The Patient Observer Part 8

"There are; but that is because they fail to recognise that opera is a perfect union of all the arts. To-morrow, Abu Nozeyr, we go to hear 'Tristan und Isolde.' It appeals to every one of our senses. To enjoy it completely, however, it is often wise to close one's eyes and just hear the singer sing."

XXII

AN EMINENT AMERICAN

After dinner I asked Herr Grundschnitt what headway he was making in his studies of American life. The professor was in more than his usually mellow mood. He had enjoyed his dinner. He liked his cigar. He confided to me that he was hard at work on a volume of sketches dealing with the career of representative successful Americans, and he offered to read me one of his early chapters. If the following summary of Herr Grundschnitt's account of the life of Wallabout Smith can even suggest the extraordinary impression which the original produced upon me, I am content.

Wallabout Smith did not attain recognition until late in life. I gather that he must have been well over fifty when a former President of the United States declared that Wallabout Smith, by raising a family of four sons and two daughters, had done more for his country than all the laws enacted by the Legislatures of all the New England and Middle Atlantic States since the Spanish-American War. Fame came rapidly after this. The college professors repeated what the former President said. The newspapers repeated what the college professors said. The playwrights repeated what the newspapers said. The pulpit repeated what the playwrights said. Interviewers descended upon Wallabout Smith. They wore out his front lawn, the hall carpet, and the maid-servant's temper; but they always found Smith himself patient, affable, ready to say whatever they wished him to say.

The reporters would usually begin by asking Wallabout Smith what were his lighter interests in life. "I find my greatest pleasure," Smith would reply, "in common things. For instance, I have never ceased to be intensely interested in the cost of shoes and stockings. The subject is fascinating and inexhaustible. One gets tired of most things, but there has never been a time in which the cost of shoes and stockings has failed to appeal with peculiar force to me. My odd moments on the train have as a rule been taken up with that question. If you have ever thought upon this subject, you must have been struck with the fact that, putting food aside, shoes and stockings const.i.tute the most permanent and persistent human need. They begin with the first few weeks of our life, and they continue to the end; the size alone changes. It is a subject, too, that opens up such wide horizons. For while a man of comparatively little leisure can confine himself to the simple topic of shoes and stockings, he may, if he so desires, widen the field of his interests so as to include the allied subjects of frocks, jackets, blouses, caps, and collars, until he has covered the entire range of children's apparel. Nor is that all. I have spent many an absorbing hour figuring out the annual rate of increase in servants' wages and rent. Of late years I have been in the habit of putting in part of my lunch hour in a study of college fees and tailors' bills. In moments of extreme physical la.s.situde, when nothing else appeals to me, I think about the next quarterly premium on my insurance policy."

How well-known men do their work has always interested the public. Few newspaper men omitted to question Wallabout Smith on this subject. From the large number of interviews cited by Herr Grundschnitt we may build up a very fair picture of Wallabout Smith's daily routine. It was his habit to spend a good part of his day in New York City. He would rise about six o'clock every week-day in the year, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing a hasty breakfast, would make his way to the railroad station, pausing now and then in perplexity as he tried to recall what it was his wife had asked him to bring home from town. Sometimes he would catch his train and sometimes he would not. Arrived at his office, he would remove his coat, and, putting on a black alpaca jacket to which he was greatly attached, he would proceed to glance over, check, and transcribe the contents of a large number of bills and vouchers representing the daily transactions of a very prosperous commercial enterprise in which he had no proprietary interest. The day's work would be pleasantly broken up by frequent inquiries from the general manager's office. Every now and then a fellow-worker would take a moment from his duties to ask Wallabout Smith how his lawn was getting on. Sometimes he would be summoned to the telephone, only to learn that Central had called the wrong number.

Lunch was a matter of a few minutes. At 5.30 every afternoon Wallabout Smith exchanged his alpaca jacket for his street coat with a fine sense of weariness, and the secure conviction that the next morning would find the same task waiting for him on his table. "I have no hesitation in stating," Smith would frequently say, "that some of the busiest hours of my life have been spent at my office desk."

