as if he had been
walled up in concrete. Moreover, he had been walled up overnight--one
day he was a sane man, and the next he was in custody as a lunatic; yet
nothing had happened in this little interval, or during any preceding
interval in his life, to account for a seizure so instantaneous.

In 1904 no more commonplace young man could have been found in any of
the great towns of our Eastern and near-Eastern levels. "Well brought
up", as we used to say, he had inherited the quiet manner, the good
health and the moderate wealth of his parents; and, not engaging in any
business or profession, he put forth the best that was in him when he
planned a lunch for a pretty "visiting girl", or, again, when he bought
a pair of iron candle snuffers for what he thought of as his
"collection". This "collection", consisting of cheerless utensils and
primitive furniture once used by woodsmen and farmers, and naturally
discarded by their descendants, gave him his principal occupation,
though he was sometimes called upon to lead a cotillion, being
favourably regarded in the waltz and "two-step"; but he had no
eccentricities, no habitual vices, and was never known to exhibit
anything in the nature of an imagination.

It was in the autumn of the year just mentioned that he went for the
first time to Europe, accompanying his sister, Mrs. Gordon Troup, an
experienced traveller. She took him through the English cathedrals, then
across the Channel; and they arrived unfatigued at her usual hotel in
Paris after dark on a clear November evening--the fated young
gentleman's last evening of sanity. Yet, as Mrs. Troup so often recalled
later, never in his life had her brother been more "absolutely normal"
than all that day: not even the Channel had disturbed him, for it was as
still as syrup in a pantry jug; he slept on the French train, and when
he awoke, played gently with Mrs. Troup's three-year-old daughter
Jeannette who, with a nurse, completed the small party. His talk was not
such as to cause anxiety, being in the main concerned with a tailor who
had pleased him in London and a haberdasher he made sure would please
him in Paris.

They dined in the salon of their apartment; and at about nine o'clock,
as they finished their coffee, flavoured with a little burnt cognac,
Mrs. Troup suggested the theatre--a pantomime or ballet for preference,
since her brother's unfamiliarity with the French language rapidly
spoken might give him a dull evening at a comedy. So, taking their
leisure, they went to the Marigny, where they saw part of a potpourri
called a "revue", which Mrs. Troup declared to be at once too feeble and
too bold to detain them as spectators; and they left the Marigny for the
Folies Bergres, where she had once seen a fine pantomime; but here they
found another "revue", and fared no better. The "revue" at the Folies
Bergres was even feebler, she observed to her brother, and much bolder
than that at the Marigny: the feebleness was in the wit, the boldness in
the anatomical exposures, which were somewhat discomfiting--"even for
Paris!" she said.

She remembered afterward that he made no response to her remark but
remained silent, frowning at the stage, where some figurantes just then
appeared to be dressed in ball gowns, until they turned, when they
appeared to be dressed almost not at all. "Mercy!" said Mrs. Troup; and
presently as the costume designer's ideas became less and less
reassuring, she asked her brother if he would mind taking her back to
the hotel; so much dullness and so much brazenness together fatigued
her, she explained.

He assented briefly, though with some emphasis; and they left during the
entr'acte, making their way through the outer room where a "Hungarian"
band played stormily for a painted and dangerous-looking procession
slowly circling like torpid skaters in a rink. The _bang-whang_ of the
music struck full in the face like an impulsive blow from a fist; so did
the savage rouging of the promenaders; and young Mr. Blake seemed to be
startled: he paused for a moment, looking confused. But Mrs. Troup
pressed his arm. "Let's get out to the air," she said. "Did you ever see
anything like it?"

He replied that he never did, went on quickly; they stepped into a cab
at the door; and on the way to the hotel Mrs. Troup expressed contrition
as a courier. "I shouldn't have given you this for your first impression
of Paris," she said. "We ought to have waited until morning and then
gone to the Sainte-Chapelle. I'll try to make up for to-night by taking
you there the first thing to-morrow."

He murmured something to the effect that he would be glad to see
whatever she chose to show him, and afterward she could not remember
that they had any further conversation until they reached their
apartment in the hotel. There she again expressed her regret, not with
particular emphasis, of course, but rather lightly; for, to her mind, at
least, the evening's experience was the slightest of episodes; and her
brother told her not to "bother", but to "forget it". He spoke casually,
even negligently, but she was able to recall that as he went into his
own room and closed the door, his forehead still showed the same frown,
perhaps of disapproval, that she had observed in the theatre.

The outer door of the apartment, giving entrance to their little
hallway, opened upon a main corridor of the hotel; she locked this door
and took the key with her into her bedchamber, having some vague idea
that her jewels were thus made safer; and this precaution of hers later
made it certain that her brother had not gone out again, but without
doubt passed the night in his own room--in his own room and asleep, so
far as might be guessed.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Her little girl's nurse woke her the next morning; and the woman's
expression showed such distress, even to eyes just drowsily opening,
that Mrs. Troup jumped up at once. "Is something wrong with Jeannette?"

"No, ma'am. It is Mr. Blake."

"Is he ill?"

"I think so. That is, I don't know, ma'am. A _valet de chambre_ went
into his room half an hour ago, and Mr. Blake hid himself under the
bed."

"What?"

"Perhaps you'd better come and see, ma'am. The _valet de chambre_ is
very frightened of him."

But it was poor young Mr. Blake who was afraid of the _valet de
chambre_, and of everybody else, for that matter, as Mrs. Troup
discovered. He declined to come out from under the bed so long as she
and the nurse and the valet were present, and, in response to his
sister's entreaties, he earnestly insisted that she should leave the
room at once and take the servants with her.

"But what's the matter, Charlie dear?" she asked, greatly disturbed.
"_Why_ are you under the bed?"

In his voice, as he replied, a pathetic indignation was audible:
"Because I haven't got any clothes on!"

At this her relief was manifest, and she began to laugh. "Good
heavens----"

"But no, madame!" the valet explained. "He has his clothes on. He is
dressed all entirely. If you will stoop and look----"

She did as he suggested, and saw that her brother was fully dressed and
making gestures as eloquently plaintive as the limited space permitted.
"Can't you take these people away?" he cried pettishly. "Do you think
it's nice to stand around looking at a person that's got nothing on?"

He said the same thing an hour later to the doctor Mrs. Troup summoned,
though by that time he had left his shelter under the bed and had locked
himself in a wardrobe. And thus, out of a clear sky and with no
premonitory vagaries, began his delusion--his long, long delusion, which
knew no variation in the sixteen years it possessed him. From first to
last he was generally regarded as a "strange case"; yet his state of
mind may easily be realized by anybody who dreams; for in dreams
everybody has undergone, however briefly, experiences similar to those
in which Mr. Blake fancied himself so continuously involved.

He was taken from the hotel to a private asylum near Paris, where he
remained until the following year, when Mrs. Troup had him quietly
brought home to a suburban sanitarium convenient for her to visit at
intervals; and here he remained, his condition changing neither for the
better nor for the worse. He was violent only once or twice in the whole
period, and, though he was sometimes a little peevish, he was the most
tractable patient in the institution, so long as his delusion was
discreetly humoured; yet it is probable that the complete records of
kleptomania would not disclose a more expert thief.

This was not a new form of his disease, but a natural by-product and
outgrowth of it, which within a year or two had developed to the point
of fine legerdemain; and at the end of ten years Doctor Cowrie, the
chief at the sanitarium, declared that his patient, Uncle Charlie Blake,
could "steal the trousers off a man's legs without the man's knowing
it." The alienist may have exaggerated; but it is certain that "Uncle
Charlie" could steal the most carefully fastened and safety-pinned apron
from a nurse, without the nurse's being aware of it. Indeed, attendants,
nurses and servants who wore aprons learned to remove them before
entering his room; for the most watchful could seldom prevent what
seemed a miraculous exchange, and "Uncle Charlie" would be wearing the
apron that had seemed, but a moment before, to be secure upon the
intruder. It may be said that he spent most of his time purloining and
collecting aprons; for quantities of them were frequently discovered
hidden in his room, and taken away, though he always wore several, by
permission. Nor were other garments safe from him: it was found that he
could not be allowed to take his outdoor exercise except in those
portions of the grounds remotest from the laundry yard; and even then,
as he was remarkably deft in concealing himself behind trees and among
shrubberies, he was sometimes able to strip a whole length of
clothesline, to don many of the damp garments, and to hide the others,
before being detected.

He read nothing, had no diversions, and was immersed in the sole
preoccupation of devising means to obtain garments, which, immediately
after he put them on, were dissolved into nothingness so far as his
consciousness was concerned. Mrs. Troup could not always resist the
impulse to argue with him as if he were a rational man; and she made
efforts to interest him in "books and the outside world", kindly efforts
that only irritated him. "How can I read books and newspapers?" he
inquired peevishly from under the bed, where he always remained when he
received her. "Don't you know any better than to talk about intellectual
pursuits to a man that hasn't got a stitch of clothes to his name? Try
it yourself if you want to know how it feels. Find yourself totally
undressed, with all sorts of people likely to drop in on you at any
minute, and then sit down and read a newspaper! Please use your _reason_
a little, Frances!"

Mrs. Troup sighed and rose to depart--but found that her fur cloak had
disappeared under the bed.

In fact, though Mrs. Troup failed to comprehend this, he had explained
his condition to her quite perfectly: it was merely an excessive
protraction of the nervous anxiety experienced by a rational person
whose entire wardrobe is missing. No sensitive gentleman, under such
circumstances, has attention to spare from his effort to clothe himself;
and all information not bearing upon that effort will fail of important
effect upon his mind. You may bring him the news that the Brooklyn
Bridge has fallen with a great splash, but the gravity of the event will
be lost upon him until he has obtained trousers.

Thus, year after year, while Uncle Charlie Blake became more and more
dexterous at stealing aprons, history paced on outside the high iron
fence enclosing the grounds of the sanitarium, and all the time he was
so concerned with his embarrassment, and with his plans and campaigns to
relieve it, that there was no room left in his mind for the plans and
campaigns of Joffre and Hindenburg and Haig and Foch. Armistice Day, as
celebrated by Uncle Charlie, was the day when, owing to some cheerful
preoccupation on the part of doctors and attendants, he stole nine
aprons, three overcoats, a waistcoat and seventeen pillowslips.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Rip van Winkle beat Uncle Charlie by four years. The likeness between
the two experiences is pathetically striking, and the difference between
them more apparent than actual; for though Rip van Winkle's body lay
upon the hill like a stone, the while his slumber was vaguely decorated
with thousands of dreams, and although Uncle Charlie Blake had the full
use of his body, and was all the time lost in one particular and
definite dream, still, if Rip van Winkle could wake, so could Uncle
Charlie. At least, this was the view of the younger alienist, Doctor
Morphy, who succeeded Doctor Cowrie in 1919.

In the course of some long and sympathetic talks with his patient,
Doctor Morphy slightly emphasized a suggestion that of late tin had come
to be considered the most desirable clothing material: the stiffness and
glitter of tin, as well as the sound of it, enabled a person to be
pretty sure he had something over him, so long as he wore one of the new
tin suits, the Doctor explained. Then he took an engraving of Don
Quixote in armour to a tinsmith, had him make a suit of armour in tin,
and left it in Uncle Charlie's corridor to be stolen.

The awakening, or cure, began there; for the patient accepted the tin
armour as substance, even when it was upon him, the first apparel he had
believed to be tangible and opaque enough for modesty since the night
his sister had taken him to the Folies Bergres in 1904. The patient's
satisfaction when he had put on this Don Quixote armour was instant, but
so profound that at first he could express it only in long sighs, like
those of a swimmer who has attained the land with difficulty and lies
upon the bank flaccid with both his struggle and his relief. That
morning, for the first time, he made no dive under his bed at the sound
of a knock upon the door, and when he went out for his exercise, he
broke his long habit of darting from the shelter of one tree to another.
He was even so confident as to walk up to a woman nurse and remark that
it was a pleasant day.

Thence onward, the measures to be taken for his restoration to society
were obvious. The tin greaves pinched him at the joints when he moved,
and Doctor Morphy pointed out that silver cloth, with rows of tiny bells
sewed upon it here and there, would glitter and sound even better than
tin. Then, when the patient had worn a suit of this silver cloth,
instead of tin, for a few weeks, the bells were gradually removed, a row
at a time, until finally they were all gone, and Uncle Charlie was
convinced by only the glitter that he went apparelled. After that, the
silver was secretly tarnished, yet the patient remained satisfied. Next
a woollen suit of vivid green and red plaid was substituted; and others
followed, each milder than its predecessor, until at last Uncle Charlie
grew accustomed to the daily thought that he was clothed, and, relieved
of his long anxiety, began to play solitaire in his room. His delusion
had been gradually worn away, but not to make room for another;
moreover, as it lost actuality to him, he began to forget it. His
intelligence cleared, in fact, until upon Thanksgiving Day, 1920, when
Mrs. Troup came to take him away, he was in everything--except a body
forty-six years old--the same young man who had arrived in Paris on a
November evening in 1904. His information, his point of view and his
convictions were those of a commonplace, well-brought-up, conventional
young American of that period; he had merely to bridge the gap.

Doctor Morphy advised Mrs. Troup that the bridging must be done with as
little strain as possible upon the convalescent's mind--a mind never too
hardily robust--and therefore the devoted lady took her brother to a
mountain health resort, where for a month they lived in a detached
cottage, walked footpaths in the woods, went to bed at nine, and made no
acquaintances. Mrs. Troup dispensed with newspapers for the time (her
charge did not appear to be aware of their absence) but she had brought
such books as she thought might be useful; and every day she talked to
him, as instructively as she could, of the terrific culminations history
had seen during the latter part of his incarceration.

Of Bolshevism he appeared unable to make anything at all, though Mrs.
Troup's explanations struck out a single spark from his memory. "Oh,
yes," he said, "I remember a rather talky chap--he was one of the guests
at that queer place where I used to live, you know--well, he used to
make speeches the whole day long. He said the doctors got all the money
and it was _our_ money. If it wasn't for us, the doctors wouldn't have a
cent, he said; and since we produced all the wealth, we ought to
organize, and lock the doctors up in the cellar, and get the money
ourselves. I remember some of the other guests seemed to think there was
a good deal in the talky chap's speeches, and I suppose it must be
something of this sort that's happened in Russia. It's very confusing,
though."

And when her lessons, as mild as she could make them, had proceeded
somewhat further, he passed his hand over his brow, professing himself
more confused than ever.

"I declare!" he said. "No sensible person could make head or tail of it,
if I may use such an expression. I never dreamed anything could actually
come of all these eccentricities--women's rights, socialism, blue
Sundays, prohibition and what not. I've heard of such people--heard
jokes about 'em--but never in my life _met_ a person that went in
seriously for any of 'em, except that speechifying chap I told you
about. How on earth did it all _happen_?"

Upon this she was able to enlighten him but feebly, and he rubbed his
forehead again.

"It's no use," he told her. "There's no _reason_ behind these things:
the only thing to do is to realize that the world's gone crazy. We used
to think that civilization was something made of parts working together
as they do in an engine; but, from what you tell me, it must have been
trying to split itself up, all the time. The nations split up and began
to fight one another; and as soon as they'd all got so crippled and in
debt that they couldn't fight any more, the other splits began.
Everybody had to be on the side of the women or on the side of the men,
and the women won. Now everybody has to be either a capitalist or a
labourer, it seems, no matter what _else_ he is; and even if he doesn't
know which he is, he'll have to fight, because somebody's sure to hit
him. And besides _that_, the people have gone and split themselves into
those that drink and the others that won't let 'em. How many _more_
splits are there going to be, with the people on each side just bound to
run the world their way? There are plenty of other _kinds_ of splits
that could be made, and I suppose we might as well expect 'em; for
instance, we can have all the married people on one side in a
'class-conscious class', as you were explaining, and all the unmarried
ones on the other. Or all the parents on one side and all the children
on the other." He paused, and laughed, adding: "However, I don't suppose
it's gone quite so far as children versus parents yet, has it?"

Mrs. Troup looked thoughtful. "I suppose it always _has_ been 'children
versus parents', at least in a sense," she said. "I've been thinking
lately, though, that since all revolts are more apt to take place
against feeble governments than against strong ones, if the children
_are_ in revolt, it must be because the parents are showing greater
laxity than they used to."

Mr. Blake went to his afternoon nap, shaking his head, but in silence.
Naturally he was confused by what he heard from her, and once or twice
he was confused by some things he saw, though in their seclusion he saw
little. One mistake he made, however, amazed his sister.

From their pleasant veranda a rounded green slope descended slowly to
the level lawn surrounding the Georgian upheavings of an endless hotel;
and at a porte-cochre of this hotel a dozen young women, come from a
ride on the hills, were getting down from their saddles. Mr. Blake, upon
the veranda of the cottage a hundred yards distant, observed them
thoughtfully.