Walking was his favourite form of exercise. When he lived in the city during the first few years after his marriage, he used to walk the floor with the baby. Later when the children began to grow up and he moved out into the country, he walked to and from the station. His gait was a free, manly stride, bordering close upon a run, in the morning, and a more deliberate, sliding pace, somewhat suggestive of a shuffle, in the evening. He was at his best when tramping the country roads with a congenial companion or two on a Sunday afternoon. On such occasions he would pour forth a continuous stream of light-hearted talk on everything under the sun--the new board of village trustees, the shameful condition of the village streets, the prospects of a new roof for the railway station. Good-nature was the keynote of his character, but he would frequently sum up a situation or a person with a sly touch of irony or a trenchant word or two. He once described the village streets as being paved chiefly with good intentions. Another time he characterised the minister of a rival church as having the courage of his wife's convictions. But such flashes of satire went and left no rancour behind them. His high spirits were proof against everything but automobiles.

These he detested, not because they made walking unpleasant and even dangerous, but because they were run by men who mortgaged their homes to buy motor cars, and thus threatened the stability of business conditions.

Wallabout Smith would often be asked to lay down a few rules for those who wished to emulate his success. He would invariably reply that the secret of bringing up children was the same double secret that underlay success in every other field--enthusiasm and patience. "It has always been my belief," he would say, "that the head of a family should spend at least as much time with his children as he does at his barber's or his lodge, and, if possible, a little more. Children undoubtedly stand in need of supervision. In the beginning, it is a question largely of keeping them away from the matches and the laudanum. Fortunately, we live at some distance from a trolley-line and there is no well in our back-yard. As my children grew up, I made it a point to know what books they were reading out of school and whether the boys were addicted to the filthy cigarette habit. On the subjects of breakfast foods and corporal punishment, I have always kept an open mind."

The experiment of living upon a basis of comrades.h.i.+p with one's children which we see so frequently recommended was not a success in the case of Wallabout Smith. "Although my boys are fond of me," he once told a reporter, "they usually regard my presence as a bore. When I find time to go out walking with them, they do their best to lose me, and whenever we divide off into teams for a game of ball, each side insists on my going with the other side. I have made up my mind that there is a time for being with one's children and a time for letting them alone, and that the proper time for being with them is when they are in trouble and want you, and the proper time for letting them alone is when they are happy and wish to be let alone. This I admit is the reverse of the common practice, and probably there is something to be said for parents who grow fond of their children's society when they, the parents, have nothing else to do. As a rule, I have never obtruded myself on my boys, being confident that natural affection and the recurrent need of pocket-money would const.i.tute a sufficient bond between us."

There was, in conclusion, one factor in his success upon which Wallabout Smith would never fail to lay the most emphatic stress, and to which Herr Grundschnitt attached equal importance. "Such fame," he would say, "as has fallen to my share must be attributed in the very largest measure to my wife. Many is the time she gave up her meetings at the Browning Club to watch with me beside the sick-bed of one of our little ones. And she would do this so uncomplainingly, so cheerfully, that it almost made one oblivious to the extent of her sacrifice. There must have been occasions, I feel sure, when it cost her a pang to find her photograph omitted from the local paper's account of a club meeting or a church bazaar; but if she ever suffered on that score, she never let it be known. I can truly say that, without her, my life work would have spelt failure."

XXIII

BEHIND THE TIMES

I had scarcely exchanged a half-dozen sentences with Howard King before we knew ourselves for kindred spirits. I was in a roomful of people who were talking about new books I had not read, new plays I had not seen, and new singers I had not heard, and I was exceedingly lonesome. There was one youngish middle-aged lady in pink, who asked me what was the best novel I had read of late, and when I said "Robert Elsmere," she looked at me rather grimly and asked whether I lived in New York. When I said yes, she turned away and began chatting with a young man on her right, who looked like the advertis.e.m.e.nt for a new linen collar. It was this reply of mine that attracted Howard King's attention. He had been sitting in one corner of the room quite as disconsolate as I was. But now he walked over and shook hands and told me that in his opinion "Robert Elsmere" was not so good a book as "Trilby," which he was just reading.