"It may be only the difference in fashions," he remarked; "but people's
figures look very queer to me. The actual shapes seem to have changed as
much as the clothes. You're used to them, I suppose, and so they don't
surprise you, but down there at that porte-cochre, for instance, the
figures all look odd and--well, sort of bunchy. To me, every single one
of those boys seems to be either knock-kneed or bow-legged."

"Boys!" Mrs. Troup cried.

He stared at her. "What are they?"

"Good gracious! Don't you see? They're women!"

He still stared at her, while his incredulous expression slowly changed
to one of troubled perplexity. But he said nothing at all, and after a
moment more turned away and went to his room, where he remained until
dinner time. When he appeared at the table, he made no reference to his
mistake, but reverted to the topic of which they had been speaking that
afternoon before his attention wandered to the horsewomen at the
porte-cochre.

"Prohibition must have altered a great many people's lives quite
violently," he said. "I suppose it was quite a shock for people who'd
always had wine or Scotch at dinner--giving it up so suddenly."

"I suppose so--I don't know----" A little colour showed below Mrs.
Troup's eyes. "Of course, quite a number of people had supplies on hand
when the day came."

"But most of that must be gone by this time."

"Quite a good deal of it is gone, yes; you don't see wine very often any
more. People who have any left are getting very piggish about it, I
believe."

"It must be odd," he said contemplatively, "the whole country's being
absolutely sober and dry, like this."

"Well----" she began; then, after a pause, went on: "It isn't like
that--exactly. You see----"

"Oh, of course, there would be a few moonshine stills and low dives," he
interrupted. "But people of our circle----"

"Aren't exactly 'dry', Charles."

"But if they have no wine or----"

"It's my impression," said Mrs. Troup, "that certain queer kinds of
whiskey and gin----"

"But we were speaking of 'our circle'--the kind of people _we_----"

"Yes, I know," she said. "They carry these liquids about with them in
the most exquisite flasks. Jeannette has one--a boy friend gave it to
her--and it must have been made by a silversmith who is a real artist.
It must have been fearfully expensive."

Mr. Blake's open mouth remained distended for a moment. "Your
Jeannette!" he exclaimed. "Why, she's only----"

"Oh, she's nineteen," his sister informed him soothingly.

"But was it exactly nice for her to receive such a gift from a young
man?"

"Oh, he's one of the nicest boys we know," Mrs. Troup explained. "They
swim together every day."

"Swim together?" her brother inquired feebly.

"Yes," said Mrs. Troup. "His aunt has a tank."

"'His aunt has a tank'," the convalescent repeated in a low voice, as if
he wished to get the sentence by heart. "'His aunt has a tank'."

Mrs. Troup coughed placatively. "It may be a little difficult for you to
understand," she said. "Of course, even I feel obliged to have something
in the house at home--a certain amount of whiskey. I don't approve of
such things, naturally, but Jeannette feels it's necessary on account of
the young men and the other girls. She doesn't like whiskey and never
touches it herself."

Jeannette's uncle uttered a sigh of relief. "I should think not! I was
afraid, from what you told me of her flask----"

"Oh, in that," said Mrs. Troup, "she keeps gin."

"Gin?" he said in a whisper. "Gin?"

"She's rather fond of gin," Mrs. Troup informed him. "She makes it
herself from a recipe; it's quite simple, I believe."

"And she _carries_ this flask----"

"Oh, not all the time!" Mrs. Troup protested, laughing. "Only to dances
and girls' lunches." And, observing her brother's expression, she added:
"Of course, she never takes too _much_; you mustn't get a wrong idea of
Jeannette. She and all the girls of her set don't believe in _that_, at
all--I'm positive none of them has ever been intoxicated. They have the
very highest principles."

"They have?"

"Yes; you see, Jeannette has read Wells and Shaw since she was twelve.
When we go home and you meet Jeannette, you must try to understand that
she belongs to a different generation, Charles. You see, Jeannette has
had so _many_ influences that didn't affect your own youth at all. For
instance, she always insisted on going to the movies even when she was a
little girl, and I rather enjoy them myself, when I'm tired; and then
there's the new stage--and the new novel--you know, we have everything
on the stage and in books that we used to think could only be in books
and on the stage in France, because here the police----"

"But in France," he interrupted, "--in France they didn't let the _jeune
fille_ read the books or go to the theatre."

"No," she agreed. "But of course over here we've had feminism----"

"What's that?"

"I don't know exactly, but I think it's something to do with the
emancipation of women." She paused, then added thoughtfully: "Of course,
Jeannette smokes."

"What!"

"Oh, that's nothing at all," she said hastily. "They've had to permit it
in nearly all the restaurants."

He rose, leaning heavily upon his chair, as if for support, and looking
rather more pallid than usual. In fact, his brow was damp from the
exertion its interior workings had undergone in the effort to comprehend
his sister's conversation. "I think, if you don't mind," he murmured,
"I'll go directly to bed and rest."

"Do," she said sympathetically. "We'll talk some more about Jeannette
to-morrow. She's the most lovably pretty thing in the world, and you'll
be cra----" She changed the phrase hastily. "You'll be delighted to have
such a niece."

But, as it happened, when she began to speak of Jeannette the next day,
he gently protested, asking her to choose another topic. "I'm sure I
couldn't understand," he said, "and the effort rather upsets me. It
would be better to wait and let me form my own impressions when I see
her."

His sister assented without debate; and nothing more was said about
Jeannette until a week later when they were on the train and half the
way home. A telegram was handed to Mrs. Troup by the porter, and after
reading it she glanced rather apprehensively toward her brother, who, in
the opposite seat, was so deeply attentive to a book that he had not
noticed the delivery of the telegram; in fact, he did not observe it,
still in her hand, when he looked up vaguely, after a time, to speak a
thought suggested by his reading.

"So many of these books about the war and the after-effects of the war
say that there is to be a 'new world'. All the young people have made up
their minds that the old world was a failure and they're going to have
something different. I don't know just what they mean by this 'new
world' the writers talk so much about, because they never go into the
details of the great change. It's clear, though, that the young people
intend the new world to be much more spiritual than the old one. Well,
I'm anxious to see it, and, of course, it's a great advantage to me,
because I stayed so long at that queer place--where the doctors were--it
will be easier to start in with a new world than it would be, maybe, to
get used to the changes in the old one. I'm mighty anxious to see these
new young people who----"

His sister interrupted him. "You'll see some of them soon enough, it
appears. I really think Jeannette shouldn't have done this." And she
handed him the telegram to read.

    THOUGHT I BETTER LET YOU KNOW IN CASE YOU PREFER TAKING UNCLE
    CHARLES TO HOTEL FOR FIRST NIGHT AT HOME AS AM THROWING TODDLE
    ABOUT FORTY COUPLES AT HOUSE SAUSAGE BREAKFAST AT FOUR GM TO
    FINISH THE SHOW AND BLACKAMALOO BAND MIGHT DISTURB UNCLE
    CHARLES.

Uncle Charles was somewhat disturbed, in fact, by the telegram itself.
"'Am throwing toddle'----" he murmured.

"She means she's giving a dance," his sister explained, frowning. "It's
really not very considerate of her, our first evening at home; but
Jeannette is just made of impulses. She's given I don't know how many
dances since I went away with you, and she might have let this one drop.
I'm afraid it may be very upsetting for you, Charles."

"You could send her a telegram from the next station," he suggested.
"You could ask her to telephone her friends and postpone the----"

"Not Jeannette!" Mrs. Troup laughed. "I could wire, but she wouldn't pay
any attention. I have no influence with her."

"You haven't?"

"No." And upon this Mrs. Troup became graver. "I don't think her father
would have had any either, if he had lived; he was so easy-going and
used to sing so loudly after dinner. Jeannette always seemed to think he
was just a joke, even when she was a child. The truth is, she's like a
great many of her friends: they seem to lack the quality of respect.
When we were young, Charles, we had that, at least; our parents taught
us to have that quality."

"But haven't you taught Jeannette to have it?"

"Indeed I have," Mrs. Troup sighed. "I've told her every day for years
that she hadn't any. I noticed it first when she was thirteen years old.
It seemed to break out on her, as it were, that year."

"How did it happen?"

"Why, we were staying at a summer hotel, a rather gay place, and I'm
afraid I left her too much to her governess--I was feeling pretty blue
that summer and I wanted distraction. I liked tangoing----"

"Tangoing?" he said inquiringly. "Was it a game?"

"No; a dance. They called it 'the tango'; I don't know why. And there
was 'turkey trotting', too----"

"'Turkey trotting'?" he said huskily.

"Well, that," she explained, "was really the 'machiche' that tourists
used to see in Paris at the Bal Bullier. In fact, you saw it yourself,
Charles. A couple danced the 'machiche' that night at the Folies
Ber----" She checked herself hastily, bit her lip, and then, recovering,
she said: "I got quite fond of all those dances after we imported them."

"You mean you got used to looking at them?" he asked slowly. "You went
to see them at places where they were allowed?"

At this she laughed. "No, of course not! I danced them myself."

"_What!_"

"Why, of course!"

"No one----" He faltered. "No one ever _saw_ you do it?"

"Why, of course. It's a little difficult to explain this to you,
Charles, but all those dances that used to seem so shocking to us when
we went to look on at them in foreign places--well, it turned out that
they were _perfectly_ all right and proper when you danced them
yourself. Of course I danced them, and enjoyed them very much; and
besides, it's a wholesome exercise and good for the health. _Everybody_
danced them. People who'd given up dancing for years--the oldest _kind_
of people--danced them. It began the greatest revival of dancing the
world's ever seen, Charles, and the----"

He interrupted her. "Go a little slower, please," he said, and applied a
handkerchief to his forehead. "About your seeming to lose your authority
with Jeannette----"

"Yes; I was trying to tell you. She used to sit up watching us dancing
in the hotel ballroom that summer, and I just _couldn't_ make her go to
bed! That was the first time she deliberately disobeyed me, but it was a
radical change in her; and I've never since then seemed to have any
weight with her--none at all; she's just done exactly what she pleased.
I've often thought perhaps that governess had a bad influence on her."

He wiped his forehead again, and inquired: "You say she's given dances
while you've been away with me?"

"Oh, she asks plenty of married people, of course."

"And it wouldn't be any use to telegraph her to postpone this one?"

"No. She'd just go ahead, and when we got home, she'd be rather annoyed
with me for thinking a dance _could_ be postponed at the last minute. We
must make the best of it."

"I suppose so."

"We won't reach the house till almost ten, and you can go straight to
bed, Charles. I'm afraid the music may disturb you; that's all. Dance
music is rather loudish, nowadays."

"I was thinking," he said slowly, "--I was thinking maybe I'd dress and
look on for a while; I do want to see these new young people. It might
be a good thing for me to begin to get accustomed----"

"So it might," she agreed, brightening. "I was only bothered on your
account, and if you take it that way, it will be all right," she
laughed. "The truth is, I enjoy Jeannette's dances myself. I like to
enter into things with her and be more like a sisterly companion than a
mother in the old-fashioned strict sense. That's the modern spirit,
Charles--to be a hail-fellow of your children, more a wise comrade than
a parent. So, if you feel that you would be interested in looking on,
and won't be disturbed--well, that's just too lovely! And you'll adore
Jeannette!"

He was sure of that, he said; and added that as he was Jeannette's uncle
he supposed it would be proper to kiss her when she met them at the
station.

"Oh, she won't be at the station," said his sister. "In fact, I'll be
surprised if she remembers to send the car for us."

But as it happened, Mrs. Troup was surprised: Jeannette sent the car,
and they were comfortably taken homeward through a city that presented
nothing familiar to Charles Blake, though he had spent his youth in it.
The first thing he found recognizable was the exterior of his sister's
big house, for she had lived in it ever since her marriage; but indoors
she had remodelled it, and he was as lost as he had been under the great
flares of light downtown. Mrs. Troup led him up to his room and left him
there. "Jeannette's dressing, they tell me," she said. "Hurry and dress,
yourself, so as to see her a minute before she gets too busy dancing."

In spite of her instruction, he was too nervous to dress quickly, and
several times decided to get into bed instead of proceeding with his
toilet; but an ardent curiosity prevailed over his timidity, and he
continued to prepare himself for a state appearance, until a strange
event upset him.

There were a few thin squeaks and low blats of warning--small noises
incomprehensible to him, and seemingly distant--when suddenly burst
forth the most outrageous uproar he had ever heard, and he thought it
just outside his door. When it happened, he was standing with his right
foot elevated to penetrate the orifice of that leg of his trousers, but
the shock of sound overturned him; his foot became entangled, and he
fell upon the floor.

Lying there, helpless, he heard a voice sweet as silver bells, even when
it screamed, as it had to scream now to make itself heard. "No, _no_! I
don't want 'The Maiden's Dream'! _Stop; damn it!_" And the outrage
became silence, murmurously broken by only the silvery voice which was
itself now indistinguishable, except as ineffable sound; he could not
make out the words.

Fingers tapped on his door. "Do hurry, Charles dear," Mrs. Troup said.
"Jeannette's arguing with the musicians, but she might have a moment or
two to see you now. People are just beginning to come."

"With whom?" he asked hoarsely, not attempting to move.

"'With whom' what? I don't understand," his sister inquired, shouting
through the closed door.

"You said she's arguing. With whom?"

"With the musicians."

"With whom?"

"The musicians. They began to play 'The Maiden's Dream', but she doesn't
like it; she wants something livelier."

"Livelier?"

"I must run," Mrs. Troup shouted. "Do hurry, Charles."

In spite of this departing urgency, Charles remained inert for some
time, his cheek upon a rug, his upper eye contemplating the baseboard of
the wall, and his right foot shackled in his trousers. Meanwhile, voices
began to rise without in an increasing strident babble, until finally
they roused him. He rose, completed his toilet and stepped outside his
door.

He found himself upon a gallery which looked down upon a broad hall
floored in wood now darkly lustrous with wax. He had a confused
impression of strewn and drifting great tropical flowers in haphazard
clusters and flaring again, in their unfamiliar colours, from the
reflecting darkness of the polished floor; such dresses as he had never
seen; and flesh-tints, too, of ivory and rose so emphasized and in such
profusion as likewise he had never seen. And from these clusters and
from the short-coated men among them, the shouting voices rose to him in
such uproarious garbling chorus that, though he had heard choruses not
very different, long ago, it increased his timidity; and a little
longing floated into his emotion--a homesickness for the old asylum,
where everything had been so orderly and reasonable.

Suddenly he jumped: his hands were clutched upon the railing of the
gallery, and they remained there; but his feet leaped inches into the
air with the shock; for the crash that so startled him came from
directly beneath the part of the gallery where he stood. In his
nervousness, he seemed about to vault over the railing, but as his feet
descended, he recognized the sound: it was of a nature similar to that
which had overcome him in his room, and was produced by those whom his
sister had defined as "the musicians"; they had just launched the dance
music. The clusters of tropical flowers were agitated, broke up. The
short black coats seized upon them, and they seized upon the short black
coats; something indescribable began.

The dance music did not throb--the nervous gentleman in the gallery
remembered dance music that throbbed, dance music that tinkled merrily,
dance music that swam, dance music that sang, and sometimes sang sadly
and perhaps too sweetly of romantic love--but this was incredible: it
beat upon his brain with bludgeons and black-jacks, rose in hideous
upheavals of sound, fell into chaos, squawked in convulsions, seemed
about to die, so that eighty pairs of shoes and slippers were heard in
husky whispers against the waxed floor; then this music leaped to life
again more ferociously than ever.

The thumping and howling of it brought to the gallery listener a dim
recollection: once, in his boyhood, he had been taken through a
slaughterhouse and this was what came back to him now. Pigs have
imaginations, and, as they are forced, crowding against one another,
through the chute, their feet pounding the thunderous floor, the
terrible steams they smell warn them of the murderers' wet knives ahead:
the pigs scream horror with their utmost lungs; and the dumbfounded
gentleman recalled these mortal squealings now, though there was more to
this music. There should be added, among other noises, all the agony
three poisoned cats can feel in their entrails, the belabourings of
hollow-log tomtoms by Aruwimi witch doctors, and incessant cries of
passion from the depths of negroes ecstasized with toddy.

A plump hand touched Mr. Blake's shoulder, and lifting his pale glance
from below he found that his sister had ascended the gallery stairs to
speak to him.

"What are they doing down there?" he shouted.

"Toddling."

"You mean _dancing_?"

"Yes, toddling. It's dancing--great fun, too!"