Howard King and I belong to the comparatively small cla.s.s of men whom nature, or fate, or whatever you please, has decreed to be always a certain interval behind the times; it might be years or months or days, according to the rate of speed at which a particular fas.h.i.+on happened to be moving forward. King told me, for instance, that of late he has been possessed with a pa.s.sionate desire to learn the game of ping-pong. When all the world was playing table-tennis eight or ten years ago, King viewed the game with disgust. He thought it utterly childish, uninteresting, and admirably ill.u.s.trative of all the idiotic qualities that go to make up a fad. But for the last six months, King said, he frequently wakes at night and sits up in bed and yearns with all his soul for a ping-pong set. He was, of course, ashamed to speak to others about it. But if he could find some one who shared his feelings on the subject, he had a large library with a square table in it. Would I come to-morrow night? I said I should be very glad, indeed.

I told Howard King what my att.i.tude is toward clothes. It is my fate always to grow fond of a fas.h.i.+on just as it is pa.s.sing out. I recalled the exaggerated military styles for men that came in with the Spanish-American and the South African wars. Those enormously padded shoulders and tight-shaped waists and swelling trouser legs, and the strut and the stoop that went with the whole ugly _ensemble_, roused my anger. My feelings remained unchanged until some time after the Russo-j.a.panese War, and then one day it came to me that I must have a suit of military cut. It was like the sudden awakening of the unregenerate to grace, it was as irresistible as first love. And when the tailor said that only sloping shoulders were now being worn, that what I wanted was hopelessly out of date, the sense of loss was overpowering. I confessed to King that in my opinion nothing uglier in men's apparel was conceivable than the green plush hats that are just beginning to go out of style. And I told him that I was as certain as I am certain of anything in this world that some day in the very near future I shall be seized with an uncontrollable longing to wear a green plush hat, and I shall enter a shop and ask for one, and the man behind the counter will look at me quizzically, and, after a long search, bring me the only plush hat in his shop, and I shall carry it home in shame, and put it away in my closet, and mourn over the resolution that came too late.

You must not imagine that Howard King and I are conservatives. We do not hold fast to one thing, or even hold fast to the old. We move forward, but at a pace so curiously regulated as to bring us to the front door just when most people are leaving by the back. I have worn every shape of linen collar that the best-dressed men have worn during the last fifteen years; but I have worn them from three to six months late. I became pa.s.sionately fond of bicycling shortly after all the bicycle factories began the exclusive production of automobiles. I am not very fond of automobiles, but I shall be, I know, when aeroplanes come into extensive use. It is only in the last few months that I have discovered how amusing a toy the Teddy bear makes. And this is true of fas.h.i.+ons in games and of fas.h.i.+ons in language. I have no fundamental objections to slang, but I always pick up the bit of slang that most people are just discarding.

I recall, for instance, how, up in the hills last summer, the woods and glens were echoing to the sound, half a howl and half a screech, of "Oh, you!" addressed at quarter-minute intervals to every object, animate or inanimate, that came within the howler's vision or thought. This particular bit of gutter-slang induced a peculiar irritation. It seemed to me utter desecration that this quickening beauty of hill and sky and river and green woods, which should have stirred young hearts to madrigals and chorals, should resound to the blatant, shrieking vulgarity of Lobster Square. I do not mind confessing that at times my feelings towards the innocent young barbarians bordered close on murder.

Until--until, alas! one September morning, after all the guests were gone and I alone remained; that morning I woke with the poison in my soul, and I walked down to the river for my bath, and, coming across the farmer's herd of cows halfway down the hillside, saluted them, before I knew what I was doing, with that horrid, that unspeakable--I blush now to think of it. When I told Howard King, he admitted humbly that after holding out for years he has just begun to say, "It's me," and that he feels morally convinced that within the next year or two he will be saying "Between you and I."

But you must not think that this peculiarity in Howard King and myself is an acquired habit or a pose in which we take any measure of pride.

Our att.i.tude towards those happy people who are always in fas.h.i.+on is one of sincere and profound envy. I think there is nothing more wonderful under the sun than the unknown force that impels the great majority to begin doing the same new thing at the same time. It must be a precious gift to feel instinctively what the right new thing is to do. A mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on black straw hats surmounted by a c.o.c.k in his pride. Another mysterious order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation.

Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.

In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken aback, told him that I was just finis.h.i.+ng Frank Norris's "McTeague" and was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy. I told him that I might very well do so if it were a question of writing something he would find personally instructive, and rose to go, with the intention of slamming the door behind me.

But he called me back and insisted that he meant no offence, that he simply must have live, up-to-date copy or nothing at all. He proposed a popular article on art, and wondered if I could write something about the Dutch masters, with special reference to the recent notable exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. I was obliged to confess that I had missed the exhibition by two weeks. "Well," he said, patiently, "there is opera. You might do something about the singers. You have heard Mary Garden, of course?" I told him no. Only the other day I had irrevocably decided to hear Mary Garden in "Thas" next season; and the next morning I learned that Mr. Hammerstein had gone out of business.

He continued to be patient with me. "There's 'Chantecler,' to be sure, although that is ancient history by this time. Have you read the play?"

I had not, but just here an inspiration came. "You sneered at Homer just now," I said. "Well, there was another Greek who wrote a bird play 2,300 years before Rostand. I mean Aristophanes----" The editor leaped from his chair. "Great, great!" he cried. "We'll call it 'Chantecler 400 B.C.'" I caught the infection of his enthusiasm. "And Aristophanes had another play on woman's rights," I told him. "You might call it 'An Athenian Suffragette.'" "Splendid!" he cried; "splendid; we can make a whole series, and Goulden will do the pictures in colours. It's the most novel thing I have heard of for a long time. It will beat the others by a mile." And he sent me away happy.

XXIV

PUBLIC LIARS

There are three things that puzzle me; yes, four things that I cannot explain: Why street clocks never show the right time; why thermometers hanging outside of drug stores never indicate the right temperature; why slot machines on a railway platform never give the right weight; and why weather-vanes always point in the wrong direction. At bottom, I imagine, these are really not four things, but one. For it must be the same mysterious and malicious principle that takes each of these contrivances, set up to be a public guide to truth, and turns it into an instrument for the dissemination of error.

What makes me think that there is some animate principle behind such clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently Jones will break in upon me in the middle of a column of figures and tell me that the largest ranch in the world is situated in the State of Sonora, Mexico. "Yes?" I say, hoping that he will go away. "Yes," he a.s.sures me. "It is so large that the proprietor can ride 200 days on horseback without leaving his own grounds. He has 2,000,000 men working for him and he lives in a marble palace of 700 rooms. No one can be elected President of Mexico against his will."

Now obviously it would have been better for me to remain altogether unacquainted with Mexican conditions than to share Jones's distorted view of affairs in that interesting republic. But Jones insists on taking the innocent blank s.p.a.ces in my knowledge of the world and filling them up with the most incorrect data. He tells me, for instance, that Mme. Finisterra once sang the mad scene from "Lucia" before the late Sultan of Morocco, who wept so bitterly that the performance was interrupted lest the monarch should go into convulsions. At the age of eight Mme. Finisterra knew twelve operatic soprano roles by heart, and when she was ten she played Juliet to Tamagno's Romeo. She now gets $10,000 a night, in addition to the service of a maid, a chef, and two private secretaries. In private life she is very stout. All this, needless to say, is not true.

But I must not forget the clocks. The worst of the cla.s.s, oddly enough, are those found in front of watchmakers' and opticians' shops. I sometimes think that such clocks are purposely put out of order by the shop-keeper. The object is apparently to induce irascible old gentlemen to enter the store, watch in hand, in order to protest against the maintenance of a public nuisance. It is then a comparatively easy task to sell them a pair of solid gold spectacles with double lenses at a handsome profit. I, for one, would not blame the old gentleman who should pick up a stone and hurl it at one of these Tartuffes and Chadbands of the street-corner with their chubby, gilded hands reposing on their prosperous stomachs, sleek and smug and ultra-respectable, but unconscionable liars for all that. They are not content with their own success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent a.s.surance on the ordinary man.