He was still incredulous, and turned to look again. To his perturbed
mind everybody seemed bent upon the imitation of an old coloured woman
he had once seen swaying on the banks of a creek, at a baptism. She
jiggled the upper portions of her, he remembered, as if she were at once
afflicted and uplifted by her emotions; and at the same time she
shuffled slowly about, her very wide-apart feet keeping well to the
ground. All of these couples appeared to have studied some such ancient
religious and coloured person anxiously; but this was not all that
interested the returned Mr. Blake. Partners in the performance below him
clung to each other with a devotion he had never seen except once or
twice, and then under chance circumstances which had cost him a hurried
apology. Some, indeed, had set their cheeks together for better harmony;
moreover, the performers, who, in this exhibition of comedy abandoned
forever all hope of ever being taken seriously by any spectator, were by
no means all of the youthfulness with which any such recklessness of
dignity had heretofore been associated in Mr. Blake's mind: heads white
as clouds moved here and there among the toddlers; so did dyed heads;
and so did portly figures.

"I came up to point Jeannette out to you," Mrs. Troup explained,
shouting in her brother's ear. "I wanted you to see her dancing: she
looks so beautiful. There she is! See! _Doesn't_ she look pretty?"

His eyes aimed along her extended forefinger and found Jeannette.

Jeannette did "look pretty" indeed, even when she toddled--there could
be no test more cruel. She was a glowing, dark-eyed, dark-haired,
exquisite young thing shimmering with innocent happiness. One of her
childish shoulders bore a jewelled string; the other nothing. Most of
her back and a part of each of her sides were untrammelled; and her
skirt came several inches below the knee, unless she sat. Nothing her
uncle had ever seen had been so pretty as Jeannette.

To her four grandparents, Jeannette would have been merely unbelievable.
Her eight great-grandparents, pioneers and imaginative, might have
believed her and her clothes possible, but they would have believed with
horror. In fact, to find ancestors who would not be shocked at
Jeannette, one would have to go back to the Restoration of Charles
Stuart. At that time she had five hundred and twelve
great- great- great- great- great- great- grandparents, and probably
some of them were familiar with the court. They would have misunderstood
Jeannette, and they would not have been shocked.

"I just wanted you to see her," Mrs. Troup shouted. "I must run back to
my partner and finish this. Come down when this number is over and meet
some people."

He did not attempt to reply, but stared at her blankly. As she turned
away, more of her was seen than when she stood beside him; and a
sculptor would have been interested. "Don't forget to come down," she
called back, as she descended the stairway.

But he did not appear at the end of the dance; nor could she find him in
the gallery or in his room; so, a little anxious, she sent a maid to
look for him; and presently the maid came back and said that she had
found him standing alone in the dining room, but that when she told him
Mrs. Troup was looking for him, he said nothing; he had walked away in
the direction of the kitchen.

"How strange!" Mrs. Troup murmured; but, as her troubled eyes happened
to glance downward, both of her hands rose in a gesture of alarm.
"Jennie where's your _apron_?" she cried.

"It's on me, ma'am," said Jennie; then she discovered that it wasn't.
"Why, how in the world----"

But Mrs. Troup was already fluttering to the kitchen. She found trouble
there between the caterer's people and her own: the caterer's chef was
accusing Mrs. Troup's cook of having stolen a valuable apron.

Uncle Charles was discovered in the coal cellar. He had upon him both of
the missing aprons, several others, a fur overcoat belonging to one of
the guests, and most of the coal.




CHAPTER XXI


That vast spirit of diversion, seizing upon the country, was, however,
less and less a spirit meaning diversion at home. More and more people
seemed to feel the longings of unrest, the necessity for more and more
movement at faster and faster speeds. Cabarets and night clubs succeeded
the old roof gardens, and in these and in the road-houses that sprang up
along the new automobile highways, crowding and noisy people "toddled"
and paid Arabian Night prices for slightly poisoned alcohol, until dawn.
The young people began to use an old word in a new and mystifying sense;
it was the word "petting". The era of the obscurely "parked car" had
begun.

New "movie theatres" were built and opened in all quarters of the cities
and in every smallest town; negroes who lived in woodsheds bought
phonographs that cost two hundred and fifty dollars; high-school boys,
deprived of automobiles by stern fathers, easily stole others; the new
profession of bootlegging, thriving so mightily that lawyers left their
desks to join it, revived piracy and merrily called the revival
"hi-jacking". The automobile also revived a jovial form of banditry out
of the Eighteenth Century. The earlier highwayman depended on the speed
of his horse; the new one depended on the speed of his stolen
automobile; he murdered a shopkeeper, robbed a till, disappeared at
seventy miles an hour, and drank and danced the rest of the night with
his girl at a road-house.

Among the less adventurous, the automobile was not content with mere
revivals. In company with the phonograph and that compact culinary
device called the "kitchenette" (to which the radio set now began to be
added) it projected and created a substitute for the household of
earlier times. Multitudes of apartment houses and apartment hotels
supplied the demand of a new type of family--one that required no sand
pile under a shade tree, for it consisted only of a husband and wife,
with perhaps a tiny dog to interest the latter at odd times.
Characteristically they lived in one room with a kitchenette and a bed
that folded into the wall; they paid an exorbitant rent for this room,
and their possessions were their clothes, a little jewellery, the
phonograph and an automobile (in which they seemed to live about as much
as they did in the apartment) and as they had no other taxable property
they were usually not greatly interested in good government; if election
day was a holiday it meant longer automobile excursions. They danced,
kept bootleg alcohol in the kitchenette, followed the murder trials in
the newspapers, went tirelessly to movies; some of them played golf;
some of them played bridge; and if they were bored they moved to other
kitchenette apartments or got divorces. Some of them did none of these
things and were strict sectarians; some of them devoted their time to
charities, hospitals or local mission work; but, whatever they did,
their numbers continually increased and so did the buildings that
sheltered them. When the weather was warm and the windows were open, the
air in the neighbourhood of one of these buildings vibrated day and
night with the warring of tinny jazzes.

Bootleg alcohol was also kept and, more copiously, in more ambitious
forms of residence than the "kitchenette apartment". Except in isolated
and old-fashioned drawing rooms, "afternoon tea" became the great modern
cocktail party. With similar exceptions, dinner parties devoted a
preliminary hour or so to chilled alcohol, virulent and emetic in orange
juice; the food was served later and later, becoming merely an
adjunct--an entirely superfluous one when the cocktailing was long
protracted. Theatre curtains rose at a later hour to please the cocktail
diners, and, after rising, showed more and more boldly what was
perfectly to the taste of somewhat drugged audiences.

...It used to be said, along the coasts of Bohemia in New York, "To
the pure all things are impure", a shot at the Puritan. But even a
Bohemian of that day must have begun to feel some misgivings when he
went to the theatre in this new period of "frankness", or read what was
called the "modern novel" and some of the livelier journals, for
apparently he had become purified and was in danger of being penetrated
by the arrow he himself had aimed at the late Mr. Comstock.

In this new age of "frankness in art" the old-fashioned liberal
discovered that he was now become a puzzled conservative protesting
against what appeared to him a prevailing tainted ugliness, anything but
frank. The moment he did protest, however, he encountered hot defenders
of the new frankness: they assailed him in the sacred name of "realism",
and were loftily scornful of him. "You belong to the age of half-truths
and the old hypocrisies," they informed him. "You called legs 'limbs'."

"No," he replied. "As a matter of record, I didn't, unless I spoke of
arms and legs together. But it is a curious thing that I hear you
repeatedly charging old-fashioned people with this crime. Whenever we
ask you to tell us precisely what are the old hypocrisies that you have
so usefully swept away, you almost always fall back upon 'limb'. It
seems to make you very bitter with us to believe that we said 'limb' for
'leg'. You repeat and reiterate the accusation, evidently regarding it
as serious. You are not historians and fail to understand that 'limb',
instead of 'leg', was a euphuism of the feebler spirits practising the
art of being genteel--an art that disappeared in our youth, when we
ourselves assisted it to disappear. But, just to please you, let us
imagine that we did say 'limb' when 'leg' would have been more definite.
You are not indignant with us when we sometimes say 'seat' for 'chair',
or 'building' for 'warehouse', perhaps, or 'pets' for 'dogs' and 'cats',
or 'bird' for 'parrot'. In fact, I think you may say such things, upon
occasion, yourselves, without any subsequent great amount of moral
anguish or remorse. How does it happen that you concentrate your attack
upon 'limb'? Why is 'leg' of such overpowering importance to you?"

"Because you felt that 'leg' had some connection with sex," they
replied, "and you declined to speak frankly of sex."

Here the liberal of a former age had again to make an inquiry: "What do
you mean by 'frankly'?"

"The way we are speaking now is art--our honest realism in art. You
charge us with offering as art a 'tainted ugliness'. Well, life has
uglinesses. We are frank enough to represent in art the uglinesses as
well as the beauties of life, as they are in reality. How do you justify
the use of the word 'tainted' that you apply to our honest realism?"

"I have been to your serious theatre," the old liberal answered. "I have
read your novels and, also, I have listened to your frank comedies. You
say truly there are uglinesses and beauties in life, but the uglinesses
I find you concerned with are mainly those of what you call sex; and, in
this euphuism of yours, 'sex' for 'sensualism' and 'sexuality' and
'animalism', you yourselves are far more genteel than the poetess who
spoke of 'limbs' in Eighteen-seventy. Out of all the uglinesses of life
you select but the one for your great subject; and when you consider it
a beauty of life, not an ugliness, you make it hideous by your
'frankness'--a maiden upon a hilltop is something in anatomy for you.
You are interested in her dreams only as they may reveal something about
her 'sex life', and, when you speak of her heart, you love the jargon of
sex-specialist psychologists better than English. You appear to found
your claim to a universal honesty upon your own predilection for the
sexual, which is your topic."

"We are compelled to make it our topic because you denied its existence
by ignoring it."

"Ignore?" the veteran returned. "If I write of a man eating his dinner,
do I ignore his digesting it? If I say that he stood without a raincoat
or umbrella for hours in a heavy rain, must you be informed that he got
wet? And, without ignoring, if I omit from detailed description the
known inevitable results, common to all men under such circumstances,
leaving descriptive details to the imagination of a reader, or an
audience, may I not also, without ignoring, omit descriptive details of
universal intimate and private sexual experiences when those details may
possibly stimulate imaginations unhealthily?"

"No," the new champions retorted with ardour, "you may not. Unless you
report such details faithfully, you are not honest and give us nothing
of life."

"While you, on the contrary," the veteran responded, "are busy giving us
nothing of art."

This seemed to be, so far as a spectator could make out, something like
the inimical dialogue between the old and the new in "realism". The new
charged the old with lack of frankness and the old charged the new with
dirt, and in this latter charge there was matter of concern to the
bystander. He had no need to be concerned with the former; the charge of
lack of frankness in the old was negligible. It was merely a form of
saying that certain artists did not choose the sexual, or the digestive,
or the obvious for their subjects.

Of course any artist may choose whatever subject he pleases: the Nike of
Samothrace is not a dishonest work because she is draped; and although
the undraped Venus of Syracuse lacks the "frankness" believed necessary
by the "new realists" of Pompeii, and by those of to-day, yet it is
evident that the Venus of Syracuse is a very great work of art. Lack of
realistic frankness, or merely imitative literalness, is therefore no
impediment in the way of truth and beauty: there is no more sex or
sexuality in Gray's Elegy than there is in the Sainte-Chapelle; the old
has already proved itself, that it is honest art. Hence, in the dispute
between the older "realists" and the newer, the only question that
concerned us, as bystanders thinking of art, was whether or not there
was dirt in the "new realism". That is to say: When is "art" art and
when is it dirt? With this problem in mind, I went to New York and
attended the theatre, for, if I could discover the essential truth of
the matter there, the same truth would apply to any other art anywhere.

It was necessary to go to New York because New York had apparently
become the United States, at least so far as the commercial theatre was
concerned. The Little Theatre Movement was independent of the
metropolis; so were several excellent stock companies. Moreover, a few
special enterprises in classic drama, revivals of Sheridan's or
Goldsmith's comedies, or of Shakespearean plays, and a few theatrical
stars, personally admired for their talents and for themselves, might
successfully ignore New York; but these were exceptions. Chicago or
Philadelphia or Los Angeles might exhibit symptoms of theatrical
independence, as regional dramatic capitals; but, for the purpose of
general practical consideration everything outside of New York,
theatrically speaking, had become "the provinces". This was not the most
agreeable view for the rest of us, who were the provincials; but more
and more we had been forced to accept it.

"If there's anybody who doubts it," said a New York manager who would
have liked to doubt it himself, "he has only to produce a play in New
York and take it out on tour. After he's read the New York opinion of
his play, rehashed in the newspapers of one-night stands in the
Midlands, New England, the South and the Far West for a couple of years,
he'll begin to see what he's up against."

However, to say that New York was the United States theatrically was not
to say that New York opinion could make audiences out of Minneapolis or
Kansas City people who had stopped going to the theatre. The provincial
theatre had become so often discouraging to managers that they found
themselves more and more stressingly forced to depend, for any success
at all, upon a New York run. Since the provincial audiences wouldn't go
to see a play unless it had secured a New York run, and, since they
wouldn't go often enough, even then, the New York run might, indeed,
become the manager's whole means of support. Therefore he must please
the New York audience; he must either give New York what it wanted or
perish--and even theatrical managers cling to life, though I have known
them to wonder why they do.

It may not well be doubted that a Rip van Winkle of a playgoer who went
to sleep theatrically in 1906 and woke twenty years later to visit the
New York theatre would have been amazed and delighted by many things. It
is true that he would have found a little of the old artificiality here
and there, and some of the old and cheap stencils of pathos and of
humour; but Rip van Winkle would have discovered that most of the old
offences against theatrical plausibility had been swept away.
Improvements in the technique of the drama and in stage direction would
have astounded him, while in naturalism of character building and in the
writing of dramatic dialogue there was such an advance as he could
hardly have dared to hope.

He might have wished to strike medals in honour of the people
responsible for so much improvement; the distribution of such medals
should have included the first-nighters, and especially the dramatic
critics, who are apparently the first-nighters made articulate. For it
is, in most cases, the enthusiasm of the first-nighter that gives a play
its chance of life. A not ill-founded opinion is that the critics and
first-nighters who opened the way for the success of that fine
"Harlem-flat" play, _Paid in Full_, by Mr. Eugene Walter, would be
entitled to special recognition for their encouragement of what was the
beginning of a new epoch in naturalism. No one can doubt that the best
dramatic criticism in the New York newspapers has been not only the
expression of the first-nighter but his education; and we must not deny
the critic his medal, for it is the better critic who gives the better
playwright, better actor, better director and better manager the chance
to exist.

A new generation of critics found that a gay mockery was a keener weapon
than any other; and, mocking the old-school balderdash and clumsiness,
they pretty well cleared the stage of a great clutter of nonsense and
pinchbeck monstrosity. At least the old-school clumsiness and balderdash
have gone; and, if there is a new balderdash come in with the moderns, a
newer school of critics may, in turn, clear it away. Something must
always be left for critics to do, and we may thank the present ones for
depositing upon the trash heap stage villains, perfect heroes and
heroines, stencilled maternal pathos, stencilled patriotism, stencilled
virtue, valour and a great deal of stencilled humour.

They laughed, too, at the stencilled coincidences that made the success
of many of our old melodramas and comedies; they laughed at anomalies in
stage settings, furnishings and lighting; they laughed effectively at so
many false and cumbersome things that elaborate research would need to
be undertaken in order to make a fair list of what they have laughed to
death. One thing above all others the true audience of a play asks of
those who put plays upon the stage: it asks to be allowed to believe
what it sees and hears; and the New York best critics of these recent
years have done more to allow an intelligent playgoer to believe what he
sees on the stage than was accomplished by all the previous forces for
naturalism since Sheridan. In a word, the theatre was prepared, by
intelligent criticism, to be more intelligent than it had ever been.

We had seen the advance in naturalism, for which we have just been
thanking the newer criticism; and it was certainly true that naturalism
had come to prevail. But it may be that in this new naturalism there was
something done halfway--a naturalism that was not yet natural--and also
something that was distasteful to us, though acceptable to the New York
first-nighter.

Going over the plays of recent seasons in New York, we seemed to find
among all sorts of plays a type that prevails over the other types; and
the prevalent play appeared to be what we provincials in our
unsophisticated way called a "sex play"; or, when we were still more
unsophisticated, a "realistic play", thus bringing two inoffensive words
into rather wide and wholly undeserved disrepute through misuse. For,
although there may be some modernist opinion to the contrary, it is
fairly safe to assume that a love theme in any expression of art depends
for its interest upon the principals being of opposite sexes. Hence, any
play constructed about a love story is a "sex play", and _Hazel Kirke_,
_The Lady of Lyons_, _Fanchon_, _The Banker's Daughter_ and _The Little
Minister_ are "sex plays", while _Damaged Goods_ and _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ are not--the former being instructive propaganda against
disease and the latter a moral allegory.

Realism in any art means only lifelikeness, and since likeness to life
cannot be complete in art--for even the best waxworks have no
digestions--realism in a play or novel can mean no more than that an
apparently natural effect is presented, which, of course, may be done in
plays wholly lacking a love theme and not depending on a relation
between the sexes. Both terms, "sex play" and "realistic play", are
misnomers, therefore, though they have attained a kind of acceptance as
jargon. What we mean when we thus slangily speak of a "sex play" or a
"realistic play" is rather definitely a play in which there are
represented or discussed more details of animal sexualism than police
authorities used to permit as part of public exhibitions in this
country. A "sex play", more accurately speaking, would concern love,
while what is generally called a "sex play" dwells upon and emphasizes
man as merely an animal, though not broadly or realistically, since it
represents him as primarily concerned with--and generally consisting
entirely of--only one animal function, and that one not the most
important; whereas, even when considered entirely as an animal
mechanism, he has several.

Now, retaining the jargon form "sex play" to avoid confusion, and, in
spite of its inaccuracy and the fact that other definitions much more to
the point suggest themselves, we may pertinently inquire how and why the
"sex play" has become prevalent and for what reasons the first-nighter
has applauded it into its prevalence. Also we might plausibly ask how
even the first-nighter could give it prevalence, since it is so
obviously a fragmentary statement, no more than a half-truth, navely
unrealistic and quaintly old-fashioned in theme. Of course, the theme is
more than old-fashioned, being ancient, older than the oldest obelisk;
but the English public and police heartily sanctioned its theatrical use
no longer ago than the Stuart Restoration. People are likely to speak of
it as modern, because its treatment and present excellent manner of
presentation are modern.

A clue to why the first-nighter himself likes it might be delved out of
the fact that the "sex play" was so long in disuse because it was
forbidden by fashion more effectively than by the police. True, there
have been sporadic appearances, and elderly theatrical people will
easily recall one such appearance that was contrary to the will of the
first-nighter; for the first-nighter of twenty-five years ago
characteristically did not permit the "sex play" to exist. This one was
attempted on Broadway, and the first-nighters laughed contemptuously at
it; but the newspaper reviewers, instead of pointing out its
stupidities, put emphasis upon its sensuality; they called it "filthy"
and said that it was a failure because decent people would not listen to
indecencies. The critics, in all sincerity, meant to kill that play,
and, until they heard the news from Broadway, believed it dead after the
one night. But their reviews had reached the public and the theatre was
already "selling out" for a long run.

The production of this play, however, was only a bit of commercial
audacity on the part of a manager; the first-nighter himself was against
what he then called "indecency" and what he now calls "frankness". The
two facts--the two things--of which we are roughly speaking when we use
these two words in this connotation are much the same. But when you call
a thing "indecent" you need an excuse if you look at it; while, if you
call it "frankness", it seems all right to bring Grandmother and the
children to enjoy it with you. The old-time first-nighter called the
"sex play" an indecency; the present first-nighter calls it an
expression of honesty. Evidently there has been an alteration in
vocabulary; but the alteration goes deeper than that.

To understand the intelligent first-nighter--for, of course, there are
some first-nighters who are not intelligent--we must first have an idea
of the conditions under which he thinks. To form this idea
sympathetically we might aid ourselves by eating a partridge a day for
ten or twelve months. After a few weeks anybody who could cook a
partridge for us in a new way, or devise a sauce that would disguise the
partridge flavour, would be our true benefactor. We could not easily
moderate our enthusiasm for him or call him less than a genius, and, for
a while, we should eat our partridges only in the new manner. Of course
it would be a matter of time before the new flavour would cause our
gorge to rise and we should pine for a newer genius. Now suppose that
there were a flavouring matter that culinary fashion among chefs
declared unwholesome for the system and held as taboo; and suppose that
we had tried all other possible flavours until we could never rid
ourselves of their dreary taste, and that somebody daringly cooked us a
partridge with the tabooed sauce upon it. We should be grateful, and,
however wholesome or unwholesome in fact the forbidden sauce might be,
it would seem wholesome to us--it would seem a sauce from heaven.

Thus we might obtain a hint of one reason, at least, for the
first-nighter's indorsement of the "sex play". His calling is
horrifyingly like the partridge eater's, and as distorting to the
natural functions of the palate; the wonder is that he has any capacity
for taste left at all. Yet this fantasy explains the "sex play" only in
part, and comes far from being all the story. If "sex plays" were the
only "sex" in fashion, the partridge fantasy might serve completely; but
simultaneously with "sex plays" we had "sex novels", "sex magazines",
"sex music", "sex painting" and "sex sculpture", so that the arts and
literature appeared to be assaulted by squads of practitioners and
apprentices bent upon indecency, or frankness, as you may choose to call
it. Only structural architecture has seemed to be a little difficult to
render with sex motives; though no doubt sex architects may some day
emerge from Europe and be imitated here in some of our more liberal
railway stations.

Moreover, science and philosophy, as well as art, had been invaded by
sex. We possessed an already voluminous sex psychology, for instance,
and the invasion was so enthusiastic and general that it appeared but a
question of time until mathematics should be perceived as essentially a
sex problem and algebraists, in examining their students, would require
them to set forth not the binomial but the bisexual theorem.

This is to say, all in all, that although the American theatre is the
expression of the New York first-nighter, the first-nighter himself is
only a mechanism, being in fact no more than the expression of a
fashion. He produces nothing in the sense that artistic creation is
production; he declares what artistic creation of one kind may have an
existence, and he is not responsible for "sex music" or "sex sculpture",
of course, nor for the other "sex arts". Obviously, his present judgment
in favour of "sex plays" is not a judgment at all, any more than
twenty-five or thirty years ago it was a judgment in favour of the
rapiers, gadzooks and Zenda kingdoms he so warmly indorsed. He is
fashion's automaton, creaky with dried partridge; and the better
automaton he is, the more instantly he is lubricated by the oil can of a
new fashion to enact the vehement gestures of enthusiasm. If there was
to be indictment, then, on account of the "sex play", the true writ must
be brought not against the first-nighter but against the general fashion
of which he, in his own specialty, was but the mirror and the beau.

In other words, though the first-nighters are arbiters, they are but
arbiters within the machine, being merely at the top of the fashion, not
above it. They go cycling round and round with it; they do not spin it;
and so are not to be blamed or praised for it. Individually, of course,
they are not here considered at all; though it might well be added that
individually the more significant of them are generous, witty, patient
and kind--one might honestly say that they are touchingly kind. They go
hopefully to the new play and their state of mind is one of entreaty;
they humbly beg the play to let them like it, to give them the slightest
chance to like it, or to afford them any justification for saying
pleasant things of it; and, if they can possibly bring themselves to
like even a part of it, they will lay stress on that part of it, and,
when it is at all possible, minimize the rest. They are not vultures,
but highly gifted and intelligent men and women whose greatest anxiety
is to find something they may honestly like and befriend.

Yet manager, actor, playwright and director dread them and speak of them
as the Death Watch. For manager and actor and playwright and director
know but all too guiltily well that they are about to offer the
surfeited partridge eater another partridge. How anxiously, then, must
the poor cooks study the newest flavour that has seemed least
intolerable to him!

"That last sauce he liked," they say, "contained three curses, six
blasphemies and nine franknesses concerning illicit love. Ours shall
consist altogether of these. We will give him thirty-six curses,
seventy-two blasphemies and one hundred and eight franknesses about
illicit love. This is undoubtedly the surest present means to stuff a
partridge into him and not get killed for it. Heaven helping us, we
shall make our partridge so spicy that he may almost believe it a new
dish altogether, and even remain unconscious that he is eating partridge
until he has finished the meal." Thus the cooks are compelled by the
fashion that compels the partridge eater to compel them.

The fashion appears to be mainly interested in hints of sexual detail
offered for its inspection--and getting more and more interested and
asking for stronger and stronger hints. For one of the oddest things
about all this frankness is that frank is the one thing it certainly is
not. The toughest and most illicit lovers on the whole sex stage speak
of their sins like rather literary people playing a game of synonyms;
though of course now and then one of them will use a good, strong,
fashionable, literary bad word to show how frank the author is being.

Our digestions are more important to us than our sex, as we should
easily discover if we had a food shortage. Our sex, historically
speaking, was an incident in our existence, developing long after we had
digestions. There is more realism to our digestions than to our sex. Our
lives are more vitally dependent upon our digestions than upon our sex.
Digestion therefore offers a more vital subject to the realist; and can
any impartial person deny that true frankness requires a digestion play
before it does a sex play? But, on all the stage to-day, there is not
yet even a frank and open food play. It will come some day--from Russia,
of course; and, unfortunately, there are parts of Russia where people
would attend such a play with interest. But as yet there are no signs in
either western Europe or America of anything at all serious and frank
about either nourishment or digestion in plays or novels.

The "sex plays" and "sex novels" seem to take all the details of those
things--so much more important--for granted, which is so inconsistent it
makes one's head swim to think about it. They leave those details
absolutely to the imagination of their audiences. Pompeiian art was much
deeper and more rotund; it at least went so far sometimes as to portray
indigestion.

Only a little while ago the prevailing theatrical and rather literary
fashion was irony. The popular prevalence of irony got to be a little
dreary to provincial readers and audiences, and yet it was pleasantly
humorous to see so many earnest writers determined to be ironical about
everything, or be nothing. There were as many, immediately afterward,
even more earnestly convinced that they must get "sex" into everything
or be ruined as true artists.

For fashion is a terrible thing; but of course it isn't permanent,
since, if it were, it wouldn't be fashion. Yet the sex fashion may last
a long time, though the Puritan might kill it if it does. For the
characteristic of the Puritan in action is massacre. Because some people
play cards for money, he destroys all cards. Because some people get
tipsy, he destroys all the liquor he can get his hands on. Because some
people dance wickedly, he bans all dancing. And, when art has been
insulted by fleshliness, he destroys even the statue of the Madonna. He
makes a painful world of it, indeed, for the innocent bystander.

Perhaps that is what we provincials who used to like to go to the
theatre really are--innocent bystanders--and we couldn't very well keep
on going to the theatre and remain innocent.




CHAPTER XXII


Yet even in New York there are unfashionably taintless plays upon the
stage--some of them warmly approved by the first-nighters--and they hold
their own bravely and handsomely against the fashion. Upon my
experimental journey to the metropolis I went to see only two plays and
the first of these, a comedy, which had been warmly praised for its
realism, was of this taintless type. In it I found no glint of light
upon the question that had sent me forth: When is "art" art and when is
it dirt?

Yet the play was realistic and could not well have been more frankly
honest. The portraits were of kinds of people familiar to any American;
the action shown was the action of commonplace natural selfishness in
commonplace lives. If I could have been made invisible and had inhabited
for a time the living-room of an ordinary American house, I might have
seen just what I saw upon this stage. The playwright did not take me
upstairs to the bedrooms or even to the bathrooms, but I understood
without difficulty that there was a second story where the people slept
and bathed. There was no smell of cooking, yet I understood that there
was a kitchen, and, indeed, I believe I saw a housemaid come in from
there once or twice. Perhaps she had a lover; perhaps he had a low
nature; I got no information about that. The people all appeared to have
sex, though it is true that they didn't seem to have just excitedly made
the discovery, as the curtain went up, that they were not neuter. They
had the air of being accustomed to take their sex for granted and of
supposing that other people took it for granted without needing any
explanation at all.

Evidently I could have sat in that theatre night after night without
learning anything useful about "dirt"; my quest would never be advanced
there. So I tried the other play that I'd heard praised as a "fine
modern realistic thing" in its way--it was extremely in favour with the
public, but was not known as a "sex play". Nowhere had I heard a hint
that it was unclean, though it had been authoritatively spoken of as
"frank" and as "original", too. It was definitely of the "new realism".
To my surprise, the story told in this drama was not strikingly
unfamiliar. There was a virtuous young girl, the heroine, and she had an
honest, hardworking, smooth-shaven young lover, the hero, who meant
marriage and had fathomed the villain's intentions. (In spite of the
fact that villains had supposedly been erased from the stage, there was
undeniably a villain.) He was unscrupulous and handsome; he had a dark
moustache and smoked cigarettes. He had dishonourable designs upon the
heroine; he did not mean marriage. He was well dressed, rich and
powerful, and he had detestable myrmidons (one of them comic) who aided
him in his continuous plots to get the innocent girl into his power.
There was an honest detective with a good heart, and he had suspicions
of the villain.

At the climax of the play the honest young hero defied the villain and
was cast into prison by the lying machinations of the scoundrel and his
wicked myrmidons. Thus the pure young girl was at last in the villain's
power, but the honest detective with a good heart secured the hero's
release from prison, and a happy ending was brought about by the
rightful slaying of the villain. The girl never for a moment would have
been safe from his plots as long as he lived, so he was put out of the
way by the sweetheart of a man whom he had foully assassinated; and,
that nothing might be lacking to the audience's pleasure, the
meritorious lady who performed this sympathetic execution was protected
and released by the honest detective with a good heart.

None of these people analyzed himself at the audience in the
author-now-speaking manner of new realistic "characters"; none of them
mentioned that he found himself caught in the inexplicable mechanistic
formlessnesses of life; no one sat down to face the inevitable
meaningless tragedy produced by his having a sex. No one swept away the
veil of false conventionality that covers the hideousness of life; no
one even defied the old hypocrisies and went out into the sunlight. No;
this play had at least to be granted these special merits of novelty.

It had also other novelties, some of them amazing to a Midland visitor
in search of light upon art and dirt. The pretty heroine and her
girl-friends were a great part of the time more undressed than they were
dressed; they were seen in a principally bare condition, and, possibly
to save them from embarrassment, the honest young lover, in approaching
the climax of his anxiety for his dear's honour, bravely appeared before
the audience in no more than his underwear. Moreover, all of the people,
except the kind-hearted detective, used language startling to a
provincial of somewhat reclusive habits.

From the stage one heard strong profanity and also what the
old-fashioned might define as indecency, and, during the depiction of a
felonious orgy, there was an unmistakably honest pantomimic
representation of the frankest obscenity. Beyond question, one saw
lewdness and heard foulness, but I was not sure that this lewdness and
this foulness must inevitably be labelled "dirt". In the first place, of
course, no actual obscenity was before the audience: we were seeing only
the representation of it by excellent and conscientious actors who were
doing their best to interpret it to us in the frank manner of the "new
realism". The characters they enacted were low forms of human life; and
the whole representation and portraiture appeared so plausibly to be of
a complete truthfulness as to convince the auditor that, although he
himself might never have seen such people, nevertheless, creatures
almost identical could easily be found if he chose to look for them.

There was also, in the selection of these low forms of life as the topic
of the play, a plausible, realistic reason for the barenesses exhibited
and for the profanity, and for the obscenity, and even for the honest
young hero's underwear. Thus, as the evening wore on, although I was
sometimes embarrassed and hoped that there were no very young people in
the audience, I inclined to the opinion that what I beheld might not
necessarily be defined as "dirt". From my own point of view, I did not
like it; but that, of course, was a personal matter, and I was present
neither as a moralist nor as a protector of morals: I was only seeking
light upon a question about art.

There were times, it is true, when I was startled into thinking, "No,
this is dirt: this is meant to interest me by the cheap and urchin means
of shocks; they want me to pay money for the enjoyment they think I take
in being shocked. Or perhaps they charged me six dollars for this seat
because it gives me a chance to exhibit my sophistication in _not_ being
shocked by what is either pleasurably exciting dirt or repulsive dirt to
the unsophisticated. They are selling dirt to every taste."

Thus wavering, I sat unenlightened almost to the final curtain, when
suddenly from the stage there came a "line" that cleared the air for me.
It was a "laugh-line", and, if what we saw and heard had been actual,
the words would not and could not have been spoken. They were out of
character, false, and whatever questionableness had preceded them there
was no question about this lugging in of a sly and leering double
meaning, borrowed from the old garbage of the smoking-car. It was a
"line" directed at the most vulgar risibilities of an audience led by
degrees to the proper point for receiving it; as if someone on the stage
had said to us, "Well, I guess after that last you can stand this one!"

The calculation was just: the audience of well-dressed people had
descended to the expected level and shouted their hilarious delight in
what was, beyond all question, sheer dirt. Immediately the hovering of
art that I had felt was revealed to me as a temporary charitable
illusion of mine, and I seemed to perceive instead the dexterous hand of
a cunning salesman. For an artist will not suffer dirt, nor, though he
may need and hope for reward, will he make anything with the mere motive
of selling it.