The difference between the typical public clock and a watch out of order is obvious. Every prudent man knows the peculiarities of his own watch, just as he knows the peculiarities of his own wife and children; and he is consequently prepared to make allowances. But the clock on the street corner persists in thrusting false information upon you. The man who consults his watch does so with a purpose, and is naturally on the alert. But the cheating clock confronts him in moments of unsuspecting security, and throws him into a condition of the wildest alarm. It is peculiarly active on bright spring days, when people rise early and look forward to being at their desks half an hour before their usual time. On such occasions they invariably come upon a clock which points to a quarter of ten, and sends them scurrying breathless up four flights of stairs, to find the janitor engaged in cleaning out the baskets.

Church clocks are not so bad as jewellers' clocks; but they are bad enough, and, in the nature of things, we have a right to expect more from a church clock than from any other kind. For the same reason the weatherc.o.c.k on a church steeple is to be judged by a higher standard than the one over a carpenter's shop or the ordinary dwelling. I cannot, for instance, imagine a more dangerous moral _ensemble_ than a church with a clergyman preaching bad doctrine in the pulpit, a clock indicating the wrong time on the tower, and, over all, a clogged weather vane pointing to the south when the wind blows from the east.

With reference to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the window at 9:30 and find this clock pointing to eleven, and to look out ten minutes later and find it pointing to 9:35, is extremely disconcerting. One is inclined to expect something more restrained in a clock connected with the most prosperous parish of one of our most conservative denominations.

What I have said of clocks is largely true of the weighing-machine. Like the public clock, it thrusts itself upon us, and like the clock it betrays the confidence which it invites. I feel convinced that no one would ever think of using a weighing-machine if it did not const.i.tute the most characteristically national piece of furniture in our railway stations. All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil. Yet even this mockery of a weighing-machine is preferable to the emotional type of scales which simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your fortune in utter disregard of age and s.e.x, and plays a tune that cannot be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval after walking across the room on his hind legs.

As for the ordinary street thermometer, there is this to be said for it: It may deceive, but it gives pleasure in deceiving. When a person is sagging beneath the heat of an August midday, it is a distinct source of comfort and pride to have the thermometer register 98 degrees. Even when we are fully aware that the mercury is too high by three or four degrees, it is easy enough to make one's self believe for the moment in the higher figure. If it were not for this spiritual stimulus, I should be inclined to regard all thermometers as a nuisance. Translating Fahrenheit into Centigrade and _vice versa_, is one of the most painful mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put 38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the const.i.tution of that European monarch that he should have survived the violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142 degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.

I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public inst.i.tutions I have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and weighing-machines--they are but the remnants of the fine old communal life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile.

Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above reproach and above suspicion.

XXV

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--III

Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws--the straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper stand the blow, his friends wondered. He took it very well. Within a week he had set to work on a new fad, the collection of Statistical Realities, and in a half-year he had filled three good-sized lofts and a large back-yard with his treasures. Yesterday he took me through his galleries.

"What do you make of this?" he said, stopping before a gla.s.s jar some four feet high, in which, to the peril of one's nerves, you could distinctly see the upper two-thirds of a child's body. Head, trunk, and arms were beautifully fas.h.i.+oned, but there was no vestige of growth below the knee-caps. I could only show my astonishment. "Well," he went on, "you must have seen the statement by the president of Bryn Mawr that the average number of children among college-bred mothers is 3-6/10.

This is the six-tenths of a child. Here," he said, pointing to another and somewhat larger jar, "you see three-fifths of a woman; 1-3/5 women to one man is the ratio in some parts of Ireland. Here, in adjoining bottles, are three-tenths of a physician, seven-eighths of a lawyer, and four-fifths of a clergyman, the latest census having shown that we have 23-3/10 physicians, 29-7/8 lawyers, and 17-4/5 physicians for every 1,000 of our population."