So in this play I had before me a thing very adroit, shrewdly made, and
craftsmanlike, designed to be sold, and the pinch of unmistakable dirt
that had been added, to give it greater value to buyers fond of dirt,
seemed to warrant a suspicion that the whole had been calculated merely
to be salable. Apparently, in this suspicion of what I had heard was one
of the better and cleaner plays on exhibition before the matine-going
children and adolescents and theatre-loving adults of our country, I had
come upon a clue to the answer to my question. I perceived that a thing
is not art if a pinch of dirt is deliberately added to it to make it
sell. That is to say, a thing may not be partly a work of art and partly
dirt, though dirt may be cunningly and skillfully used to look like a
work of art.

Art is expressed to the cool intellect and to the emotions that are not
animal; and herein lies the difficulty of expressing an animal sexual
subject by means of a work of art, for, in order to express this
subject, men must be represented in their animal aspect. Moreover, the
honest artist, attempting the animal sexual subject, must find himself
in the inevitable company of two competitors who make use of the same
subject, and with these he may be but too readily confused. One is the
outright pander who sells "shock" or stimulation to the animal part of
man, whether on the stage, or in books, or in surreptitious photographs
and drawings. The other competitor is the revolutionary moralist,
evangelistic in his use of shock to destroy "Victorian reserve"; he is
so ardent that if he possesses any art he will use it as an adjunct to
his propaganda, and a revolutionary preacher is infectious company for
an artist: the artist will presently be using arguments out of theology
to justify his art. Thus he too becomes an evangelist and not an artist.

Art is the language of a heart that knows how to speak, and a work of
art is a beautiful interpretation of a truth. However ugly the truth,
its interpretation must be informed with beauty. A realistic or literal
and photographic imitation of the physical aspect of a truth is not a
work of art; mere imitation is never art, and a pretended work of art
that stimulates the animal part of a spectator is dirt. If its creator
makes money by the sale of this stimulation, he comes under the
suspicion of consenting to the rle of pander.

Now, having felt that these uncomfortable conclusions might be thought
just and inevitable, I submitted them to a "new realist".

"What?" he cried. "By such a rule, if I modelled the Venus of Milo
itself you might call me a salesman of dirt because some moron looked
upon the Venus as a half-naked woman!"

But I had taken the precaution to have an older realist present, and now
he stepped forward. "No," he said. "But if what you make is a half-naked
woman and you get rich by exhibiting her, we must believe you to be in
that kind of business and not in art. When you can model a Venus of Milo
we will forgive you the moron!"

Art knows no limit to its subject; it has never suppressed sex. But when
it touches sex, as when it touches anything, it touches with neither a
hot nor a heavy hand, nor yet an itching palm. The struggle with the
Puritan was won long ago. We could dance; we could sing love songs; we
could write realism; and now the "sex play" and "sex novel" arrive upon
the field to commit excesses after the battle. Henry James wrote of some
subjects that the most audacious of the sex writers may hardly dare to
hint, even when they use no punctuation and omit all capital letters;
they are too heavy-handed and would perhaps get into jail, in spite of
the fashion. For they cannot do what Henry James and Alphonse Daudet and
Thomas Hardy and Bernard Shaw have done; they cannot talk without
grossness of anything no matter how gross.




CHAPTER XXIII


But the change in the kind of theatrical entertainment in which popular
enjoyment was most conspicuously found was only a blown leaf on the
storm of change; yet no doubt it showed as well as anything else did the
direction of the wind. After all, the commercial theatre itself was no
longer universally popular. It was a diversion for the opulent because
of the prodigious increase in the price of tickets. The "masses" got
their drama from the movies which had begun by taking the "gallery gods"
from the theatre and had remained in taste what the "gallery gods" had
always liked. And, studying the tastes of new generations of "gallery
gods" who were now become millions and millions and thus brought
millions and millions of dollars to the movies, the movie magnates
provided huge palaces, or at least what they judged "gallery gods" might
think were palaces; and, in company with the pictures, tabloid revues
and tabloid vaudeville were offered; for, as part of the speed of life,
there had come a necessity for instantaneous and tabloid things, so that
even newspapers were administered as tabloids. The challenging and
questioning spirit of the age of speed was itself often tabloid and
expressed in the paragraphs of columnists.

Challenging and questioning had begun, of course, long before the Great
War; it really began in the most ancient times and had always gone on
among small groups of constitutional critics and objectors. But, after
the war, the old men who had headed these groups began to find
themselves the chieftains of large and fashionable coteries. Hordes of
young followers imitated them, learned their manner of speech and
proclaimed faith in an old god they thought was a new one because he had
a horrible new name, Debunking: on this altar, they said, everything old
must be burned as incense; all believers in anything old were either
fools or hypocrites and must be jeered to death. The new questioning,
believing Science to be new, could therefore have faith in it--at least
so long as it could be interpreted as maintaining the ancient
theological theory of predestination now masquerading in the new phrase,
"mechanistic universe". For, like the automobile and all the new
machines men had invented for greater speed and for ease to labour, the
fast-whirling universe itself must be, these new questioners argued, a
machine--and they insisted, a little inconsistently, that it was a
machine of its own invention. Hence all of its parts, including
themselves, could never be anything but machinery moving to the
inevitable. Wherefore, "Eat, drink, and be merry", materialism's
prehistoric motto, not precisely new.

And meanwhile, as the dancing and new theorizing went on, with
automobiles swarming over the earth and airplanes darting across the
skies, with the ether shaking to broadcast jazz, with giantism becoming
colossalism, so that Atlas would have reeled at the sight of New York,
and with Tennessee legislating against evolution, the women were cutting
off their hair.

                 *        *        *        *        *

That was what most upset my neighbour Judge Olds. He has always been
what is called a prominent and public citizen; he was a captain in the
war with Spain and by virtue of his ancestry belongs to several
patriotic societies; he is a church member, though not an inveterate
attendant at services; moreover, he has never been thought narrow or
bigoted in any of his views--at least not until recently, his daughter
being the first to bring such a charge against him. It was just after
she brought it that I happened to drop in on him, in his library, and
his face was still pink.

"I've been going to the same barber shop for fourteen years," he said
harshly, as I sat down. "I went to it for the last time to-day. I took
off my coat and necktie the way I always do, and then I noticed there
were three women sitting there in the waiting chairs and looking at me
as if I'd committed a crime. _Mad_ at me for taking off my coat and
collar in a place where they had no right to be, themselves! I thought
probably they were there to solicit for a charity or something; but just
then old George called 'Next!' and my soul! if one of those women didn't
get right up and march to the chair and sit down in it! That wasn't the
worst of it. The person that had just got out of the chair was wearing
boots and breeches; but it wasn't a man. It was a girl--one that had
been a nice-looking girl, too, until she sat down in that chair and had
three feet of beautiful, thick, brown hair cut off. She was my own
daughter, Julie, nineteen years old. I didn't say a word to her--not
then; I just looked at her. Then I told old George I guessed his shop
was getting to be too coeducational for me and I put on my things and
went out. I'll never set foot in the place again."

"Where will you get your hair cut, Judge?"

"I guess we'd better learn to cut our own hair, we men," he said
bitterly. "There really isn't any place left nowadays where we can go to
get by ourselves. Coming home from Washington the other day, I was in
the Pullman smoker--what they call the club-car--and I'll eat my shirt
if four women didn't come in there and light cigarettes and sit down to
play bridge! Never turned a hair--didn't have any hair long enough to
turn, for that matter. They won't let us keep a club-car or any kind of
club to ourselves nowadays; they got to have anyway half of it. I said
when we let 'em into the polling-booth they'd never be contented with
that, and I was right. Remember all the fuss they made about their right
to vote? Well, they've proved they didn't care about that at all,
because more than half of the very women that made the fuss don't bother
to vote now they know they _can_. They just wanted to show us we
couldn't have anything on earth to ourselves. They haven't left us one
single refuge. It used to be, a man could at least go hang around a
livery-stable when he felt lonesome for his kind; but now there aren't
any more livery stables. He can't go to a saloon; there aren't any more
saloons. Once he could go sit in a hotel lobby because that was a
he-place; nowadays hotel lobbies are full of women sitting there all
day. When I studied law there weren't three women in all the offices
downtown; now you can't find an office without a bob-haired stenographer
in it, and there are dozens of women got their own offices--every kind
of offices. That's another thing I've been having it out with Julie
about. She's not only cut off her hair; she wants to go into business as
soon as she finds out what kind she'd enjoy most. She's like the rest:
the one thing that gives her the horrors is the idea of staying home.
What's become of the old home life in this country, anyhow? Everybody
seems to have to be going somewhere every minute: there's the car in the
garage; it'll take us anywhere--let's go! If there is such a thing,
nowadays, as a National Motto it's certainly, 'Let's Go!' 'Let's Go' is
the unceasing cry. I understand they do a great deal of what they've now
invented a horrible word for--'necking'--while they're on the road
between parties and movies and end-of-the-night breakfasts. But it's
always, 'Let's Go--let's go anywhere except home!'"

He paused for a moment while his bushy gray eyebrows were contorted in a
frown of distressed perplexity; then he looked at me almost with pathos
and, speaking slowly, asked a question evidently sincere: "Does it ever
seem to you, nowadays, that maybe we're all--all of us, young people and
old people both--that maybe we're all _crazy_?"

"No--I hadn't thought of it that way. Why?"

"Well, for one thing, a while ago I was remembering back to when I was a
young fellow about Julie's age or a little older, perhaps, and what I'd
have thought then if somebody'd told me I was some day going to have a
daughter like her. We used to talk about the 'eternal feminine', you
remember. Think of that and then think of walking into a barber shop--a
barber shop!--and seeing a creature sitting in the chair with its legs
crossed--legs in boots and breeches--getting its hair cut, reading the
paper and smoking a cigarette in a holder six inches long. Then think of
this creature getting up and sticking its hand in its breeches pocket
and handing out a fifteen-cent tip and saying, 'Don't let all this money
make you snooty, George!' Then think of recognizing the creature as your
daughter! Think of seeing your own 'eternal feminine' swaggering around
a barber shop, smoking, getting its hair cut and wearing breeches!"

"But they've been wearing that kind of riding-clothes for twenty years,
or more."

"Yes; but not just casually anywhere. At first they'd change back to
skirts as soon as they came in from riding; then, at a resort hotel,
maybe, they'd lounge around and have tea before they changed; but now
it's all off--like their hair. They wear breeches into your own barber
shop and drive you out of it. Breeches! Why, the other afternoon one of
Julie's young men had been riding with her, and she came home laughing
her head off over how funny he looked because she said his brother had
taken his riding-breeches and he'd had to borrow Shorty's. Shorty isn't
a boy; Shorty's a girl; she lives next door to the young man that
borrowed her breeches. And when I told Julie it was horrible to me that
she could laugh over such a performance, she said I was crazy, and it
seemed to me that either I was or she was. It seems more so to me
to-day, when she's deliberately destroyed what was the prettiest thing
she had. She says she feels better without her hair and that she looks
better, too. You could see she was in earnest about that; she honestly
and serenely thinks that amputation a great success. Of course that's
because it's the fashion--anything that makes them look more in the
fashion makes them prettier, they think. If it were the fashion now to
wear a big hump on their backs they'd all think a humpless girl lacked
beauty."

I agreed with him there. "Yes, we saw that in our own boyhood. We can
easily remember when a woman without a bustle seemed to be of a
strangely meagre appearance."

"Yes, but a woman's hair is a natural ornament. Julie was a lovely girl
this morning, and this evening she looks like a debilitated kind of
scrawny boy. Either somebody's crazy or the devil's got into what we
used to think of as our 'best' people, especially into our 'best' young
people. It strikes me as an important question, because a good deal of
what happens at the top is likely to filter all the way down through the
whole body of society. But just now it often looks to me as though what
used to happen at the bottom of society when we were young had filtered
up, so to speak, till at last it's contaminated the top. Every ideal we
had when we were young--every one of our old rules of conduct, of good
manners, of womanhood, of modesty and of morals--is shattered. You can't
find the remnants of any of 'em among these young people of to-day--not
a remnant!"

"All because Julie had her hair cut?" I asked.

At that he looked at me fiercely. "My goodness!" he said. "Do you mean
to say you find any _excuse_ for the way they're behaving?"




CHAPTER XXIV


The judge did most of the arguing, so to call it; he leaned forward and
spoke with emphasis and severity. "Look here; you surely aren't going to
sit there and tell me this younger generation to-day is anything like
what our generation was in its twenties, or the generation of our
fathers and mothers when they were that age. You know better than that,
don't you?"

"Yes--I suppose so."

"When we were the younger generation," he said, "most of us went to
church with our fathers and mothers pretty regularly. What proportion of
these young people do you suppose do that now?"

"I don't know. I don't know the proportion of the fathers and mothers
that go to church nowadays, Judge. The young people can't go to church
with their parents if the parents don't go, can they?"

"That doesn't bear on the point I'm making," he said. "What I say is
that in our day we maintained a conformity with the behaviour of the
older generation. I admit that youth always is and must be a little
wilder and more indiscreet than middle-age. I don't deny that when we
were young men we were too lively sometimes--when we were out of sight
of the girls we knew. Of course a good many did things they shouldn't
have done. But when we were young, no matter how lively we were
sometimes, we didn't just tear loose and raise Cain all over the place,
girls and boys together, drinking poisonous, illegal liquor, gambling,
dancing entwined to sensual and savage music, reading disgusting books,
going to outrageous shows, chattering indiscriminately about
unmentionable things, and, in our conduct as well as our talk, really
scoffing at the ideals of our parents. Our generation didn't do any of
those things."

"Whereas a great many of the generation now middle-aged do all those
things, don't they, Judge?"

"They do indeed," he said, and his frowning brow grew darker. "It's
dumbfounding and disheartening to see how they've broken away from the
ideals of our youth."

"Then these present young people are really doing what you've just said
we ourselves did: they're maintaining a conformity with the behaviour of
the older generation. In that, then, they're doing not only what we did
but what all younger generations do. This present one shocks us with its
reflection of our own conduct, though, as you say, the reflection is
livelier and more indiscreet than the original. If we are to place the
blame it must be upon the originals, mustn't it?"

"I don't care where you place the blame," he returned irascibly, and
with some inconsistency, I thought. "It's the spirit of the age and that
spirit is either a crazy one or a bad one. There's never been such gross
materialism let loose on earth. Nobody cares about anything but money
and pleasure. What proportion of our people ever talk about anything
except dollars and pleasure? Everything's been speeded up and has to go
on being speeded up. Making money has to be speeded up; having fun has
to be speeded up; life has to be speeded up to keep pace with the
automobile and all it brought with it. A bricklayer, or even a college
professor, can have luxuries now that a multi-millionaire of the
Nineteenth Century couldn't have, and can move faster. People lived at
seven miles an hour thirty years ago, now they live at forty and
seventy. Nobody has time to do anything except rush; and the women rush
worse than the men. Girls haven't time to learn to play the piano any
more, or to study singing, or to acquire any of what we used to call the
accomplishments. They buy all those things canned, just as all the
cooking they can do is out of cans. They don't even spend any time over
their clothes; they used to put in hours and hours at the dressmaker's,
and more hours at the milliner's, having their hats trimmed becomingly
on their heads. Nowadays, they see a wax figure in a window wearing a
sack they call a dress, and they dash in and get a duplicate of it
ready-made. For hats they buy little ready-made cloth buckets without
any trimming. They haven't got any more time to put in on what's
becoming than they have to cook and sew and play the piano. No wonder
their music has to be fast and noisy! All you've got to do to understand
this age is to listen to a jazz band doing what they call 'pepping it
up'. Only people made of metal could stand it; and human beings actually
are more metallic than they used to be; they're harder and brassier; but
they still have nervous systems--that's why you hear of so many more
'nervous breakdowns' than you used to. Even ordinary talk has been
speeded up; nobody listens unless you talk fast and yell; and I suggest
you might notice some of the language our most prosperous classes are
pleased, nowadays, not only to listen to from the stage and to read in
books, but to use, themselves. You haven't anything to say for this
age's attitude toward what we used to speak of as 'refinement of
speech', have you? I suppose you know that's what the bulk of the
younger generation seems to hate most, of all the old things they've
cast aside, don't you?"

"It seems so, sometimes; yes. Their 'intelligentsia' got to distrusting
refinement, I believe, because it appeared to them a way of 'covering up
facts'."

He took me up quickly. "What facts did our former refinement of speech
cover up?"

"None, of course, but the young revolutionists didn't realize that it's
a question of manner not of matter. Refinement of speech appears to
consist mainly in avoiding, not at the cost of necessary accuracy,
details that may have any physical effect, except laughter or tears,
upon a reasonably sensitive listener. Refinement may find it useful to
mention a garbage barrel, but will not detail its contents except of
necessity. The contents are sufficiently sketched in the imagination of
the listener by the mention of the barrel; to detail them would perhaps
sicken him a little. But the young generation and the new age,
overturning the old in everything, clamoured that the contents must be
'brought into the open' and spoken of 'frankly'. This is partly because
it was the habit of many of the older generation, once, to shirk some
uncomfortable subjects almost entirely. The young people and some of
their elderly leaders confused this shirking with refinement; they also
confused refinement with hypocrisy."

"No matter how it happened, you can't deny that their speech is coarser,
can you?"

"No; and that's a loss; yet along with this loss there is some gain: the
attack on refinement was an attack on the inoffensive bystander, the
wrong party; but in the general mle the shirked subjects did get
pulled out to where they can't very well go on being shirked."

"Yes! 'Pulled into the open', Julie calls it!" he said indignantly.
"They could always be spoken of with decent reserve and caution; but now
this pulling them out into the open means pulling them into the
foreground where they don't belong."

"But that always happens at first to subjects that have been kept in the
dark."

"I don't care," he said. "It isn't wholesome. You don't argue that this
present craze for sex stories and sex shows and sex discussion--yes, and
sex jokes--you don't argue that it's wholesome, do you?"

"No, not while it's a craze or fashion. When the new age has got
accustomed to what it still rather defiantly feels is this new privilege
of 'open discussion', the subject will take its proper proportion."

"It's not possible to make that subject a wholesome one for general
discussion," he said. "That's what shocks and depresses me about this
new age--its unwholesomeness. You can't go out on the street without
seeing it."

"No?" I said. "It seems to me that I can."

"You can't!" he returned sharply. "If you pass a movie theatre you'll
see the titles on the bill boards in front, won't you? Among others
you'll see _Red Hot Stockings_, _Harem Love_, _Passions of the Night_,
_Oriental Lulu_, _Fires of Innocence_----"

"Don't go on, Judge; the list is long; but I understand that most of the
titles of that kind are misleading, and the films themselves have passed
the censors."

"Nevertheless, you'd hardly say that the fact of its being profitable to
use such titles as a lure is a token of wholesomeness, would you? You
said you could go out on the street without seeing any signs that
there's unwholesomeness in the new age; well, I'll ask you to take note
not only of the clothes but of the complexions of the women on any of
the crowded blocks downtown. What about it? Suppose you'd seen as many
painted faces twenty years ago, what would you have thought?"

"I suppose I'd have been startled."

"Startled!" he cried. "You'd have thought it was Babylon! What would you
have thought, a few years ago, if you'd seen a woman in a street-car or
a restaurant take out a little box with a mirror in it and powder her
nose when she knew a lot of men were looking at her? You'd have thought
she was either pretty unpleasantly common or pretty ludicrously vulgar,
and she would have been. And if, in addition to powdering her nose, she
went on to smear red on her lips or her cheeks, you'd have thought she
was bad, and again she would have been. But nowadays half the older
women and nearly all the younger ones are at it. They smear themselves
with cosmetics and they do it right in your face. You can't tell which
of 'em are good and which bad, because, according to the old standards,
some look worse than others but they pretty nearly all look bad. They
seem to _want_ to look that way. Julie got me to go with her to a movie
the other night and during the intermission she got out her 'vanity
case' and began to redecorate her lips. I said to her, 'You put that box
away or I'll take you home and do my best to whip you, no matter if you
_are_ nineteen years old!'

"She just laughed and went on with her art work. 'My heavens!' I said.
'Can't you see the craziness of what you're doing?'

"'How's that, Pops?' she asked me, and went right on using her lip-stick
all the time I was talking.

"'You're trying to make people think that red smear is the natural
colour of your lips,' I told her. 'In the name of conscience, if you
can't see in the first place that it's cheap and deceitful, and if you
can't see in the second place that besides being cheap and deceitful,
it's an intimate detail of your toilet and therefore hasn't any business
to be performed in public, then, anyhow, in the third place, can't you
see that doing it in public defeats its own object?'

"'How's it defeat its object, Pops?' she asked me.

"'My heavens!' I told her. 'The object is to make people think the smear
is your own colour, and here you're deliberately proving to 'em that it
_isn't_!'

"She never stopped looking in her little mirror; she just went on
smearing; but she gave a little absent-minded laugh, as if an
unimportant and rather imbecile person had said something a little
amusing. 'Yes,' she told me, 'we're all aboveboard with it nowadays. Our
generation is so much franker and honester than yours was, Pops!'

"That's the way she is. That's the way they all are. And what can
parents do about it? We can't whip 'em; they'd probably have the law on
us if we did. When we try to reason with 'em they talk the way Julie did
to me that I've just been telling you about. If we threaten to cut off
their allowances they laugh. 'All right, I've been wanting to get a job,
anyhow!' There's no discipline left and no obedience. If you quote the
Bible to them, the way our parents did to us when we were a little
refractory, they tell you that ancient tribal ideas don't apply! The
rule of the churches over the general people has almost disappeared,
and, except with a small proportion of religious-minded young people,
means nothing to the new generation. I remember how my father talked
once to my younger sister when she'd let an out-of-town beau of hers
call after nine o'clock and stay until half-past eleven. 'What would our
pastor say if he knew?' my father asked her, and Mary began to cry. I
tried it with Julie. 'What would Dr. Halloway think of you?' I said. 'I
wish you'd get him to tell me', was what she answered. 'I think he's a
cutie!' You can't reach their minds; you can't do anything; you're
helpless. And yet Julie's as considerate and sweet and thoughtful in
many things as any child could be. She'd be a lovely thing, except for
the times we live in and the crazy ideas she's caught like a contagion.
Lord knows where it all came from! New-rich people with no background or
training; immigrants getting rich and sending their children to school
with ours, and ours taking up with 'em; socialist writers upsetting the
old morals in the minds of the young; the automobile getting young
people miles out of reach in five minutes--natural youthful
smartaleckism and native cussedness--anyhow, it's happened and we're in
for it! Julie doesn't lip-stick and rouge as much as some of her friends
do, but she does more than others. A few of them don't use cosmetics at
all, and when I hold them up as examples she only says, 'Oh, that's
their affair; it's the age of freedom.' Freedom! I should say so! Even
the girls that don't use lip-stick wear the brazen clothes they're all
so pleased with."

"'Brazen clothes', Judge?"

He stared at me. "Good heavens! Modern indecency in dress is so glaring
I shouldn't have thought it need ever be mentioned."

"But what are your views upon dress, Judge? You've been upset by Julie's
getting her hair cut, and I suppose, as that involves her appearance and
the question of headdressing, it's a part of the general question of
dress. You don't think it was indecent of her to shed her hair, do you?"

"As a relinquishment of her womanhood, I believe it to be bordering on
that. Certainly you don't think it makes her appear more feminine, do
you?"

"No. Much less so."

"You see that it's ruined her looks?"

"It's certainly detracted from them."

"Well, it's a woman's business to look as pretty and feminine as she
can, isn't it? She's supposed to make herself attractive in those ways,
isn't she? And not only that, but a good woman's supposed to look like a
good woman, isn't she? If she doesn't, how are we to know which kind of
woman she is? If she doesn't make us respect her, in the belief that she
has a higher nature than we have, and if we lose our chivalry for her,
how is she to protect herself and get along with us at all? Because, of
course, mentally as well as physically, we're incomparably more powerful
than she can ever be."

"Are we?" I inquired. "I'm afraid so long as we think we are they'll
take an unmanly advantage of us: they'll fall back upon their heritage
of an instinctive and superior wiliness that would prevent us from using
our strength. But there seem to be symptoms among them just now
indicating a willingness to forego that kind of advantage."

"Is that so? Then why are they so determined to show their legs? That's
what I've tried to shame Julie with. 'You've cut off your skirt at the
knee', I said, 'and you've cut off your hair pretty near at the roots.
Your hair was so lovely and you could use it to frame your face so
charmingly that while you had it people naturally looked at you above
the shoulders. You must have been afraid they wouldn't pay enough
attention to the way you've exposed your legs!' I thought it would
shrivel her up. In fact, I was ashamed to be saying such a thing to her,
even though it seemed to be the wicked truth. If my father had ever said
that to my sister, Mary would have died, I think; I truly don't believe
she could have lived after such a thing had been said to her. Julie
didn't even blush; she wasn't even _angry_! 'My legs?' she said. 'What
do I care whether anybody pays attention to my legs--or my face, or my
arms, or my hands? It's their affair, not mine.'"

"That seems fairly reasonable, doesn't it, Judge?"

"Reasonable?" he repeated angrily. "Do you remember when any respectable
woman would have been sick with shame at the thought anyone could call
her 'bold'? Along in the earlier days of the active period of the Equal
Rights movement, I remember seeing two apostles of that creed wearing
what were then called 'short skirts'--almost to the tops of their
buttoned shoes and probably five inches from the ground. Women wore
three or four petticoats under their overskirts in those days, and that
made the two suffragettes look like two self-important little hens; but
they were self-conscious, too, because everybody on the street was
bursting with laughter at them, and I don't believe they ever publicly
tried that form of feminism again. It wasn't immodest--there wasn't the
slightest glimpse of their stockings--it was merely ridiculous; and, not
until years afterward, about Nineteen-twelve or Nineteen-thirteen, I
think it was, did the first symptoms of this wholesale modern immodesty
appear. Women had got their skirts so tight, to be in the fashion of
that time, that they'd begun to leave off petticoats and underskirts
altogether. Finally they got 'em so tight, especially as the skirts
tapered down to bind the ankles, they could hardly walk. Then some
French hussy got the idea of splitting the tight skirt almost up to the
knee. People said it wasn't an uncommon sight in Paris; and one day,
downtown, in my own city, I saw a flashy looking girl wearing one of
those split skirts. She had on black stockings and a black skirt; but
the whole ankle and calf of her leg was exposed in the opening and I
could scarcely believe my eyes."

"Why not, Judge?"

"Good heavens!" he said. "You know as well as I do that self-respecting
women never did such things! Managers made fortunes out of leg-shows;
they didn't need to have any plot or any acting, or any music except
jingle; even the dancing didn't amount to anything. Look at the _Black
Crook_ and the 'Extravaganzas' that followed it. All they had to have
were some plumpish girls that were willing to wear tights for a salary;
and some of the shows didn't need to go so far as tights--knee dresses
were considered show enough for the gate-money. An old-fashioned
leg-show couldn't do much business on that basis now--not in competition
with any block downtown in the shopping district!"

"But for that matter," I suggested, "there were always the seashore
beaches. Even in our youth knee-length skirts were thought proper
there."

"They aren't now!" he returned grimly. "I must be getting really old,
because I can remember when Ouida's _Moths_ was considered a wicked
book. One of the reasons was the description of a woman in a bare-legged
bathing-suit. There's a new swimming pool at the country club I belong
to, and one afternoon last summer I happened to drive out there. Some
young people were diving from a board, and when I first looked I thought
they were all boys. Then I recognized Julie. If my father had lived to
see a granddaughter of his not wearing all she wasn't wearing, and with
young men present, I think he'd have gone right down there to her and
first prayed for her and then drowned her! But I suppose you'll be
reminding me of the old platitude that other times have other customs."

"It seems to be true," I said. "You were proving to me that I couldn't
go outdoors without perceiving the unwholesomeness of these times."

"I'm going back to that," he returned. "The split skirt didn't stay
long, and not many dared to wear it--in some places women who wore it
got arrested, and I think, myself, they should have been--it wasn't a
fashion this country would stand for until the new jazz age got really
under weigh. The split skirt disappeared; but the ice was broken, and it
wasn't long before dresses got shorter and stockings began to be shown
above the instep; the old 'windy corner' joke was already obsolete by
then. Girls began to leave off their corsets, too, especially for
dancing; and if the mothers found it out the daughters explained that
they couldn't dance the new dances with all that encasing interference
and, besides, they weren't 'popular' unless they left it off. Then,
after the war, the skirts, instead of splitting up and down, began to
split crossways, and the lower half dropped off altogether. That's how
they've got 'em now, just about at the knee, and when they sit down the
exposure is whatever it happens to be. I said you couldn't step outdoors
without seeing the unwholesomeness of these times--painted women and
full-grown girls in dresses we wouldn't have allowed a child of thirteen
to be seen in when we were still a respectable people--but, my goodness!
you don't have to go outdoors! I tell you when Julie's girl-friends sit
around here in the house sometimes, when I'm home, I'm embarrassed!"

"Why are you embarrassed, Judge?"

"Why? My soul! They don't care how they sit; they cross their legs and
wag their feet; they slide down on the small of their backs till their
knees are as high as their heads; a passel of five-year-old children
would show as much dignity and as much self-respect about exposure.
Exposure! That's what they like! They flaunt it in your face!"

"No," I said. "No more than do the five-year-old children you mentioned.
Exposure isn't exposure to the children, and it isn't to Julie and her
friends, either. Exposure is an idea not in Julie's friends' minds
unless someone else puts it there, and Julie and her friends are
determined not be to hampered by having it put there."

"Hampered!" he exclaimed angrily. "They're determined not to be hampered
by any womanly shame."

"No," I returned. "No more than your great-great-grandfather was
hampered by manly shame when he stopped wearing a wig and lace ruffles."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"You'll have to get used to short skirts and to short hair, Judge. The
skirts will be longer sometimes and shorter sometimes, in passing
fashions; and so will the hair; but the skirt to the ground will never
prevail again as a necessity of morals. You've got to change your whole
conception of what you think is immodesty."

"Why will I?"

"Because women have changed theirs--and, as Julie intimated to you, it's
really their affair."

"What!" he cried. "Don't their fathers and their brothers and their
husbands----"

"No," I said. "The ladies don't belong to us any more, and they don't
all live for us and to 'manage' us--not quite in the sense they used to.
They've decided to live more for themselves. They're not abiding as they
did by the rules we made for them as part of our possessions; they don't
placidly accept our various kinds of 'double standards', Judge. In fact,
they seem about to lay aside something of both their guile and their
meekness; they're doing a great deal of laying aside these days. Those
stays you spoke of, the stays of the hourglass girl, and the long
impeding skirts won't do for the new outdoor life that the automobile
brought when it made open country a convenient playground for everybody.
The hourglass stays and the long skirt had another reason, too, for
disappearing just at the time when the new athletic life required their
removal. For they were really, in spirit, the bindings that warped the
tiny feet of the Chinese women."

"How were they?" he asked sharply. "The old-fashioned stays of whalebone
and steel might offer you some ground to stand on there; but the long
skirt----"

"Wearing a long skirt was originally a woman's way of keeping warm,
Judge; but in time it gradually became the means of making her legs an
interesting secret. That is to say, the long skirt became one of her
weapons of coquetry, or her diplomacy, if you like, just as her hair
was; and, like the crippled Chinese feet so beautiful to the eyes of
Chinese gentlemen, the stays, the long hair and long skirt were
flattering signs of the dependence and inferiority of what was
valuable--to be protected by us and partly displayed, partly kept
secret--because it could be possessed. The relinquishment of the long
skirt and of long hair is startling, not because of any moral question's
being involved, as you think, but because it means that women are
beginning to feel independent of us. They can afford to abandon some of
their means of 'managing' us, they begin to believe--because they can
get what they want, not by making us get it for them, but by going after
it themselves, in spite of us--that is, in competition with us. If they
should ever go back, generally and permanently, to long skirts and long
hair, it would mean that they were defeated and had given up their hope
of doing anything better than first competing with one another to get
hold of men to 'manage', and then keeping--and of course, too, helping
and cherishing--what they thus secure. So far they show no signs of
apprehending any such defeat."

"No," Judge Olds said drily. "So far as I can see they're worse every
day. I think you mentioned something irrelevant about my
great-great-grandfather's wig and lace ruffles--or did it actually bear
upon what you seem to feel is the significance of your discourse?"

"I think it's relevant," I ventured to reply. "I don't mean to say that
Julie and her friends are conscious of all the obscure things underlying
the great difference between them and the girls of our youth, Judge.
Probably Julie just feels young, independent and in the fashion, and
instinctively objects to your ideas as tyrannical, rather low-minded and
hypocritical nonsense."

"Yes. That describes her daughterly attitude quite accurately. What
about my great-great-grandfather's wig?"

"Marshal Bassompierre paid what would be in money of to-day more than
ten thousand dollars," I said, "for a coat to wear at a party. Pepys
paid fifty pounds, I think I recall, for a periwig. We men used to be
greater peacocks than the women; and, though we were cocks o' the walk
and did not need to use the trickish weapons necessary to the weaker, we
bedizened ourselves from head to foot in finery. When we wore our own
long hair we sat for hours while a perruquier dressed it. We wore
diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds--we covered our hands with rings,
wore jewelled chains about our necks, wore earrings, covered our hats
with ostrich feathers, hid our throats and hands and sometimes our
meagre calves under showers of lace; we drenched ourselves with scent,
and stuck decorative black patches upon our faces; rouge was not wholly
unknown to us. Until the _fin de sicle_ that brought the French
Revolution the women never surpassed us in the expense and exquisite
care we spent upon our persons. A new period in dress began for us
then."

"Indeed?" the Judge said ominously. "We began exposing ourselves then, I
suppose?"

"Yes, we did. We began to dispense with our plumage and all of our
coquettish aids to the conquest of ladies. In our wars with one another
weapons had been improved and the science of war had changed: our
plumage had become more and more inconvenient. Taxes reduced our luxury
at the same time that republican ideas of simplicity began to prevail.
But what really ended our splendid peacockery was the beginning of the
'mechanical age', after the close of the Napoleonic wars. We'd cut our
long hair and given up the wigs that imitated it; then we cut off our
ruffles. Lace isn't useful about machinery, and it's inappropriate on a
cindery railroad train. The women didn't adopt the utilitarian costume
when we did: they weren't in as close contact with the 'mechanical age'
as we were. They waited almost a hundred years, and it's only now
they're doing what we did so long ahead of them."

"You mean that just because girls can't hop in and out of automobiles in
long skirts they're merely following our utilitarian example a hundred
years later? You mean that's all they're doing?"

"It's certainly one of the things they're doing; but it's very far from
being all that they're doing. It might even be possible, Judge, that
obscurely behind all that they're doing now there's at least a hint of
an end to the immemorial 'war between the sexes'. But if, with equality
obtained, they add to the power to compete against us their ancient
custom of cajoling us you see how dangerous that will be for us, don't
you, Judge? Our great hope must be that they will play fair and not both
compete and cajole. The 'woman of the new age' is as changed as
everything else; it's of the most vital importance that we don't fight
her; we certainly can't win if we do, and nobody knows what would
happen."

"I fail to follow you," he said. "You don't seem very explicit."

"The topic of our discourse," I returned apologetically, "has always
been one causing men to speak more or less gropingly. If you could
endure it, Judge, I have at home upon my desk a highly unauthentic paper
just finished that seems to bear upon the subject; and it might prove to
the point if I should read it to you."

"All right," he said, "but I tell you beforehand it won't convince me."

"It isn't intended to be convincing," I explained; and, thereupon,
making use of his telephone, I communicated with my own house and had
the paper brought to me.




CHAPTER XXV


"I called this venture 'The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis', Judge," I
said; and, upon his expression becoming even a little more repellent
than it had been, I began the reading, with some timidity.

                 *        *        *        *        *

...Among certain occultists of the esoteric Buddhist group there was
once this tradition concerned with the sinking of Atlantis. The
continent disappeared as the climax of a conflict between the
practitioners of White Magic and those who were experts in Black Magic.
Magic, which was, of course, only science kept secret, had gone far in
Atlantis, and the magicians ruled the continent. The general populace
was morally unfit to be trusted with knowledge of the discoveries made
by initiated chemists, psychologists, electricians and biologists, just
as a portion of our people to-day are unfit to be trusted with
automobiles and gunpowder; and therefore the Atlantean scientists were
an organized secret society, keeping their knowledge strictly to
themselves and using it for the general good. Of course they easily
became the ruling class, and the government was naturally a
dictatorship, probably a hidden one, so that the populace believed
itself to be a governing democracy.

Apprentices to the magicians were carefully selected; only young men of
promising intelligence combined with the highest sense of honour and the
most humanitarian impulses could be permitted to acquire knowledge
dangerously potential, but mistakes were made in selection; ambitious
and prying outsiders obtained copies of some of the sacred books,
deciphering them and possessing their meanings; there arose factions,
too; and, moreover, some of the greatest among the magicians, or
scientists, could not control their own human impulses, and used their
knowledge for selfish ends. Thus the opposing camps were formed. On one
side were the benevolent White Magicians, who wished to use the secrets
of nature for the benefit of the world at large; and on the other were
the Black Magicians, whose purpose was to secure power to fulfil their
own desires.

In the conflict, forces so terrific were employed by both parties that
at last the very continent was riven and sunk beneath the waters of the
ocean; the White Magicians, in their gigantic despair, thus destroying
not only themselves but all their world as well, in order to annihilate
their enemies of the dark cohorts and to prevent the further
dissemination of knowledge which man was not yet fitted to receive. This
is to say, they perceived that civilization was a failure with them;
that man was better dead than left in possession of knowledge (meaning
power) ungenerously employed; that evolution had produced civilization
too rapidly upon Atlantis and must begin the work anew elsewhere.

Such, roughly, was the tradition, as I learned it from curious books
years ago--so many years ago, indeed, that it had passed almost
altogether out of my mind when a chance meeting last winter with a
French archologist in the Djur Djurra mountains of the Atlas range
recalled and freshened it. This was at Michelet, that surprisingly
Alpine appearance among the Algerian clouds where the traveller expects
to see Swiss chamois hunters descending the snowy peaks rather than
robed and tattooed Arabs, and one must continually doubt that one is in
Africa. Professor Paul Lanjuinais, of the Institute, was staying at the
inn, and, beside the rather inadequate fire in the small smoking-room,
we fell into talk of the Kabyle people, or "White Arabs", among whom our
own party had been motoring. M. Lanjuinais was in the Djur Djurra region
for the purpose of research among the Kabyles, he informed us, and
presently he mentioned the Atlantean theory of their heavily disputed
origin.

"No single theory wholly accounts for the presence of a 'White Arab'
here," he said. "Blue-eyed fair people in Africa are spoken of by
Egyptian hieroglyphs and rather definitely assigned to this region; my
own conclusion is that the Kabyles have been here a very long time. No
one can say authoritatively that they may not spring from a flight
migration from Atlantis. It is a possible thing, even a rather plausible
one; but the same speculation--for it is a speculation rather than a
theory--has been made concerning the Basques, though the language roots
of Kabyle dialects and Basque appear to have no relation. However, since
if Atlantis existed it was of continental proportions, the peoples upon
it were probably of widely different types, even if they were united
under a common government." Here M. Lanjuinais paused to laugh. "Occult
science, which formerly had an eccentric European prevalence, probably
never touched American life, and so you are probably unaware of the
occult tales of Atlantis, and do not know that some of the occultists
believe themselves to be in possession of the true history of the
sinking of the continent. You have never heard anything of that, have
you?"

"It happens that I have," I said; and, as he spoke, my memory began to
turn the legend up from the obscure stratum of recollections it had come
to occupy in my mind. "I think it was this." And I repeated what I
recalled of the tradition.

"Yes," he said, laughing again. "That was the substance of the occult
vapourizing, if indeed substance may be attributed to what is so
extremely tenuous a vapour. I think the occultists put their own rather
forced interpretation upon a Berber story someone must have picked up
hereabouts years ago and carried either to Europe or to India, perhaps
to both."

"Hereabouts?" I asked. "Then there is some trace of a legend of Atlantis
among the Kabyle people?"

"Not if one speaks carefully," he replied. "There is a story, yes; but
one cannot say that it refers to Atlantis. It speaks of a Great Land to
the West in the Waters. That might as well be America, except for the
use of the phrase I translate as 'in the Waters', which seems to mean
'_within_ the Waters'."

"You find this story among the Kabyles?"

"Yes. I came upon traces and variations of it here and there; but its
best and most complete form appears among them in some of the hilltop
villages nearer Bougie, toward the coast."

"How does it differ from the occultist form?"

"In several curious details," M. Lanjuinais replied; and he smiled as a
man smiles over something that is between the whimsical and the
ridiculous. "Most strikingly of all, it differs in ending with a
question that no Kabyle has ever solved and is not to be solved by
anyone else, I think."

"But what a strange thing!" I exclaimed. "For a legend to end with a
question seems extraordinary."

"But not unique. I believe, however, that there are not many traditions
leading to questions as their main point. This one does that. There may
be some connection, too, with the fact that the Kabyles do not veil
their women; though that is only another speculation, and the story
doesn't directly touch upon it."

"What is the story?" I asked. "Would you mind telling us?"

"Not at all," Professor Lanjuinais replied. "It is not too long. In a
general way it follows the contour of the occultist legend, especially
in representing that governmental control of Atlantis gradually came
into the hands of a secret society, or sect, to which admission was most
difficult and involved years of trial, or neophytism. Of course the
Kabyles speak of this governing organization as a tribe--they call it
the tribe of Wise People, which may well enough be taken to mean a
society of educated persons, initiation taking place upon the completion
of education. The Kabyle legend describes them as all-powerful and,
until the great dispute arose between the two factions, wholly
benevolent. Under their rule, everybody was contented in the whole land.
There was no war; public opinion consisted of a general sense of
brotherhood; and disease was conquered, for the Wise People could remedy
all bodily defects. Also, they could direct the minds and inclinations
of the populace, so that there was no such thing as sin. In a word, the
'Great Land in the West' was heaven as a _fait accompli_ except for the
lack of one item: the people lived to be very old, but they were not
immortal. Death was the only fact the Wise People had not conquered;
but, save for that, you had a most excellent heaven conducted perfectly
by a band of angels, the Wise People; for even heaven itself must be
conducted by somebody, one is led to suppose. The invariable
circumstance about any organization is that it has officers."

I interposed. "But aren't there some religious organizations?"

"They must have at least a janitor," M. Lanjuinais returned. "And almost
always a treasurer. At all events, the Wise People, who of course lived
on mountain tops, presumably in fastnesses of learning, ruled this
legendary paradise. I think the occultist tradition follows its own
purposes in tracing the cause of the dispute to a selfish use of
science; but I prefer the Kabyle story, which gives a radically
different reason for the war."

"The Kabyle version doesn't give the factions as White and Black,
benevolent and malevolent?"

"It gives the factions as White and Black," he answered, "but not as
benevolent and malevolent. White and Black have no moral symbolic
significance in the Kabyle legend; they are simply colour designations,
as were the Blue and the Gray in your own Civil War. In that war there
was a geographical difference between the two parties; in the White and
Black war there was no such line of cleavage; and one of the curious
things about it was that every family of the Wise People was divided
against itself. In every family there was at least one White member and
one Black member, which naturally made the war a bitter one."

"But what caused the war, M. Lanjuinais?"

"I am approaching that," he responded amiably. "Allow me to reach it by
degrees. I told you there appeared to be a possible relation between the
legend and the fact that the Kabyle women go unveiled; but this I wish
merely to suggest, not to emphasize. You have seen these women on the
mountain sides, some of them quite handsome in spite of the tattooing
upon their faces; and you have observed a few of them in the villages of
the valley--apparent anachronisms among the veiled Mohammedan women. You
have caught the glance of these Kabyle girls and women--a glance a
little hard, a little hostile, and within it a glint of something wild
and driven. A very ancient look, one might call it; a look possibly
beset by some historical fear against which there is still rebellion.
One might say that a Kabyle woman's eyes are the eyes of a woman who has
seen her grandmother beaten to death, but has not been tamed by the
spectacle. There is still an antique horror in this glance, and an old,
old heritage of defiance. Where did they get such a look? Well, of
course, one does not need to go back to Atlantis for it; but if one were
in a whimsical mood he might trace it to the war between the Whites and
the Blacks in the 'Great Land to the West within the Waters'. You see,
the curious thing about this was that all the women were upon one side
and all the men upon the other. The women were the Whites and the men
were the Blacks."

"Dear me!" I said. "So ancient as that! But what was the point at
issue?"

"Whether or not the women should wear veils."

"I see. The women insisted upon casting the veils away, and the men----"

"It is not so simple," he interrupted. "In the earlier days, when the
Great Land was entirely peaceful, the initiates in knowledge, the Wise
People, were all men. At that time the women were merely of the
populace, governed benevolently like the rest; but little by little the
wives and daughters of the initiates began to steal glimpses of the
sacred books and to penetrate the mysteries. In other words, they began
to seek education; and of course many of the initiates themselves taught
a little magic--or imparted scientific information--to their wives and
daughters. In those days all the women wore veils; or, as one might
express it, they were 'thoroughly feminine'. Gradually, as they acquired
more education, and felt more equal to occasions, more able to stand on
their own feet, they did not wish to be or seem quite so feminine: some
of the bolder among them laid aside their veils and showed their faces
openly. Naturally, this caused a little grumbling among the men; but
more and more women grew bold, until finally it was thought
old-fashioned to wear a veil. Then the women demanded complete
initiation into the mysteries of the Wise People. 'We know all about it
anyhow,' they said to the men. 'We are your equals in fact, so why deny
us the mere acknowledgment of our equality?' There was more grumbling,
of course; but the women were initiated, and after that none of them
wore a veil. They divested themselves, as it were, of all femininity,
and made good their equal footing. Of course some of the men still
grumbled: their vanity was not soothed when the women sometimes
surpassed them in certain branches of learning and even in special feats
of reasoning; but in a general way the men were just, and after a time
they accustomed themselves to the new equality. They perceived that it
was a necessity if they were to be fair--although it cannot be said that
they ever really liked it--and within a generation the Wise People
consisted of as many women as men. The daughters of the members of the
organization were taught as well as the sons, and were initiated with an
equal standing. Then, when everything seemed to be settled upon an
apparently permanent basis, a strange and unfortunate thing happened.
Fashions forever move in cycles; some of the women returned to the
fashion of wearing veils. Immediately those who adopted the veil began
to be a powerful party within the organization of the Wise People where
all were supposed to be equal. They elected all the officers and
controlled the organization itself; whereupon, seeing their success, all
the other women at once resumed the veil and joined them."

I interrupted the narrative of M. Lanjuinais at this point. "Did the men
then adopt veils for themselves? Does the Kabyle story mention such a
point?"

"No," he replied. "Men are not adapted to veils and are not screened by
them. The men among the Wise People could not have helped themselves by
wearing veils. But of course they could not endure what the women were
doing to them. The men had accepted equality; they could not accept the
new inequality, though at first they tried by peaceful means to remedy
the disadvantage at which they had been placed. They held a great
meeting to discuss the matter. 'You cannot be our equals,' they said to
the women, 'and at the same time wear your feminine veils. That is worse
than being unfair; it is treachery.'

"But the women laughed. 'When we formerly wore veils,' they said, 'we
possessed something that we abandoned when we went unveiled. At the
time, we did not perceive our loss, and it has taken us more than a
generation to discover it. Now, in again veiling ourselves, we are
merely reclaiming our rights--resuming our natural possession.'

"'No,' the men returned. 'You cannot justly retain this so-called
possession of yours, because it is an advantage. Equality means that no
one seizes an advantage, and for you to seize this one destroys the
equality we have given you and leaves us your inferiors. Our ideal is
equality, and to maintain it we will either take the veils away from you
or cease to initiate you into the mysteries of our magic and reduce you
to your former state of mere usefulness to us.'

"At that the women laughed louder. 'We do not need initiation from you.
We possess the mysteries and can do our own initiating. The feminine
veil, so alluring and exhaling such charm, is natural to us; it is a
part of our long inheritance, and we could not permanently give it up
even if we wished to do so, since it is our very instinct to wear it. If
it is your destiny that our attainments and our veiling are to make you
our inferiors, you might as well accept it. We accepted our destiny for
a long, long time.'

"But the men were unable to be so philosophic as their opponents
suggested; in fact, it is related that by this time they were in a
condition of the deepest resentment. 'You shall not wear veils,' they
said. 'You have abused our sense of justice and insulted our generosity.
You shall not wear veils. We have got to know what you are thinking
about!'

"Now when the men said they had to take away the veils so they would
understand what the women thought, the women raised such a shout of
mocking and indignant laughter that the fighting began then and there.
Toward morning the survivors withdrew to opposing fastnesses and began
their war with sand storms, which they sent against each other. The
Kabyles say the Whites and Blacks used mountain ranges and thunder and
lightning as familiar weapons; that they hurled earthquake and tornado
upon each other; and that in their last battle they shook the sun so
that it rocked in the sky; and the moon, which until then whirled
noisily in the heavens like a spinning top, was struck dumb and still,
so that it never turned again, and we have only the one face of it
always toward us. Then, as the ocean came over the land in waves
thousands of feet tall, all the Wise People perished; for the men were
determined to the last not to be made inferior by an injustice, and the
women, even though they would have made peace at any time, still
protested that, even if they were willing, they could not give up the
veil for it was their very nature itself. That is almost the end of the
legend, but not the very end. As I told you, the end is a question; and,
when the story is told in the evening, in one of the Kabyle huts of
stone on a mountain top, the narrator always concludes with the great
question. After that everybody goes to sleep."

"Is there ever any answer to the question?" I asked.

"The Kabyle people think not, and probably they are right. I have
suggested that there is an apparent bearing upon it in the fact that the
Kabyle women are unveiled and have that ancient driven yet hostile look
in their eyes. You see, the tradition implies that the Kabyles escaped
from the Great Land. They left at the beginning of the war, before the
final cataclysm; but they were only a part of the uninitiated populace
of the continent and not members of the Wise People. You perceive how
easily it might be misleading to follow such a clue for an answer to the
question."

"But what is the question?"

"I supposed of course it was obvious," M. Lanjuinais returned. "'Who
won?'"

                 *        *        *        *        *

"Well," Judge Olds said, somewhat discouragingly, as I concluded the
reading, "go on. Come to something."

"But that's all, Judge."

"Good heavens!" he cried. "Do you call that an argument?"

"No, I only thought----"

"You're absolutely wrong," he said. "In the first place, I don't know
what you've been trying to express, and, in the second, whatever it is,
it's nonsense. And what in the name of common sense do you think it's
got to do with Julie?"

"She belongs to an age that has discarded your ideas, Judge, and she'll
never adjust herself to them. She couldn't even if she wanted to! And
I've been trying to suggest that it'll be a great deal better for us if
she doesn't."

"You're all mixed up and you're all wrong, I tell you. I'll certainly
never adjust myself to her ideas," he said grimly. "They're the ideas of
a new age that won't last. The pendulum will swing back."

"What's to swing it back?"

He was unable to supply me with information upon this detail, and, after
I had left him, I thought that his figure of the pendulum was not an
accurate one. There are actions and reactions in the life of mankind,
but a pendulum swings from a fixed point. In nature all is change, and
so there is no such thing as a fixed point, which can be only an
abstract conception. Looking forth upon the examples apparently set by
the rest of the universe, we are encouraged to surmise that the world
moves, not as a pendulum, but in an ascending spiral.




CHAPTER XXVI


Lately, in 1928, I motored home from New York to the Midland city. There
was no need to take a ferry across the Hudson; automobiles beyond
counting were humming incessantly, speeding east, speeding west, beneath
those deep, broad waters: we had no sight of the new Titans' skyline
growing mistier behind us. Little more than an hour later we looked down
upon the Delaware from a high bridge, and one of us said: "Down there,
not far, Washington forced his way across this river through the ice.
What a strange sight that would be if we could see it now!"

"How much stranger a sight we'd be to Washington!" the other exclaimed.
"The bridge alone would dumbfound him; but he could understand it. The
automobile shooting across it would stagger him; and most of his
half-frozen Revolutionary soldiers would take it to be either illusion
or witchcraft." Then, as an airplane rose buzzing in the nearer skies,
"But the plane," he went on, "I think they could hardly have borne.
They'd have thought they were getting too much of the supernatural to be
endured. I think there'd have been desertions when they reached the
other shore: poor souls hurrying home to meet the Judgment Day with
their families about them. Yet it's only a century and a half ago that
the Father of our Country crossed here, and what would _we_ think if we
could see now what we should see from this spot a century and a half in
the future? Would we, too, scurry home to prepare for the Last Trump?"

Probably not, we thought. We should be able to endure at least a glimpse
of full-blown prodigies not even to be in bud during our lifetime. For
we were "children of the mechanical age", inured to miracles; we had
seen men doing almost everything that in previous ages they had been
able to imagine themselves as doing. To do more they would need to
imagine more; but already they had imagined interplanetary
communication, the prolongation of human life, the end of war and even
the end of poverty. Some day, perhaps, they would imagine the end of
ignorance--even the end of our ignorance of the meaning of life, and
when that meaning is known we shall no longer be tragically ignorant of
the meaning of death. For a hundred and fifty years is not long in the
life of the Delaware River, and men will still be imagining when the
river is gone.

But now our silent, hurrying slave, the automobile, had borne us far
from the bridge; the great, hard, smooth highways built for that slave
stretched before us in their thousands of miles, west, south, north, as
we chose to go. There was company, too, in all directions; overland
traffic of freight in thunderous motor trucks; motor vans, moving all
the furniture and household goods of families from one town to another;
automobiles built like cottages and with families living in them ever
itinerant; long, swift omnibuses running on schedules and growing weeds
in the interurban trolley-tracks; bootleggers' cars with mud-caked
license plates and dusty windows; youthful speed cars, pedlars' coups,
workmen's cars, farmers' cars, rich men's cars, poor men's cars,
beggarmen's cars and thieves' cars. Tractors ploughed the fields beside
the road; love letters, business letters, letters from anxious mothers
shot through the sky over our heads; and, on all our journey, in the
remotest mountain and woodland spot we reached, messages, news items,
lectures, readings, recitations, weather prognostications and incessant
music continually passed through the ether about us and through our very
bodies. A racing car on the way to some track contest swept perilously
by us at seventy miles an hour; we saw a monoplane "stunt flying" at a
faster speed than that, and thus were made aware of the presence of the
new athlete, the Twentieth Century's realization of the centaur fantasy,
half-man, half-machine, and at his topmost far greater hero to the
people than any Marathon runner, discus thrower, charioteer or home-run
batter has ever been.

We ourselves were no new centaurs, yet we moved at a speed for which
nobody is arrested nowadays, and came home in only a few more hours of
running than we should have spent on the express train. But we had been
away from the Midland city for seven months, and so we came into it
sooner than we expected, because it was still growing. Far, far ahead of
us, when we entered the ever-extending streets, new colossi loomed in
the smoke: more skyscrapers were building.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I walked at twilight through a street of new houses where long, long
ago--yet how short a time ago it seemed, too!--I had driven a
red-wheeled runabout, and a startled farm hand told me of lightning that
came shattering out of a clear, sunny sky. The houses, all built within
little more than a year, were of the newest fashions, yet not many were
of the same fashion. They were of shapes and colours we once should have
thought fanciful; indeed, many of them suggested stage settings and
their picturesqueness was so extreme as to give them almost the
unsubstantial air of "picture-book houses". They were adaptations of
such themes as the Normandy farmhouse, the Italian villa, the Spanish
cottage, the Tudor house, the Georgian manor, the Southern Colonial
house, the New England Colonial house and even the Donjon Keep. It was
obvious that every architect, or every owner, had planned without
thought to what would neighbour the new house; we were going ahead with
our building in our old, nave, individual way, and so this new street
looked like a masquerade party wearing the costumes of all nations and
all periods. Yet no doubt every house was beautiful to the family that
lived in it. Probably when they looked at it they saw nothing else,
being happily able to exclude from their consciousness all that they had
not proudly built themselves.

Some of the new houses had been put up by builders to sell--probably on
the new instalment financing plan that enables anybody to buy anything.
Painted signs suggested alluring merit: "This Artistic Modern Home",
"This Superbly Equipped Home", "This Beautiful New Modern Home"--for, of
course, these empty houses were all "homes"; an apprentice in the new
commercial publicity would probably be reprimanded if he were ever so
indiscreet as to speak or write of even an unfinished house or cottage
as anything except a "home". But what I wondered, as I walked along in
the twilight, staring at these whimsical houses, was whether or not they
were really an improvement upon the other kinds of houses that had
preceded them in the Midland town; and, of course, the people who lived
in the new houses and the architects who designed them and the
decorators concerned with the interiors would all have thought this an
absurd thing to be wondering.

Twilight having deepened as I walked, lights began to appear, and before
one of the brightened windows I paused for a moment. The shade was up,
no curtains impeded the view, and there was revealed a living-room
interior in the "modernist" manner. A "modernist" painting hung upon the
wall over a severe oblong hole, the fireplace, and the furniture was of
a shaping unfamiliar in chairs, table, stools and bookcases, and usually
associated with engineering works of one kind and another. The painting
was of a woman with a green head and no spinal column to hold it in
place. She seemed about to enter a building smaller than she was and she
carried in one hand, at the end of her shorter arm, a pottery bowl that
must have surprised the potter, when he took it from the kiln, and made
him resolve to live thenceforth more temperately.

Then, looking at this picture and at the furniture, I was reminded of
earlier manifestations of "modernism" upon the banks of the Seine in the
first years of the century; and I remembered how tactful visitors to the
Salon des Indpendants forbore to laugh because the artists might be
standing near the works of art. They had not all perished of neglect,
those early modernists; some of them had lived to see their pictures
hung on the walls of dwelling houses by people able to bear that daily
association. Those who thus survived were the few who "knew how to put
paint on canvas"; at least they were craftsmen; but whether or not their
effort to "get back to the primitive" had brought any new beauty into
the world was still a question. They were consciously primitive, which
is certainly never a way to be primitive; and if they had indeed brought
new beauty into the world they had certainly brought with it a lot of
other things, including the pretentiousness of their apologists and the
nightmares of their imitators. Upon the point of pretentiousness I
remember a comparison made by a good painter I knew.

"All this modernist art," he said, "was founded upon a shrewd knowledge
of the hypnotic power of a vacuum. To understand that we must recall the
old story of the three weavers and the king's coronation robes. The
thievish weavers kept all the money they were supposed to spend for
materials, and said the robes they were making for the king were beyond
compare the richest and most beautiful ever woven, and also had a magic
quality: whoever was not virtuous and good could not see them at all;
they were visible to virtuous people only. So, when the courtiers came
to look at the robes, no one dared to say he did not see them; and the
king, himself, when the weavers went through the motions of putting them
upon him, expressed the greatest admiration and delight. Then he rode
forth to the coronation, naked, and all the people, afraid of giving it
away that they couldn't see his beautiful robes, began to shout: 'What
splendour! How superb! What wonderfulness in weaving!' Well, that's the
wonderfulness of most of modernist art. The people who praise it are
afraid of letting anyone find out that they don't see it."

Yet, whether they see it or not, some of those who praise it think they
see it; for the "hypnotic power of a vacuum" is that strong if vacuums
become a fashion. Fashion is the true hypnotic master of the eye; for
fashion is mob vision, difficult to resist. The owner of the modernist
painting that I saw through the lighted window surely thought his
picture beautiful and was pleased to possess it and the new shapes of
furniture, and to be, himself, as he would doubtless believe, a
forefront slave of a lovely fashion.

So, before him, had the followers of all the dead fashions felt. In the
latter part of the Nineteenth Century, before the _fin de sicle_, we
had gone through what the fashion, with one of its inexplicable
sophistications, called a "Queen Anne" period in building, accompanied
by the "sthetic movement" indoors. Wooden houses were built with little
turrets and weather-boarded towers boiling out all over them; jigsaw
work enriched gables, and at least one oval window of coloured glass
seemed to be necessary somewhere. Within, there was Eastlake furniture,
and pure decoration offered effects from the sthetic revolution:
cat-tails, sumach, sunflowers, formerly plain old chairs newly gilded,
peacock feathers, fans tacked upon the walls, embroidered owls, wooden
bread-rollers painted in floral designs, pansies painted on tambourines,
and marble-topped rococo tables. Nowadays, everybody thought all of that
bad enough to be funny; but it had seemed charming when it was the
fashion--at least, it was charming to the people who built the "Queen
Anne" houses and did the sthetic decorating.

So I wondered, as I walked on, if some day, not far in the future, these
fanciful new houses, so charming now to the owners, the architects, the
builders and the decorators, and undeniably excellent in pictorial
composition, wouldn't in their turn appear to be as funny and as "bad
taste" as the preposterous "Queen Anne" cottages and jigsaw work and
cat-tails seem to all of us now. Nevertheless, the happiness in the
world must be greatly enriched by the belief of every period that in
matters of taste, at least, it alone has come to perfection and is the
final authority.

In this, the new age was like the age before it, like the _fin de
sicle_ and all other ages; but it was not like the _fin de sicle_ in
many things.

Nature itself does not recognize a revolution; it works through
evolution only, we are told; yet since the _fin de sicle_ there had
been an overturning thorough enough to bear the aspect of revolution to
middle-aged and elderly people. They had seen their youthful conceptions
of such vital things as time and distance disappear into nothing, and
what was mystifying and painful to many who were of Judge Olds's way of
thinking, they had also seen, at the same time and as if through some
dire synchronism, their most rigid conceptions of morals and of
proprieties and of manners first questioned, then challenged, then
apparently tossed aside. Fetters had been broken; a great deal that was
useless, impeding and even evil had been swept away; startling new
tolerances were beginning to prevail, and, contradictorily enough, there
were new intolerances like the intolerance of refinement, for instance.
But this was, of all, probably the special intolerance most
characteristic of the new age, for refinement, in large part, seems to
be a quality of leisure. And, in this swiftest moving and most restless
time the world has known, leisure is for the dead, though not
immediately--even the hearses are automobiles now.

                 *        *        *        *        *

...I walked on deeper into the town with the sky overhead growing
darker and the city avenues brighter as the white globes of the street
lamps became luminous with the movement of an engineer's hand, miles
away. So I came at last to where the old, destroyed town had stood, and
I paused again, looking up at the sparkling front of a tall apartment
house. There had been an iron gateway here once, which I had often
entered long ago, and beyond a fountain had tinkled in the midst of a
green lawn. In the ample house lived an hourglass girl with a charming
voice and a piano kept in tune, and about her, at that piano, boys and
girls in their early twenties and late 'teens were wont to gather, of an
evening, and sing with her, while older people listened amiably from the
library beyond. And, by a coincidence, as I stopped there now a song was
coming from the window of a first-floor apartment of the building that
stood where the green lawn and the fountain and the ample house had
been.

But this song came out of a box. The words were distinguishable:

    "He's my boy friend, I'm his sweety.
    When we dance my heart gets leapy.
    He's so amorous
    He gets me glamorous!
    Oh, my!
    I
    Wanta die
    With my
    Boy friend,
    Right then!"

There was, of course, an accompaniment of wire-strung banjos, saxophones
and drums; also there was another--the vehement jingling of a cocktail
shaker. The sound of the ice in the shaker, however, caused me no
uneasiness, although the shrieking laughter of women and deeper
bellowings in male voices indicated that the liquor in the shaker was
not a first filling. A friend of mine, informed upon the matter, had
lately told me that nobody need drink poison now. "Of course," he said,
"until some of the Canadian provinces adopted a more liberal policy,
there was always a little danger. Naturally, prohibition couldn't be
enforced. You can enforce a law hundreds or even thousands don't like,
but not one that millions don't like. You've either got to get 'em to
like it or you can't enforce it--at least, not until there are more
eighteen-hundred-a-year men who won't take ten thousand dollars for
looking the other way a minute or so. But for a long while any kind of
liquor was expensive, most of it was bad, some of it was dangerous, and
some of it was fatal. It isn't so now. With the new wetness in Canada,
anybody can buy any quality he wants and all he wants, and for my part I
regard this development as the settling of the whole prohibition
question. Nobody wants the saloon back, and the millions that are
determined to drink can drink almost without any risk. The only thing
left to bother about is the effect on people, especially young people,
of seeing a law so generally disregarded. It makes a young fellow say to
himself, 'In their hearts, people believe it's all right to break any
law they don't like if they can get away with it'. But, before long, the
prohibition law will be like a lot of old Blue Laws, still on the
statute books but forgotten, and then its last evil will have
disappeared. Everything's satisfactory."

With this reassuring thought in mind, I passed on, going still deeper
into the town; and presently stood before a vast and solemn shape that
rose into the highest reaches of the electric light from the streets. It
was the new War Memorial, a monumental shrine, unfinished and still
building. It was of white stone and would have had a better appearance
if it could have remained clean; but of course that wasn't to be
hoped--not now; even our homage to the men who fought for us in the
Great War must be soiled with the grime that was the mark of our
prosperity. Nevertheless, the day would yet come when the great edifice
would be cleaned and kept clean, to rise in the clear whiteness that
would make it as beautiful as it should be. Some day, I thought, the
Chamber of Commerce and the Rotarians and the Kiwanis Club and the Lions
Club and the Junior Rotarians would do that work--for if they didn't,
nobody else would; and some day they would understand the importance of
doing it.

The monument was of modern design; something original and powerful had
been added to a majestic old thought that at its base was Greek; and
here, I felt, the design had done what an enlightened new age might do.
For every new age has at its disposal everything that was fine in all
past ages, and its greatness depends upon how well it recognizes and
preserves and brings to the aid of its own enlightenment whatever worthy
and true things the dead have left on earth behind them. And it seemed
to me that the unfinished Memorial, for all its smoke stains and the
incongruous huddle of buildings about it, was already magnificent.


THE END






[End of The World Does Move, by Booth Tarkington]
